Calling

     When I get very busy I cease to be a real person. By a real person, I mean the kind of person that seems real to other people; interacts, socializes, smiles, keeps up appearances, etc. I always try to keep busy because when I'm busy I feel more real to myself, which is a kind of being real in contradistinction to being real to other people, supposedly. Every phone call I make ends with a solemn comment akin to "don't be a stranger!" Something to remind me that I've been a terrible performer, socially speaking. Insufficiently friendly or familial. This seems fair to me. When something isn't there, it's just not there. Like object permanence except with people. I am the object in question. But it's more complicated than that, which is why it's fair.

    I suppose I could keep tabs on and maintain appearances with everyone in my life. If there were eight days in a week I could spend most of the eighth day calling everyone and letting them know how I'm doing and asking them about the same thing. The response one usually receives for that sort of question is generic, so I would ask further questions to determine exactly how and what the person is doing, and perhaps why, if it's not overbearing. Eighthday would be a day for chatting and vibing. As it stands, in a calendar system that contains only seven days in a given week, none of which are reserved for calling people, my ability to make phone calls is severely limited. Either way, it's a matter of choice. No, it's not. Yes, it is. That's why it's fair. Sure.

    So I emerge from an era of business (that's busy-ness, being especially busy) like a newborn, starting from square one, from scratch. A scratched square. I re-emerge into the social dimension like an alien, probably looking and acting differently (heyyyyyyyyyy; met with blank stares, maybe). Begin easily. Don't push yourself too hard. Pick one person who passively resents you for not calling as often as you should and give them a call. Talk about anything and keep talking until one or both of the two parties has something else to tend to. Call someone who has a relatively small number of things to tend to and talk for as long as you can. See what's going on. Listen to their voice.

    I called my grandfather sometime last week and sometime yesterday afternoon. He's an interesting man and he's full of practical sage advice that I assume he doesn't often have the opportunity to share. It's weird that some people talk to older folks and babies with the same cadence. I think we should avoid doing that, in most cases. Both when we talk to babies and to older folks. I'd be alarmed and probably bothered to discover that people were just putting on a voice to appease me (or, in the case of being an older person, to infantilize me? Again?); also, the cutoff and reintroduction ages for baby-voice employment are apparently arbitrary. It's probably easier for everyone to use a regular (not to say disaffected, but natural-seeming) voice while speaking to another human of any age group.

    So I called my grandfather yesterday and spoke to him in my natural, non-baby inflection, and we talked about events and phenomena. He told me that I'm at a point in my life full of potential and possibility–nothing is set in stone or absolute, most things and plans are changing and interacting with other plans and ideas for the future, etc. He talked about how there's only so much you can do to change most people or to influence them into seeing you in a particular way that you might intend or not intend. You can do your best to put your honest self into the world, and the consequences of that are usually unforeseen, or at any rate out of your control. By extension, everyone is totally different and unique. He told me that sometimes he sees people who are totally fucked up, and he thinks "what the hell happened to this person to make them this way?" This is a relevant and sophisticated question, I thought. Something about how everyone in this world is so fucked up that it's inconceivable, almost unreal. I think that's beautiful.

    The conversation continued and he offered further pieces of practical wisdom, informed by so many experiences and thoughts across a lifetime that, as of now, is longer than mine by multiples. We started talking about guns: owning them. He told me, "you don't think you need one until someone is beating down your door."

I will call my grandfather again soon. I'll call other people too.

Special Pen

     Years ago my father gave me a pen. It was a metal pen. When I clicked the push button, a ballpoint tip did not thrust from the pen's barrel; it was a small flashlight where the push button should have been, or where it usually was on a normal, plastic pen. A small flashlight the size of the push button, like one you'd see on a novelty keychain with someone's name on it (or everyone's name, when they're all organized together alphabetically on a rack, flashing out of sync with colorful letters, powered by little solar batteries, maybe. There's always a name missing. There are some names you can never find flashing on the novelty name rack). Instead of a push button, the pen twisted to thrust out the ballpoint tip. It was surprising. If you'd never seen a pen like that, with a little needlepoint flashlight instead of a push button proper and a spinning mechanism instead of a spring mechanism, you wouldn't expect it. Sometimes now I see a pen with an orbicular push-button-area, and I suspect that it might be a very nice metal pen with a little useful flashlight secreted in its design (the bright beautiful head), but it never is. Let me know if you find a pen like this, because usually I find that it's one of those touchscreen styluses disguised as a flashlight push button, disguised as a normal push button. I find this pattern of disingenuous push button posturing a little disturbing.

    I made a joke about the pen. Something like, "hey dad imagine if someone needed to borrow a pen and you gave them this pen and they clicked the top part of the pen thinking that this would make the pen click but it really shined them in their eyes." I often used to imagine childish scenarios like this one, in which somebody who was rude or bullyish would have their life marginally inconvenienced by some intervention of fate or roundabout cleverness. I probably thought that these little inconveniences exclusively happened to those who were assholes or sinners because I didn't really know how else the world leveled out between the assholes and the good people. It's pretty funny to imagine sinfulness as just being sort of an asshole or a rude person sometimes. That was my takeaway from church. Just kidding. When I was a child I was never embarrassed by the things I said, so I would talk about the imagined scenarios. Now I do not do that.

    After I made this joke that was not funny to anyone, although I wanted it to be, which is why I told it (I also probably didn't think it was funny but I would have laughed if other people did), my father told me sternly that this was a special pen, an expensive pen, a pen from his work, and that I would not be taking it to school ever and I would not be sharing it with anyone ever. I think I shut my mouth then because he seemed awfully serious, like he had known and I had not known or even been capable of knowing the importance of this pen. I agreed that I would only use the pen in the ways that he allowed me to use it–purposefully, silently, where nobody else could see it or ask about it.

    I think the pen had blue ink inside. I didn't use it very much because I did most of my writing at school, where I mostly used pencils anyway. I wouldn't appreciate the permanence offered by a ball-point pen until later in life. When you use an eraser to obliterate pencil jottings, you can still see the indentation left by the pencil tip. It's challenging to completely erase the markings. I would always use shitty erasers too, so it would smear the graphite all over the page and make a mess. Eraser shavings and graphite marks would stick to my hands; the words would be printed on the heel of my palm like when you press silly putty onto a sentence written in pencil. Then you squish and fold the putty up and the words stretch into oblivion.

    Anyway, I think the pen is still sitting around here somewhere. Hidden in a footlocker or elsewhere. I wonder if the little secret flashlight still works. I bet it does.