Stretch

As I get older my body aches and I can’t remember names, but if there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years is that staying young means stretching. Of course, physically stretching helps those aches, but I'm talking about intellectual and even a spiritual stretch.

One of my barriers, I realized, was Facebook. I’ve been on it since 2006 when after my divorce, I wanted to hunt for women, but mostly I used it for organizing and activism. The problem since Trump is that liberals have found it as a useful tool for organizing, but the alarmism and fear tactics used by liberals seems to be exactly what the Trump administration wants, which is to demobilize resistance. People respond to hope and not fear, not to mention that it’s just screaming into the void. There’s no strategy besides hold signs and vote and certainly no plan to replace the current capitalist order. I had to leave.

I’ve found my mood to be much better until a few days ago when it started to hit me that my days as full time stay-at-home dad are numbered and that, because time is a certainty, my son must also stretch in ways that daddy can’t help with. He’s gotta go to Montessori and meet peers and different teachers. I taught my son to eat and move and I will teach him many other things, but I will never teach him the things an infant will learn ever again. Time is un-fucking-defeated.

Teaching an infant was a huge stretch for me, who up until a few years ago never even envisioned being a father, but l quit drinking and mostly got my mental health together, and I taught him through the fear and self-doubt, I became a father.

Now, I have to stretch again through the fear of letting go and through new adventures in politics and automotive diagnostics, a new business or two, and new comrades to become close with. The motivation has changed, though.

It’s not for revolution, though that’s important.

It’s not for glory because I was never really into that anyway.

It’s not to heal myself, which took a long ass time.

It’s for Hank, to leave him something to be proud of, not the business, though it’s his, not the politics, though they’re for him.

It’s to leave him a tradition, a basis to build whatever he wants to build.