July 30, 2006

My dad had a heart attack and I find myself once again in Mount Clemens, Michigan (home of the Battling Bathers, seriously). My dad looks 1000% better today than yesterday. I've met my infant neice for the first time (not ideal conditions, but long overdue; she's 10 months old). I've spent the last hour on the front porch smoking one of the better cigars from my dad's humidor (he's not going to be needing these any time soon, if ever) thinking about all the things that have happened since I left this front porch at 17 to go finish up high school in France (Rotary exchange). It's not quite nostalgia, more reflection from a different perspective. Or a kick in the pants. Hard to tell now, really.

I was reading Bataille's The Accursed Share on the plane over (man, I hate Chicago Midway lay-overs). I'm only half-way through, but he seems to be arguing for a better method of wasting energy than what is currently happening (he wrote it in 1949, I think). It's a look at economics that works on the personal and the general. I've been considering what I take beyond my needs and how I expend the surplus. It's an ugly analysis. I'm not rich; in fact, last year I was working poor (didn't that used to be called working class?). But the energy that others have expended on me is much less than what I have given back. In Batialle's rubric, I am in friendship luxury at the expense of my friends.

To my friends, apologies.

dhh