My Great Grandfather’s Watch Looking at Me File Job Applications

You know watching you is getting to be a real bear.

No, I mean it, a bear. Like the big ‘ol furry asshole that steals picnic baskets.

Okay, dropping that reference is regrettable, but I was around when your Dad was in diapers, so pardon me if some cultural tidbits stick better to me than others.

But no, really, I’m stuck sitting here watching you quibble over a word in your tiny electric box doodad and whether or not it’s going to change your future or get you the job you feel you so desperately need to feel purpose after all you did before went a direction you hadn’t planned or could have possibly predicted. As if you’re the first person to have been unemployed. As if all the others in your life were sitting in the same room and staring at the one gal who couldn’t get it right and didn’t have a job for once in their life.

I don’t get out much, but I do want to let you know that none of that is real.

Yes, I know it’s called a cellular phone, but give me some room for hyperbole.

You’re only the most recent one around the block and believe me, I’m not here to minimize the value or importance of your current life circumstances.

But . . . I am your great-grandfather’s pocket watch. I’ve been a round.

I’ve seen you muttering by yourself and writing into that supermarket journal, the one that has the exterior pattern I can only really describe as matte television static (remember, you always leave me next to the Virgil Abloh-inspired design book - what else do you think I’m supposed to look at while you’re away). I know you have a tendency to put the past on a pedestal. I have a feeling most people do.

I just want to remind you that your great-grandfather was a milkman who wanted to be a gold miner in 1921. Fellow wasn’t exactly with the times. He also didn’t bathe regularly until he ran off with your ranchhand of a grandmother, but I’m not getting into that right now. I just think it’s rich he started bathing when she entered his life, her being a cowherder and all.

Did I mention that she worked on a ranch?

Or that their backup plan after getting married was to get into long haul trucking? Which may or may not have included rodeo animals? I mean, they couldn’t just find another milkman gig? Yes, I realize running away together may have made them persona non-grata in that particularly county of Montana, but this really blued my copper in a very real sense. All this during the GREAT DEPRESSION? And they decided to have a kid in all that.

Not exactly the picture of timing, am I right?

Dial the big hand around a few more times – let’s talk about your grandmother, a wonderful woman, really sad to hear she passed.

She was the one who decided to go the opposite direction and sacrificed social mobility for stability during the glorious post-war years when millions of traumatized young men returned home, throwing a whole generation clockface forward into a world clamoring blindly for meaning and purpose beyond the needs of the mortal coil?

And that didn’t quite work out for her, did it? A few men with severe trust issues can really muck up your life choices if you let them.

Luckily, she got the house, for which I will be eternally grateful and may be the only reason I can provide you with my thoughts today.

And then there’s your father.

The one that sacrificed a perfectly good job to chop wood in northern California to support your mother. I mean, do none of your ancestors have a sense of the era they live in?

None of them knew what they were doing at truly any time. They stood at the knife’s edge of their existence and deigned to peer over it. For you, sitting with your journal, 1979 was a foregone conclusion. A movie quest to get rich quick through sports betting or somehow prevent 9/11.

But they sat where you sit now. With terrible body odor. Wondering if they made the right choice. If they chose the right people. If they were the person who was needed right then to do whatever the right then concern was.

And the world around them was not much different. They worried about the Nazis in 1939. And again in the 60s. And there was that stint in the 90s where Hollywood thought they were about to be an imminent danger. And I suppose now the long hand has come around to that kind of worry yet again.

But all of it passes. Mottos, Presidents, businesses, banners, shopping malls, sidewalks, silt, it all blows away, piece by piece, by a seemingly indifferent wind pushed forward by canyon walls unseen and atmospheric tremors too great in volume to be felt by two mammalian feet running to and from a nearby sandwich shop with any meaningful regard.

Your great-grandfather lived presently, if not timely. He and your cowherder grandmother found each other and continued to fly at the same pace they met, keeping open minds to what to me feels like a million bits of analog digits blinking in malformed chatter that despite best efforts to remain discordant somehow formed their own tapestry.

Your grandmother, though pained by a society that did not see her for her own beauty and potential, perhaps fell short in the terms of success you judge yourself by now. But in that defeat, maybe there is also clarity that the life she gave herself was not so lonely or without joy and I’m not talking about caring for her children you patriarchal dimwit. I just think she was there for some people at the right time. Even if only once.

Take it easy on yourself. It’s an immense privilege to be able to overthink your meal ticket application.

Now can you close the lid? I’m getting too much sun.