Fancy? Yes. Tasty? Not as much.

It is my brother Bryan's birthday. His thirty-ninth though it feels as though one might have been overlooked.

"You're forty," I say. He corrects me, but I tell him it is only suitable to round these things.

I thought about getting him a gift because I have a witchcraft shop down the road. It is tiny, and I do not understand how it stays in business, only that it is fantastic that I can boast it does. Surely a few dollars will assure its perpetuity. Perhaps I would buy him some gewgaw meant to attract love. He has had little luck on that front since last I mentioned. A woman messaged him on a dating site. I read it and found it reasonable and realistic; Rosie was not a spambot. He replied though I'm not sure what (shouldn't he run these things past me?). She did not respond.

He fumbles with his phone while we eat -- not between courses, but fingers spotted by the juices of three expensive forms of sea life. Rosie's message, as well as Rosie herself, seems no longer to exist. I know this means that she unmatched him, so it is as though she never existed.

I take the phone from him after fulfilling my role as an older brother by giving him a hard time about using it during this meal. (We all take out our phones at some point, though I use mine to pester Bryan about a video game clown for which the internet is lustful.) I cannot summon her back. When he later asks me about another woman, I swipe instead of tapping her picture, banishing her. He says I have kept him from his wife.

He clicks to pay for the app so he can see who liked him in hopes that Rosie or his lost wife will be there. It is fifty-odd women from Uganda and the Philippines and only two women who might generously be said to be local, neither of whom he cares to message. The overlap between women who might want him and those he might want is not generous, particularly once one has turned forty (which Bryan has, even if he is lying to himself about how age works).

Before I met my family at Shadows on the Hudson, I had stopped by Darkside Records to try to offload around a hundred records given to me by my mother after cleaning out my late grandmother's home. I had not wanted them at the time, understanding them as the burden they were. My mother said I could always sell them. This, too, seemed inconvenient, so they went into the corners of two closets until Amber, cleaning, realized and suggested that I make good on getting rid of them.

Two guys -- looking every bit the High Fidelity/View Askew sort of jovial music fanatics who would work here -- flipped through my haul. The selection was plentiful but not robust. I would not listen to any of them if I could help it.

The discard pile halted a moment on a Jim Nabors record.

"Wasn't he Gomer Pile?" I asked.

The bearded one said, "He had a recording career for a while."

"Well, surprise, surprise," I said for no one's benefit but my own. ("I don't think they got the reference," I tell my mother over our black bass dinners. "I only barely think I do.")

In the end, they rejected a hundred pounds of vinyl and handed me the princely sum of $13 from the register, which I joked what the fee to make me leave with all the records I had brought in. As my mother had made the mistake of promising she would take any I could not sell, I was unbothered to have made so little.

Dinner is too fancy for me, the sort of place where the prices should be half what they are or the portions doubled, though my parents are paying, and they tell Bryan not to consider the heftiness of the cost. I have a sticky note on which I have scribbled possibilities from the online menu, as I'm not too fond of the pressure of deciding when I arrive. My mother nixes most of my options as not grand enough for the setting. I do not mind, knowing the three appetizers and dinner rolls will fill me enough that concerns about my meal are almost irrelevant. I will be taking most of it home, as my parents expect.

I understood that this would be a setting requiring more formal dress. I tried but found that I would look goofy dressing both for the setting and heat, so I opted for a tight gray V-neck. Who doesn't prefer a 41-year-old scrawny guy trying to look sexy?

I am jubilant through dinner, animated by the joy of being out to dinner with loved ones, especially when I am not picking up the tab. August will be our first adult vacation, as Dan and his brood remain in Texas. I imagine that it will constitute a prolonged version of this meal.

I am unaccustomed to genuine happiness. Most of the time, I am satisfied and still in love with my wife of almost eight years, which seems to be a rarity. I recall how overwhelmed by happiness at my wedding, but I can say that the portions since have been small enough that meals like this are graded by that curve. I was aware at my wedding with a bittersweet pang that I could not imagine how I would ever be happier. I would spend the rest of my life seeking slivers that could not reach that pinnacle but could try at times to approach it.

The first days of my summer break had tethered with bipolarity. I felt happiness beyond the rationality of having nowhere much to be, deeper nights, and uninterrupted writing. It is more than a two-months reprieve from the micro-trauma of severely dysfunctional teenagers in a broken system. It may be rooted in my childhood relief at the freedom from compulsory schooling, no matter how I enjoyed aspects of it. (Not the hours, but the company.)

But I have become a creature of habit and schedule. When these are upended, my mind dredges up traumas and worries I cannot cure, and so I otherwise leave them to their impotence. Not an hour past when my head first hit the pillow the first night I considered myself free, I stood outside the threshold of my bedroom, listening to the adorable snore of my wife, paralyzed between distracting my panic attack (as though it will forget itself) or returning to our bed as seamlessly as I can, wanting not to disturb Amber. She still had work in the morning, even though my only choice was maybe to go to the library to write for a few hours. (I did go to the library in the morning and finished two pieces.)

It is difficult to measure which outweighs the other, joy or despair. Though I give myself tasks on post-It notes --- damn Protestant work ethic! -- I enjoy the indifference of the world to my finishing them. However, says the darker parts of me, I am growing no more handsome (I have compiled a mental list of each compounding flaw), I received an unjust traffic ticket a few weeks ago, and a few other irritants that are not in themselves much amplified. It is as though my mental equilibrium depends on the chaos and toxicity of work to direct these things, a psychological analogy of the Old Friends Hypothesis that we evolved riddled with worms and bugs. Absent these, blessed by sanitation and hygiene, our immune systems overreact to strawberries and kittens. Without treatment teams, lesson planning, and the latest havoc borne from ninety adjudicated minors and an unsteady infrastructure for dealing with them, my mental resources are freed, and some respond by running Anxiety.exe.

I am not unaccustomed to the eccentricities of my head when offered novel stimuli and tell it to kindly stop barking at me. I know there are no intruders, and I should be allowed to enjoy the company around the table.

last watched: She-Hulk
reading: The Savage Song