you always want more time...

the newly began chronicling of my relationship with my father has transcended the traditionally predictable rants of father/son angst and anecdotes into something remorsefully surreal...

yes, my sentences ramble in the most awkward of badly poetic ways, i'm sorry, that caint be helped, i eschew proper school-learning, especially regarding the academics of slang - slang is my shield, my
slang-blade...

anyway, i'm avoiding the actual reason for this inarticulate post - not wanting to say it...

my father passed away in his sleep the saturday morning of July 3rd, 2010.

my last conversation with him was the friday morning before, when he called me crying; not wanting
to return to the nursing home he had been rehabilitating in. i felt his pain and sorrow, but more than that i understood the actual origins to that pain and sorrow - information he had shared with me during the 18 months (plus the 3 years since then) in which i lived with him and mama acting as his human crutch and personal errand boy (a position i held with great honor and esteem, hoping it would at last earn me a morsel of respect in his view of me) ((those issues he shared with me will be addressed in later posts/probably))...

but the man who never seemed to hold much affection for me as a child or as an adult has passed away (not to be confused with 'love' because i knew he fully loved us all, he just was reluctant or just didnt know how to show it in ways that mattered on deeper levels, at least to me) - i think he came to trust me, at least 'value' me as his sounding board, but still i didnt feel his respect for me as his son and as a man... not that such a thing is ever a requirement, its just something nice to keep stored in your self-esteem when growing into a functioning adult. esteem should grow from feelings of familial love and not from the need to prove one's self as a valuable commodity to his closest kinfolk.
how can you empower your communal ties when you keep a chip on your shoulder at all times?

forgive me. this blog might be about me, but this immediate post is in honor of my father. i didnt intend to rant on about any preconceived misperceptions about manhood and family-ties.

i've lost my father. it was hard to like him and not always easy to love him - but i did both (at least after abandoning my long-seated bitterness and hatred towards him/strictly undeserved and entirely harvested from my own emotional aesthetics) - my sisters affectionately placed the phrase 'mean and surly' in his obituary in attempts to adequately sum up his most frequent disposition - traits in which we all have, either by blood or social osmosis! - and i've inherited my fair share of those characteristics.

but i also maintain a deep-rooted sense of overpowering love and the need to visibly express it; traits i thought i had created of my own volition... and the truth i came to understand was this: these, too, were traits i had directly inherited from my father. deep within him was an overflowing well of love, one that had been capped in life by intimate reasons i may never fully know (or openly express online, at least not yet).

for so long i had misunderstood my father... but the truth became extremely clear as i had began understanding myself: if i too am 'mean and surly' by blood and against my will, then perhaps everything i feel about love and intimacy should be attributed to him as well - what reason or right had i to conclude otherwise? if visibly and by temperment daddy and i were just alike, then he too held great desires to love and be loved equally in return...

daddy's 'negative' traits were exacerbated when the life he lived proved it impossible to fully express himself through his positive traits...

or maybe he and i are just full of shit, i wont rule it out... at any rate, i found myself when going through my father just as i found him when going through myself: he was the theatrical 'dark knight' and i was just the campy ol' televised 'batman' - our origins are the same. only the cinema was different.
"mean and surly" - i know its said with affection, but to me it represents 'the unknown (and maybe now unknowable) reflections of his past' - not who he actually was but more reflective of the things in his life that made being 'mean and surly' his most adequate armor protecting whatever softer underside he may have had... in those inner-realms of himself is where my true daddy resided... reserved and calculating every single acquaintance by those conditions of an unknown extenuating circumstance - the iceberg tip to his emotional titanic.

the more i got to know daddy, the more i realized that he was soft, had grown insecure of his life choices and was badly in need of a hug, acceptance and understanding... things he was now unable to express since his mean and surly armor had long ago become the prison by which he was now held by and most commonly viewed through, condemning him to live out his last precious moments as a characture of himself to those he needed the most support and understanding from.

rother davis
1937-2010.

- in love and obedience.

daddy issues part one

my father is a hard, unaffectionate man (unless you are a friend or a cb buddy, then he is warm, exchanging blue-colored languages joyfully with them - i am so jealous!)

as a child i would side up to him while he was under the hood of the family car (motor oil was a body fluid for him) - but he would always push me back, very gruff, saying i was getting in his way; would tell me to go play somewhere else... it's sublime at first, but after awhile you look out into the garage and wonder how long it would take you to go get help if the jack slipped, trapping him beneath the pontiac he was working on. not "run off in a panic" for help... i'm talking about "IF i ran off..." would i go to the candy lady first, get a bag of pop-rocks and a pickle before returning home to tell mama "mama, i think daddy is stuck under the car."

this is bitterness. i wasnt an evil child. this is one of the many negative emotions that will eventually surface when you instill ... what's the word? ... "detachment" ... when you instill detachment in children. which still isnt the most correct term, because the bitterness you feel is most definitely attached to the person who helped nurture it!

but you grow up. i understood that daddy didnt not love me, he just didnt show it in socially recognizable terms. so, i didnt not love him in the exact same way the he didnt not love me...

i also swore blood vows to the heavens that i would NEVER love my wife and children in such a manner once i was old enough to indulge in the arrangements of adulthood! my children still might not like me, but dammit, they will sure as shit know that i love them above all else!

(let me smoother my loved ones with love... or else, let me smoother them in their sleep. their choice.)

this lovelessness-as-an-act-of-love i was shown as a child would not be permitted in my home as an adult. it has shaped the way i am now emotionally connected to the friends and family willing to fully express their love respectfully and openly. al green said, "love and happiness" -  that man was a goddamn genius. i have no time in my life for loveless, unhappy people - not just because they are a drain, but also because their very existence trudges up the emotionless-void stuck in orbit between resentment and bitterness (metaphor for the relationship between a father and his son).

at times, i have hated daddy. deeply. not the angst-ridden "i wish you was dead/i had never been born" overly dramatic, cinematically dysfunctional type of hate. just a good ol' fashioned clean, angry hate.
("if you wasnt so much taller than me, i'd fuckn kick your ass!")

 i guess this is normal for many folks. but what happens to you, as an adult, when the ancestral link begins to claim you and you find yourself FEELING, ACTING AND BEHAVING in the same exact vein as the person you abhorred?!?! - - - in my mid-20's began the realization that i was becoming my father!

not in temperament. but... well, yeah... in temperment! some damn genetic switch was thrown and the traits in my father had begun to metastasize in me!

NOT HIS HABITS! not the way he expressed himself (not entirely, anyway) but a deeper understanding, appreciation and acceptance of why he was the way he was.  temperamentally i was wired the exact same way as he was... the switch had been thrown. or maybe it had always been there and i was just becoming aware of it. but at any point, it took being in a successfully joyless relationship for me to understand my connection to my father:

acts of lovelessness was a self-defense mechanism to hide the pain and failure of not having/living the life you wanted deeply for yourself. you love your family to no ends, but you accept the stifled confines of an unhappy relationship and simply make the best of it. i can see how having a loving, happy child running his hot wheels collection around your feet while you hide  your head inside an engine block can ruin the spa-effect of your powertool-based escapisms... once i'd understood this about daddy (though maybe not completely accurate in my own unlettered analysis) the love i had been stifling for him came rushing back into me. and in doing so, i was able to fully love the parts of me that reminded me of him; insight and perspective had freed me from that foolishness... i became calm. began talking to my gods again. understood not just what 'a good love' was, but understood how to avoid the actions in a relationship that can lead or push you away from that same 'good love'...

al green wasnt just a genius, al green is my jesus! in love and happiness i am saved.

hallelujah, aché, show you right!