The Post Secret page has never been more poignant for me:

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

My relationship with my own father was very problematic, but at the last I was horrified by his suffering and alienation.  His senile dementia and hearing loss left him completely alone and he’d been a traveling salesman never-meet-a-stranger kind of guy who was extremely social.  He was hurting and curled into a fetal position after breaking his hip/leg in a fall.  He was clearly afraid and did not understand what was happening to him.  Death came as a blessing in my mind.  Yet, I could not mourn.  For years, he had not only lost his own humanity, but my mother had also become withdrawn and isolated by her stubborn resolve to take care of him at home until it simply became impossible.

I left my father’s house pretty young — not yet 18 — and my guilt about my father’s death is not close to my guilt about leaving my sisters behind.  My father was physical with them and increasingly so.  I felt the most guilty about my middle sister and even though she and I are estranged, I still understand many of her problems when I remember how he resolved the issues between them with his physical prowess — the back of his hand ended many “discussions”.

Like any child, I wanted my father to love me, approve of me and be proud of me.  It never happened. 

Dad didn’t hug us, he “wrestled” or “tussled” with us and every time one of the children ended up hurt and crying.  I have a portrait of “Daddy” on my studio wall:  it’s a watercolor of the brown belt that sent us to bed weeping almost every night.

By contrast, Dad had many, many friends who adored him, found him funny and warm.  When I say Dad never met a stranger, I mean he would kid and chat with every service station attendant and store clerk he encountered.  He could be loving:  I prayed and wished and hoped that someday he would treat me as well as he did the family dog.

He’s buried in Lawton next to my grandmother, Elsie, who was the one adult in my family who made me feel the most loved.  There’s so much emotion there I can hardly go to Comanche County with my mother, who still tends his grave.

I have many legacies from my father: starched shirts and shined shoes; a well-knotted necktie; great silver hair; the idea that I can’t do anything right and that I’m therefore worthless.

Now, I’m a father and grandfather myself.  My youthful contempt for the hypocrisy of the Ozzie and Harriet outside and abusive inside of my family life is now more mournful and understanding.

Now, the frustrations of not knowing how to raise a child and the temptation to take those frustrations out in anger on the child are more real to me.  My own youthful parenting is a blot on my soul and my subsequent reform is one of my most proud achievements.

I hope my children remember the hugs and not the hurts.  They cannot know how deeply they are loved.  They cannot know how deeply I regret my shortcomings as a father.

There are some situations as a parent I believe are so fraught with peril that it’s something you can’t get right:  you make a decision knowing that it’s wrong, but in hope that it’s less wrong than the alternatives.  In retrospect, you hope and pray the positive outweighs the negative.

My alcoholism while my children were under my care is a source of regret, to be sure.  As a recovering alcoholic, my hope is to live as a man they can be proud of, a man they forgive and a man who now demonstrates the unqualified love I always felt.

I’m sorry I was so self-centered and selfish, kids.  I’m sorry I followed the path I was shown and not the one I knew was right.  I hope you can love me for making a change, lowering my voice and staying my hand, giving hugs and telling you “I love you”. 

I couldn’t have done too badly, they both turned out to be perfectly lovely, wonderful adults.

I don’t take the credit, Jack and RebL.  I do deeply appreciate the love you show me throughout the year.

Happy Father’s Day

It’s Ed and Mandy’s restaurant webpage.  They’re putting in a pizzaria and juice place on the Paseo down by Blue Moon.  Here’ the link for the 411 and I’ll permalink when I get around to it.

 

http://www.yoursauced.com/

good luck, kids

My libido is down around my net worth, some astronomical negative figure that I don’t want to know.

I’m doing home improvement projects today.

I paid bills this morning.

I went to f’n HOME DEPOT today!

Who is this man who has occupied my body?

don’t have a date tonight and don’t want one.

not sure I even want to leave the house.

the dishes are washing and so are the clothes.

I fixed my own food in my own kitchen.

Who is this man who has occupied my body?

I don’t feel like writing or painting.

I’m thinking about a case I’m working on at the office.

It’s about a house that flooded.

I’ve never even met the client, I’m just doing a favor for another lawyer, taking the case to trial later this summer.

The top is up on the new car.

Who is this man who has occupied my body?

I noticed that I stopped eating red meat about a week ago.

It’s been mostly cold salads lately.

I’ve secretly been exercising — walking around the block and doing situps in my bedroom.

I’m prepping for a colonoscopy on the 27th and otherwise taking care of my health.

Who is this man who has occupied my body?

He wants serenity and security and solitude.

WTF???

 

I’m dreaming that today I’m up at 6:45 a.m. so I can be in court today.

It’s not my case: it’s my “partner”, Floyd’s, and I’m going to court because he’s taking off for a fishing trip to Canada while I stay here and be the grownup and do work.

I know how the British felt at the end of the Revolutionary War.  I can hear the band playing “The World Turned Upside Down”.

Oh. My. God.

I’m awake and this is real.

I’m practicing law today. 

I’m on the phone and drafting documents and doing that sort of thing.

When did this start?

 

One of the incidents that came out of my car wreck is that my cell phone pitched forward into the windshield.

It didn’t fare as well as I did.

I took it to the Cingular ER for a catscan and it was fatally wounded.

So, I talked to the Cingular people and my contract was up and I could re-up and get a good deal on a new phone and got a humdinger of a Blackberry.  It’s the newest, fastest all-blowjobs-all-the-time model.

It gets my email, has a PDA, does everything.

On the other hand, it’s so complicated I can’t figure it out.

It’s got my old SIM card, but I can’t retrieve my phone numbers.

Hell, I can hardly figure out how to make and receive phone calls.

It seems this morning like a metaphor for my entire life.

All this potential.  So many skills.  Transformative powers.

Yet, somehow a mystery to me about how to make it work in the “real world”.

My friend Jenan sent me this and it’s too good not to reprint in full:

With Ineptitude on Full Display, the Party’s Over for Republicans

by Garrison Keillor

People who live in mud huts should not throw mud, especially if it comes from their own roofs. As Scripture says, don’t point to the speck in your neighbor’s eye when you have a piece of kindling in your own.

I see by the papers that the Republicans want to make an issue of Nancy Pelosi in the congressional races this fall: Would you want a San Francisco woman to be speaker of the House?

Will the podium be repainted in lavender stripes with a disco ball overhead? Will she be borne into the chamber by male dancers with glistening torsos and wearing pink tutus? After all, in the unique worldview of old elephants, “San Francisco” is a code word for “g-a-y,” and after assembling a record of government lies, incompetence and disaster, the party in power hopes that the fear of g-a-y-s will pull it through in November.

Running against Ms. Pelosi, a woman who comes from a district where there are known gay persons, is a nice trick, but it does draw attention to the large shambling galoot who is speaker now, Tom DeLay’s enabler for years, a man who, judging by his public mutterances, is about as smart as most high school wrestling coaches.

For the past year, Dennis Hastert has been two heartbeats from the presidency. He is a man who seems content just to have a car and driver and three square meals a day. He has no apparent vision beyond the urge to hang onto power. He has succeeded in turning Congress into a branch of the executive branch. If Mr. Hastert becomes the poster boy for the Republican Party, this does not speak well for them as the Party of Ideas.

People who want to take a swing at San Francisco should think twice. Yes, the Irish coffee at Fisherman’s Wharf is overpriced, and the bus tour of Haight-Ashbury is disappointing (where are the hippies?), but the Bay Area is the cradle of the computer and software industry, which continues to create jobs for our children.

The iPod was not developed by Baptists in Waco. There may be a reason for this. Creative people thrive in a climate of openness and tolerance, since some great ideas start out sounding ridiculous.

Creativity is a key to economic progress. Authoritarianism is stifling. I don’t believe that Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard were gay, but what’s important is: In San Francisco, it doesn’t matter so much. When the cultural Sturmbannfuhrers try to marshal everyone into straight lines, it has consequences for the economic future of this country.

Meanwhile, the Current Occupant goes on impersonating a president. Somewhere in the quiet leafy recesses of the Bush family, somebody is thinking, “Wrong son. Should’ve tried the smart one.”

This one’s eyes don’t quite focus. Five years in office and he doesn’t have a grip on it yet. You stand him up next to Tony Blair at a press conference and the comparison is not kind to Our Guy. Historians are starting to place him at or near the bottom of the list. And one of the basic assumptions of American culture is falling apart: the competence of Republicans.

You might not have always liked Republicans, but you could count on them to manage the bank. They might be lousy tippers, act snooty, talk through their noses, wear spats and splash mud on you as they race their Pierce-Arrows through the village, but you knew they could do the math.

To see them produce a ninny and then follow him loyally into the swamp for five years is disconcerting, like seeing the Rolling Stones take up lite jazz. So here we are at an uneasy point in our history, mired in a costly war and getting nowhere, a supine Congress granting absolute power to a president who seems to get smaller and dimmer, and the best the GOP can offer is San Franciscophobia? This is beyond pitiful. This is violently stupid.

It is painful to look at your father and realize the old man should not be allowed to manage his own money anymore. This is the discovery the country has made about the party in power. They are inept. The checkbook needs to be taken away. They will rant, they will screech, they will wave their canes at you and call you all sorts of names, but you have to do what you have to do.

© 2006 The Baltimore Sun

There is some chance that I’ve opened a Yahoo! email with the “New Graphic Site” tag.  I don’t think so, but it’s possible.  It’s a worm called JS.Yamanner or something like that.  I almost never use my Yahoo email and sometimes I just go through the list of incoming deleting one at a time.  I think I remember seeing that tag, but I can’t be sure since it would have been in a basket of spam.  In all events, please scan your computers since the worm if I’ve got it would go to my address book.

I apologize for any inconvenience. Here’s the story: