If You're Racing, You're Losing
Being a Bubba Wallace fan isn't much different from kicking yourself in the balls every time fortune shines light upon you. Relentless as all hell.
Every Sunday, NASCAR was was on the family TV. Although my father loved it, he was a relatively closeted fan. It was always difficult to gauge what areas of pop culture he was comfortable publicly embracing. His personality was bewildering. Loved by strangers, feared by family, no gimmick aside from the illusion of wealth. Fandom wasn't worth investing time or money into, probably because the end result is personal satisfaction and not physical accomplishment. He was a worker, so when he wasn't managing a grocery or retail store, he was gardening, crafting, fixing, creating. Only ever stopping for brief rests, short naps, or to watch the race.
My father and I had a tumultuous relationship. Topic for another day, but he and I were simply never in agreement. My mother would say it was because we were so much alike, which I would vehemently refuse to believe. He was kind of an asshole to us when things weren't going his way at work, or if he was feuding with Mom. He would go days without speaking to us, and as kids, we quickly learned this was just his way of throwing a tantrum. These episodes certainly played a role in influencing how we perceived our father. We expected strong-willed, unflappable patriarch of the family. But instead we had a complexly dissatisfied man who couldn't keep his angst in check. Just an absolute depressive slime of a grown man. Sad.
Now, in my late 40s, I can see some similarities to dear ol Dad, but mostly in regard to how I approach free time. Sometimes, it feels impossible to truly do what I want to do. This inability to seek leisure, pleasure, or even just brief self-satisfying distractions from the world is oftentimes debilitating. I force myself into mental knife fights with myself over merited leisure. Like, I literally have to accomplish something before I'm comfortable relaxing or taking in a selfish activity. There always has to be a product that was worked for in order to be rewarded with leisure. The harder the work, the more rewarding the leisure. Whether it be cleaning the house, managing the yard, fixing something, paying bills, running errands, there always has to be a task or chore first.
I learned it from watching you. Presumably.
When I'm unable to create and complete leisure-earning tasks, I get a little prickly. My brain just refuses to relax, skip the labor, and do what it wants when it wants. I literally have a text block stating "Do what you want, and do it for fun" saved as a widget on my phone. I need these little reminders, or else succumb to a midlife sinkhole similar to my father. Sometimes I feel sorry for them, my parents. RIP.
This is just one piece of the gifted heirloom luggage handed down from my parents; the overnight bag of unexplainable family trauma. Having never really gotten to know my parents personally (wild to think, right?), all I have to reference is what they exhibited, and very little of it turned out to be valuable for a son growing old.
I still remember them telling me college would be a waste, and that I should just find an entry level retail job and work up the ladder. Get married, buy a house, have a kid, retire, die. Just like Dad, whom they expected to be my inspiration, I suppose. Sorry Mom and Dad.
You can't win them all (Bubba begrudgingly understands this), and for some, this first big life L could present itself at birth. We enter this world without choice, and are expected to make it despite having lackluster mentors and emotionally crippled loved ones.