To the hardest-working dads in show biz

So, this is our day, Father’s Day. My guess is you’re not lying on a hammock in the back yard, but rather this day is pretty much like all the rest. You’re happy for what you have, but you hold some deep wish that some day it might be that you get to lay around like the normal dads on your day off and listen to the sounds of your children doing the things other kids do. I remember being a kid, always running, no matter where. It seemed like I could fly, and I ran and ran. Where did that energy come from? Even more, where did it go?

Right now, Dad, you work hard, and you try to keep a stiff upper lip. When the gang at work asks about your kid, you don’t say much. “She’s doing great.” You feel kind of odd because you don’t do more, you don’t hang out more, you didn’t see this game or that game. In fact games don’t interest you much. It must seem to them like all you do is stay at home. Doubtful anyone knows how much it actually takes to get up each day and put on your brave face like everyone else, when you’re not like everyone else, and you know it.

The moms have their networks; their sisters, their tears, and their open ways of coping. At the end of the day, maybe even a greater acceptance of the way things are. For us, much more alone with our thoughts, that acceptance looks uncomfortably like acquiescence, which will never be, because it’s not bred in our bones.

So you push on, maybe sometimes pushing too hard, both our loved ones and ourselves. You have your opinions, but truly you aren’t in the driver’s seat this time, making it all the more difficult. Actually no one’s is in control of this overwhelming force. Even the so-called experts are practically useless, which renders you a helpless observer to your family’s long, slow descent. Occasionally you make a stand, but then that’s just Dad being mean, critical, impatient. Fill in the blank: That’s just Dad.

They say work is good for the soul, but do they know that it’s also a relief? The weekends and the holidays are actually far more demanding compared to the long stretches of time when you find you’ve actually not thought about your beloved child or your long-enduring wife for an hour or two. But then comes the guilt, for shouldn’t you be thinking and doing and staying focused all the time? If not you, then who? Certainly the world can’t be trusted with your family, especially its resident angel, so unique of soul. She who has blessed and challenged and opened you up to places you would never have gone. How can the world be trusted with such purity? In your world, you’re taught that only the strong survive, so in essence you’re fighting the forces of the universe, which seem to have lined up against you.

At work, everyone around you is doing it for their kids. Even the ones without kids are building their nest eggs, but your charge is more exacting, because money may be the one thing that would provide a cushion when that day eventually comes when mortality shifts the equation and you’re not there any longer to provide that imperfect wall of protection. You know it’s a jungle out there, so forget trying to explain to a non-verbal child the cycle of life and death, just leave something in your wake that wraps around that child for their entire life like armor. For that you’ve got to get up and go to work the next day, and you can’t have tearstains on your cheeks when you walk through the door. Probably better not to think about it too much, and yet… you woke last night to the sound of thunder.

So, I’ll wish you type of Father’s Day wish I wish someone would wish me: Dad, I already know you’re a good dad and a good man. I already know that you ought to be lying around in a hammock under a shady tree, though I doubt you could relax long enough to enjoy it. I already know your family loves you and you’re a god in the pure, unquestioning eyes of your child, and that’s good. But what I really know is that that it’s lonely in there sometimes, and I understand. You are not alone.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Live long and prosper.

Snausage Snoup

My friend received his sentence today; his long-awaited judgement, the thing that he has simultaneously dreaded and painstakingly created. He went to the supposed Mecca of civilization, the place where he could be free, and he now finds himself dragged into legal proceedings that will make him more a slave than he ever was.

I reviewed the Webby Awards page and I saw two people who I have worked with and personally know. I know four people who have been recognized for their work, either by winning or being nominated. I also know a lot of airbags and a couple of geniuses who have never even been allowed into the ceremonies. I couldn't help but cringe at the crap I'm producing now.

It struck me last week that in seven years, I had never heard my daughter cry. She has suffered more than anyone I know, yet she does not cry. I thought about it, told friends about it, pondered it and went to sleep that night. The next day, coming down the steps, she stumbled. She looked at me and exploded in the most anguished cries I have ever heard. The storm lasted no more than a minute, and then the sun re-emerged and she quite happily continued her journey. Her strength spreads deserved shame among the masses.

Last night I had a dinner party for my niece's 26th birthday. The whole family descended on my pesto and ate and drank their way through my meager savings like locusts. As they left, my wife and I stood at the door, dressed in barrels, waving goodbye clutching the dried brittle stems of the grapes of wrath. I had a rotten hangover this morning and had to miss work which further depleted the totally GDP.

A former colleague who nobody could stand is sliding down the tubes to the roaring cheers of the crowd. My wife and I check into his blog almost nightly to see how much farther he has slid. Once a powerful art director with a noteworthy hairdo, the blog chronicles his descent into odd jobs such as retail clerk and security guard. This amuses a second colleague (see paragraph 1) who once spearheaded the campaign of detest against the first. I've never understood why everybody hates the first guy, but I read the blog nonetheless and laugh too.

There's a certain point at which you give up any hope of doing anything cool or memorable in this world and you merely go for the fetid gold. A friend of mine called this epiphany and the ensuing money grab Operation Greed. I have embarked on this op myself and I assure you, it's no place for pussies. The irony is that the people whose approval one may have most sought, i.e. those revolting cocks who call themselves your family, do double spurging backflips because you're pulling down respectable bank. They couldn't give a shit if you've won a Webby or not, just show them the Benjamins; with some of them rank Lincolns will do. All the artistic triumphs you hoard in your little jewel encrusted memory box can be set out with the recycling along with the beer can house sized allotment of empties, because in this world, it's money that matters.

My wife is an artist of ill repute. She paints and sculpts scenes from her mind, in other words, tableaux of chaos and strange beauty. These pieces she gives away to strangers while the walls of our house are as bare as the Gobi desert. Strangers of like mind send her art which she discards or stores in drawers. The drawers in our house cannot be opened because they're filled beyond capacity with crap that even Fred Sanford wouldn't want. The drawers in our house are as worthless as knobs on walls.

It's been recently reported that according to White House sources, I am considered obese. I don't look obese, my clothes aren't grossly oversized, I am clearly smaller than most of my coworkers, including the pretzel guy and all the neighbors except for Tareyton, the white trash lady with emphysema that lives across the street. It's obvious that the charts are from another era when people were scrawnier. Post-depression era charts that do not account for the ruddy physique of the 21st century man. I went to a Web site for diabetes and filled in a few simple questions and clicked a button and the whole page flashed red and warned that I was at high risk for diabetes. I am going to die, thank god, but maybe I should lose a few pounds first with no admission that I am obese, though naked, admittedly, I'm not as compelling as I was 20 years ago.

My cat is jealous of my daughter. My daughter calls the cat Puppy, which doesn't help matters. It's all my fault, like everything else.

Later I will tell you about the Chinese woman who thought I was her doctor and chased me with guns. Actually I think I'll do a whole gun evening, because there's also the guy who thought I had harmed his Afghan and menaced me with a German Luger, and the guy who told me that he was going to shoot me but changed his mind, plus the one time a famous rock star pretended he had a gun and saved me from an ass kicking by a crazy Italian whose knickers were in a twist because I thought with my dick.

Roli

To you, Roli. now lying in the dirt in the hillside below Mirthios. Forever wed now to our beloved Crete. Your 2002 Christmas card made its way back to Alex and I a year and a half after she had sent it, and in Cate's words, it gutted us.

Trying to focus on my feet, I went to Zipp's and bought a bottle of Jim Beam so we could have "vun viskey" in your honor. Cried and smoked and drank, and kept waiting for it to get better, but to this day every time I think of you lying in that grave in the unforgiving Cretan countryside, I get a lump in my stomach and I want to scream.

We were supposed to meet you back there. After Amsterdam, it would have been necessary because I was such a scared little asshole, and you were patient as always; used to waiting in your wheelchair. You said you had nothing but time.

You wanted us to bring Phoebe to Crete. To get her off the ineffective dope she's pumped full of. Let her breathe Greek air and swim in the Mediterrenean sea for the cure no doctor thinks exists. After all, it finally cured you, and you're probably happy now, but look at the cost. To miss you so.

Phoebe was just starting to have seizures when you showed up in A'dam. The business was failing, and life was crushing us all. I cursed god every night, and I still hate his fucking guts for what he let happen. Only later did I figure maybe he couldn't do anything about it. Like everything in life, maybe he's overrated too.

I think of holding Phoebe for endless afternoons, while her mind slipped through my clutching fingers like fine sand. There are only a few grains left now in the palm of my hand, and three years later, she's a six year-old baby.

But you got to see her when she was still whole. She loved your chair, and she climbed up in your lap, so curious, so free of guile. She didn't understand the difficulty you overcame to come visit us there. And instead of telling those revolting cocks I worked with to go get fucked, I left you sitting and waiting while I continued the charade and made Death March 2000 back and forth along the Amstel to the twitching corpse that was e-City.

People who don't believe in angels must never have met one. Cold Amsterdam was the last place I held you, the same cold Amsterdam where you jumped eight stories down, trying to escape your demon, but she held on tight and steered you away from the cement and took you in for a landing on the soft mud, where instead of dying, you lost everything but your mind. You're the mirror image of my beautiful Phoebe angel, who in Amsterdam, lost nothing but hers.

Later in Minneapolis, I emailed you, but in '92 when our lines converged, you, me, Alex, Urs, and all the major and minor players, email was unknown, and we wouldn't have cared anyway. That was also before Phoebe, and before I forgot how to do everything but hope.

So you told me you wanted our voices to wrap around one another in the warm night breeze outside the taverna. You wanted me to understand that the people who were "normal" didn't know shit, and you wanted us to come home to the island and take Phoebe's future into our own hands. I didn't have the strength to step into that realm alone, even though I knew you would be waiting and that nothing bad could happen to us with you there.

Now your body lies in the dirt and your spirit mingles with the Meltemis, but without you there beside us, I doubt if I could ever return.

Sleepless

They say you should get up after a little while. You never get to sleep lying in the dark worrying about it. They say it's a guilty conscience, a lot on your mind. They say a lot of things.

I tell them I can't sleep on a full moon. They always look at me incredulously when I say that, but it's true. I can tell if the moon is full without even looking out the window because I get a buzzing and throbbing in my head, and when I feel that familiar feeling and hear that blood rushing in my ears, there's not a snowball's chance in hell I'm going to sleep that night.

I don't think the moon is full tonight though. Too lazy to look out the window and find out and too pissed off to care if they think I'm strange when I say celestial objects keep me awake. Let's face it: I can't stand where fate has thrown me, moon or no.

I never thought I'd find myself back in the landlocked shithole that I left so many years ago, when I was different and the world was so much less what it's become.

A lot of things have I happened that prayed never would, the kind of things that startle you; the things you steer your mind away lickety-split when it wanders too near. The unthinkable things you're secretly relieved happen to someone else.

Situations conspire that make you move to the last place in the world where you'll ever find a kindred spirit, and yet you're lucky to be there -- by god where's your gratitude you little prick?

San Francisco was no paradise, believe me I know it wasn't. It wasn't any one thing, how could two decades anywhere be anything but life? And yet now, I can't tell you two sticks about my old life except it's so full of ghosts they knock me down while I walk and I think it's the wind.

Nobody here cares about ghosts, at least the ones I'm talking about. Sometimes on a moonlit night, con artists and storytellers are able to stand them up and blow enough goo into them so that they come alive again, but I think you have to be something to do that: Braver than I am. Smarter too.

And yet, sometimes being pissed off and sleepless makes you do crazy things, sometimes it fills in for the weaknesses.

So, I'd like to write a long letter to all of those ghosts, some of whom are me at an earlier age, laughing at what I've become, some are friends who are dead, enemies who should be, and some who are only dead to me now.

I'd like to write and write and take the rest of my life to finish. When I'm done, I'll grab one of those old ghosts and blow a little color back into their cheeks, only so I can pretend again and reminisce and talk to someone besides myself. Someone who was there, who didn't stay behind for twenty-two years to gape incredulously at lost spirits whose last resort is to return, haunted by ghosts and moons and restless nights.

And then I will be one of them, waiting for the next sleepless soul to come and talk to me. But for now, I'm awake. Very awake.