Something borrowed, something blue

It's nine o'clock and the house is finally quiet. It was a tough day: disappointments, fatigue, irritation, screaming, whining, spilled milk, ... and the kids weren't much better! As the day winds down, I'm at a loss to draw any particular insights from it -- but Mark Heard's liner notes for Second Hand fit pretty well:

I am always telling my wife that a day doesn't seem to have a full twenty-four hours anymore. I always wish they were longer, or I had a much faster metabolism, say, like a shrew or a hummingbird, because two or three o'clock in the morning always comes too soon and I'm still trying to figure out where the day went.

There are days when you suddenly glance around as if awakened from a stupor and are struck by the great magnitude of life, the realities of mortality, the ironies of our time. ... You cringe at your stupidity. You cower under the future. You fear for the world of your children.

There are other days when the intuitive awareness of the great and wonderful depth of life you felt and harbored as a child, that feeling brought gushing by a certain, sound or smell or time of day or season, will come flooding back in again. You relish the past, you pity the present, you play to the imagination of your children, you try vicariously to re-experience your own fresh youth. I must admit these days seem to become rarer, and worth the effort it takes to remember them somehow.

Most usual are the days you wish you could feel anything. You wish that you could care more than you seem to be able to, or could focus on something beyond the mundane little dance steps involved in the busywork of subsistence. At least there is the impulse to ask yourself, "Why?" There are reasons to be thankful just having something to keep you busy. Songs written by those so inclined to busy themselves in these days tend to become a simple documentation of feelings in the waxing and waning of our awareness of events on the planet, both near and far. But the clock seems only to remind you that there's more to do and you're behind in whatever it is you're already supposed to have done. Your children are loud. Things could be better. Things could be worse. Luckily a few things never change.

I have a T-shirt with those last two paragraphs printed on the back. No-one ever bothers to read them. That's OK.