Memoir Excerpt

Surely there was a time I felt content and secure, you ask. I am not so sure. For one, George Carlin was right: security is an illusion. The world isn’t safe…at all. It is an amoral globe stockpiled with physical and mental threats at every corner and at every time of day. Just go to google news if you doubt me. So while safety and security are out the window, contentedness is not and contentedness is what allows us to deal with our amoral world. I’ve been content. I have immensely enjoyed hot baths after twenty mile runs with a Sunday crossword perched on a clipboard hovering over steaming water; I have melted into my bed after sensuous, passionate, exhausting sex with a beautiful woman; I have quietly cried looking on in awe as my children do the most mundane things – finding the sublime in their development; I have been lost in thought, lost in music, lost in philosophy and history, lost between six strings on a Gibson Les Paul and not caring if I got back; I have…been content. So why am I not self-actualized and why is life exponentially harder for me than it is for…others? Why am I waiting for the other foot to fall, waiting to be insulted, waiting to be hurt, waiting to be considered less than, waiting for them to talk behind my back? Why? Did I not have positive influences? Am I analytical to a fault, thinking there are no heroes and no monsters? Leaving everyone, human, all too human, as Nietzsche supposed? Is this the cause for my outlook on life? Were all of my influences negative? Perhaps my outlook on my childhood needs to jettison the rose-colored glasses in favor of some reality tinted shades? Nope. There are no monsters. My parents were human, doing the best they could. That may seem tautologous and it may ring like a platitude but in this context, realizing my parents’ humanness and my childhood as something other than pure negativity capable of producing only dysfunction and abnormality is more than wishful thinking; it is all that is the case and it means everything. It is the everything that puts me right here right now…a man trying to keep it together, trying to get the most out of what he has, trying to be more, trying to be a good husband and father…but battling his nature and nurture…a nature and nurture that can’t be overcome, only reconciled…and that too, is everything.

Osbourne Cox: Some clown, or two clowns, have gotten a hold of my memoirs.
Katie Cox: Your what?
Osbourne Cox: Stolen it, or I don't know...
Katie Cox: Your what?
Osbourne Cox: My memoirs, the book I'm writing.
Katie Cox: Well why in God's name would anyone think that's worth anything?