1.
Gout and the nature of chronic illness, mild as it may be. My first, and truthfully not so bad a one.
2.
The fatherly shift in finding workshop time to be entirely a treat.
3.
Picnics, medical detritus, and diaper caddies.
I find #3 the most interesting.
I always have a twinge of nearly manic overwhelm every time I pack and unpack a picnic or a work space. The profusion of tools necessary to do damn near anything is astonishing. For my shed, for example, just to cut a few joints I needed my jigs, my square, my saw, my rubber mallet, my japanese mallet, two chisels, my skilsaw, my pencil, my ear protection, my eye protection, my tape measure, my pencil, my drill, my belt, my gumption and a few things I’m no doubt forgetting.
Something about all of those things just feels unbelievable to me.
It’s the same with picnics. The cups, the cutlery, the scraps and the containers and the crubs. It’s just an incredible number of things that we need to operate as human beings out in the world. At home all of these things have homes and we can go get them one at a time.
I believe it’s in Snowcrash that Neal Stephenson describes the shoals of drifting medical detritus left after a gang related shooting. That always stuck with me, and it stuck deeper, like a splinter, the first time I saw it first hand, though I don’t believe my leftovers were gang related.
We leave a great deal of shit in our wake, an overwhelming amount, really, and babies are a new genre of such clutter. But it’s a good sort of clutter.