WORKS ON DIGITAL PAPER

Bedford & North Seventh, Brooklyn

Sometimes I wonder whether my son will be a late-bloomer like me, or an early go-getter like my wife. While I was still struggling to get cut from the catholic school junior varsity basketball team, she was already deep into her career at ballet school. By the time I had finished public high school, my wife was already on her second or third year of college. By the time I graduated college, my wife had already earned her degree and lived in France. Twice. When we first got married, she held down two, sometimes three jobs doing all sorts of things, while I sat on the couch making collages or worked part-time stuffing airplane tickets into bill-folds at a travel agency. She accomplished all of this and more despite starting a year later. Admittedly, I hope the boy garners the same suspicion of authority that sometimes comes with being an outsider. I hope he learns to distrust the group-think, jock-think and popularity-think that sometimes accompanies great physical facility early in life. Then again, I can only hope he gets at least one little touch of my wife's determination and expectation, her innate ability to see through affairs to the greater personal good. I hope his brain works better in the morning too. My body and my brain seem to pass each other at midday. As the sun rises, so do I, fresh and vital, able to leap tall building and et cetera. As the sun sets, my brain comes into focus and loses control of my limbs. Outside, the form becomes mired in molasses as inside the twitching of branial muscles hasten their pace. And so it is that we play our league soccer games at night and my mind wanders a little to specific things, paying attention to nuances, forgetting to activate the corpus in little ways. And so it is that this interacts with my distaste for authority and my fundamental lack of respect for things arbitrarily organized. When we play in the mornings, on Sundays, I am a ball of energy, unthinking, unblinking physical joy. There are no referees to give carte blanche to bad behavior, players must be respectful with contextual self-control. In the evenings I brood and my body betrays me and I wish I were elsewhere as the jocks who run the joint tickle into aggravation the little late-blooming snob who twiddles his thumbs, waiting, at my core.