Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Age, Whatever
    Age, Whatever
    Age, Whatever
    Ebook182 pages3 hours

    Age, Whatever

    By Cameron Glenn

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A middle aged man contemplates his daughter, aging and having an affair.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCameron Glenn
    Release dateAug 31, 2016
    ISBN9781370350209
    Age, Whatever
    Author

    Cameron Glenn

    Cameron Glenn grew up the third of seven children in Oregon. As a child he dedicated hours to the pursuits of basketball and cartooning, as well as waking up way too early for his paper route in order to earn money to buy toys, candy and comic books. He also loved to read and write, which he continues to do voraciously. He currently lives in Salt Lake City after having earned a BA in literature from Boise State.

    Read more from Cameron Glenn

    Related to Age, Whatever

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      What I Wish you Knew About Grief

      Apr 4, 2021

      Grief can also be a time of joy. Dad had Alzheimer’s and was deteriorating. In his last year he was 80 years old, but felt more like a teenager. He had an overwhelming love affair with my mum – he would call her “my queen” and serenade her and stare

      4 min read

    • Article

      Summer Playlist: Beyond the Cyclical

      Jun 20, 2018

      It’s summer, which means it’s time for a new playlist. Instead of seeking out new music, I decided instead to play through the songs in my current music library, combing for old or undiscovered gems. If you’re like me, you’ve accumulated music over t

      8 min read

    • Article

      The OTHER BREAK-UP

      Dec 18, 2020

      The OTHER BREAK-UP
      6 min read

    • Article

      In the Beginning, In the End

      Sep 1, 2020

      In the Beginning, In the End
      10 min read

    • Article

      Unclaimed: Finding My Unique Identity…Finally

      Mar 11, 2022

      Estimated reading time: 10 minutes — I never wanted to be alone, ever, but that is precisely what I did. I got vastly lonely first before confronting the nervous energy coursing through me that engaged a need for relentless mobility. It is how I hid

      7 min read

    • Article

      Chelsea Wolfe

      Feb 4, 2020

      Chelsea Wolfe
      5 min read

    • Article

      Mattie Jackson Selecman

      Nov 1, 2021

      Mattie Jackson Selecman
      4 min read

    • Article

      On Sheila Heti and (Not) Motherhood

      Apr 26, 2018

      A friend texted me a few months ago to tell me her period was late. We spent five minutes going back and forth on the specifics, but I was about to teach a class and she was getting on a train. Remember, I said, just before I put my phone away, the a

      9 min read

    • Article

      Sea Change

      Apr 27, 2021

      Sea Change
      12 min read

    • Article

      Life, Death, and Love

      Nov 20, 2018

      Life, Death, and Love
      7 min read

    • Article

      SEE INTO Your Future

      Mar 5, 2023

      Q Could you tell me about my brother, and his financial intentions towards me and our mother? – CHAVAH A You are a very spiritual person who has a great connection to spirit. Your celestial guide is strong, and wants me to tell you her name is She

      3 min read

    • Article

      When Greg Died by Stacey Heale.

      Jun 2, 2022

      Let me start at the end—my husband Greg died in September 2021. He was diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer five years earlier on our daughter’s first birthday. As well as a baby, we also had another daughter about to turn three; tiny little humans w

      3 min read

    • Article

      On Summer Crushing

      Jun 12, 2019

      On Summer Crushing
      7 min read

    • Article

      Q/a Perry Farrell

      Jul 2, 2019

      Q/a Perry Farrell
      7 min read

    • Article

      What Makes A Father Tough

      May 2, 2024

      What Makes A Father Tough
      5 min read

    • Article

      Your Dilemmas

      Sep 8, 2022

      Find Ruth on Instagram @theswandoctor or visit theswandoctor.com I’m an only child and my mum disowned me at the age of 16. I have everyone I need in my life, but I can’t help but feel like it’s going to affect me in the future. Should I try and reac

      3 min read

    • Article

      Learning to Grieve

      Sep 1, 2020

      Learning to Grieve
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Ecstasy And The Agony Of Being A Grandmother By Robin Marantz Henig

      Mar 4, 2021

      I was in the delivery room when my first grandchild was born. It was a gift from my daughter to be invited in at all–I know I can be overbearing sometimes–and I cherished the invitation like a rare and precious gem. During the long night of my daught

      5 min read

    • Article

      Frankie Pangilinan

      Sep 1, 2019

      Frankie Pangilinan
      4 min read

    • Article

      On Grief and Reentry

      Nov 30, 2021

      On Grief and Reentry
      7 min read

    • Article

      Sir Kenneth Branagh

      Jan 17, 2022

      Sir Kenneth Branagh
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Baby Grudge

      Feb 2, 2020

      A Baby Grudge
      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Age, Whatever

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Age, Whatever - Cameron Glenn

      157

      Age Whatever

      By Cameron Glenn

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2016 Cameron Glenn

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Age Whatever

      The hurt of it is in not being loved by that which you love.

      **

      When did she awaken from the delusion to learn the truth of me, he thought, ruminating over his fourteen year old daughter. A truth which I had myself denied and deluded myself from: I am no longer cool.

      She’s listening to her new music in her room. She’s listening to the same song over and over on full blast rattling the walls with the escalating bass thumps and stirring guitars. He feels proud of her; this isn’t like a song which is played on the radio or fits into the mainstream; this song is earnest and without gimmick. An indie rock song like one he might like when he was younger. Guitars are rare now in pop music; becoming extinct. That’s okay, but he likes that she’s listening to and enjoying a guitar driven song. The more he’s heard it the more he’s liked it. He changed his opinion on it. At first it sounded nice but nothing new; generic. As you get older you learn everything is repetitive. It feels that way anyways. No real new discoveries just constant recycling. Hold on to whatever you’re feeling now, he thinks of his daughter. How nice it was when I could feel that way. She’s listening to it on repeat like it contains all the mysterious of emotions and the universe deep within it, if only she could sink herself deep enough into it. It’s just a song; of course just a song can’t really contain that much mysticism. But at a certain age at times it feels that it can; that a song can contain powers and exploding beauties which captures all the swirling dreams, aspirations and sulked dreads mixed in the banal complexities of teen life. Old enough to let go of belief in magic; enlightened enough to know your parents aren’t cool; young enough still for idealism and to become both morose and hyper excited, sometimes within the same breath, in dreams, desires and impossible possibilities.

      When you get older you recognize, mostly correctly, how stupid you were when young. Stupid is the harsher word; naïve is the nicer one; neither should be meant too negatively any more than the word ‘incontinent’ is to a baby or severe elderly. But how nice it was to be so blissfully stupid, he thought while musing over his daughter. So dumbly confident. So ignorantly idealistic on how the world is, should be, and their ability to shape it in their future, both intimately and cosmically. It is a shame that this idealism, this expectancy, fades gradually through passing years, same as potential does, like a vibrant poster becoming bleached white laid out in the at first breathtakingly dazzling and then harshly brutal, sun heat. The first taste after hunger is the best then the more you eat the less appealing the food is then if you keep eating you barf. Or you no longer eat from hunger but of need and boredom and the want of undeserved rewards and you get fat and you’re life isn’t over then but… it’s closer and you’re unhealthy and unappealing to yourself and the world, mostly. For what it matters; it doesn’t matter. His daughters at the age where she can eat anything and still be skinny. Unfair but not really; he used to be that way as well. Metabolism slows. The years speed up. You become slower. What is this song she’s listening to called, he wonders.

      She’ll come to be embarrassed by her over earnest high school poetry. We all are. Mostly. He sneaked in her room and discovered a binder full of lyrics a few months ago. She wrote of emotions and circumstances he was fairly certain she hadn’t even felt yet, only being fourteen. Was she trying to mirror some of the lyrics she loved? Part of the stupidity of youth is believing there to be romance and beauty in hurt. Had she even kissed a boy before, he wondered. Or girl. He liked the idea of her not knowing. Things. Of the ugliness of things. People and the world and sex and things. There is beauty in innocence which fades with knowledge, sometimes. But you must learn. It’s good to learn. It’s good to know truth, even ugly truths. It is not good or healthy to live in blissful delusions even if there is more happiness to be had within that bubble. He mostly believed this. It’s good to challenge.

      She felt the bigness of the immediacy of the moment, this experience of listening to this song over and over again. Able to make a song feel important, beyond itself and probably even beyond how the makers had even thought of it and its potential powers or impact, despite all their hopes and wishes for it. Not that this song, yet or probably ever, made or would ever make a big cultural splash in the world, bringing them all the incredible fame and money they had once dreamed of, but to this one girl, this one soul, his daughter, at this one moment, this song appeared to mean everything to her. They birthed it into the world and it is out in the world and it comes to no longer belong to them; they can’t control it or what various people of all ages decide to make of the sounds, and what they feel. Was she on her period, he wondered. He didn’t know if she were menstruating yet. His wife would take care of that, she had told him. Tampons. That world. He didn’t know of it. A man can’t ever really know. You have to live it to really know. It disturbed him to think his baby girl, his former buddy and best friend, cute, wide-eyed, giggly, in near worship of him, wrongly yet still, of him, could biologically now produce a baby herself. How quickly children become mysteries to their makers. You plant a seed, water it, but it will grow and bloom and wrap its tangled vines how it wants, where it wants, by its own volitions. It blows off in the wind and is lost and is not yours and never really was yours and this is true and strange to think of. Yes and no; tethered by biology, by science, by DNA, but these things aren’t really ‘yours’ either, they are bigger than you; you are just a small part. Your faults, your ‘potential’ your intelligence or lack thereof, your talents, personality, drive, are imprinted in you before you were even fully formed and chained and glued in you and into you against your will yet you also have your free will. Who would you be if you were born elsewhere as well, under some other religion or political party or time; how much are you to blame or take credit for yourself? You and your offspring, if you have any. Pointless questions, really.

      He was starting to get sick of the song. How many times has she played it in a row now? Twelve? But he would let her play it again; play it as many times as you want. Strange to think he still had the ‘power’ or ‘authority’ to make her stop if he wanted. Stop or you will be punished. It’s too loud it’s bothering me, stop it; he could tell her this. But he won’t. He wants her to like him still. It’s not really bothering him. He likes it. Likes the song and likes that she’s liking it. He thinks of how soon it’ll be that he won’t have any ‘authority’ over her. He doesn’t really even now. It’s an illusion. Sort of. In less than ten years she’ll live on her own. Times moves fast; this is strange to think of, strange to consider. Who will she be? Better than I was, he hopes. He likes to think she’ll be better than him; it’s fun and comforting to think of and daydream about. He was glad she was having this moment, whatever moment it was for her, of some apparent insular discovery that she probably didn’t fully understand and thought just ‘one more time, one more listen’ would bring her total enlightenment. Or maybe she used the song as either a conduit or a shield to some new complex emotions; real love for the very first time, or envy, or the new and devastating peculiar type of sadness from rejection, or a mix of all of these. He was becoming weary of the song but it wasn’t so bad; not like some pop songs are which she had liked in the past and which he had suffered through while driving her to soccer practices and elsewhere. You make sacrifices for the ones you love because you want them to be happy.

      Maybe the cruelty of the world will never be a personal discovery for her. He hoped for this. There comes a time when the cruelty of reality interferes with dreams and ambitions for most, but one should come to this reality through life and experience, not through dampening and discoursing words, he believed. Besides, it’s not necessarily ‘wrong’ to dwell in possibly silly or over-ambitions dreams as a youth, because it is fun to dream and to believe. And really the harm of the disappointments are really not as deep or barbarous as one might assume; maybe just slightly more than the pain from no longer being able to experience the oblivious joy that comes from believing in Santa Clause. Like wind erosion through time smooth’s curvy rocky landscapes into flat sandstone, so does time sooth any pain from all the mounting delusions one crashes into stumbling through life, he mused. This is both comforting and kind of sad. If the youth could look at what his older self has become the youth would think there great cause for his older self to be massively depressed, usually. Depressed because of unfulfilled potential and dreams, a loss of looks and vitality and ‘coolness’; not as rich as the youth had assumed and hoped he’d be, and so on. But the reality is that this older person, while recognizing his younger self would think his older self should have cause to be depressed, enough for even suicide, he doesn’t feel so bad, he feels fine, and while his younger self may have scoffed that coming to feel ‘fine’ is unacceptable; one must feel ‘alive’ and exhilarated, the older self no longer feels this way, and no longer being able to feel that way is both comforting (just not caring anymore about such nonsense) and sort of sad. He had recently conversed on this topic to one of his co-workers. A whip smart and ambitions twenty something year old, eager and gorgeous. An ‘underling’ really; he was her boss but he liked to think of her as a co-worker, an equal even; he wasn’t one of those who believed that more experience, or simply being older, makes one more capable and wise necessarily. You are always ignorant. When you get old you’re ignorant of what it’s like to be young in the current year; you only know, through the sketchy medium of memory, what it was like to be young when you were young. Some things never change many things do.

      But there are some that have all their dreams come true. There are some, not the majority, but many, who fulfill their highest hopes and potentials, or near enough. He hoped his daughter would be one. That she would discover what makes her happy and attain that happiness. That she would do better in that regard than he had. That she wouldn’t have felt that she squandered away years or that a constant existential crisis nagged. He felt this although recognizing he had fared much better than most, in influence (however slight) and monetarily (thanks mostly due to a generous father). He sometimes wondered if happiness would be easier attainted if there weren’t so many limitless expectations and possibilities presented at the outset. Maybe those born thousands of years ago achieved the same level of happiness in their short, dull, simple lives than those told that they could be the first to set foot on Mars or be the one that cures cancer or be the first trillionaire or a beloved celebrity. He had had a discussion like that with Sarah, his co-worker recently, as well. They weren’t being serious; of course it’d suck to live thousands of years ago; you’d probably literally either be a slave or barbarian and be constantly cold and hungry. You’d be bored without internet or television; what would you do? Anything pre electricity or flushing toilets would be intolerably miserable. Although that’s partly the point; you can’t miss what you don’t know and don’t have. Once you’ve lived with electricity and flushing toilets and grocery stores, TV’s, Smartphone’s, all we have now, it’s hard to retrograde to some type of medieval existence, which millions were once tolerably happy enough stewing in, not knowing any better. It’s all relative.

      How remarkable, he thought; in one room there’s a young girl feeling the power which a song can bring, the strain of euphoric rush washing over her as the science of the sounds tingling the pleasure sensors of her brain plays out, perhaps with a tinge of welcome melancholy in her enjoyment as well, and a few paces off, her father, unable to enjoy the song as she can and is, yet appreciating it, in how it could make his daughter feel whatever it is she feels which causes her to replay it over and over. It also brought him a sweet nostalgia over when a song could strike him as powerfully as this one seemed to be striking her; time makes you immune, somewhat, to this phenomenon. Not totally, a song can stir a soul at any age, but not in the same way. Was she feeling bored and frustrated when she put it on, he wondered, a typical mix of teenage emotion, yet when young enough, the teen years, a layer of anger is slathered over the boredom and frustration because they still have the energy and gumption to want to rebel against boredom and frustration, not yet settled or resigned to the fact that a simmering exasperation will become the constant droning white noise of life in which one must either simply learn to live with in relative peace, or become insane. The older you become the clearer it becomes ‘relative peace’ and comfort are the better choices. Sort of sadly, age beats out of you a will to fight if that fighting will make you less comfortable. Sometimes; maybe that’s not true; sometimes the most bristled and angry people are older people for varieties of reasons, few of which are probably really valid. Yet still the old fight less wars, figuratively and literally. Still an old person can become unhinged and fire weapons and kill people. That happens a lot actually. He didn’t really know. The instigators of the American Revolution were all mostly young and wouldn’t have instigated it if they were old; their ideals and hopes and fight and boldness and daring and so on would have waned too much; yet there was also old Benjamin Franklin in it.

      He comes closer to her door. What is she doing in there? He tries to pick up audio clues that

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1