searching_for_storylines past i was driving the kids to the grocery store in the minivan when the song came on the radio. my eldest, who likes a good beat, began to nod in time. the middle got a goofy grin on his face. the baby wasn't visible, but she usually joins her brothers. when was the last time i heard this song? i remember when it was released. it was on the radio all the time. we'd track how many times the station played it in a 12 hour shift in the kitchen. depending who was working, there was a limit where johnny cash got thrown on the cd player by the grill cook in disgust. usually though we'd just sing along (sometimes mockingly, sometimes not) as we danced that exhausted dance of fire and knives. after raze called me back, i began trying to time when i last left these blue and red pages (sometime between 2017 and 2019, i think), but that drew me further back to those more desperate days of the middle 2000s, hugging the edge of poverty and only eating so well because i'd get to eat for free during those long shifts at work, while what little money i made when to rent and tuition. i can see those struggles in my past words, though my memories of them paper over much (but not all) of those hardships. it's really an exercise in revisionist_history trying to figure out how i got to where i am, and if there's a storyline that can actually make coherent sense of it. truly, a lot of luck was involved. and luck doesn't necessarily make a good story. there's no real moral to a story that pretty much comes to "i didn't know what to do but i knew i needed some kind of direction" to "the department chair who didn't know me decided to stick me as a ta in this class because my name is towards the start of the alphabet and the class had a low course number" to "that the adjunct who taught the course had a position he needed filling at his day job" to "the person i ended up falling in love with and marrying also had a summer job at that same institution" to "driving a minivan with three beautiful kids happily bopping away in the back to a song i heard way too much not quite twenty years ago." storylines help make the world make sense, they're what let us truly live in this world. my eldest recently was trying to work through a struggle with a couple kids he often plays with in kindergarten. the others have gotten hard into stem activities, but their enthusiasm is a bit toxic. "they told me that pretend things -- is that fiction? they said it's just for babies. only science is for big boys." not an uncommon opinion, to be honest, even among adults in those field, but one that has done great damage. the idea that there's one truth, and one way to get to it. it's an epistemic and ontological closure. there are many things science doesn't teach you, like how not to be an asshole, or how to be brave, or how to accept that difference doesn't have to be vigorously contested until one victor holds the mighty Truth in their article published in nature. but how to explain that to a five year old? what kind of story can we create together to help him rebuild his confidence so he can find other kids who might be more into cooperative imagination play? it's all moments, tied together by the movement of time. but we get to write and rewrite our stories in scrawling cursive on those ties. and sometimes a song or a smell or a face in passing will pull me back to re-examine one of them, and revise the connections based on the present. and we get new stories in the messy palimpsest, as true and more as those before, to help better describe our new selves that are also created by the constant re-searching for these storylines. 220516 ... raze for a second there, i thought, "did we talk on the phone once and i'm just not remembering it?" then i understood. i love this. and i'm grateful i get to read the new stories you're writing as you're living them. 220516 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I had thoughts about this on Tuesday but some of them have since fled the ill-guarded coop of my mind, flapping white feathers. I do remember I thought of H., a friend's friend, who had a dramatic career story: she got a degree and job as an accountant, found it draining, tried to make it as a freelance writer. At one point she was working at a medical marijuana clinic, but her parents were being tough on her (for different reasons). In the time we didn't talk, she'd been homeless. And when she filled me in on that time, when we talked the spring before last, she said she began to work with the charity that had helped her get back some financial footing, and they later hired her. But that the drama of the success was in the fall and recovery rather than a rags-to-riches kind of rise. And I say success, but I'm trying to get out of a success/failure mindset myself: I just mean something like past was talking about. Basic stuff - having enough money, things to do, people you get along with. And I wanted to agree, as someone trying to write a slightly autobiographical novel, it's hard to grasp at the threads that will make a good story. Sometimes you also want to admit that things are a product of chance, of other people's decisions rather that your own. This line popped into my head: "The good thing about life is that no one and everyone is the protagonist." Which is pretty trite, but I'll treat it as one of my half_asleep_thoughts (complain that it doesn't contain enough imaginary words). Anyway, this was thoughtful and made me also think thoughts, even if the more coherent ones have been too chicken to stick around. 220519 what's it to you? who go blather from