Why Occupy Wall Street Will Fail

So the Occupy movement has been cropping up in cities around the nation, and now they’re claiming to be in unison with protests happening around the world. Unfortunately I don’t think anyone has been able to convince the protestors that what they’re trying to accomplish is impossible, and also a waste of everyone’s time and money. Now we have to acknowledge that the Occupy movement has no centralized leadership or spokesperson so you can’t nail down their list of objectives, and say why each one will fail or succeed. Collectively they’ve listed off thousands of demands that range from somewhat reasonable to outright insane. As a whole their general goal is simple, to have the 99% controlling themselves, and to eliminate corporate greed.

If you’re not laughing at them already, please begin now. They want to eliminate corporate greed by simply gathering, occupying, and drawing attention to their “cause.” While I think that most people in America would agree that eliminating corporate greed is a good idea, I don’t think that anyone has really stopped to think about the result of doing such a thing. As much as we all hate to admit it, greed is the driving force behind all innovation, advancement, and essentially the one thing propping up our entire lifestyle here in America. Let’s take the protestors themselves as an example. Greed is just a more advanced case of selfishness, and is there anything more selfish than shirking your responsibilities, jobs, families, etc and going to “occupy” some place in the name of some self-righteous cause? Rather than just staying home, trying to participate in local politics, and causes that they could actually have a chance of impacting, they decide to go for their 15 minutes, and do something that is nothing more than a dog and pony show.

Hall Pass

DISCLAIMER: IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED BY ANYTHING, OR HAVE EVER USED THE TERM CHAUVINISTIC IN CASUAL CONVERSATION, THIS POST IS NOT FOR YOUR EYES.

The wife and I were watching Hall Pass tonight and I had a thought. For those of you who haven’t seen it (spoiler alert) it’s about two married guys who have settled into complacency with their wives, and are dreaming about every girl they meet. Of course in the end they realize that the grass was always greenest with their wives and are more grateful than ever to have them. Touching story indeed. While I realize that it is a movie and that the characters are exaggerations of real personalities, it shines some light on some truths about marriage.

Firstly, marriage can get boring. You see the same person day in and day out, and you become comfortable with them. When you first started dating you probably wouldn’t dream of showing up to their house in your pajama pants, and an old t-shirt. A decade of being together, and suddenly it doesn’t seem so bad. Things like your hair, shaving (for both men and women), dressing nicely, and generally putting in some effort tend to go by the wayside. Men, who tend to be more visual creatures and are more interested in the physical than women seem to be, will always find something to look at. Put them in a room with 50 ugly women, and 10 attractive women, and they’ll have spotted the attractive ones like a sniper in a desert. Men are like raccoons, easily distracted by something shiny, so it is up to the wife, girlfriend, or fiance to be that something shiny.

Back to the movie. At the start of Hall Pass we see Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate looking worse than I’ve ever seen them in a movie. It’s obvious they downplayed the hair and makeup on this movie to make them look more like “real housewives” and they have them dressed fairly similar to my grandmother in the mid-80′s. Think Sarah Plain And Tall. Yet both women seemed shocked and offended to find their men staring at women in tight jeans, mini skirts, or cocktail dresses. Really? Sadly, I have come across this exact situation in the real world. I’ve seen real women get mad at men for checking out other women, while the poor guy’s wife or girlfriend looks like she’s getting ready to snuggle up on the couch with a cat, a copy of Dirty Dancing, and a Snuggy. Fortunately for most of these women they are in committed relationships and most guys are good people deep down who will not cheat. Also, love is real, and will keep a relationship together, unfortunately. Let me explain that.

The Psycopath’s Guide To Christianity Part 2

So as we last left our hero…it’s been a little over a month since my original post on becoming a Christian. As I imagined would be the case, there have been a lot of interesting thoughts running through me. There have been a lot of struggles. My primary struggle at this point is really just coping with what I’ve accepted. When you spend as long as I did outside of the world of faith, it can be hard to get back in. It’s hard overcoming your own cynicism. I literally find myself having arguments with myself in my own head. Mocking myself for my own lack of rationality. Then I chastise myself for not having faith. It’s weird, and sometimes a strange way to start the day…wonder why taking a shower invokes all of these thoughts. At any rate…

I’ve been continuing to read the bible as often as I can and it’s been helping a lot with all of this. Reading through Matthew last night gave me a real kick to the head. I won’t go into details because I feel like I’m too new to start “lecturing” on scripture. I’m a freshman in a post-grad class, and I think it’s wrong to speak out of turn. What I will say is that faith is hard. In my more cynical days, which I don’t think have completely finished, I would chalk Christian’s beliefs up to a mental weakness. I would tell myself that my lack of faith, my “reality check”, was because I was mentally strong enough to break free of tradition. Break free of an upbringing that was forced on me. I was better than the rest of them because I could see past all of the bullshit and get to something real. They were taking the easy way out, like faith was some type of porridge they were being spoonfed. I now realize, more than ever before, that cynicism is the easy way out. Believing in nothing is so much easier than believing in something.

The Psychopath’s Guide To Parenting pt 7

Normally I don’t do two blogs in a row, but these lead off of one another, but are different enough that I thought it warranted a second post. Cool? cool. In discussing how our decisions as parents may not become obvious until much later on in life, it sparked an interesting thought in my head. There is always the ultimate variable, which is free will.

The Psychopath’s Guide To Parenting Part 6

Here in the psychopath’s household we like coining phrases. The Parachute point. Craptastic. Panda Face. And the latest addition to the Psychopath’s dictionary, the censorship bell curve. Parenting, in my not very humble opinion (which is to say it’s correct), is a matter of trial and error. You do something, you find out how it works. Then you determine if you repeat it. For example, your child misbehaves so you try a punishment. This could be a verbal warning, a tangle punishment such as grounding, or for some parents spanking their kids. Very quickly you realize which of these works and which doesn’t. If the child misbehaves again and again, you change up your response, until you achieve the desired outcome. Unfortunately some decisions we make as a parent won’t show their results until much much later. There are many adults who are only now feeling the repercussions of actions taken by their parents. Maybe this was some form of verbal abuse. Maybe it was a certain degree of neglect. It doesn’t matter. The parents were, I’m sure, acting on their gut instincts and doing the best that they knew how at the time. They didn’t realize that they were messing up their kids until a much later date.

The Psychopath’s Guide To Christianity Part 1

I was driving home from work one night when I was around 16 or 17 years old. It was late, the middle of winter, and in Nebraska. What that adds up to is that the roads are covered in ice, deserted, and the wind is blowing about 50 mph. This predates the crackdown on seat belts and I wasn’t in the habit of using mine at all. I was cruising along on the highway at around 60 mph, no seat belt on, when suddenly I had an inexplicable urge to buckle up. No idea why, just my gut telling me that I’d better get that seat belt on. About 10 seconds later I found myself fishtailing on a patch of ice, moving full speed towards a pair of headlights. I collided head on with a pickup and the rest was a blur. I remember my car spinning out of control, his pickup getting torn in half and somehow I ended up on the side of the road about 30 yards from where the truck had stopped. We were both unharmed. Let me reiterate…we were both COMPLETELY unharmed in a head on collision at almost 60mph, leaving both of our vehicles as crumpled masses of metal on the side of the road. The rest is fairly uneventful, we called the police, we made it home, and I got a stern lecture on driving.

This is usually the type of story that concludes with, “that’s when I knew that God was real, and he had saved me from that crash.” Not for me. My story concluded with, “Damn it’s a lucky coincidence that I buckled my seat belt.” People are constantly telling stories like this where they take some strange event in their lives and they attribute it to God. They hold it up as a symbol, a clear piece of evidence, that there is a plan, and that someone is watching over us. I just as easily dismiss all of this saying that people struggle to assign meaning to random occurrences to give themselves comfort. We don’t like the unknown. We leave a light on for our children because they don’t like the dark. The dark is the unknown. The room is no different in the day than it is at night, yet one is more frightening. A car wreck without meaning, without redemption, is simply an unknown occurrence, and if it’s unknown it will happen again, to anyone, at anytime. we don’t like that idea. It means that we can die, whenever. Thinking that we’re part of a larger plans means that we’re integral to that plan, that we can’t be removed, or the plan falls apart. It’s just consolation.

If you know me personally, or have read this blog for the last few years, then thought strains like these are not surprising to you. It’s always been how I’ve thought. It is how I “reasoned away” my affliction of organized religion. I was born, and raised, a Catholic boy. I went to confession, I took communion, and I was confirmed in the church. I took it all very seriously as well. I was convinced that if I sinned, and didn’t make it to confession, I could burn in hell for all of eternity. In Catholicism the key word is repetition. There is no pursuit of knowledge, simply of routine. Again, routine is safe, known, and gives us comfort. We eat the stale bread, dip our fingers in the water, and know, beyond a shadow of any doubt that we will live on in paradise. It requires no mental effort, no spiritual struggle, nothing. Just do the motions and you’re fine. It’s the spiritual equivalent of a weight loss infomercial.

It was no surprise that when I started to mature mentally, the cracks began to appear. By the time I was 18 I had completely abandoned the Catholic faith in favor of a more “free” Christianity. What that truly meant was that when it was convenient for me I claimed to believe in God, sometimes Jesus, and never went to Church. I had had enough ritual to last me a lifetime and church was the embodiment of ritual. Eventually I began to expand a bit, reading literature on different Christian viewpoints as well as other religions entirely. I also began discussing religious matters with atheists, studying philosophy, and delving into various schools of thought. After 2 or 3 years of this, I came out on the other side a self proclaimed Agnostic. I believed in God but in no one organized religious system. I did not believe in the bible, or Jesus Christ, but I did believe that there was a creator of all things, and that this Creator did still play a part in all of our lives.

But did I actually believe this? Thanks to a fortunate job opportunity I was forced to leave my home, my friends, my family, and all things familiar. I was plunged into a strange city, in a different state, and into a different culture entirely than the one I had before. What I soon found was that I had absolutely no personality of my own. I had simply become a disgusting sponge. Filled with all of the thoughts, ideas, and personalities that I had absorbed over a lifetime. No matter how far I had come from it, I still believed in Hell. Ironically I didn’t truly believe in Heaven, but did believe in hell. I couldn’t shake 18 years of brainwashing, and this little fragment was still lurking. I couldn’t shake my cynical side that I had picked up during my college years. The idea that the majority of the world was ignorant, blind, or somehow “below” me intellectually. I would hear myself utter sarcastic remarks, biting comments, and seemingly witty commentary, but it was all just vomit. Regurgitation from a life that I had once lived. I had become absolutely no one. Reading through past entries of this blog is like going through a list of cliche’s one after another. The geek, the metal kid, the punk, the stoner, the hippie, and the corporate stooge. They’re all there. Somewhere, I had become lost and these people had taken over.

The one glaring exception came in my marriage. It seemed the one last refuge of my true self. The one last place where irony, sarcasm, cynicism, and fear all took a backseat. Where pure joy, intrigue, and true creation happened. So finally it begged the question of me, and my wife. Who are we actually? What part of our persona is just a mirror of our past, and what part is truly original? This is an almost impossible question to answer, but it also leads you down a rabbit hole of other questions. What did we find at the bottom of that rabbit hole? The question that leads to, and eliminates all other questions. Is there a God?

I’m a logical person, to a fault. My wife is not. She thinks and acts with her heart, always. It is one of my favorite features about her. It gives her an innocence that can’t be fabricated. I don’t have it. I research, I analyze, and I decide. I remember the good ol’ days of high school. I was struggling so hard to carve out a space for myself as the “artsy” kid. I filled my schedule with art classes, and creative writing classes, but I couldn’t escape one thing…I was great at Math. I scored a 34 out of 36 on the Math portion of the ACT (midwestern equivalent of the SAT), and that was while being hungover, and partially stoned. I was barely coherent for my junior and senior year, but somehow breezed through College level Trigonometry and Calculus. Numbers have always made sense to me, as much as I wish I was simply a creator, not an analyzer. But I digress…

I started researching God. By process of elimination I started with Christianity first. I had spent most of my life involved with it, so it made the most sense to point out its flaws. A natural point to start was disproving the bible. I started reading “Misquoting Jesus.” It’s actually a terribly interesting read. I also began reading blogs, interrogating friends who were Christians, and former-Christians. I scoured the internet looking for facts, looking for something. Anything really that would put this issue to rest. As you may imagine I found a lot of material that both supported and refuted Christianity’s claims, but there is nothing that can prove or disprove the existence of God. Just opinion. After much searching my wife and I came to the conclusion that we definitely believed in some sort of a Creator. So we were back to Agnostic. But what about Jesus?

This was the one point of debate. It just didn’t make any sense to me. God so loved the world, a world filled with evil, with assholes like me, with terrible things happening everyday, that he gave us his only son and let us murder him in the most horrendous way possible? I’m a father, and you’d better believe that if there were 1,000 people about to die, and all I had to do was sacrifice my son to save them, I’m letting every last one of them go down. So why would God do this? Why give us a world, watch us destroy it, destroy ourselves, and then give us something even more precious to destroy? It made no sense. Let’s raise the agnostic flag once and for all.

And then the “Aha!” moment came. I was discussing all of this with my wife, telling her the analogy of the 1,000 people and our son, and then it hit me like a cannonball to the gut. I had been viewing it all wrong. What if I had 8 children. 7 of them were being held hostage with guns to their heads (with no possible means of escape), and the 8th one was at my side, safe and sound. What if the assailants offered a deal. “You hand over the 8th son, and we’ll let the other 7 come back to you. Then we’ll kill your 8th son, but he will come back to life shortly after and return to you also.” Boom! For God so loved his children, that he offered the best of those children, in order that they all might live. Now it made sense to me. My wife and I had this aha moment and almost the exact same time, and I was floored. Suddenly I was mentally rewinding my life and looking at it like a chessboard, seeing all of the pieces move into place, all events in 28 years leading up to this one moment. Like a great novel that had finally reached a climax that had been setup in the thousands of pages preceding it. It was the most clear revelation that I have ever had. And so we went from Agnostics to Christians in that one second. There was no need for confession, because God had already seen it all. There was no need for ritual because he and I were already connected. there was no need for recited prayers because my thoughts are wide open to him. it all made sense.

But what about the evidence? Am I, the math hating, but terribly logical, person throwing all science, reason, and evidence to the wayside? Am I abandoning it all in a desperate grasp at finding consolation? Yes. Yes I am. It was like trying to use biology to explain a painting, or Geometry to explain a song. The reason there’s no conclusive evidence for or against any of this is because it just can’t be proven, or even fully understood. It’s much like love. I knew that I was in love with my wife on our first date. Within 4 weeks I told her that I was going to marry her. Even SHE disagreed with me at the time. I couldn’t explain my feelings, I could make sense of them, and I still can’t. She wasn’t the logical choice. We didn’t have much in common, we were weeks away from attending different colleges hours apart, my parents hated her, and I gathered that her’s weren’t huge fans of me either. But there was an inexplicable connection that I couldn’t resist, and couldn’t ignore.

God, and Jesus, have that same connection with me now. I can’t ignore them anymore. I know that there is ample evidence that it’s all a fairytale and I’ve lost my ability to care about it. I can’t justify or explain my new found beliefs. They just are what they are. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve delayed writing this post. I wasn’t sure how to explain something this abstract, but I hope I’ve done a decent job. This wasn’t some hopeful attempt at converting the “poor sinners” of the world. this was merely a truly earnest attempt at relaying my experience so that someone else may be able to garner something helpful from it. All too often when I would meet a “born again Christian” they would tell me that they were “born again” when they were a child. I would think, and still do, “How can you be born again, when you’re less than a decade away from you were BORN?” They hadn’t thought it through. No child can. They had simply done what I had done when I was “confirmed” as Catholic at the age of 13.

I have met very few Christians in person who struggled with God, with spirituality, with Jesus, for as long as I did, and who took as long of a way around the topic as I did. But where does this leave me? Well let me spell it out.

On the issue of the Bible, I’m reading. Well to put it correctly, I’m rereading it. I read the bible an awful lot both as a Catholic and as an Agnostic. In both cases I was reading it with colored glasses. I was simply finding what I wanted to find to further support my current beliefs. I’m reading it now and taking it in for exactly what I feel it is, not what I think it should be.

On church, I’m not going…yet. If I’ve learned anything it’s that God is going to put me where I should be, so I’m letting that one unfold as it will, but as of right now my lingering disgust with the modern day church, both denominational and non, is preventing me from taking an honest stab at it.

On my life. I have lived a pretty sinful life by any measure you can think of. I won’t dive into it all here because most of it is pretty “back alley” but what about all of my “bad habits” as I’ll call them? Again, I’m leaving it all up to God. All I can do is remain open, let him break me apart, and rebuild me the way that I should be. I have to give up on the idea that I know what’s best for me, or that I can somehow plan out my future. It’s all a giant question mark to me, and it’s not to him, and I’m okay with that.

There are still a lot of questions floating around my head about a lot of things, but I hope that this post is somehow helpful to someone. If not, then it’s pretty much in keeping with all of my previous entries. Don’t expect any drastic changes to the format of this blog. I didn’t drink some magical Kool Aid that will having me spouting Christian rhetoric any time soon. If you ever see the phrase “have a blessed day” on here you have my permission to hunt me down and slap me. But I do believe in this 100%, and while I can’t debate my side of the aisle, while I can’t argue the point, I can answer questions about how I got here, and what it’s like to be here. So if you have them, comment or email me. If you don’t, then on we go.

Until Next Time

The Psychopath

Children Of A TV Nation

While watching a few movies in the past few weeks I’ve noticed a similar ad. It’s for the “digital copy” that is now included with most DVD’s and Blu-Ray’s. They advertise how you can upload this to your computer, then transfer it to your phone, or other portable device. They then go on to illustrate how this can “benefit” you in your life. They picture people watching movies on their laptops, then change the setting to watching the same movie on their laptop in a coffee house, then in a park, finally in a library. They ad goes on to show a child using a smart phone to watch the same movie while in a shopping cart in a grocery store, while at the playground, riding in a car, and finally a shot of a smiling teenager sitting on the bench at a basketball court, watching a movie while kids play behind him.

Snow Day/Free Music

This post should live on my music blog but thanks to a hard drive crash I can’t really update that for the time being. Yesterday the fair city in which I live got pounded by a winter storm and so I got snowed in. While waiting for snow plows, and possibly angels, to come to my rescue I sat down to record an album in one take. No do overs, no edits (other than erasing lots of minutes of me making weird noises), and no effects. I had to throw a basic EQ on there because the mic picked up so much low end it was unbearable but outside of that, it is raw, for better or worse. I tracked it in one take, ran a quick pass over it with a limiter to even it out a bit, then bounced it. Hope you enjoy the results. You can download it for free, or just stream it by clicking HERE.

Until Next Time
Fathomless Regression

Psychopath’s Guide To Marriage pt 3

Tonight was one of those nights that I live for. Perfection. After a few hours spent out in the garage (build a dresser right now), I came in to hang out with the fam. We had some dinner, watched a movie, and then both of the kids ended up crashing. Nothing extraordinary, I know, but it doesn’t need to be.
My wife and I then began a conversation that went on until 3:30 in the morning. I’ve commented on this before to several people, including my wife, but I’m still amazed that after a decade together we haven’t gotten board with one another. That sounds terrible as I write it, but it’s true. I’ve always been that guy that maintains a relationship (romantic or otherwise) until it doesn’t seem worth my time anymore. I had this terrible habit in my younger days of breaking up with girls very spontaneously. It would hit me out of nowhere, ‘I don’t want to be around this person anymore.’ So I stopped being around them. I’ve done it with friends, girlfriends, bands, my mother, my brother, several other people that I’ve already forgotten.

10 years in and I’m still not tired of my wife. I find her more interesting than ever to talk to. When we first met we were both pretty generic people. Neither of us had really developed into a true personality of our own, and were really just compilations of those around us. I’d like to think that my compilation of the dark, silent, artistic type was more original than hers of the popular, people pleasing, party girl type, but in reality it wasn’t. We were equally unoriginal on opposite sides of the fence. It wasn’t until we met that we really started to develop into “real” people. Now that it’s happened, it’s really exciting to see where we started and where we’ve come to so far.

Tonight we were having a very “what would you do?” kind of talk. “What would you do if I were paralyzed?” “What would you do if I died?” You know, all of the fun questions. What’s really exciting about these conversations with her is that they’re real. Not cheesy bullshit answers, where your response to everything is “I would love you no matter what.” That’s a lie, no matter who’s saying it. There is no way to promise something like that because you don’t know what the future holds. 12 years ago, I would have told you that I was in love with another girl, and that I was going to marry her. That wasn’t a lie, it was simply my feelings at the time. Little did I know that I would meet a girl at a club, date her for a few months, then leave her for her best friend, and then go on to marry that best friend. I’m not arrogant enough to tell my wife that we’ll be together, forever, no matter what. I can honestly tell her that as of right now, I love her more than any other person I’ve ever met, and don’t want to spend this life with anyone else. As unlikely as it is, tomorrow may bring a man into her life that she connects with more than she and I ever did. Again, highly unlikely, but possible nonetheless. If that happens you’ll probably fine me at the bottom of a bottle, but still, I accept this possibility.

Typing this, it seems a bit cynical and lacking in romance. It actually sparks romance in my opinion. It means that you never get too comfortable. You never take the relationship for granted. If that man of her dreams shows up tomorrow, I want to know that today I did everything that I could to make the most of our relationship. I want to know that I did everything that I could to make both of us happy. When you assume that you have forever, it leads to procrastination. It leads to you putting off romance, putting off conversations, putting off real connections for another day. Before you know it, you look up and you’ve become another one of those couples that eat at the same restaurant every friday night, order the same meal every time, have the same small talk about the same topics, and don’t ever really experience one another. If my relationship ever becomes repetition, then it’s not a relationship, it’s a routine. I’ve got a job to fill the “routine” side of my brain. I don’t need another routine.

I’ve told my wife several times that if she ever got severely overweight I would leave her. People who have heard me say this before give me a look like I just slapped their grandmother. My wife has said similar things to me. I don’t understand people’s confusion with this. If you don’t care enough about yourself to maintain even a minimum standard of maintenance, then you clearly don’t care about the other person. You’ve collapsed in on yourself in a wave of self-loathing, followed up with a splash of pity. Does this mean that I’m leaving my lady if she puts on a pound? No, that would be crazy, even for me. That means that if she, or I, get to the point where we’ve stopped trying to improve ourselves, both mentally and physically, then this car stops moving. Our relationship is about growing together, and improving one another. We don’t simply have a relationship based on routine, or familiarity. We didn’t get married because we had been dating a while. We didn’t have kids because “that’s just what you do.” Everything we’ve done has been an effort to build a stronger bond between us that will strengthen both of us because we’re connected to it.

I’m rambling as usual. It’s 5:21am so that’s to be expected. I love my wife. I can also say, without a shred of doubt, that she loves me. We’ve built an amazing family from the ashes of two failing (in my opinion) families. I don’t know if there’s anything special about what we’ve done, but it feels special to me. It feels like an amazing gift that I don’t really deserve. Something that I’ve somehow stolen away from a better man that I’ve never met. Thoughts of losing this undeserved gift keep me awake at night. When there’s no one left to talk to, and nothing left to distract me, this is where my mind wanders. To the fear that someday soon this amazing bubble that we’ve built for ourselves will be destroyed. I worry that it’s almost gotten too perfect to continue. That we’ve experienced so much happiness, and been given so many gifts, that our time in the sun must end. I hope that this isn’t the case, but fear that it is. I’m off to shut down for the night. Off to lay next to a gorgeous woman that I don’t deserve, in a house that is better than I need, down the hall from two kids that are so perfect I can barely stand it. Do you remember the really corny and idiotic scene in American Beauty with the drug dealer and the plastic bag? When he talks about so much beauty in the world, and his heart wanting to burst? As much as I want to punch him in the face while he’s saying that, I have to say that I know exactly what he means.

Until Next Time
The Psychopath

Last Summer

taking a break from the psychopath’s guide…

“Kid, love is one giant kick in the balls after another,” he said. He leaned back in his oversize leather arm chair as if that was the conclusion of the discussion. As if he had come to a great revelation and was satisfied with just that.

“How can you say that?” I responded. “You were in love with mom for 47 years. You’re telling me that your entire life together was just a kick in the balls?” I asked while holding up air quotes with my fingers. I knew he couldn’t stand the gesture, and it would add that much more salt to the wound. He stared at his knees as he tapped an impatient finger on the brown leather. It was as if he was frustratingly waiting for his own mind to catch up to him. It did.

“Look, you little shit,” he began. “You know as well as I do that I love every moment with your mom. Every god damn second with her was like coming up for air after drowning my whole life. But when it’s over…” He paused, coughed for a second, and seemed to be choking on air. His eyes started to look like wet gray stones, darting back and forth, searching. Remembering. Trying to hold it all in. He raised his eyes to meet mine, blinked hard, regained composure and began again. “When it’s over, when love ends, you’ll wish it had never started. You’ll wish you had never let yourself get so vulnerable, so weak. There’s no way to guard yourself against what comes next. Whether she cheats on you, you cheat on her, she dumps you, you dump her, she dies, you die, in the end, everyone gets fucked.”

“I don’t get it dad. I saw you with mom. I saw the way you turned on when she was around. It was like she a battery keeping you going. When she left you’d just kind of shut down, and when she came back you became yourself again. You’re telling me that you’d give up the way you felt when she was around?” I tried to dull the edge of the conversation by using the most calming tone of voice I could muster.

“Have you ever given someone your heart boy?” he asked.

“I think so, yeah I have,” I replied.

“If you think so, then you haven’t. You’ll fucking know it when you do. And when you do know it, then come talk to me about this. Until then stick to talking about something you actually know a thing or two about.” With leather rippling and squeaking, he got up out of his chair and walked to the nearby window. He reseated himself in a lone dining room chair seated next to the window, and next to a small table with an ashtray on it. He pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit a cigarette. With a slight gesture of the pack, he silently offered me one. I walked to the window and leaned against the sill, taking a cigarette and lighting it. With one puff every flavor, every scent, every story of this house came screaming through my body. Holidays, birthdays, Tuesdays. With this one burning stick of paper and tobacco it was as if I could see the entire life of this house playing back in my mind. I let the memories flow through me with each breath of smoky air. I wondered to myself why I had ever started this conversation? Hadn’t I learned after all of these years together that some topics were best left out of our discussions? Obviously not, because I pressed on.

“Dad, we’ve established that I don’t understand true love. You’ve proven that,” I said, stroking his ego slightly. “You do know about it though. So tell me why you’re so soured on the idea of love. Explain it to me, make me see your side. Isn’t that what you always told me growing up? If I could explain my position then I could do whatever I pleased when I was a kid. Well explain yours.”

“I’m not explaining a damn thing. I’m not asking for permission to do anything. You’re the one blabbering on about love, trying to get me to sign off on the idea of you wasting time with some girl you barely know. Why should I explain anything? You explain it to me wise ass.”

“You are asking for permission though!” I shouted. I angrily smashed my cigarette into the green ceramic ash tray. A small of trail of smoke burst out before completely burning out. “You’re asking, without having the balls to actually ask, for permission to not have a part in this wedding. To not show up, to not acknowledge that I will have a wife, to not be there for the most important day of your sons life just because you’ve got some delusional issues with the whole idea!” I moved back over to my seat and fell into the sofa. He got up from his chair and walked slowly over to a bookcase, trying to find anything he could stare at to avoid eye contact with me. “Dad,” I continued, “you’re asking for permission to ignore this and so you’re going to have to explain yourself. If you can’t, then you’re going to show up.”

“Boy, you’re getting good,” he said without turning to face me. Keeping his eyes on the spine of a random book on the shelf he went on. “I used to tell your mother how much I looked forward to the day when you and I would go round for round in some heated argument. Watching you adapt, twist my words around, drudge up things I said in the past. It’s a proud day for me,” he said with a hint of sarcasm. “I’m a stubborn old cuss who loves a good argument. But you’re right. I do owe you an explanation.”

He finally turned to face me, walked over to the sofa and sat down right next to me. He rested his worn hand on my knee and patted it gently. “When you give someone your heart, and you truly give it entirely to them, it’s gone. You turn your whole life over to them, and they turn theirs over to you. You live for them, and it’s almost like they’re living for you. Their breath is what keeps you alive. Their voice is the only sound you want to hear. Their face is the only thing that you can see. The world doesn’t stop when they’re not around, it just goes dark. It gets muddy, and suddenly nothing seems as bright or as good as it was a few moments ago. I can tell you boy that I gave your mom my heart. My whole heart. And that wasn’t enough to keep her going. I’d have burned this whole god damn world down if it would have kept her going. I would have torn out any part of my own body and gladly handed it over, but nothing could save her.” At this his glassy stone eyes finally burst. For the first time in 4 years I saw him cry.

“When she left, she still had my heart. She took it with her and there’s no way of getting it back. I died with her. Now I’m here, waiting for my body to catch up with my mind, and finally give in. So like I said, whether you just split up, or whether death steals it from you, in the end we all end up fucked.” Still crying, he reached into his shirt pocket and fished out his pack of cigarettes. With shaking hands he quickly lit one and inhaled hard. He flicked ashes from it onto the carpeted floor, and wiped at his eyes.

“Dad, I know feel empty since mom died, but I wish you could understand where I’m coming from.” He stared blankly, and with the exception of the smoke streaming from between his fingers, he was as still as stone. “I know that this will end. I know that everything eventually ends, but I also know that if I have a chance at even one day of what you had with mom, then that is worth it. You said you would have burned the world down to save mom. Well I’d burn the world down just to be in your shoes. To have the knowledge that someone had completely given themselves up to you, and you right back to them. The knowledge that what you had was absolute and as stubborn as you yourself! That’s worth anything that I’ll have to endure as a result of having that same feeling.”

I reached over and took his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and lit one for myself. I blew a puff of smoke into the air and watched it mingle with his. “I don’t know if I’m even making a dent here dad, but just know that I say this with all sincerity. you’re the luckiest guy I know for having buried your true soul mate and knowing that she was just that. Most people just get to put a familiar face in the ground.” Still unflinching, he stared ahead, at a blank wall. I stood up, flicked a few ashes from my cigarette to the floor, and walked out of the room. Out of the house. Out of that place. That was weeks ago. I haven’t hear from him since and can only hope that I broke through enough to see him sitting in this church today.

As I scribble this letter to you, sitting in small room in the back of the church, I still have no clue whether or not he’ll be here today. I don’t know if a single thing that I said made any impact on him whatsoever. I do know that when you left, you left two broken men in your place. Two men who had built a world centered around you, and without you they don’t even know what should happen next. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to know that, not one but, two people’s lives are completely and cripplingly attached to your own. Of course I’m not immature enough, or even stupid enough, to believe that you had any control over when you left us but I still can’t help but feeling angry that you left at all. You left us both in pieces, and right now we’re both struggling to pick those pieces up off the floor and put them back together into something resembling what we once were. As much as we called ourselves a family, I see now that it was really one amazing person with two others lucky enough to have been included.

Whether you can hear, read, or sense what I’m writing to you is completely unknown. Can you see what’s happening today? Are you here somehow? Are you anywhere? If so, then I guess we’ll find out together how this story ends. What becomes of these two shattered men. What becomes of any man who truly did give his heart away? I gave you mine, he gave you his, and I don’t think either of us would ever want them back. Without you, they just seem like useless organs, beating in our chests. Maybe I can give this heart a new purpose. We will see.

Love,
Charles