Anyone with half a brain will tell you life is weird but if they have any thoughts going on at all they’ll also tell you it’s cruel and beautiful at the same time. That it’s unfair, magical, and finite.

I spend a lot of time in children’s parks because I have a two and a half year old son. Yes, it would be creepy if I hung out there and didn’t have a kid. On occasion I do see someone like that, just a random dude hanging out for no reason. I always keep one eye on these guys and my intentions are murderous if he even goes a little close to my boy or my friend’s kids. Shit, any kids. Anyway, (yeah, that got grim for a sec, sorry I’m a trained killer) spending hours outside everyday watching kids play is as good and bad as you may imagine. The trick is to let go and allow yourself to be young again. Yeah, sometimes I’ll be one of those dull parents that’s standing there gazing into the lonely, soulless abyss of my phone but then I catch myself and a voice goes off that says “You’ll never get this time back, do you really want to be one of those fuckwads?” Then, all of a sudden, I’m playing tag, and hide and seek and going down a slide my fat ass is too damn big for. I’m laughing for no reason.

There’s another bunch of voices too. One that says “What the hell brought you to this insane place?” and “What does it all mean?” Yeah. I had some thoughts yesterday at the park. I took the boy to The Palms Recreation Center. I like to go the back way, which is in this cool neighborhood called Cheviot Hills. If you’re headed east on Overland, take a left on Northvale right before the bike path entrance. Go about three blocks and there’s a cool little bridge that goes over the train tracks. It’s the back way into the park. A secluded oasis in the maelstrom of concrete and cars. A nice swath of thick grass. Up on the hill is the typical kid stuff–slides, shit to climb, swings.

Almost every day I go to any park and it’s just the nannies and me. Yeah, most people that can afford a Spanish speaking caregiver for their kid decide to do so. Shit, if I had the money I guess I’d think about it but I don’t know if I’d want a stranger raising my kid. Bartender deep into my forties isn’t exactly how I thought this would all turn out, but working nights allows me to be outside with the boy during the day while Jo is at work. There might be something to all of this. Maybe that’s the way it is the way it is, you know?

So yesterday, I was there, and my son was instructing me to swing while he rocked back and forth on the other one and this little girl came up to us with a bald head, no eyebrows. Yes, I’m thinking what you are. I don’t even want to say it. It broke my fucking black heart. It was like the Grim Reaper reached inside my ribcage and squeezed the old wounded ticker. I didn’t pretend to know the whole situation but all I could think of was how life was just too damn unfair and that we’re all a bunch of assholes who complain about really stupid shit. For the first time in a long time, I thought about God. Weird right? I thought that if he or she or it or they existed, that he, she, it, they were a total bastard for allowing something like that to happen to a child.

Listen, I’ve been around the bush in more ways than one. I’m too dumb to be a philosopher but I can say I may have learned a few things in life. Lessons that had to be beat into my head. There’s a possibility I wasted some time and now, here I am, I’m suddenly old and living in a fucking pre-apocalyptic wasteland. Los Angeles is one of the ugliest cities I’ve ever been in. Parts of it, especially at night, look like scenes from the movie Children of Men. You’ve got to look hard and try to find beauty in the madness. There are exceptional parts, yes, but you’ve got to travel a bit and it’s few and far between compared to the daily viewings of suffering in the streets.

I was deeply immersed within a congregation of nannies who were all taking care of a bunch of white children. They put out blankets, they’ve got all the toy trucks strewn everywhere, there’s a ring of strollers circled around like the wagons of yore. One of them was rocking a kid to sleep in a hammock while playing a recording of the instrumental version of “The Wheels on the Bus” ad infinitum. Yes, part of me wanted to go over there and soccer kick the goddam device out of her hand, then stomp it.

I took a few deep breaths and told myself this is exactly where I was supposed to be at this moment. Some real hippie shit I probably learned while doom scrolling on instagram. Being in the present, etc., whatever, meh. Pretty stupid advice if you think too much about it. Yeah, no shit I’m supposed to be here in this time and place. You could say that about anything because there’s no other place you’d be except where you are.

Along the train fence, a row of beautiful purple flowers caught my eye and I took a shitty phone picture for some reason.

Not too shabby, right? You get a little older and wiser and you make less stupid decisions than ever before, but then weird shit starts happening to you and those you love, shit you have no control over. When you’re young you blame the world for your stupid decisions. When you’re old, you watch as people die and get sick. You (hopefully) realize all the bad things that ever happened while you were young were mostly your own fault. When you’re old the wisdom saves you from yourself but not from time.

I thought more about God. All the creatures of the Earth. The recent UFO sightings. The infinite universe. I started doing math in my head. The Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 light years across and contains 200 billion stars. There’s planets circling most of those stars. That’s just one galaxy in the universe. Did you know there’s trillions of galaxies? The largest one of them, The Condor, is over 500,000 light years across and is 212 million light years away from us. Some of those stars and galaxies are so distant we may just be seeing the remnants of the light they shed before they died. They may not even exist anymore.

The closest star to our own solar system is called Proxima Centauri. It’s four light years away. Using our current technology, it would take 6,300 years to get there. Yeah, this all went through my head as I watched my son play, as I stood in the patch of nannies and on occasion, watched the train as it rumbled through, beyond the overgrowth of the steel fence, the kids all running toward it to see, my own excited son saying “Train, train,” in his little boy’s voice over and over. And you God, whether you exist or not, you did not create the world we live in now, stupid hairless ape human beings did that. If you’re responsible for something, it’s the simplicity and simultaneous, mind boggling complexity of the known world and its incredible mysteries and the innocence of children to let us know just how far we’ve come and where we’ll end up.