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Dad wasn’t feeling well this evening. I can count on my hands the number of times my father has been really sick, but when he’s sick at all it bothers me because it seems so incorrect. I mean, he’s in his 70s, under a lot of stress all the time. It’s reasonable for me to be worried about him. That’s a legit worry to have. It’s valid. It’s probably nothing, but still. I’ve always been a worrier. I think, since I’ve never reacted well to chaos, or change, or whatever, my brain is constantly trying to prepare me mentally for any disaster it can imagine, and it’s very good at imagining disasters. A lot of people rely on my father for their well being. I don’t think they really understand that. It’s not the kind of thing you think about unless you’re prone to stepping back & looking at the big picture of things. I’ve always been like that so I’m always a little overwhelmed by the scope of life.
It’s like when you catch a clear glance inside a house as you drive by. I don’t know what it’s like for other people, but I always have these intense flashes of conjecture about what the lives going on in that space are like. Things ripple out from us as we move through our days in so many ways no one can calculate all the outcomes, but you can kind of follow them back to a source sometimes. All the people my father employs, all the business he does in the area, it all contributes to this area a lot.
There was a guy who used to own a bunch of stuff out here, but he died of cancer several years ago. I remember how it shook everything up & a bunch of things just started to fail. He was this pillar that kept all this stuff going & once he died the deterioration he was holding back won. The hotel he owned slowly fell to ruin, the truck stop got worse and worse until we just sort of stopped eating there on the weekends, all the stuff he oversaw crumbled away. That’s kind of what successful people do on some level. They hold back the rot caused by lesser people. That’s not to say they don’t cause problems too, but in general they keep the success they have going. Apple after Steve Jobs has been declining grimly, slowly, inevitably… Not quite living up to the standards they set for themselves.
No one is irreplaceable, but having to replace a good person is often a disaster, because good people, talented people, competent people, are always in short supply.