My wife and I don’t understand each other.

What does she mean we don’t spend enough time together? We frickin’ live together.

When I’m coming home from work, she’s on the computer surfing the net. When I drop by for lunch, she’s doing the laundry. Or she’s nursing the baby while I’m working on beats.

The point is we are always around each other under the same roof. We don’t spend enough time together is a misdiagnosis.

The real issue is we don’t play with each other enough.

Actually, that’s something we can probably agree on. She would love if we took more walks together, had more sex and went on dates. I would be satisfied with a back rub and oral sex, but I wager I’m missing the point of sharing. She wants to play with me is the point and I think I want to play with her, the problem is we can’t ever seem to decide on any other game except Point the Finger.

I noticed this today while engaging in a passionate text argument over the need for us to be together more. My wife isn’t without a point. Since the end of summer I’ve been averaging  12-hour days at work, often longer. When I get home I want to watch TV and chill. I want to work on some music or just chase my son around. I am not necessarily in Chaka Zulu mode, I don’t necessarily feel like talking about my day, all I wanna do is be.

My wife by contrast wants to share. She wants to talk. She wants to hold hands. She wants to make love without making love. My wife is like a Prince song.

So we’re texting about this and going back and forth while I’m at work and it suddenly occurs to me that this is our substitute for interaction. This texting we were doing was going to replace what would ordinarily be a conversation, the possibility of a hug or a kiss. This meaningless dialog on what she needs, staying together, responsibility, a two-parent family, all this stuff was just abstract unreal  nonsense propagated for the purpose of keeping a line of communication open no matter what information was being relayed.

It was the grown-up in-a-relationship version of looking for negative attention, like when a child misbehaves because its parents won’t pay attention to it.

Her response was to craft an elaborate thesis on how we needed to rejigger our relationship and my response was to go back to playing with my Tonka truck and wait until the whole thing blew over. Both are stupid ineffectual responses. Both are because we’re in love.

I took mushrooms for the first time in years this weekend. Melissa and Langston were at Grandma’s house for the day and I got bored around four o’clock. I ordered a bbq pizza from Lenzini’s and ate a single stem and cap with it.

For an hour, nothing happened so I laid down and tried to fall asleep. Around half-an-hour later I woke up, my body humming, my stomach tight. I recognized the signs, but I still wasn’t sure about the potency of my dose so I wasn’t sure if anything else would happen. Or if I wanted it to.

15 minutes later, my body was still throbbing and my sensory input started to slow. Simple tasks got increasingly nuanced. Mundane got intriguing. Funny got funnier. Absurd made perfect sense.

It wasn’t like the last time I did shrumes when I walked around Los Feliz with Sam and accosted perfect strangers with the price tag of enlightenment ($25 bucks a pop, by the way). Actually it wasn’t very cosmic at all, it was very specific.

The input distortion made everything seem hilariously new. Very banal issues became subjects of deep consideration, like the variety of alphabetic characters available on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard. Ordinary sounds erupted ominously – the neighbor’s trash being taken out sounded like jet engines, a car engine shutting down sounded like a death spasm, pedestrians sounded exactly like encroaching ninja assassins.

By the time the family got home around 11pm, I was sober. I think. I couldn’t entirely tell. The boundary of magical consciousness is very, very subtle. How can you tell whether something is actually boring but seems interesting? What would that even mean?

I could still be tripping.

One of the differences I’ve noticed about blue collar and white collar work is that when you’re blue collar and you feel like your job, boss and the world are shitting on you after a large Mexican meal, nobody looks at you sideways because, well, you’re blue-collar and why shouldn’t you bemoan your toxic fate in life?

But if you’re white collar, nobody wants to hear you whine. You can still talk about the same, comet-sized dump the workplace is dropping on you, but you have to phrase it differently, you have to adjust it and wear it like a badge of pride.

Guy 1: I’ve been working 32-hours straight and my eyes are about to bleed caffeine.

Guy 2: Tell me about it, the last time I saw my kid he was still in pampers. Now I gotta figure out how to pay his tuition.

Guy 1: Dude, you’re killing it.

Guy 2: Yeah man, on the grind.

Gallows humor is OK, but only if deep down it sounds like you really couldn’t imagine doing anything else. The idea is that you’re not bragging about how great and lucky you are to have a job at all, much less at a white collar workplace. You’re being self-deprecating and playing up how harsh the gig is and, by reverse psychology, implying how awesome you are for being able to handle it. Because riding a desk and paperwork are just as trying, exhausting (maybe moreso) than plain old manual labor. Just because your hands don’t get callouses don’t mean you doesn’t mean you can’t on your soul. Right?

Summation: Real shit sucks. Fake shit is awesome. Understand?

Yeah, me neither.

This weekend was just too short. Two lousy days. Two crisp, fleeting days – like two mint-fresh dollar bills – tendered as quickly as their receipt. And for what?

To wake up Monday morning as tired as Friday left you? To pick up the plow and start splitting earth without so much as a thank-you-kindly?

Our labors make a mockery of us.

I used to be so care free. I used to piss away the days like cheap beer. I’d leave them half-drunk on the bar, sloshed carelessly amongst the peanut shells and chewed hot wings. I would dedicate entire days to slacking off, like a harbored boat dripping champagne.

Now between the kid and the wife and the job, there’s no time. I suck at it now like a famine-victim. I bite and claw at the scraps.

All the while I’m flailing, the sands are falling past me. Grain by grain. Moment by moment.

Such a terrible, wasting metaphor.

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Michelle Obama says you should look at the way a man treats his mother to see how he will treat you. I never really thought of it that way in relationship to myself, but now that I do, I gotta say, it’s a pretty damning statement for me.

It’s not that I treat my mother poorly. I don’t actively hate her or anything like that. She never did me wrong or abandoned me or anything. Nevertheless, we have always had a quietly strained affection, almost as if we were both kind of just tolerating the other for a good part of the time.

I guess it has something to do with the fact that my parents got divorced when I was young. My big brother (peace be on him) was 11 years older than me and got the whole nuclear family deal, but by the time I arrived, my folks were already getting rocky. It has always been my informal suspicion that I was conceived in order to bring Mom and Dad back closer. It is now my opinion based after the fact that this kind of thing is retarded. You can’t engender love with collateral.

Because my parents got pregnant and married young, Mom was only in her early 30s when I arrived. She was still in her early 30s when they got divorced and she emerged from marriage a disillusioned, over-sheltered young woman in search of herself. Unfortunately, she also had two kids to lug around on her travels.

My brother grew up fast and left home at 17, leaving me and Mom alone. Dad was around every once in a while, but I mostly just saw him on vacations and holidays.

Mom tried to have a life. She went out and had affairs with bad men, men who stole from her, men who threatened her and almost all, to a person, loved her. I think more than anything I hated these men. For one, they weren’t Dad and on the other they took my mother away from me.

I think Mom and I started growing apart from there. She couldn’t give up her social life and I couldn’t be any more understanding than my years would allow, so I became introverted. Maybe I had always been introverted, but I can’t remember. All I remember is knowing early on that if I wanted to amuse myself, I would have to do it myself. Grandma would reiterate this to me on at least one occasion when I complained of being bored and she retorted, “No, you’re just boring.”

That’s my family.

Self-reliance aside, I don’t have a single memory of either my Mom or Dad helping me out in school, reading a book with me or anything. I liked books and reading, that was obvious. Dad made sure I had word processors, then computers, to facilitate my interests, but he could never really relate to them. Mom was terrified of my interest in the occult and science fiction and hid books from me on many occasions or simply threw them out. She forbid Dungeons and Dragons, but not the white boys I played with so we would sneak around under her nose, going off on our mind-adventures.

If only she knew then how much that escape meant to me. Maybe she would have supported it and maybe we would be closer today. After the loss of my family, after being ejected from the middle-class into the projects, after watching her stabbed, all of this, obviously a kid needs a safe place to escape to. Mom did too. She just didn’t see the connection between her clubbing and my gaming.

Maybe it all boils down to that. Connection.

Sometimes Mom and I would watch the same TV programs in different rooms. In retrospect that sounds so crazy to me, but it happened. It was normal for me.

Now not calling my mother is normal for me. She doesn’t call and I don’t call. When we do, we speak warmly and easily. I love my mom, but I don’t think to call her. When I ask her to call me more, she promises she will or says, yeah, she oughta, but she never does. When she asks me, I tell her the same and that’s that.

It’s terribly sad. I wish it were different. I wish we were.

Anyway, the past is the past, as Mom would say. What worries me now, I guess, is how this will play with me and my son. I already see how it plays with my wife. When we first met, I was romantic. My emotions poured out of me. We made love all the time. That quickly changed. As money and then a kid entered the picture, we got more distant. Now there is as much sarcasm as romance, as much resentment as commitment. We love each other, but it’s different. The word ‘love’ means so many things – sadly the only thing that remains the same is the word.

If I had to pick a phrase, I’d go with emotionally detached. My emotional gears are very slippery and it’s easy for me to disengage. Rev me up too fast and it’s over. My engine is going but the transmission is gone. For as long as I’ve been able to recognize this, I have encouraged it in myself. I’d even go so far as to say I have worshiped detachment, prayed to oblivion and often wished for nothingness.

How can anyone deal with that? How do you argue with someone who doesn’t care? How do you extract meaning from someone who sees everything painful as meaningless? I wish I knew what to tell her. I wish I knew what to tell myself.