Everyday chaos, as reported on by a father and husband who's always got one eye on it.
Author: willzificsak
Husband, father, dad-rock devotee, sometimes writer. Old-school punk/metal guy who named his blog after a line from a Jimmy Buffett song, because if things made sense what would there be to write about?
I just noticed that WordPress offers writing prompts on the create-a-post page. This is actually sort of cool. Not particularly germane to whatever it is I’m trying to do here, but neat just the same. Here’s today’s: What place in the world do you never want to visit? Why?
That’s kind of a loaded question, don’t you think? Ah, well, I’ll fall back on the bit of advice that folks like me who love to overthink things hear often enough, regardless of its place next to “you should smile more” in the useless advice hall of fame: just say the first thing you think of!
Alrighty then: Camden, NJ. Why? Because I’ve been there, and once was enough.
And with that, I scratch “travel agent” off my list of potential future career paths.
Alright, so commonly that’s “knowing is half the battle”, not “showing up is half the battle,” but in this case I’m all for appropriation. I don’t actually have any great ideas for a post right this minute, but I’m here anyway. The last time I put up a rah-rah post about how I’m back in these parts, it was another year-and-a quarter before I showed up again. I don’t have a good idea today; maybe I’ll do two tomorrow to make up for it. The interest, or lack thereof, compounded quickly.
Right now, it’s 2:10 or so on a Tuesday afternoon. I’ll leave in half an hour to pick up kiddo from school. The ice cream truck that will prove trouble when he’s parked outside her school just drove by blaring his song (which, for reasons I try not to dwell on, is “La Cucaracha”), which is a lovely reminder that it’s a beautiful edge-of-Spring day, and that there’s an entire world beyond this computer screen where I spend my days mostly doing work and looking for more.
My wife just called. She works as a push-in specialist teacher in schools to help kids who need it; more of them are somewhere on the autism spectrum than not. The main class teacher at this one particular school – a forest school at that – is of the opinion that no one on Earth needs help beyond what she can offer. This leads to friction. I listen and empathize, both with my wife and the poor kids who are clearly not getting the support the need. Adults and their egos, what a combo.
And that’s life right now. Nothing earthshattering, not a post that anyone, self included, is going to be in any rush to share. But it’s here, and so was I. I didn’t have a good idea today, so I at least made something instead of settling for nothing. Maybe I’ll do another later on today if inspiration strikes.
Last post was January 8th of last year, with a promise that I was REALLY going to write more? Excellent. High-five. Ugh. (Pause for brief moment of self-flagellation.)
Ah, well, can’t do anything about it now except actually try again. So I turn fifty years old in two months and two days. I’m not sure how I feel about it, or truly if I actually feel anything at all except that I’m always pleased with the dining options that come with another birthday. An entire weekend of wings, cake, and beer? Sure, I’ll march a mile closer to oblivion! It’s not like there’s a choice anyway, and you might as well take the good stuff when it’s offered, amirite?
My original idea was something along the lines of, well, alright, I’m going to make up for my literary slack by writing a new post EVERY SINGLE DAY until the big five-oh! I applaud my own bout of late-night ambition, but let’s get a little bit real here: that is precisely the sort of declaration that allows this little corner of the web to collect digital dust for another year-plus. Instead, I’ll make myself a bit more comfortable; attainable goals are actually a good thing to have, friends. I’m thinking five-out-of-seven days per week until 50 (and beyond? we shall see) is reasonably possible.
My escape hatch from this tidal wave of insane ambition is this: the posts can range anywhere from lengthy, heartfelt essays to three sentences about how my ankles hurt because it’s raining and I’m aging. Like getting older itself, it’ll truly be a mixed bag…
…but hopefully also mostly-good. After all, it all beats the alternative.
I started this blog nearly a year ago, with the intent of getting back to blogging after letting my old one go dormant around the time I got married at the end of 2014. (Understandable, sure, but disappointing just the same, at least to me and the one or two folks who occasionally find one of my old Cheap Trick reviews, as well as the Casino Bots who occasionally need to be shooed from my old digital doorstep.)
To be continued later, as I’ve been unexpectedly called away from the computer. But I started this, so I’ve gotta get back to it, right? RIGHT?
I think so. See ya when the kiddo gets off to bed tonight, or (at worst) once she’s at school tomorrow. 🙂
As I mentioned in the pleased-to-meet-you post below this one, my daughter is five and a half years old. She’s an amazing little human, and she has worked harder than everyone who ever reads this put together just to get to a point where she lives, thrives, and sings the current Disney hits. Actually, that’s not quite fair to her; until Encanto came along, her previous favorite musical artists were “Weird Al” Yankovic (yay!), Laurie Berkner (also yay!), the Trolls soundtrack (what can I say, Branch is kind of my spirit animal), the Sesame Street gang (alright as long as it’s not Elmo singing), and Peppa Pig (ugh, stick to acting; if you’ve never heard “Birdy Birdy Woof Woof”, DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK). All things considered, we’re doing alright for ourselves on the “songs we now have to hear a million times this hour” front: Baby Shark made barely a ripple on our waters, we’ve successfully avoided the likes of Blippi, and most of the best/worst of The Mouse. I’m sure there’s also a million other things I hope to remain blissfully unaware of.
Not a word about this guy, unless it’s sung…and sung again.
Bruno, though. We don’t talk about Bruno. We don’t have to, because we SING about not talking about him all day and some of the night. I’ll concede that the song is brilliant, Lin-Manuel Miranda is brilliant, the movie is (surprisingly) brilliant, and that my eardrums need a break NOW. Seriously: Kiddo is at school right now, my wife is at work, I’ve got the apartment to myself, and I just sang “I need to empty the garbage” to Bruno’s melody as I did exactly that. It’s more infectious than Covid, and wearing masks over my ears is ineffective, uncomfortable, and just plain awkward, even for me.
Of course, I would never say a word of this to Kiddo: her unabashed enthusiasm for this (and anything else she loves, including me) is truly a beacon. I know that life will inevitably do the lousy things it does and make her no longer want to display her colors so brightly, and the moment that happens I’ll feel like I’d trade anything to not talk about Bruno just a little bit longer.
As for Encanto itself, it’s a pleasant surprise. I’m not a huge acolyte of the Mouse in general: dear readers, there are no princesses, and the last thing I want to raise my smart, courageous little girl to believe is that only some Prince Charming type can make her life complete. Frankly, when I heard that it was a Disney film about a magical Colombian family, I cringingly prepared for an onslaught of cultural appropriation that happily never arrived. The story is solid, the lessons admirable, and the characters reasonably three-dimensional. It’s a thumbs-up from me, and I’ll shut up about it now because we don’t talk about spoilers, no no.
The important part of all of it is this: yesterday afternoon, we took Kiddo to her first in-the-theatre-movie. Given that she was born immunocompromised and as a result we still have to be more careful about Covid than most, this was a miracle in and of itself. She sang along with every song, and when the end credits rolled she walked into the aisle and danced to the music. Encanto, enchantment, in spades. Long may my little one sing, but not talk, about Bruno.
Hey, Internet! I’m Will, the guy who’s throwing this little writing party, and this is the part where I’m more or less obligated to talk a bit about myself. I’m a middle-aged music nerd who’s happily married to a gorgeous, kind woman who not only doesn’t hate my hobby but shares it (which means, right, I’m a unicorn). We are the incredibly fortunate parents of a seriously premature, but now thriving, five and a half year old who has made every cliché in the world about how your kids become your world ring truer than I’d ever imagined they could. In those same five and a half years, I have lost both of my own parents to cancer, two years apart. The duality of learning how to be a parent while simultaneously losing my own is quite a thing, but I (hopefully) do a bit better with it each day.
I’m old enough that when I was young the phrase “social anxiety” wasn’t discussed in polite company, but I’ve no doubt it’s a thing for me. It’s weird: I can give a presentation to a large audience with barely a butterfly in the stomach, but talk to someone one on one with no one else I know immediately around? Terrifying and impossible and good God, where’s the bar in this place anyway? On the other hand, I’m also the kind of guy who decided, as the Covid pandemic descended upon us, that 47 was the right age to cultivate my first mohawk. A year and a piece later, I’m still rocking it. So, do I like the spotlight and the attention? NO! But also yes, but also sometimes but then again maybe not. So yeah, I’m blogger material for sure.
Speaking of which, while it’s my first time here in these new digs, it’s not my first time writing stuff on the internet. About a decade-ish ago, I started a music-plus-other-stuff-sometimes blog called Turned On Its Ear (link right here) that ran from 2011 until I got married in late 2014, at which point there was too much living and learning going on and the writing took a backseat. I keep the archives alive (although many of the links are now likely broken), and do my best to clean out the comment spammers (my apologies if you headed over there looking for some tips about the BEST ONLINE CASINO), but that was then and this is now, and this isn’t just a continuation of that on a new platform with a new name. I still like a lot of what I wrote there, but this blog will be a little more essay-centric and real-life based.
Lastly, we come back to what you likely saw first: what’s in a name? I’m an old-school punk and metal guy at heart musically, so why does this blog take its name from a Jimmy Buffett lyric? Thanks for pretending to ask! For the first, last and only time on this blog, I’ll write the following sentence: it’s my wife’s fault. She was originally the parrothead in our relationship, with me as a hard dissent: “why on earth would I want to listen to an entire album by the “Margaritaville” guy?” “No”, she said, “you need to listen to the details and the storytelling in his early material.” In the end, she was right, both about Buffett as a songwriter and about how one of the greatest gifts we can give to our loved ones is a nudge to reconsider something great we’d previously been willfully blind to.
It’s also a perfect phrase for me. I live southeast of disorder most of the time. I’m aware of the chaos. I may even be a catalyst for or direct participant in it, but I’m always, above all else, an observer of it. I don’t always know what to do about or with it, but I’m always hoping to learn, or at least talk through it in an attempt to better understand it all.
Thanks for listening in while I do just that. Welcome aboard!
Southeast of Disorder 