Washington D.C. from concentrate

I’m sorry, but what is my temptation? I have to wonder this while I’m marveling at my inability to want anything other than what I have. I don’t want to go out drinking. I really don’t care for another cheeseburger, and I’m not even up for a coffee. A freakin’ coffee? The entering-your-40s delight, especially for a family of five. You NEED coffee, right?

I’m not feeling it. I seem to be happy with everything I have. I know. I am sitting down. This revelation has Our selfie in front of the Washington Monument (not pictured: Washington Monument)already shocked me enough to prepare for stability. Even more shocking: I’m not even pining for work. Which is weird, because I’m that guy who’s always thinking he should be doing more. He squirms to get back to the computer or on the stage to try it one more time before trying it one more time. It’s an endless cycle of professional stabbing. Right now I don’t seem to want to assail life anymore than to hang with my boys and watch Spongebob on hotel cable. (Spongebob seems to be the only thing on hotel cable.)

Something must be wrong. This is where I usually stand firm in a room and let it spin around me until something tumbles out of the wobbly gyroscope of centrifugal worry. Something surely needs tending too; there’s got to be a thing that I should be doing. But it hasn’t happened, and I should be worried that not worrying isn’t even worrying me.

I don’t want my sedative state to come to any alarm to anyone who feels I should be concerned for him or her. Paco, I miss you. I hate leaving my dog behind. And at this very moment, for the first time in her young life, Eliot is not with us. I miss her. I miss clutching my giggly little girl and “gobbling her up.” I’m going to get arrested for grabbing a stranger’s baby and pretending to eat it. From what I’ve heard, she’s doing well and most likely being spoiled with love and affection by her doting grandparents. We also hope they’re teaching her things like how to walk and tie her shoes.

So I’m relaxed, and I know the boys are. They’re each in a bed, curled up against the hotel air conditioning and watching the cartoons their parents are too cheap to get. (Parenting tip: Don’t get cable and any hotel seems like a trip to Disney.) We were just in the pool and are preparing for another day in DC. Today we saw the Lincoln Memorial and went to the Air and Space Museum. The boys were appropriately astounded and I got excellent parking, which is the suburban dad equivalent to killing a mammoth.

Lincoln, backstage.

Lincoln is very moving. The Parthenon-like structure and that huge marble man, one hand open and the other in a fist, a hammer, all carved to an exacting size and posture for mortality and immortality: he’s torn but not divided. There’s even vulnerability in the huge pillars. “We’re only trying to compete with time; we’re doing the best we can to represent you, man.” You do get the feeling though, the literal chill in your gut, that the only thing that’s permanent is the cycle, and you hope (as you walk past the Vietnam wall) that somehow we improve with every lap around the sun. That somehow we’ll understand how it is we die and how it is that the grass gets watered with blood and mothers have to stare at photographs of babies and wonder how it is the little human they coddled ended up splattered across some old man’s doctrine. And you can’t imagine the horror of war and the horror of more. Abraham Lincoln, so large and towering across time, can’t seem to get the message across.

The past and the future are present. Lincoln Memorial 2014.Sarah’s on the phone with her mom getting an update about Eliot. She’s been good, if not a bit fussy (Eliot, that is.) She won’t give too much of a damn about us being gone until we get back. That’s when she’ll look at her grandma, and then her mom, and then wail and rail against the double cross.

Mom, dad I miss you so---holy crap a Lite Brite.Today we’ll walk the Mall. The boys were mesmerized by the Air and Space Museum (understood to be Aaron’s Space Museum when Sarah was a young girl) and seem to be taken by the spectacle as a whole. We have the Washington Monument out our hotel window, and I’m so proud of Quin for appreciating Lincoln. He wrote a report for first grade: “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. He wore a tall hat,” although my impassioned speech about the 16^th president was interrupted with, “There’s a hole in this ice cube!” His right eye stared back at me through the icy orifice. It’s those distractions, though, that make me want for nothing.

The one thing this picture needed was a giant phallic symbol.