This one's for the family

So I meant it, earlier, so, about my parents. My parents have been married for 32 years and 2 days. That is an approximation of 11,682 days of effort, struggle, partnership, shared experience. I have been involved in approximately 76% of this union. Um ... since birth, that is. I calculated.

It may seem odd to many who have known me over the years as being somewhat older than my age or "world weary" (citing a report card circa 1996) that I continue to obsess and confess about parents, family, relationship, searching, personal hygiene, hope, love, and other vulgarities, with such adolescent naivete, relish, and sense of righteous subjectivity. But as I meet the next generation of promising upstarts from Swarthmore, for example, and am asked by this bright buggy-eyed youngling with a Corona in his hand "Woah-what does it feel like to be 25?!?" I happily answer: "right. fitting. Now please remove me from your active short-term memory because I no longer need to abide by the rules of the diverse social laboratory that was our shared environment, as much as I treasure the memory, as much as it has enabled me and allowed me to grow. Please, no--really, you still have acne, a weak palate, and are embarrassing me with your sense of entitlement." I've been wanting to be 25 since I was 18. I think I am finally in my own skin. I think I finally fit. I think I have finally relinquished being "set apart". I am so lonely "set apart". I can finally cling to a status quo of pop cultural references and haphazard knowledges that I like. As I've been perhaps not so much proudly as cognizantly telling as many people as I can obtain a first impression with: "It's taken me 25 years of hard soul work to become as superficial as I am right now."

So my parents, yes, my parents have made a name for themselves, as a unit, as world travellers. They have made a fantastic team in this way, good representatives of our national and familial culture to others, and faithful, if not aggressively devoted opportunists of other cultures and histories. No stone unturned, I believe the phrase goes. No passport stamp uncoveted. Now, don't laugh -- you, too, shed an inner tear with the consolidation of the European states. You, too, are a collector of sites and I-was-heres. And surely I've written about this, too, that is, the ontological premise for the tourist photograph. Maybe this blog. Maybe my harddrive. Vintage: 2006. This is turning out to be a season of theme-making. I am in my skin. I am beginning to make sense.

So my parents, my parents, yes, so dedicated are their walking boots that when calling to wish them a happy anniversary in the company of visiting cousin John, I was greeted sooner with a "what are you doing in the house, why aren't you showing John the city?" than I could deliver a hung-over "but yesterday..." itinerary check-in. There is potentiality in everything. There is not a second to waste. They taught me that. They taught me to live like that. I mean it. I celebrate it!

My parents have a love of the itinerary. OK, to be fair, my mother has a love of the new (experiences, sites, nature, currencies, bank notes of these currencies, all of which require a solid itinerary to discover and execute/amass), while my father has a love of organization, and receives a performative joy from displaying organizational prowess, i.e. the tabulated, shaded, bold-typed, underlined, and italicized Microsoft Word itinerary. Somersaults, high kicks, and the triple-axel. My parents have a love of the itinerary. In honor of which, I am producing one, in retrospective (since all days are by nature full, it being very difficult or very impoverished to have NOTHING to do and to do nothing--and I say this with no small recognition of human beings who do, by injustice or unfortunate circumstance, live this way), of my 42 hours with dear cousin John Davys in Vienna. But for the sake of extended family who may have an interest in this dedicatedly EVENT-driven and NARRATIVE-based account and who yet may be unsympathetic to the otherwise circumloquacious Musings of my Um -- we start a new page.