I am, undeniably, focused on my nuclear family to the point of near paranoia.  We are watching Homeland - no cable, we buy episodes one by one of whatever I can bare to sit still for, which isn't much - the Clare Danes character is paranoid psychotic but correct in her suspicions all the time. Can you imagine?  I can.  There is nothing I have learned so much as to trust my own mind.  There is nothing I have learned so much as to be wary of my own mind. It is an exhausting dual imperative for us all.  Meanwhile, I don't much care if the badguy character blows something up, I'm only interested in his plotline in so far as I projectingly relate to the wop milf wife whose career as a single mother is now considerably complicated by the return of her pow husband who is often cranky and who is the center of the universe of the plot and who doesn't fuck her (not at all often or well, anyway) and when/if he commits some act of terrorism I hope for her sake it's a suicide bombing so she can get back to doing everything herself, including herself, without having to deal with his pain-in-the-ass overbearing presence too.  So there.  The portrayal of that family as seemingly-ideal while suffocating utterly for the wife, whose parameters of control extend only as far as her haircut, strikes such a chord that I do believe it wore me out last night and I had to go to bed at 8 p.m. after only one episode, not caring enough who won the presidential election enough to wait to find out (cmon, it was going to be Obama, duh right? but still, lame).  On the other hand what really left me prostrate was the exact opposite of anti-family; it was one of our days, where we can carve out 4-5 hours and do nothing with that time but pour over one another.  These dueling emotion-sets are related, my aversion to the suffocatory threat of family life and my extreme pleasure in it ft. defensiveness of it.  So defensive of US are Aa and I both that nothing assuages our anxiety that something might "be wrong" than these spates of hours we spend reassuring ourselves about the US we both live at now, until it feels like such a very defended and stolid place to be that nothing and nobody else can impact it.  The Family is our Bomb Shelter and for no demonstrable reason we each feel as if the world has ended already, we are living now on the canned peaches of our closed private life.  We keep the kids close and each other closer.  In the cold, we get out and under every blanket and breathe beneath them in a humid tent, even light isn't invited unless it's filtered.  So, empty of all energy for worry/strife, I didn't have energy enough to even watch strife of any kind - I couldn't find it in myself to care, not for the wop-milf's troubles nor for the nation's, and I went to bed a husk.  I woke up later thinking about paranoia and putting aside the litany in my mind of all the things that have gone wrong, that I fucked up, that got fucked up in me, that got fucked up some kind way....sometimes this litany runs from childhood forward, sometimes lately for obvious reasons it starts at Mark, sometimes I stand at the side of the hole in my head that is where Andy used to be and now is a crater (I feel nothing, not even appalled by that), sometimes it goes backward from some future calamity to my childhood stopping at whatever karmic fault of mine that seems to explain the future calamity as a justifiable comuppance (those are the really crazy litanies), sometimes it's a only fragment that doesn't quite amount to a viable litany (I now realize that I never did think/feel John was dead/dying really, the feeling was only "I hope he calls" which was dead-unlikely, and that seems a very amusing emotional mistake on my part, like slapstick funny), sometimes it is a litany-tome that amounts simply to Mother Guilt.....etc.  I wake and seize up and then rub out the grooves in my mind trying to stop the mental-LP skipping.  Aa sleeps soundly yet senses every sigh or shift, instintively curling around me tightly so that getting up to pee involves minutes of extricating myself.  So I hold my pee and I lay there thinking the core thought that engenders all the rest: I so urgently do not want anything bad to happen that I don't want anything to happen at all.  It is such a common complaint that people have of their moms that they hadn't wanted their kids to grow up, that they always prefer the baby pics, that I think this "don't happen!" near-paranoid defensiveness of the nuclear nest must be a banal sign that once, for however long it lasted, there was happiness and she tried to dig her heals in right there and then.  And failed, of course.  At that too. 

So. What can I do if I can't keep anything from happening?  I guess I can make something happen, logically enough.  At 30 years old, Aa is built for forward movement.  His restlessness is as normal as teething in a toddler, I figure, so I can't keep letting it worry me that he has to keep happening as if that's inherently a bad thing (which given the fact of mortality, it IS totally a bad thing but say la vee), and I have to get on board with it instead.  Which is why I am again looking at landporn (when in doubt......).  I like this one because the castle (click thru the pics, the castle w moat is worth it) is so symbolically apropos that it appeals to my funnybone.  I'd be like, "Okay boys, get in there, I'm locking you all the fuck in!"

p.s. click satellite view to see the GIANT CLIFF at the back of the property, lol oye