epitaph 45

here lies a man who often worried that he was not spending enough time with his son, that instead of engaging in backyard penalty shootouts or teaching him how to play the theme to Star Wars on the piano or illustrating how to properly reinforce his Lego starships so they wouldn’t crack apart the minute anybody picked them up, he spent far too much time in front of his computer and phone, tinkering with words, reading and commenting upon his students’ papers, taking breaks to check scores and read e-mails and log onto a virtual dashboard that allowed him to scroll past the stream of images posted by all the blogs he followed, swiping the mouse pad and positioning the arrow on a valentine-shaped heart and clicking it whenever he liked a particular photo, or clicking the word “re-blog,” if he wanted the image to appear on his own customized site, thus reserving with a curatorial glee the images that had struck him as absurdly inexplicable, like the toddler who was trying to light a cigarette or the couple sporting 1950s threads lounging beside an idyllic stream while in the background a giant mound of raw strip steaks sat like a gruesome mountain or the kid with a Darth Vader mask sitting alone and forlornly at restaurant table or a guy surfing past a wildfire or a woman sleeping in bed with an actual cheetah or a group of men shoving off in a giant canoe from an ice floe into what appeared to be a galaxy rich with star clusters or a man wrestling a caribou by the antlers or a group of Mormon girls in dresses and braids playing basketball, all of which were mere confections the deceased used to distract himself from work, the computer becoming, as it were, a glorified play pretty, a toy that allowed him to escape for brief moments the drudgery of daily life, if not also to suppress the fact that he had wasted, with the help of this infernal machine, an enormous portion of his only child’s life, had probably dedicated more time to staring at screens and monitors than he had stared at his own flesh and blood, who he could’ve taught — by this point in the son’s existence — to do a great many things, but because he — the deceased — was too lazy or impatient to do so, the kid had not yet learned, for example, how to fold clothes properly, or how to lift — with any predictable frequency — the toilet seat, or how to operate a toaster, or how to spread peanut butter on toaster waffles — two of which the son had eaten every morning for the last six years of his life — or use the pizza cutter to slice these toaster waffles into bite-sized squares, and furthermore, the deceased, as a teacher of English, could’ve overseen the correspondence between his son and all manner of pen pals, could’ve played piano alongside his son instead of yelling at him to practice a quote unquote actual song and not to bang please, could’ve created persuasive incentives for his son to identify and memorize the names of leaves and trees and birds and animals and flowers in his neighborhood, could’ve shown the boy how to plant seeds and fertilize plants, how to start and maintain and stoke and feed a fire, but the sad truth was that the deceased, despite being employed by a state university, often felt crippled by what he didn’t know and had failed to accomplish or learn, as he was, when it came right down to it, a man who could not change the oil in his car or remember what the word hypotenuse meant or explain how the stock market worked, and neither could he — following a total collapse of the economy and societal systems — be expected to subsist upon the bounty of the natural world, for he could not track and kill an animal and roast its meat on a makeshift spit above a fire he’d built without matches, could not read the night sky except to point out the two or maybe three most obvious constellations, a man who had never put together a piece of furniture right the first time, because he simply could not bring himself to read the instructions before proceeding, a man who did not floss frequently enough, and was not — sad to say — always a friend to animals, a man who wondered if the world into which he flung this message would look back on his generation and say thanks for nothing you heartless bastards; thanks for getting suckered into buying bottled water; thanks for making cheese-flavored corn chips and crack cocaine and candy bar nougat and strips of dried steer muscle and strips of processed cow teat secretion; thanks for carrying this quote unquote food away in plastic bags that blew away from their landfills and subsequently drifted down creeks and streams and into rivers and then the ocean, which carried them to a place where all the world’s plastic bags had congregated, thus forming a huge monstrous plastic soup, which, when it nudged against a continent, barfed out a thick, gooey sludge; thanks for spraying your lawns with chemicals to kill the grubs and dandelions; thanks for buying all those slabs of liquid crystal, which relayed images of helmeted barbarians, the majority of whom died young and forgotten but nobody cared because a parade of new and better gladiators were always rising, rising, rising; and thanks people who demanded wars to avenge their enemies even though their enemies couldn’t with much precision be identified; thanks people who sent their sons to these wars because their fathers and grandfathers had gone before them to wars of their own; thanks people who injected your dead with embalming fluid and laid them to rest upon satiny pillows before lowering them into their graves; and though the deceased could go on he would rather say he’s sorry, because he too used aerosol canisters of lubricant to ensure that food wouldn’t stick to the pans in which it cooked; he too was a champion of refrigeration; he drove when he could’ve walked; he depended on others to grow his food; he spent hours staring into screens that displayed fat guys lip synching to Moldavian songs and busty babes biting their lips and orangutans peeing into their own mouths; he too sucked at the electric teat of Appalachian Power; he too dreamed about getting off the grid but instead clung to it for dear life and with the full knowledge that someday there would be hell to pay, but then again, someday — not soon, but someday — the sun would expand into a red giant and swallow the earth, and what’s more, someday — in fact, any day — any one of us could keel over from a heart attack or get creamed by an 18-wheeler — you couldn’t do much about that, either, though you could at the very least, when your son, on a late fall day, asks you to throw a ball in the back yard, you might, for the love of all that’s holy, shut down your phone, slap your laptop closed, and run to the backyard, to bobble that poorly snapped ball, and, as you dodge a barrage of invisible defensive linemen, instruct your son, who is already running at top speed toward the end zone, to go long