Jay Ouderkirk/Post-Everything

2007: Even though I pretty much know why, regardless it's funny to me that I consider a thirty-one year old as young now. But I see pictures of me then and I see it plainly in my face, eyes brighter, still making dumb faces and making dumb poses, often with friends, sometimes maybe even trying to smile. Sixteen years one direction or the other makes a difference. Also, I'm jealous now of how good I used to look. I didn't give myself enough credit on those days but I've never really been known for giving myself much credit about anything. And then I wonder if I'm still not giving myself enough credit now. However with it being the latter half of the aughts and even though I probably reeked of cigarette smoke all the time I happened to be at this really great intersection of being attractive, young and single where ending up with women would be considered a not-uncommon occurrence. I'd be restless after spending the day writing in my dark apartment all day, begin the night intending only on visiting Waffle House with a friend of mine, somehow veer off into some other misadventure, then often enough the outcome at night's conclusion compared to the beginning just winds end up being a gulf from what it was, a vast one. At times the hopscotches I used to do in the course of an evening were incredibly reckless and irresponsible and I hope I'm not coming off right now like I'm proud of it. It's interesting in a way to think back upon it but it isn't me, now. While it was all happening I still felt, deep down, that all the random and cheaply-obtained experiences I would have with others were only reminding me of what actually could bein my life. Maybe that's what it all was; the person I was is no longer around for me to ask him.



2008: I kind of knew her from before and randomly knew her name. She was a barista at the coffeeshop that my friend was managing and we never talked about anything aside from what drink I wanted. To her, I was just another customer in line and she was never really friendly. Life throws curveballs at times. Meeting later in a different environment and figuring out what we had in common, I still initially had strong reservations; she was just barely old enough to drink legally and had a very young child already. She also had a lot of tattoos, which I really like, secretly. Although she was young she was brave enough to strike out on her own in this world and had goals and a plan and was determined to make a life for herself. I kept coming down to where she lived and stay the night, back in the city. Sometimes, if I thought I needed to pace myself and hide out in the country for a week or two, she'd get restless and come up to where I was and start looking around town for me. Excelsior Springs started to feel like I was wearing the same clothes for way too long without washing them. I'd made the best of it during the time I was out there but I knew it wasn't enough for me anymore. I kept getting caught between just enjoying the moments with her and maybe even feel too comfortable and start throwing up more walls around me again, but she would just keep seeing them for her and knocking them down. Not everyone could do something like that I wasn't expecting any of this to happen. So over time and several internal arguments, my desire for happiness won. The way Summer lived her day to day life created its own gravity, and let's face it, this point of my life was akin to something like weightlessness. Slowly I descended, and landed there. I proposed to her just a few months after we moved in together.

2009: Someone we knew was murdered. I didn't know her very well at all but other people did. She was just recently hired as a junior scientist at a world-famous laboratory near here, and her real life was just immediately ahead of her, but she was shot while running from two men who attempted to rob her in the city while she was walking back to her car. The realization sank in for us that the life we were building together, with a very young child no less, is actually more fragile than we think it is. I'm putting a young child in a swingset in the park after walking there with a stroller. I'm carrying diaper bags around with me. Every day it feels more and more like we all a unit, a family. In the aftermath of such senselessness all these shared moments that we were were inhabiting started feeling too precious to leave to chance and cold indifference, so we moved to Lawrence, a college town in Kansas thirty miles or so outside Kansas City in the notion that that environment would be safer for all of us. It's a cute and progressive town with plenty of food options and aside from the occasionally rowdy college student, there isn't much crime. But, we weren't happy there. The commutes we had were before podcasts happened so it was long and incredibly dull. Plus we had a small child and the logistics weren't the best. We realize that to some extent the chaos suits us. Neither one of us had a storybook quality to our lives, growing up. We move back to hang out with our friends, whose presence during this time colors my relationship nearly as much as the actual person I was in it with.

2010: The wedding itself was performed in a backyard belong to the mother of one of our mutual friends. It had been featured, along with the house itself, in more than one issue of assorted interior decorating and landscaping magazines. It was a gorgeous and a peaceful place. Outside was humid in the way that the month of June often is around here; I'm uncomfortable in a black tuxedo. Summer looked beautiful and I couldn't get over the fact that she was going to marry me, of all people, but without a doubt she had to be uncomfortable too. Some friends of ours formed a string quartet for the ceremony. Another friend of ours, a minister, officiated. We made hundreds of paper cranes to hang from the walls of the empty space above Prospero's Books for the reception. My mom did all the catering; this was before she knew she was sick. We got drunk and danced while everyone in my life contributed to the money tree that was near the front door. We end up getting a suite at a hotel downtown and had late night Mexican food delivered to us. I never want to go through all of this again, I told myself, but it wasn't an unhappy decision.

2011: I started to consider just how fleeting all these moments are. At one point somebody that you know can be healthy and happy, the next moment something about your body, so ephemeral as well, begins feeling very wrong and soon they're diagnosed with a life-altering health problem. I'm thirty-five now and I'm up at night next to my asleep wife staring at the ceiling, having those thoughts like oh, so you know what being alive thirty-five years feels like, now you're halfway to seventy and then your life is essentially done with. Even though I'm married now things are still not perfect and there's no slow morphine drip of happiness every day, which is something I had spent most of my life convinced would happen. I'm climbing a mountain but all I can do is look down at worry about how far I'd fall if I let go. I'm going to therapy and a psychiatrist also, partially to make Summer as happy as I can with me showing I can be proactive about my problems, I'm also taking antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. Because the tug to cast myself into nothingness and void is always there, never all that far, whether or not it suits me, whether it matches my current responsibilities and desired lifestyle. That desire, when it shows up, is the ultimate solution to finally cause my overactive mind to finally rest. There would be no more thoughts, no more worry, no more doubt. I really am making the most of what I can with therapy and trying to pay attention to how my brain feels on the drugs I've been prescribed, using it as a tool to work and build the programming to deal with these occasions of quiet self-implosion. Still, there's only limited success. These quiet nervous breakdowns are drowned out by the din of a young, loud family.

2012: I still didn't consider myself a father until some months after, on a quiet afternoon with no one else there, with baby Eliot at one end of the living room laying on her back in the playpen and I on the other side of the room, we looked at each other like it was the first time, and she was still so young that this might have sincerely been the case. Slowly the little girl smiled at me. And I smile back. And that's when it was and that's the moment I'll always understand and it's the closest I think I've really ever been to the truth of things. The Void flickers for a moment. I feel the flow of time pass through me and for a second, everything, literally everything, feels like it's in order. A bolt somewhere from above found its target and I'm one step closer than I ever used to with understanding an infinite love of the finally Divine. My heart is lighter immediately but, again, the Void just flickers, and a feeling like a weighted blanket falls on my shoulders. This is vulnerable. When a person finally starts to understand what is really important in his life, the outcomes can hit new and undiscovered heights, but also the things that can go wrong can get even worse, exponentially. Even the good can be bad; I had been through enough now to understand this. Being an adult is just an array of choices and decisions that so rarely contain all positive or productive consequences anyway, and there's no denying now that I really am a grown-up. There's always bills to pay. There are always pros and cons. There are also, however, perfect moments that I know I'll always remember. It's a double-edged sword. It's several double-edged swords, all of which can defend, but can also slice right through you.

2013: The constant state of feeling tired permeates everything. There's two children in the house now, one of whom is very young and obviously needs near-constant attention, the other very firmly a first grader who needs us to read bedtime stories for about two hours every night. A cornerstone of young parenting where it doesn't matter that you might have had the worst day of your life, you still have to figure out what you're going to do about dinner. Going to the office at this point feels like I'm getting a temporary reprieve from the challenges I go through at home. I'm still changing diapers, cleaning all the time, laundry, lawn work, taking out the trash, while rarely if ever getting the daily recommended amount of sleep. Often at night I'll stay up after everyone has gone to bed, Summer included, and revel in some moments of stillness where no one is needing me to do anything. Of course she's tired too from being a parent and working in a cubicle all day and so I'll do all the things that she's too exhausted for, whatever dimension that exhaustion would take that day. Even though I no longer smoke inside, I still get sick more frequently than most other people and stay like that for much longer than I used to. Of course I'm a horrible employee, probably the worst foreclosure claims processor that James B. Nutter and Company has ever seen. I call in sick all the time or show up late with a cup of coffee in my hand, and then often I won't be at my desk and pretending to be off in the filing room but really just hiding out for long periods of time communing with my smartphone. Eventually enough, I get fired, which stung but at the same time, I would have fired myself too. I try looking for work anywhere else but my lack of enthusiasm is clearly interfering with getting hired. Every new choice feels like more spinning wheels and the bitterness of complacency. Some time of this later and maybe because there were a lack of any other options, we decide that for the good of the family I should focus on being a stay at home parent. Money will be tight but it's better for the kids and daycare is just so expensive anyway. It's worth a try, we assume, to discover if it provides us a foil for our various woe.

2014: My own future is abstract but all I have for a goal is to be as good of a teacher for Eliot as I can be, as her guide into her new life and new world. I begin to consider more the world around me, studying everything around me I can. In my free time, what little of it there is and surprisingly so for someone who didn't have a legitimate job, I seek out to understand more the shared story of humanity, and think about my own part of it. I consider the environment more and how I can affect it from my actions (or possibly inaction). I start running again on some evenings and I'll end up going for several miles before quitting, bothering Summer somewhat who gets concerned when I'm out running the streets of the city at night for hours. I lose pretty much all interest in modern music and with the help of Spotify I begin listening to important and culturally meaningful music from the past. It dawns on me that I've been surrounded by trees and bushes and plants my entire life where I never knew what the names of them were, the names of clouds, several types of birds, to which I decide that this will absolutely not do. The only real important thing is my daughter, and my world contracts accordingly. Friends of mine are becoming slowly strangers and if it weren't for social media I wouldn't know what's happening with them at all, just about. Ellie and I know shopkeepers in the neighborhood we live in that are her friends. Every playground within a large radius from our house is our sovereign territory and I plan different parks for different moods and instances of weather. We sit out in the warm rain, she loves that. It's a baptism. And I'm capturing each moment in some way or another because I'm not entirely unconvinced these aren't the best ones of my life.

2015: The honeymoon period is ideally supposed to lead to something better, becoming more comfortable and harmonious, where the bond between people matures and they find ways to fall even deeper in love with each other. Problem is, though, is that humans aren't really quite wired that way with our relationships, and it takes work, most importantly communication, and a lot of it. We also need to be able to visualize what we want with ourselves and each other and feel strongly enough about it to create a plan to follow through. Because that's what healthy, well-adjusted adults are supposed to do. Summer tried a lot harder than me, I realize it now. She wanted to help me for so long after I had already given up. There's times where I still can feel the sickness in my heart that had completely taken over then, a sixth or maybe even seventh sense like heartburn after a very, very bad meal. We needed extra money coming in to pay for little rewards to distract ourselves from the feeling that all that we're doing is grinding ourselves down to nothing, so I start working evenings as a security guard. I had quit smoking as a New Years' resolution but after using cigarettes as a crutch for twenty years, for so many months afterward every moment felt like holding in my breath just long enough to be uncomfortable. We're not really talking anymore. We're not even watching the same TV shows. Every day became a simple equation where I would sit in a factory in a polyester uniform all night and after a few hours sleep being home with Eliot during daylight hours. In the beginning of a relationship we think about what it is we have in common, but what's happening between us is this in reverse. And when you come up with too many ways to consider yourself different from someone, it's a chain reaction, it becomes so much simpler to lose what respect you have for them.

2016: I don't like revisiting these times. It's something I've tried writing about for years but the events had proven to always be such a dreadful block. I probably needed time, and at my age just asking for what passes for time could very much just as well be something like needing seven years to develop the ability to write about it even in this abstract sense with an even enough keel and without dragging anyone through the dirt. No one deserves a bad name, except perhaps me. And I hope that's how it's all coming off, I really do. There's two memories that are crystalline, they'll probably always be: one of which watching the children burst into tears when we sat them down and told them that your mother and I are splitting up. The second is the morning after on the couch, drinking coffee, trying our best in order to be as civilized as we can, this slow methodical conversation. I know it hurts a lot right now, she said to me. It's hurting me too. But I promise you that there will be a day where you will wake up and realize that you're free again. And that all of this was for the best. At the time the thought of finding the inner fortitude and emotional gymnastic required to move forward like this felt like a cruel sort of fiction. I was a man who had just been sleepwalking through what was supposed to be the happiest and most meaningful time of his brief existence, a man, and really only in the strictest sense of that word, who robbed himself and those he loved for the better part of a decade. It felt like the reasons, whether maybe I was innocent through circumstance of some of the charges I had levied against myself, were ultimately irrelevant, when such damage as this becomes the outcome. For things to be better, to be right, would require a better version of me that I had likely never been.

2017: The divorce was an amicable one; while men are often raised hearing about horror stories where the evil ex-wife will wreck someone's life and make them miserable, it didn't happen to me. In the big scheme of things I'm sure that anything is possible but to an extent I've always dismissed them as distorted narrative from hyper-reactive men who so often are unable to fully recover from broken pride that they point blame in every direction other than their own. I've known a lot of people who have come and gone that were like that. We decided to work together, one last time, and make this as easy as possible. We filled out the divorce paperwork on our own and decided on joint custody without really any argument. Going to court about it was still a necessary embarrassment but once we got up in front of the judge and declared our marriage to be irreconcilable, the gavel dropped, it was simple enough. We weren't rich enough to have anything to fight over, really. She got an apartment nearby but I kept living in the same house, albeit without much in the way of furniture. Adopting her daughter from our relationship was something that we always talked about throughout the entire marriage but never followed through with, but they would still live with me on the same schedule as Eliot. I had to make adjustments: now on my own and needing to find something better, I got a job working overnights at the Internal Revenue Service, retrieving people's requests for tax returns. I spent what free time I had trying to find free furniture and other decor through Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace and try to rebuild my life around me. I bought a PlayStation and found a foosball table and decided to put it in my living room, because now I was a divorced man in his forties, and I might as well have these things. The kids think it's great. Nonetheless, none of this is beginning to feel like it was for the best. I didn't miss Summer but I still felt alone, and very much vulnerable. My mental health is still fragile and every day is still just me putting one foot in front of the other and I'm just never far from remembering that there is no one now to be there to help me, should I fall. I'm still Jay Ouderkirk and there's always going to be a fall. Maybe sooner or maybe later, but eventually, inevitably.

2018: Time goes by and I begin to feel more at ease with myself. I wake up every day, being me, and I go to bed at night (albeit it's pretty late at night due to my weird hours) still being me. Maybe there isn't going to be much of a fall after all and I'm relaxing somewhat. Perhaps things might not actually be too bad. Perhaps, the past is in the past, and that history doesn't have to repeat itself, perhaps it doesn't even have to rhyme. So, did everything happen for the best, when it's all been said and done? Maybe that too, but things are not all said and haven't all been done, that's just the thing. And it doesn't feel like any of it is coming to any sort of conclusion anytime soon. Things keep advancing, progressing. I'm starting to understand my own innate, secret powers. For the first time in my adult life, I actually get promoted at my job. For so long I have had a passive attitude towards how and why I got my paycheck, but now I'm taking a greater ownership of my work, being responsible for others, mentoring people. For Heaven's sake, I'm even leading a classroom - a classroom, of all things! - with dozens of people using the materials I've prepared over multiple weeks for a new training program. And what's even more significant than being given the opportunity to do it, is my actual willingness to do so. It takes a lot out of me and I'm exhausted and my voice hurts, but by God, I'm doing it. I also start dating again. It doesn't work out, they never do, but there's a difference to it all now: not all that long ago before these kind of failed experiences would leave me feeling defeated, worthless, now I just don't care about it very much. It's barely showing up on the radar. That's life, I say. There's too much happening at this moment for me to understand just quite exactly what this new kind of indifference truly represents.

2019: There's starting to be a lot more phone calls. My mother is getting sicker. Shortly after Eliot was born she was first diagnosed with myotonic dystrophy, which is what her brother had, and probably what her father had too but he died years before anyone really knew what it was: a progressive muscle wasting disease of which there is no cure, and the prognosis is as bad as anyone would think it is. And it is getting worse, for her. It's scary because she is only twenty years older than me, which seemed for so long like such a huge gulf of time, but now only feels woefully soon. Her progressively weak state begins to inform me of what could very well be my own future, one way or the other. I was told that since so many people in my immediate family have had it I effectively have a fifty-fifty chance of developing it myself. It could manifest itself at any time, but normally it happens in a person's forties. All I'd have to do, they tell me, is go to the University of Kansas Hospital where they have doctors in the area who study this disease, and get tested. I decide that I'm not going to. I don't want to know that I'm going to die. I also don't want to know that I'm not going to die. Summer also still calls me quite a bit because she's having trouble with her oldest child, now twelve, whose fugues which have always been a part of her life since she was very young are beginning to become more unpredictable, more violent. Sometimes I have to leave work early to rescue Eliot because things at her house are not safe. There's other times where I'll need to pick them up from school because it gets to me more than even their trained counselors are equipped for. It can get ugly. I try to be as stoic as I can, weathering the blows. Blaming them, or anyone else, is not the answer. I'm a part of many conversations in which I simply do not know what to say. The laws of the State of Missouri and the Department of Family Services or any other safety net that supposedly exists out there apparently have no idea what to say either. Towards the end of the year, they're in a special place for other young people, and my heart sinks.

2020: Everyone panics. Eliot is my main concern at this point, so while the world closes down everywhere I empty out what retirement savings I had, leave the job in the private sector that I had just recently started, stockpile on groceries, wash and disinfect all of them, and hunker down in my apartment to watch the news. I don't subscribe to any conspiracy theories, but at the same time, have little faith in my government to show the leadership required to minimize the problem. It's difficult for my daughter, who is still only seven years old, to really understand what's happening. That was the worst part, I think, I'm accustomed to watching everything crash down around me in one way or another, but this is new to her. I have to explain why we can't see friends anymore, why we can't go to the same fun places that we used to go. It gets to me, too. Whereas leaving the house I had lived in for years a few months before for a smaller space made sense at the time, the eight hundred or so square foot two bedroom one bath soon starts feeling like a cage, for the both of us. There isn't anything wrong with grabbing a fishing pole and going to the lake, I reason, and events blossom from there. We keep masks in the car and hand sanitizer in our pockets and go out into the world again. Gasoline is extremely cheap and secretly I'm delighted that there were no traffic, no lines, no thoughtless people to have to maneuver around in public spaces. Truth really be told, it was the most active that I've been in years. Dysfunctional as it probably seems all this renewed vitality ends up changing me for what I feel is for the better in certain aspects deep and internal. As the years go on it becomes more clear that things for me can be classified as either happening before or after this year. It's the beginning of the modern period, of which it still has no name. From here it feels apparent that though the book is long, my story is still not completely written.

2021: The time I spent not having a job has the benefit of giving me breathing room to consider what it is I really want out of that facet of life, always inescapable, most people are not independently wealthy and cannot avoid for long needing to perform services for other people in exchange for money, and while I tried to pretend otherwise during the pandemic as long as I could, eventually reality conquers. I get a job pushing data in a modern office, with modern people, most of whom are considerably younger than me. Their minds are more elastic than my own and at first I have to pretend I know how the cloud works, how Slack works, how to do videoconferencing. I take it all in stride and listen to my superiors even though they're ten, even twenty years younger than me and try to learn from them as much as I can and try my very best. The story isn't completely written, I'll tell myself. There's a lot more to come. I task myself with discover sites like Udemy and Coursera and begin studying for certificate courses that might help me out for the future: programming, web development, marketing. Summer graciously allows for a deviation in our shared custody for a few weeks and I'm flying out of town on business. Can anyone believe that they let someone like me fly out of town on business? My daughter and I Facetime each other, she turns nine: a big kid now, she understands what's happening and she's probably my biggest cheerleader. In my eagerness to test what my limits are I run out of gas momentarily and crash all alone in a hotel room in Houston after working twenty hours straight on my laptop and still not feeling that I'm even remotely finished with what I needed to do. I check out of the hotel room the next day and fly home, pick up my daughter back in Kansas City and take her swimming. Unfortunate as that crash was, with one eye cast to the vagueness and darkness of the future (and the future is ever closer) it's apparent that I still can't let myself stay in one place, as it were, for too long. It's dark thinking, but undeniable. If I were twenty years younger, I could afford to demonstrate longevity in my resume, but time's debt to me has been already well paid and it feels like I'm shaking the last of the drops out. There's still way more on my route before I get to where I feel like I should be. Later on that year I get a different job doing graphic design and e-commerce, that within a few more months turns into managing the Web department. But still, it isn't enough. I do not consider it a burden but more like a period of discovery to see what I can do, where I can go, and what kind of person I can become, to develop and understand and fulfill my real potential. It's a renaissance, might as well be one anyway, and the process contains a certain kind of intoxication that always get fumbled in the conversation whenever I'm trying to explain it all to somebody else. When I speak they will nod their head and say oh really and glaze their eyes and I know that they aren't really interested in knowing more.

2022: Some days up there are a lot better than others. It's hard to get up to her house in my little electric car with just a commuter's range, so often I'll hitch a ride out there with my sister. My mother's second husband is really good to Zoe, and and Eliot as well who often finds herself pretty bored out in the country sitting in an old person's house, even with her own phone, and usually a trip to the Dari-B or Wal-Mart for treats of various kinds is soon enough in order for all of them, just about every time. As for me I can buy ice cream for myself whenever I like so I'll stay behind and have a conversation with the last still living link to my past, the person who gave birth to me so many decades ago. I know there isn't a lot of time left. She doesn't even look me in the eyes anymore, not like she used to do. She was the sort of person whose every sentence was never too far away from laughter; these days it's all too rare. Her disease has been merciless over the course of many years in this cruel, methodical way and she's so very frail, now. Absent-minded usually, too, and a constant flickering in and out of what's going on around her, which everyone attributes to the THC gummies she eats constantly for the sake of the constant pain she experiences. But I know that it's something else. They haven't seen this in other people before, but I have.

Is there a special someone in your life right now, she asks me.

I really try very hard not to lie to people now but in this instance I'm tempted to tell her what she wants to hear. Being a parent myself I understand that when the endgame is growing closer that our biggest hope and concern is that we know that our children our taken are of and still loved, no matter how old they are, after our departure. We're all the same in many ways, no matter how young or old. We all need someone to look after us in some way. But I can't do it.

"There's not," I say. "Which is fine with me, Ma, really. It's better that way."

Her eyes meet mine, then, for a moment. There's doubt.

"It probably is, ain't it," she says. "No one to make you miserable. You've had awful luck with women throughout your life anyway. Just the worst."

I nod, I sigh. Not saying anything. Sip of a Diet Coke. Right, right. You're not too far off the mark.

She gets more animated now. "I know you're a good person. You're a wonderful father. That little grandbaby of mine, I...you just have so much to offer someone. I don't understand it. I just don't get why everything for you always has to end in disappointment."

"I don't get it either, Ma. I really don't," I tell her. But I do know, sort of. Halfway. Part of it is the bad fortune that I've fabricated all by myself over so many years, through uninformed decisions, addiction, poor mental health, but another part of me that I rarely ever say out loud is that there's lots of times where I consider that maybe I just happened to be born under the wrong star. Who knows the reasons, anymore. My entire life I've always felt out of step with everyone else iin some way or another, and it's one of the few things that appears impossible to overcome. I've tried my entire life. But I'm okay with giving up on that now. I really am: deciding not to stress and worry about something that cannot be fixed undeniably brings about better consequences. If I really am without a partner in life, then let me make the best of it.

"My life ain't over yet, though," I tell her. "You never know what could happen."

It's really quiet there in those moments where we're not speaking, with everyone else gone. The roar of an occasional airplane flying miles above. The wind travelling through the branches outside in her front yard. There's only that.