…Then the Drifter said:

The Drifter is phoning it in this weekend, or at least shooting from the hip, because the kids (the twins) have pneumonia. And he himself feels like he might be coming down with pneumonia. Or it might be the effects of a lifelong insomnia problem. I remember wandering around exploring our little house in the Detroit suburb of Madison Heights alone in the middle of the night before my brother was born. I was four when he was born. I remember, like it was yesterday, the day they brought him home from the hospital. Like it was yesterday with a large gray veil thrown over it, that is. Sometimes I wonder what are all the things I don’t remember. I know what I remember. What I don’t know is what I forgot. Meanwhile, what I forgot doesn’t mean it hasn’t affected me. It might have been a traumatic thing that has affected my whole life more deeply than anything else that I do remember. I also know that memory has a way of casting a beautiful sheen over some things they could not possibly have had to that full of an extent while they were happening. This hectic week has also reminded me that you need a zen-like control of the mind in order to do any good writing at all, except maybe fragments you can save for later.

Regarding the pneumonia, the effort of providing (or trying to provide) constant emotional support while also talking everyone down and also talking them up all the time (“it will be okay, you can get through this,” etcetera), while simultaneously dealing with crowded doctors’ waiting rooms, harried medical staff, looming insurance debacles, half-assed pharmacy escapades, endless traffic jams, social anxiety disorder caused by bipolar disorder, and near-migraine headaches can be a thing that will lead to nervous breakdowns, just like it has done in the past. My well-medicated brain that has a dead patch in it from having a stroke can handle a lot but it too has its breaking point. The first sign is usually emotional, followed by physical, collapse. Lest it sound like I’m complaining I admit that all of the above is a journey too and these are also some of the most meaningful events in life. Watching your children suffer and panic and cough up blood up close teaches you something, even if you don’t know what it is at the time, and even when they are otherwise healthy kids who you know are probably gonna be okay.

The kids’ mother, my ex-wife, teaches sixth grade math fulltime at a public elementary school. Nearly half of her seventy or so students either have no father at all (that they know of or know) or have a father who’s in prison. It doesn’t make for the most controlled eleven- and twelve-year-old male behavior imaginable. The job has too many students and too many hoops to jump through almost constantly but teaching jobs around here aren’t easy to come by even under the horrible conditions. She takes over with the twins after work when they’re sick and I get to fly away like a bird, but until she’s available, the job of double caregiver is all mine. What I get out of it is a great relationship with great kids. The danger is a bunch of small nervous breakdowns that can lead to a big one. But I get to look myself straight in the eye in the mirror and say, honestly, that I’ve never abandoned them. The sense of freedom this causes through a lack of guilty feelings from doing otherwise is one more freedom in a world where we all want freedom. Freedom comes from what isn’t there as much as from what is. It’s hard to concentrate on anything else when the bombs and the bullets are flying in your direction.

I had started on a column this week before the pneumonia thing began and I here append a 287-word fragment of the rough draft as evidence. I believe it is worthy of perusing or I wouldn’t append it:

This is for all unsung spiritual warriors everywhere who know whereof I speak.

Those who do not know whereof I speak are of course free to read this anyway but it’s unlikely you’d get the same kick out of it as those in the know.

Whether this happened to you yesterday or forty years ago matters not one tiny jot.

What does matter is that the reader of this understand the concept of life as a war and certain individual chapters of it as battles and battlefields.

Understanding this concept does not mean that the symbol and metaphor indicated is real, if it were real it wouldn’t be symbol and metaphor, even though symbols and metaphors are real.

Real war is a horrendous ordeal for all involved, except the ones who get off on it, and there are many who get off on it, probably far more than is generally acknowledged.

The concept of life as a spiritual war means that the strains and stresses of living it on a daily basis can take the same kind of toll that a real war can take in the long run.

On any given day living my normal life in Chicagoland all these things might happen, sometimes within the same hour.

I might be almost run over or slammed into by an errant, enraged driver who then yells at and curses me for almost getting in his or her way even though I’m following the rules of the road and she or he is not.

I might be accosted on the street by a beggar in such a horrific, bedraggled and tragic condition of decomposition and desperation that my eyes, and my heart, can barely stand it.

I might

UNFINISHED.