Not Knowing the Half of It

My father's interment was Monday, and it's been a weird week. I drove over to see my best friend in Jersey for a little bit, and hang with his amazing DAWG, named Luna, and then went to Long Beach Island, quite intentionally to grieve the death of my father, as he was at his happiest on our vacations there. The Vivian Maier photograph featured here had reminded me of this, a couple weeks ago. The man in the photograph looks almost identical to my father—same clothing, shoes, hair, body type. 

Vivian Maier, August 22, 1956, Chicago Man on Beach

The interment, everyone masked and distanced

Lovely Luna

Several other themes coalesced around the Long Beach Island jaunt, haunt, and tumble. I stayed in the Holiday Inn in Manahawkin, that I had stayed at way back in 2011 on a really weird day where I originally started driving as if I were going to just drop in on an ex of mine in Rhode Island, but then almost the whole way there realized it was a stupid idea, and turned south, and ended up driving through New York City late at night, and all the way to Long Beach Island. This was after a brief family visit, and I just felt insane with loneliness, so I guess that's why I figured "just dropping in" on this particular (married, problematic) ex would be "fine." So I was recalling that odd chapter of my life and feeling some heavy codependent energy. 

Then I went onto Long Beach Island proper and had some incredibly good seafood and went to a little place called The Custard Hut, where we used to buy frozen custard cones when I was like 7 years old. 51 years later the place is still up and running. So a whole flood of memories of my family and my father was coming up. Down to the end of the island to photograph the sunset, which then reminded me of the night before a decisively fateful day, a little more than three years ago. 

The southern end of Long Beach Island, sunset, June 29th, 2020

In short, Monday the 29th was like a Proust novel packed into one day. It turned out, when I woke up Tuesday, that I got a dozen referrals from a private secondary school headhunter I am working with, so to make things even weirder, I did a full job interview with a school administrator on the way back to my sister's, pulled over on the side of the road. 

It's a lot to try to unpack. The switch to looking for a secondary school teaching job was not easy to make. I console myself that I can still search for postdoctoral or college level jobs as time goes on. I feel like a failure, though. It's odd, because I love teaching secondary school. I just had this secret hope that those days were gone. The job search for postdocs or college has been a total frustration, however, and secondary schools are jumping all over me, so it seems like the universe is speaking. Who knows. I'm just done trying to figure shit out. I'm just letting go of every single hope or expectation I've had. It seems like it works best. 

It is the three year mark since a life changing experience that I didn't even realize I was having, at the time, until a little bit later. It's interesting from where I am now to consider that, on July 3, 2017, I had no idea what the next 10 days were going to be about, nor that July 14 on would be so significantly different from my daily experience prior. I think this is always true anyway, but it lends an odd perception now that some surprising thing could be right around the corner. Like, who knows? I tend to think that ten days from now, I'll feel like shit, exactly like I do today, but we don't even know the half of it. Of course, the surprise could also be unpleasant. My sister, for example, who went to bed on March 3rd and woke up a widow March 4th. 

And the estimation of what occurred is always subject to revision. I wish I didn't have a mind that tells and retells and figures and reconfigures so ardently. But, well, if wishes were horses, etc. 

More wilderness and solitude, please. I will probably be on the job hunt while traveling. For this very reason, I switched to the Verizon network, so I'll have a lot more coverage in more rural areas. The tempting feeling in my heart and on my mind is to disappear. To get somewhere perfect for remote hermit life and sink into monastic silence. I had the weirdest dream the other night, where a mysterious woman lived in a shoe box, and she was saying the famous phrase: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," and I couldn't keep from laughing. A buddy of mine reprimanded me, saying, "Dude, that's Julian of Norwich, show some respect" and I just laughed harder.