That's what we all are.
Fingers and arms exploring what we can build or destroy, legs moving us around to do what it seems like we should do in the only we know how to get it done.
Breathing in and out some invisible gas that keeps this awkward, temporal collection of action together.
People.
Humans.
Always being cool.
Sounds like a religion.
"And, Bob, if you take a live look now at the line at the local gas station here this Memorial Day weekend you'll see the cost of a gallon of gas nearing $4 and causing some serious pain at the pump ..."
I swear, if I hear that phrase one more time ...
BOOM!
I'm sorry, did I break your concentration? You were saying something about ... "pain at the pump?"
Oh, you were finished. Well allow me to retort ...
... say "pain at the pump" again!
SAY "PAIN AT THE PUMP" AGAIN!
I dare you!
I DOUBLE dare you, MOTHERFUCKA!
SAY "PAIN AT THE PUMP" ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME! 
This is a new world we're heading into.
We don't know what this is, let alone what's it's going to be.
But I'm here with him, no matter what happens.
He's handed a #14 jersey with athletic tape over the name on the back, over the name of a kid who's out for the season after his dad accidentally hit him with a softball and sent him to the hospital with a fractured head.
I forgot the copy of my son's birth certificate. He can't play without it. I left it on my desk at work, 15-20 minutes away. I race to work and back.
He sits in the dugout -- the new kid who knows no one, playing in an elite USSSA league for 9 year olds, the youngest on the team, just turning 8 years old on April Fool's Day -- watching the opposing pitcher throwing flames into the catcher's mitt.
Just the day before, he learned he'd have the opportunity to face this daunting challenge -- thanks to a neighbor who believes in him enough to vouch for him and, unfortunately, thanks to a softball to the face.
Up until now, he's played coaches pitch. If it weren't for the fact that this team was a private squad in a league featuring a parade of 9-year-old all-stars from the rec leagues, he wouldn't be allowed to face a pitcher, because he's not old enough.
"Do you want to do this? Do you realize you might get hit by a pitch? It's a lot faster. There's going to be things you don't know how to do. You're not going to know any of the kids. I can't promise you that you won't make mistakes. But it'll all be OK."
"I want to do it, Daddy."
Up to bat: the Southern Spinners (a tip of the cap to the old, early 1900s textile league semi-pros of Upstate South Carolina; where Shoeless Joe cut his teeth).
Strike out. Strike out. Hit. Strike out.
He sits on the bench, the only kid in the dugout, as the rest of the team takes the field.
After giving up a couple of runs, the Spinners are back up to bat.
I barely am prepared for when he steps into the on-deck circle.
He fires off a few authoratative practice swings, acting more than being the part of a player who is about to face a live pitch for the first time in his life.
I put my head between my legs for a moment; not worried, so much, just doing something with my body to express the visceral nature of the moment.
He steps into the batter's box, the strip of athletic tape leaving him to be labeled "unknown."
"What's his name?" a parent in the stands asks me.
"Asa," I tell her. "A-S-A."
"OK, come on Asa!" she yells.
The kids yell out for him.
"Come on, Asan. You can do it, Asan."
He takes the first pitch.
"Strike!" the umpire exclaims.
He swings at the second pitch. A good cut. "Strike!"
The third comes, above his chin, and he swings.
"Strike three!"
He runs back to the dugout.
"That's all right," the parents yell. "That's all right, Asa."
The coaches tell him not to swing at anything above his hands.
The kids take the field. Again he sits on the bench, alone.
Another inning goes by. And again the kids take the field as he sits alone in the dugout.
I walk over to him, differently than usual. Not in the way I usually do, not when I coached him in basketball, with a steady dose of "Yeah, you think you're awesome, but ..."
Not tonight.
I walk over to the back of the dugout.
"Asa, I want you to know something. It doesn't matter if you hit the ball. Just look for a good pitch to hit. Just do what you do. I don't care if you hit the ball. Just know that I'm over here, and I'm here with you. I'm with you."
He nods his head.
Back into the on-deck circle. And back into the batter's box, nameless, to face what turns out to be one of the best pitchers the team has faced halfway through the season.
He swings at the first pitch. "Strike!"
He swings at the second. "Strike!"
I clasp my hands. Taking nothing for granted. A slight grin on my face, watching my little boy battle his way through something that I never could have done myself. I smile, because I know that just him standing in that box is enough.
Just him going down swinging is enough.
The third pitch ...
"Ping!"
Foul ball.
He got hold of it. He nicked it. Just barely. And he's still alive. Even if he strikes out again, he got hold of it.
He digs his feet back in. He's going down swinging.
The next pitch ...
The pitcher let this one go with a slight hitch ...
It's just a bit slower ...
"You can get this one, son ..."
"I think you can get this one, son ..."
And ...
"PING!"
No name. No fanfare. No expectations.
A single.
It's hard to believe, but hurricane season is only two months away.
I heard this on the TV news this evening. Yes, it's April 3. Yes, it's 40-something degrees outside with daylight still left. And, yes, hurricane season is (only) two months away.
I'm not here to rant on about the news. They've got a difficult job, having to communicate with few words and curious selections of images.
But, kind of indirectly, it makes me think about something I've noticed after 34 years living in South Carolina. Something about the idea of springtime in a place that everybody assumes has to be warm all the time.
This is the Deep South. When you think of April 3 in the Deep South, you don't think of 40-something-degree highs. I would say, "Well, that's if you don't live here," but that's not the case.
For whatever reason, people who have lived here their entire lives seem to live under this delusion of expected warmth.
The truth is, it starts getting warm here in the spring ... but each and every year, there are plenty of days that it's cold. Cold as shit, in fact, if shit is cold.
Yet people who should know better say all the time when it's cold in March and April and even a bit into May that they "thought it was supposed to be springtime."
It took me awhile to realize this. When I was 19 this time of year, I distinctly remember shivering in shorts and t-shirts in denial of the fact that just because the sun had officially crossed the equator didn't mean it was license to so-easily put winter behind me.
Because putting winter behind you is work, an uncomfortable, plodding transformation.
Something that I've grown to like about where I live is the changing seasons. It's like a liturgy that binds you to a fundamental understanding. Each year, we live through a symbolic-yet-very-real cycle of life and death.
The dead, brown leaves that a March wind blows seem like ghosts hissing when the first blooms are emerging. On a day when the sun feels like a merciless taskmaster, you can't imagine that the ground your sweat drips on was and will be again covered in a sheet of ice.
It's taken me three decades, but I've learned that no amount of thinking otherwise will change the fact that spring is a season I just endure.
It's a harsh time, much like birth seems to be (though I neither remember being born nor have to bear the burden of giving birth).
I don't like the flowers of spring.
I don't listen to music in the spring.
I don't try to actively enjoy anything in the spring.
A 65-degree is not ideal to me. Nor is a 75-degree day.
I like it 85.
Or more.
Or 35.
Or less.
Spring here in South Carolina is a reflection of the general rawness of our culture.
It's ironic that the people of a state so used to dysfunction wouldn't recognize the bi-polar nature of its most-misunderstood season.
Eight years today he's breathed life on this planet -- beginning at 1:12 a.m. April Fool's Day 2000.
My first son. No more or less loved than my youngest son but presents to me a unique second-to-second series of revelations, because he and I are treading this path first together.
And after eight years, I've begun to see a pattern in how I lament each birthday that comes.
I've found myself indulging in a masochistic equation:
Age x 2 = a factor that increasingly scares me.
The equation takes into account a restrospective comparison on much time has actually passed, related to the sobering reality of how the fact that "they" said it would all go so fast was a cliche, but that cliches are recognizable because they are so true.
At first, it was easy.
Age 1: 1 x 1 = Yeah, whatever.
After all, when they're babies, I just look ahead to the time when they can wipe their own ass and cook their own cheese toast without waking me up in the morning.
Age 2: 2 x 2 = Cool.
Four? That sounds great. Maybe he'll be wiping his own ass and cooking his own cheese toast by then. And still, he's off the public school system grid, which means he's still a baby -- but without all the menial responsibility.
Age 3: 3 x 2 = Neat to think about.
Six? That doesn't sound too old. Sounds like it might be fun. I bet you can throw him a fastball. And I bet he still will give you a kiss and still call them "spoiled" peanuts. And that tooth-line will have a few gaps.
Age 4: 4 x 2 = Where we find ourselves today.
I bet he'll think a lava lamp is cool, and I bet he can appreciate and will remember forever his first Jack Johnson show in Atlanta. I bet his teacher will say during his cookie-cake party that she calls on him last when asking a math question because he always gets it right. And I bet he'll prove to be an all-star-caliber baseball player when he practices on his birthday and his coach tells him the only way to throw him out is to cheat. And I bet he'll still curl up with a stuffed animal that causes him to become severely distraught if it were left at a car wash.
Age 5: 5 x 2 = A decade. Hmmm. A decade. Have we talked about sex yet? I was 9. That was a little early, but not too bad. But maybe 10. We'll see. Whatever's natural.
(The 15-year-old down the street who plays baseball with him already told him that taking steriods causes your junk to shrink and that "you want that to be as big as possible." Not a bad lesson).
And I bet he's graduated to cooking a grill cheese sandwich over a stove.
Age 6: 6 x 2 = Middle school. And another stick of Right Guard to buy at the store. And hoping that the steady chipping away of my faults that I've tried to engage in have been enough and at a fast enough pace so that my glaring weaknesses are at best not obvious.
Age 7: 7 x 2 = "Yeah, high school's weird, son. And, no, you can't have that girl over at the house with you two all by yourself. I hate to do this to you, but I need to talk to you about that thing they call 'safe sex.' It sounds paradoxical, I know: telling you how to do something that I'm telling you that you just shouldn't do yet. I promise, your time will come. And when it does, realize that it's ideal to wait for marriage -- but good luck with that, man. Just have some self-respect. And I know Google is the name of a state now, but do you remember when we first realized it could be a verb, too?"
Age 8: 8 x 2 = "You might have a driver's license, but I told you when you were 8 that you had better start saving that piggy-bank money to buy your own car. Of course, that wouldn't have done you any good, because I stole all that money so that I could render your driver's license a distinction signifying nothing. Yes, I know you hate me, but you told me when you were 8 that you extra-promised you wouldn't."
Age 9: 9 x 2 = On to college. "Did you manage a baseball or math scholarship? Because that would really help us out a lot, kid."
Age 10: 10 x 2 = ... 20.
OK, no reason to go any further than where we're headed next.
Though watching him sleep, and thinking of his day today and who he's become in a short-yet-long eight years ... I'm hoping I'm correct in thinking that the worst problem I'll have is that I'll miss him.
I already do.
