"What's taking you so long, dad?"
I'm eight, and we are on a fishing trip, and I'm having a terrible time. My father is attempting to set up our antique tent and making a great mess of things. He is not the type to keep particularly organized. Perhaps it was he who passed that onto me.
"This goddamn rod is bent all to shit," he grumbles. He always used to curse when he was irritated, which was often. I always knew to steer clear of him in those moments or he would find some arbitrary task for me to do...
Never before had he witnessed such decadence. In every direction he sees strangers from a planet he has not lived on. They do not share his world. Humongous flashing screens paint the slopes of this urban valley with a grotesque LCD glow, electrifying the smoggy night and blotting out constellations he was accustomed to observing. A foreign land indeed.
They had told him about these men, and their women and children, of their social clubs and religious events and twenty-four-hours-a-day informational overload. He had watched the training videos explaining how to communicate in their language, how to mimic their gestures...
"The day after tomorrow, this will all be over." Such a fucking cliche.
Sure, our road trip would be ending soon enough, and we would be returning to our miserable, monotonous, minimum-wage jobs that regularly take us to the very brink of sanity... but to pretend that everything we just experienced would be concluded as soon as we return to home port strikes me as truly false.
The thing that he seems to miss is the continuity of events which develops out of the dynamic relationship between what we do and otherwise experience, and the way we see our fundamental...