7:28 AM PDT - Jun. 04, 2002
karma
so today it's smoggy day in Los Angeles -- sometimes i think the best thing that's happened to me at work is this office with a view. i feel more than ever that my outlook on life is what i make of it, that my own future and success -- however i define it -- has never been based on luck or karma or blessings or curses but on me. or maybe their is some karma or blessings or curses but i've rolled with them, i've relied on myself to bring about the luck or success or failure on myself. at least that's what my wife told me. remarkable woman my wife is. that in this twenty-something week of her pregnancy she does what she does and still ambles around and has little complaint about anything. she says it's the lack of hormones that keeps her on an even keel. sometimes i think her monthly cycles dump her into the ocean, the sun diffused, the world blurred into clouds of sand and everyone's mouth is goldfished into white balloon comic dialogue. i don't know. we spend our evenings on the couch. i want to sit next to her and just be, watch her read, turn on her favorite background television noise or place my hand on her belly and hope my son is awake and thump back dad, leave me alone will ya? today we have an ultrasound and i will see my son on the screen, the white light like the sun peeking through water and there he'll be, sleeping, eating, growing, kicking at the insides of his mother. i'll never really know how much my own parents waited for me. and it's times like this when faith in something helps. that maybe all this prayer and religion and belief may amount to nothing more than a pile of yellow stickies on God's computer screen that gets dished off into a gigantic blue recycling bin and shredded into a million little bits. i will tell my son to believe in himself the way i believe in him and his mother and myself, that i believe in God and me but i never really ask God for anything. i think of my grandfather who passed two months before i was born, how my mother and grandmother wept, how i hear little of his name except when i see his pictures. and how they live through that, their loss of father and husband and how i came into the world and the memories i so wanted to make -- i wonder if he smelled of peppermint, if he smoked, if he liked to drink whiskey as my father drinks whiskey, if he wore cheap Old Spice or Brut for aftershave. i wonder if it is he who is teaching me all these ways of thinking, that with any incident you have two ways to react -- let it teach you or let it haunt you -- and only now do i know this.
