User:Jtneill/Creative writing/What is more?

What is more …. shameful or self-sickening – the ache of not having written creatively with any regularity or effort for years (and realising that and trying again) – or the slide of the body not well exercised through middling years into sloppiness. There is no answer; everything is interaction. They’ve gone together. Wife’s away for three weeks getting ridiculously fit and focused at a yoga ashram. The boy ‘though I love him (its his 8th birthday) and his mate run seemingly insolently for the goal of a midnight stay-up, oscillating between computer games, videos, lego, and sporadically visiting me in my littered cave with requests for sustenance, miracle cures for temporary ailments, and other forms of boyful manipulation in effort to wrest the entire planet around their hungry little ego’s fingers. Thankfully my day can rotate at least sometimes instead around small, vital mercies – a Tibetan folk song audio documentary on the radio. A short story from an ‘old’ friend which seems dredge up in me the groan of a forgotten creative self. And I have written one paragraph again. And I have sung some ohms. And I have weathered my offspring through another arc of the sun (with the aid of my mother who uncomplainly in the next room helps with my kids doing what she already spent a generation doing for me). And my daughter … ‘though the request came again seemingly 1000 times today down the tunnel of my ear-drums as though from a far distance morse code requests for another “apple-turn”, another “banana-turn” please dad (over the shoulder, down the back) please dad – how can one refuse? I know she will be grown up in the blink of an eye – so one must comply; it would be utterly inhumane not to. And it is pleasurable to play. Yet everything about this twists on paradox. Why are these creatures so voracious in their dependence and demand, chewing up and spitting out every ounce of parental resource and on this feed of love, finding new demand for even more. I recall a documentary about the fierce battle between embryo and mother’s body, both vying for the same limited resources, a tug of war revolving around the sun, selfish genes clad in fleshy guise calling out for each other across the vast nano-ness.