...bacon & eggs...

…dedicated to work done during Father’s Day Brunch…

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Part One :: BACON (pig)

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“It is a wise father that knows his own child.”

-William Shakespeare-

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Dad are you listening because this is what I sound like now. 

Different voice.  “Dad are you listening because this is what I sound like now.” 

I sound good.  I am good.

I don’t care if you are listening by the way.  That is a lie, but what else isn’t between us.  I don’t know you.  I don’t even want to write about you because to admit you exist is to give you power.  Those who have power and aren’t powerful gloat.  How satisfying to own a position no one else can buy.  How impressive you can buy things.  Buy me this.  None of your time.

I am angry.  I don’t want to have this conversation.  No one needs to love the missing and ugly.  I can invest my nothing into us.  I hold my chasm and divide dearly.  This void is not avoidance.  The empty between us teaches me more than you have.

But then I am wrong.  I am wrong to make difficult problems so easy.  I am wrong to make complex emotions so simple.  You can’t be all bad.  You can’t only be waste.

Here are some names I never called you.  Papa.  Dada.  Father.  I’m not going to talk like a baby.  I hold no reverence for your remembrance.  You are an asshole.  But then again so am I.  So is almost everyone I meet.  We are all convinced we are the best looking cocktail on the bar.  We are fermented poisons waiting to get drunk and pissed, served in red plastic cups on a  Wednesday at a T.G.I. Fridays.

You can’t be all bad.  You can be majority bad.  You can be confused, human and real.  You can be forgotten, mysterious, and boring.  Here is what I know about you now.  A photo.  Occasional text messages that prove you have no sense of humor.  I watched you laugh in the movie theater and then tell me the jokes weren’t funny.  I listened to an old girlfriend tell me you creeped on her.

I pity you.  I pity you a lot.  You found true American success, recognition through the value of job titles. This inflates safety onto you, a flamingo shaped innertube you can float down life’s river on.  The water cools you.  The tube lets you stay above the murky flow.  I’m not sure you could swim without it.

I see you as a briefcase.  As an office full of papers.  As books we bought to celebrate each year that you existed near us.  I bought you the collected volumes of Mr. Bean. I bought you “SeinLanguage” twice.  I bought you a golf towel.  I hand drew you a happy map.

…i saw the Sein and it opened up my eyes…

I see you as all the times you told me to do things I didn’t want to.  When you did the same to my siblings.  Some of those things I won’t talk about here.  I don’t do this to protect you.  I do that to protect me.  To protect anyone reading this.  No one needs to know how deep your pitiful is.

I don’t want you to read this.  I don’t expect you to find this.  And when you do or don’t, I ask that you don’t reach out and tell me about it.  Your power is not in my words.  You didn’t make me.  You started me.  You can be one of the first letters of my story.  I get to choose where those letters go.  

I instead make you a period.  You end some random sentence on a page I don’t number.  You are impossible to find amongst the words.  All anyone will know about you is the end of a thought.  You get to be plain and forgettable.  Which one are you.

Maybe you prefer to be seen. The last time I saw you, at grandpa’s funeral, you let me call myself fat while your dad’s body lay empty in a box twelve feet over your left shoulder.  You wore the type of boring suit you can’t find at Sears anymore.  Sears isn’t anymore.  Sears is failing and disappearing.  Sears can’t take my annual photograph.

You talk like a weiner.  This is my memory of you.  Your sound is weiner and weasel.  You are *skree skree* sound effects poorly recorded on a free internet database.¹  A.I. will replace your vacant utility (a footnoted punchline to this paragraph).²

I can’t take your power.  Your power is your own.  I don’t want to take anything of yours.  I struggled with whether or not you were worth even these words.  I mean, look how I have built you today.  Look at your specter as I whisp you haunted amongst all the blank spaces on this page.  Read not yourself for you won’t find you here.  I’m purposely holding back your good bits.  I’m laughing at you because you aren’t funny.

I have given you recognition.  I don’t know that you deserve that.  I have given you time and space.  I don’t know that you deserve that.  I have given you your ghost.  I don’t know that you deserve that.  Boo, but boo who. 

This isn’t about you.  This is about me.  This is about how I relate.  I forgive all you have done, but I won’t forget all you have done.

Dad are you listening because this is what I sound like now. 

Different voice.  “Dad are you listening because this is what I sound like now.” 

I sound good.  I am good.  I am getting better.

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“It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”

-Anne Sexton-

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…sharpie on 8.5”x11” digitally colored…

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Part Two :: EGGS (chicken)

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“When one has not had a good father, one must create one.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche-

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The less said about my dude the better, and I say this to sing no song of sympathy, but rather to encourage any of us with a relationship good or bad, with any side of our family and friends, to find what value we can in those connections.  Even if the end result is a clean sweep and move on, that act carries within it great value.  Life is as much choice as chosen, and as we stamp the dirty path of our trail let us not forget the stewards who tended to this land before us. 

Or do forget them.  Forget them very much.

A father can be anyone.  One of my favorite fathers is James Brown, the godfather of soul.  Christmas of 2006 I sat on the couch with my father's father discussing possible shows we might see at the turtle themed casino near his cabin on the advisably unswimmable portion of the Mississippi river (near the nuclear power plants).  I swam there once.  This is how mutants are made.

We watched the Spurs, Pistons, Lakers and Heat bounce basketball on the TV, John Tesh playing roundball rock for our pleasure, falling asleep between gravy covered bites of ham juiced stuffing.  I told him I wanted to see James Brown some day, I had heard his shows were incredible and I knew only that he toured the casino circuit at that point.  As the games ended a newsbreak informed us that James Brown had passed, and so too then our opportunity to see him live.

It was a passing moment that stuck with me and a decade or so later, when as I drove a snowstorm through Nebraska then Iowa to visit my family for Christmas, I got a call from my estranged dude informing me that my grandpa had just passed away.  It was the first time my future wife would meet that side of the family, and the tangles of the estrangement made the events of those days really really strange.  

Here, meet these people that I really don't talk to much anymore.  

Let's pretend everything is normal, because death.

How odd that the ritual is to wait until someone is gone to share in that celebration of life.  The best part of a wake is the pleasure of memory.  Finding all the good of someone and making it central to the occasion.  

I have two dogs that I father.  I want to be the dogfather of soul. To celebrate today they both licked me awake and let me pick up their poop for them on a pile of California wildflowers.  The sun spit off the bay onto my burnt brow and I made sure to take thoughts slowly and savor them.  The park on the bay is filled with ground squirrels that sprint the dry morning grass creating a mirage of undulating brown such that the earth looks living. It is mother nature. 

What then is father nature?  I suppose it is the cars, and the roads that brought me to this park by the bay.  Everything "man"made.  My father, missing as he is from me, can at least be appreciated as having been some part of what made me me (hold to insert meme). 

I am man made and mutant.  I am a road to somewhere, a road to nowhere.  I am that park by the bay, undulating brown, alive. 

Thank you to all the fathers of this world.  Like a dad might joke, "I asked you to leave and you did.  You moved father and father away from me". 

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“When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.”

-Unknown-

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…thanks to

Lee A Smart

&

Harrison Moore

for your feedback…

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FOOTENOTES

1. https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/weasel/

2. https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/weiner/