It's Later Than You Think
When my dad died at 77 a half hour before Father’s Day this year, it filled me with a complicated mix of emotions, many of them painful. I was filled with love and appreciation for my old man, but also intense guilt.
When I moved to Marietta, Georgia, to live in my in-laws' basement after getting laid off from The Dissolve shortly before it ceased to exist, I left a city that I loved and hated in equal measure. Chicago was like many aspects of my life: I held onto something I loved until it hurt like hell.
I felt like I was abandoning my father. That’s partially because I didn't have the money to visit him regularly, and partially because I wasn't as good about keeping in touch as I should have been.
I tried to console myself with the appealing fiction that there would be time to make things right. Sure, my life might currently be a goddamn mess spinning out of control, but who’s to say that I won’t be absolutely killing it two years from now?
As a neurodivergent trainwreck, I have a complicated relationship with time. That’s a nice way of saying that my relationship with time is completely fucked. I struggle with time management, an exceedingly important skill for a full-time freelancer or small business owner.
I tend to procrastinate, especially when it comes to matters that are important. I’m similarly inept at estimating how long a project will take and how much time and energy it will require.
For example, my frenzied brain somehow convinced me that with Saturday Night Live turning 50, there would be a sizable market for a project where I covered 50 years of wildly uneven sketch comedy that would involve watching roughly one thousand and four hundred hours of a show that is notorious for sucking much of the time.
I was so convinced that I had a brilliant, career-making idea that I didn’t tell anyone about it out of fear that people would rip it off. I should have known that watching nearly 1,500 hours of Saturday Night Live in time for its 50th anniversary would require a superhuman level of focus and resilience, and I’m subhuman in most regards.
I thought timing would be the Saturday Night Live project’s greatest strength. I thought I’d timed it perfectly. I should have listened to my wife when she gently suggested that other books might require a less psychotic level of work and have a broader appeal.
I pulled a real screw job on the Saturday Night Live project. Out of neuroses, fear, and anxiety, I never checked the tally for the Indiegogo campaign for the books/online project, so I didn't realize it had ended before I could make a final push.
I’d love to believe that time is on my side. It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like time is running out. I feel like I’m committing a moral sin by squandering the precious gift of time.
I wish I could replay what I probably subconsciously knew would be the final decade of my dad’s life. There were so many things that I wanted to do. There were so many things that I wanted to say. I tried to convince myself that there would be time at some point, that the frenzy of everyday life would subside long enough for me to do all of the things that I wanted to do, or at least some of them.
That’s the thing about life. Everybody runs out of time. Death has its malevolent way with us all. It’s what we do with the variable amount of time we have on earth that matters.
I wish I could have given my dad a copy of The Fractured Mirror, a book I am continually working on, putting the finishing touches on. I didn’t want him to die with me at a low ebb, struggling professionally and financially. My dad was always proud of my success. I felt bad that there wasn’t much success to be proud of at a certain point.
Time has had a magical and malevolent impact on The Fractured Mirror. For years, I used it to distract myself from more immediate and urgent work. I happily watched obscurity after obscurity, some on a semi-legal Eastern European website.
I fucked myself over by taking three and a half years to finish the book. However, I made my future a little easier and rosier by also spending years obsessively researching a fascinating corner of American cinema in a way that has resulted in an absolutely mammoth book covering over 500 films, which I also plan to use for Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas and Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place.
Nathan Rabin is Uniquely Bad at Time Management might be a more accurate name for this site, but that’s a little too niche.
My dad’s passing has made me ashamed of the time I wasted. It’s also made me intent on making the most of the limited time I have left on the planet.
I’m 49 and have the credit score of a Junior College kid on meth with a gambling edition. Yet I hold out hope that I can pull it together at least one more time.
Tomorrow’s not promised. We aren’t given an endless series of tomorrows. Everybody’s time here is limited. That’s why I feel a burning need to create something of substance and value while I’m still here, something that will make my dad proud of me.. He may no longer be here physically, but I’d like to believe that’s still possible.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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