There is no “conceit.”

What? –

I don’t answer my husband. I continue to give him the stink eye.

What did I do? –

We are three seasons into This Is Us and he still hasn’t figured it out.

I sigh.

TBH he hasn’t “done” anything, this time, unless you mean exist in contrast to EVERY MALE character on the show. For the past two years I’ve been glaring at my husband every time Jack even appears in a frame. Or Toby. Or Miguel. Or even Kevin. Sober Kevin.

I know I’m not alone here. This show is bringing us all down, people.

(PS: Also my kids — even on their best days — NOT Randall.)

It’s fiction, you say, but the thing is I do so relate to the show, and not because I was alive for most of the time span covered. While I get a kick out of seeing cars with roll down windows, what does that tell you when the most personally affirming detail was discontinued three decades ago..?

My identification with This Is Us is the perpetual conceit, the slight of hand: time travel. The parallel narrative structures that provide the weekly theme, selected from non-linear timelines, being all “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose-y,” deploying dramatic irony on all cylinders, setting up the inevitable plot twist — this IS my resting state.

It is always the 80s, baseline. Suddenly, it’s May 23rd, 2012 and I’m bawling, watching the LOST finale with my son. Then it IS April 8th, 2015. Now back to the 80s. Marvelling at The Breakfast Club, for the first time, on a stolen afternoon in Times Square with my friends. Cutting actual high school to watch a bunch of kids in “pretend” high school detention is something only a select group of people spanning four years will ever truly appreciate. FLASH! I am in the – ugh – minivan, and Simple Minds mutates into Bowling For Soup. It is 2004. My house burned down. My boys – 7, 5, and 2 are in the Odyssey (which despite the protests I will come to love and miss) and all I have at that moment is my family, that car, and these memories…

HOW THE HELL IS IT 2020? We are living in the future DO NOT try to tell me otherwise. Maybe everyone who read 1984 before 1984 experiences anything after the turn of the millenium as post apocalyptic.

Are we, Generation X, living on borrowed time? Or are we becoming the Early Bird Dinner Special Club?

Is it just me? Or are all of us d’un certain âge feeling suspended in time, in our own multiverse, incredulous as the calendar pages fly out the window into the hole in the ozone.

I blame it squarely on the bowed shoulders of this thousand year old woman I met, June 1996, in a Riverdale card store. Old Rose from Titanic. It was right before Father’s Day and I wheeled my first newborn son in his carseat stroller through the narrow aisles.

He’s so new. How old? –

About two weeks –

(I didn’t return the question.)

Hold on to him. Before you know it, he will be grown and gone. –

—

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I have not had an unexamined, unponderous moment since. Do you know how exhausting it is to be missing a moment while trying to experience it? To grasp the grains of time, desperately trying to catch them, but they slip through your fingers, to be forever trapped in the hourglass?

If I could go back in time, I would hurl that cruel bitch into the sea with the Heart of Ocean.

That’s how my story will unfold. It meanders a few years back, buckles a couple of years ahead, is stuck in neutral somewhere in my prefrontal medial cortex dancing with A-ha in a comic book – oops – graphic novel.

There will be that fire, unexpected death, expected death, addiction, friendship, failure, fear, success, free makeup, celebrities, regret, mortification, and lots of stuff I can’t remember RN and may be totally senile before I get to. By the time this is over Coronavirus may have taken over. By the time this is over Mandy Moore may not need prosthetic aging (but she probably always will.) By the time this is over I will no longer be employable by my *current* patrons (best / worst case senario – not sure) and I will no longer care.

My husband will still not understand why, despite my seeing the puppeteers pulling every one of my heartstrings on This is Us, and knowing that NO MAN LIKE JACK (Pearson or Dawson) exists IRL, I will seethe a little every Tuesday between 9 and 10 PM.

#ThisIsMe