On Breaking

One of the commitments I made to myself and this blog some years ago was the fact that to the greatest extent possible, I intended to be as honest as I could in my writing (especially easy after surrendering any hope of commercial success; it is easier to be honest when there is no hope of earning money by your words).  I would write as a felt, preserving only the names of the innocent to at least keep them from any of my own mis-steps.  Even as late as yesterday morning, I had started posts for this week's update from Turkey (The Istanbul Archaeological Museum, a pretty cool place).  Pictures were uploaded and everything.  I just needed text.

Somehow, something broke in me between then and the time I am writing this.

I have no idea what it was fully.  Partially, it is going through a season at work where there is not a terrible lot for me to do and I feel like a third wheel (or fifth wheel, depending on your choice of transportation or dates).  Part of it is the fact that, like it or not, our income has changed somewhat drastically over the last year and the ramifications of that continue to make themselves felt.  Part of it is the fact that, with the wedding complete, the paperwork for the estate is starting to trickle in and I am having to start to consider truly impactful decisions.  And part of it is world which, no matter how little I try to follow it, seems intent on descending into madness.

I go through these phases sometimes, as longer time readers of this blog will remember.  It is not quite despair, unlike younger me who could feed on this sort of thing for weeks.  It is more the sense that there is a wrongness that, no matter how I try, things will never really be whole again.

I think about my father and maternal grandfather at these times.  

My maternal grandfather graduated on the cusp of the Great Depression; his post graduate life was finding a job at a utility and working through the Great Depression and World War II (he was not allowed to enlist as his job was considered critical, something which always bothered him), and Eisenhower's 1950's and the eruption of the 1960's.  I am reasonably sure that by the 1970's he had no idea what had happened to the world and with retirement retreated to a world of fishing and working in the yard and Lodge business and going abroad with my grandmother.  His world shrank.

Likewise with my father; by his 50's the world had passed him by as well, or as much of it as he wanted to understand.  He, like my grandfather, became a man of his family and The Ranch and his local community.  He watched the world, but it was the view of a man who did it more to try to stay abreast of things that had moved beyond his own understanding as well.

And now, I find myself in their place.

I have become lost in these things, lost beyond my ability to understand or even care about them.  My concern about work has shrunk to "Will I continue to have a job?"; my concern about my larger life has shrunk to a family who even now are going off on their own adventures and a much smaller span of interests and even contacts.  And the world?  It is safe to say I no longer understand what is going on or why, merely that by every sign I see we long ago left the world of common sense and have ventured into a place where people pretend to know the way based on maps that were written with only the vaguest ideas of the world they claimed to portray.

Sure, likely some rest and rabbit time will put some of this to rights.  But buried down inside now seems to live this sense that somewhere, somehow, something changed about me, my view of the world, the world - or perhaps all three - that will not be set right again.