I’ve never imagined myself not being a newspaperman. It’s strange, the drift, since I left daily journalism.

But there’s been this odd calmness to everything. Maybe it has something to do with dad’s death. I dunno, but to have the job come end didn’t fall me like it has others who caught the blade. They’re devastated.

But I don’t have an ounce of anger in me. The New York Times quoted me in the story about the layoffs, and at the end the reporter said ‘you seem awfully composed about all this.’

And it was the first time it occurred to me; I guess I was. But it seems we invert our energy, and I can’t for the life of me get it.

We rail against the inevitable. Yet we idle life when we get to steer.

Perhaps it was the diabetes early on, but i’ve learned to accept the world as she presents herself. When the world is truly revealing herself, truly fixing her gaze on you, it can be no other way. You will look this way. Your heart will beat this way. You will have this as your health. You will have this as your ill. Here is your deepest fear, and don’t forget your undying love; I worked all night on that. You thank mom for the help, though you wish she’d talked with dad first.

Or I treat it like a poker standoff: Check your hand, pair your threes and bluff the fuck out of the table. Sorry for the thematic change; swell of anger.

But so much we do get to choose! What shall I be? What path do I take? What shall I have my ancestors think of me? Where are the goddamn keys?

We get to choose that. Teddy and Esme live the life I tell them to lead. I am their good-meaning-but-naive mom, their mob card shark.

So why do we look at so much of our life as an unstoppable tide? Is it really that? Or is it the fear we’ll look foolish punching at a wave that will probably douse us anyway? I sometimes think it’s the latter, and it becomes an excuse for inertia. Beware inertia. It’s the mirror of life, yet a fiction. anything that lives moves.

Besides, I got no problem looking like an ass. I choose to slap the shit out of those waves. Sure, you may still get wet.

But the water, once you’re in, really ain’t that bad.