Americana

 "Why do I write," he wrote in his second journal, the one for musings and useless thoughts.  I'm almost forty, he thought--no one will read me, never mind publishing.  He flipped back through his prior scrawls, some quite familiar and close, some shit, many of them too dark to read out loud.  "If I want people to read me, I need to write some kind of Americana," he wrote, rattling his mind to recollect some poignant stories--if not from his own life, then things he'd heard.  Cutoff jean shorts, country music, latchkey kids, diversity in public schools, that kind of thing.  There was a current of melancholy running through his thoughts; he labored to make it flow into faded empires and the American Disappointment of the late 1990s.  There wasn't anything good.  Nothing Hemingway.  "I probably shouldn't write," he wrote, thinking, but I won't stop.  A brief vision of posthumous discovery and fame first pleased, then infuriated him.  Finally he settled down and wrote:

The kind of man that buys a lot of fireworks for the family July 4th reunion is often also the kind of man who refuses to be paid back, although he will also grumble about it between Coors Lites if something doesn't go his way, thinking without acknowledging it that he did pay for this evening, after all, and so it's somewhat owed to him--in which, he's not completely wrong, but there are so many rebuttals that it's hard to know where to start; so, most people don't say anything, and he either gets his way or gets a good cause for a short-lasting resentment, and then his wife or daughter or maybe his mother-in-law will bring him another beer, and that's that.

Personally, I used to be the kind of half-assed guy that hangs back at first but by the end I'm lighting all the fuses; but I've made a few subtle adjustments, and now I'm the kind of half-assed guy that sits back the whole time, only getting involved if the safety of my kids demands it, leaning on someone's car like it's the bar at a downtown cocktail lounge and drinking pricey scotch since about 3 in the afternoon because if that asshole is going to drink Coors Lite like it's the only thing not too fancy for him, then I too will drink what I prefer instead of downing the IPAs and wheat beers everyone else bought.  That's the kind of dick I am now, despite a few weak efforts to be anything else.

The literature for the pontoon boat says it carries 15 souls, but everyone's stepmom was watching her 3 grandkids from the first marriage, so that made it 18 and ruined everything.  One of the middle kids looked up a law about it and we could have all gone out together, but it didn't matter.  Some people had a nice fight about it while I watched my three kids and two of someone else's kids and maybe there was a neighbor kid, too.  Since the other seven adults watched two of the other little kids, it was pretty much an even split.  At some point I was sitting on a porch with the step-mom and one of the brothers-in-law and someone's daughter from a previous marriage and I realized none of us were related by blood or even directly by marriage.  But America is all about family, and family is very important, so we gather for reunions and argue with each other just to remember how incredibly special we are to each other--even though Family, as a modern American concept, deconstructs into "people somebody else picked for us to hang out with."

He stopped writing and looked it over.  All shit, he thought, closing the journal & tossing it on lightly on a nearby chair.