Air - Sexy Boy

A part of me thought that this forced confinement thing would be fairly easy to deal with, after all, I'm not a terribly social person, and I only go out if I must.
However... I should've remembered how easily some things can outright spin out of control. i.e., sleep schedules. Working from home, I find myself exhausted all the time, and I recently even confessed to missing being at the office. You know what this means, right? Somewhere in hell things started to freeze over.
But my regular day is something like getting up - logging in to my workstation - grabbing a bite to eat - christ, it's lunch time already and I feel like I haven't done anything - sleeping for 45 minutes - get back to work - what do you mean it's six o'clock already? - maybe do some shopping - watch some TV and fixing dinner - being asleep by 9 p.m. - waking up sometime around midnight - being up until six or seven a.m. - going back to bed for maybe a couple of hours - and rinse and repeat.
I hate this.
I hate this with a passion.
I feel perpetually sapped of energy, strength and the actual will to do something, anything. All the cool things I said I was gonna do, like going for a run at 4 a.m.? No sir.

So I sit in the sofa, headphones on, listening to music - somedays even catching up on my reading - most nights. And most nights, like so many of us out there, I think, my mind does tend to wander, and think and overthink. Lately I've been thinking a lot about my son, Ian, whom I've not been with since this quarantine began. Ian turned twenty years old last December, and he's been my one constant companion these past few years, and he's seen me at my very worst - the dark days of 2013-2014 - and he's seen me at my most hopeful, only to see those hopes dashed against the rocks. Had his not presence been in my life, I don't think I'd be here still. Ian is, in so many ways, very much like me. Though he is far braver and more resolute than ever I was at his age; when I was 20 I'd started giving up already. Well, that is to say, I'd made my peace with the fact that all I'd amount to was some lowly, easily replaceable cog in the great machinery of life.
Twenty now, and though we've had our disagreements - what parent doesn't? - it's been a privilege to watch him grow. I couldn't teach him much, except to be a kind person, to judge people by what's in them and not how they look, and to find in his soul a charitable bent. All this, and so much more, he's accomplished.
Twenty now, and it saddens me on a personal level just how much of his early life I can't remember, and also missed out on, and this on account of having lived abroad when he was younger. I don't actually have many photos of him when he was a baby - we didn't really use the camera we had  back then - and so I can't even fall back on those records.
But I still remember a bit. I remember when we found that we were going to have a child. I remember my first tine holding him at the hospital, looking at the wee gremlin and thinking 'so you are my son'. I remember the very first word he said, something weird that sounded like 'OH-GAH-NEE-BOO-GAH'. I remember sleepless nights. I remember waking up to change his diapers, only to find him soiled up to his neck, and thinking 'HOW?'. These memories - distant ones, to be sure - are still firmly etched in my mind.
I also remember how those sleepless nights were often spent watching 'Hill Street Blues' reruns, playing Final Fantasy VIII, and watching music videos on whatever music channels we watched at the time. And that takes me to today's song - Air's 'Sexy Boy' and its video that was on heavy rotation at the time on the french MCM channel. Though the band itself is mostly miss than hit for me, when I found this record on some bargain bin a few years ago, I couldn't pass it up. In some way, it's a memento of those very first memories I have of my son.

I swear I always promise to myself that whatever I intend to write about is going to be concise and to the point. Maybe I don't have it in me. Ah well!

Stay safe, folks!