“You know, I’m glad you are starting to get outside and cruise the neighborhood on your bike with your friends. Video games have gotten extremely advanced since I was a kid, especially with the internet. They are just sucking people out of reality,” Greg says to his 11 year old son, James.
“Yup. Not much different than Pornhub,” James replies.
“Ah, I see we have a quick wit developing as well,” Greg awkwardly replies. While he is pretty sure that his son is making a jab at his recreational activities, he wonders if he should check his son’s browser history and then decides against it for a whole host of reasons. It’s pretty obvious developing hormones are what is driving James away from his Xbox. James has mentioned a few times how much he wants to take his dog to the park, because it will draw the admiration of all of the girls with his pitbull’s seemingly default facial expression of that goofy smile pitbulls are increasingly becoming known for over aggressive behavior. Pretty much the entire house hold felt guilty when they got him neutered. The dog was ripped before hand, and has since then pudged out a little. He was still in far better shape than Greg, who pudged out an absurd degree as he advanced to, and then through, middle age, despite not being neutered. While neutering James was not a viable option (Greg even let him keep his ‘penis skin’ as James referred to it,) he was definitely socially gifted and able to float between the various social groups common in 5th grade. This included various cliques of girls at his school. There was apparently a clique that hung out after school in the playground, and James and his kid-guys circle appeared be very adapt at mingling with them. Greg was a bit soft on James, but was overall doing a decent job as a father, if such a thing was possible. Sure every parent does some permanent psychological and neurological damage at times. Greg threw James into the ceiling a few times as a baby by accident. Then there was the fact that James learned to turn over for the first time on the changing table, thus hurdling himself onto the linoleum below. Sometimes the damage was just fatalistically in the genes, like how he passed on rather severe bouts of anxiety and depression, combined with a good dose of occasional gross over-confidence and poor impulse control. His teachers had noted part of the problem was that he required a much more complex approach than generally required for a typical student anywhere near as young as James. It wasn’t even that James was a savant. He seemed to posses a rather natural ability to call out bullshit. Albeit early and without major provocation, James seemed clued in to philosophical absurdism. While most parents passed on the cognitive dissonance of faith based religion and a drastically over-simplistic understanding of evolution closer to the words of Hobbes than Darwin’s contemporary successors, Greg accidentally passed on the inner turmoil of existential passions in a universe ultimately rooted a cold and nihilistic void in place of any real foundation for morality and the pursuit of higher truths. Greg passed on the determination to live, to leap towards valuing love and compassion, to forgive himself last, and to face the void of death with fear and self awareness that was with much more brutal integrity than even most adults could bare without snapping into some semblance of spiritual denialism, so he’d struggle to find the beauty that shined through agony and death, rather than in the pain and despair itself.
Perhaps a mind capable of handling such lucidity wouldn’t need to anesthetize itself with drugs to quite the extent Greg needed to, until his love for James demanded he progressively pull his own shit together. Greg didn’t mind that James was chasing girls. He was probably one of the few parents twisted enough to hope his son make his own best mistake Greg ever made too early over too late. Find the joy of love over the happiness of self interest. The latter can be short cut with addiction. The former is an actual reason to live beyond oneself or even the false hope of immortality in reproduction. Even the mere biological instincts to survive and reproduce are shit in the hands of time.
Moments of love and beauty still existed, however brief or pointless they were. Even when the music is gone, and there is no life left to consciously hear vibrations, it still got to be played and heard. While egos amass wealth hoping to escape death into space by exponentially forcing the rest of society into their economic debt and servitude, the rest of us live and laugh knowing they missed the cosmic joke of just living for a moment, or if one plays their cards right, two.
Joker's Wild 