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.

Let’s say that some of the most influential and powerful people on Wall Street finally conceded. Let’s say they finally crumbled under the oh so difficult stress of slightly delayed subways, excess loiterers, and camera crews hanging about. Let’s say the heads of some of the largest corporations wanted to sit down and talk it out with the protestors to hear their ideas, and implement some of their practices. Who are they going to sit down with? OWS has no leadership. You can’t hold any type of constructive meeting with thousands of people and a few CEO’s, it would just be chaos. You need representation, that’s the entire idea behind our democracy. You elect someone to represent your interests, and go to bat with you, but OWS can’t do that. The moment they do elect someone to sit down in that meeting on their behalf, they have just gone against their very mantra. The 1% is now speaking for the 99% again, while fighting the 1% controlling the 99%. Ah, logic bomb!

But let’s ignore that for right now and move on to eliminating corporate greed. Say hello to the downfall of the entire world economy, as well as all luxuries that we have come to enjoy. Sure, OWS is quick to talk about living a simpler life where we all look out for one another, and live humble lives without all of the luxuries, but where are they when we revert back to a almost tribal like society. That seems to be who they envy most by all of the rhetoric I’ve found on their website. You’ve got your medicine man, your baker, your carpenter, and so on. Everyone working to help one another and life is just perfect. Guess what, you don’t need to dismantle Wall Street or the big bad corporations to live like that. Grab your thousands of people huddled in NYC right now, pool all of your money and believe me you’ll have enough to collectively buy a large plot of land, and start up your utopian society. Live on your own, then we won’t have to listen to your shit anymore or pay the almost $17 million pricetag that your protests now boast.

The only reason that corporate greed will even affect you is if you WANT to be a part of the corporate landscape. That’s what these people are really bitching about. They don’t want to do away with corporate greed, they want to simply take those that they deem to be overpaid and bloated and strip them of their lifestyles. While I’ll admit that there are those who are taking ridiculous salaries, and bonuses while others in their organizations suffer, or even while the American people suffer, that is just human nature, not corporate nature. You’ve had people like this since the dawn of time. Go back through history and look at every empire since the dawn of recorded history and you always have 1% controlling 99%. Do you know why? Because we, the 99% demand it! We are afraid, we are unoriginal, we are weak!

No one wants to admit it, but we don’t want to have all the control in our lives. When you have all of the control, you have no safety net. Your failures are all your own. I work for a large company because frankly I don’t want the responsibility of running my own company. I don’t want to be in charge, to make decisions at that level. I want someone else to guide the ship, while I simply row my oar. I don’t have to know where I’m rowing to, I just know that if I keep rowing, I’m given my pay, sent back to my home, and back to my family. This is the case for most of us, 99% of us. The 1% are the dreamers, the innovators, and the greedy. They are the ones blazing the trail while we merely walk the line behind them. The 99%, the protestors, all of us, are merely cowards. If these protestors weren’t cowards they would have gone off the grid long ago, it’s really not that difficult and then they’d never have to participate in this oh so corrupt system again.

Corporate America knows this! That’s why OWS will fail, because their opposition knows that they’re all hot air. Just hypocrites making a lot of noise. I shall just patiently wait until this entire movement fizzles, like so many before it, and we are back to our normal everyday lives. The lives that we have chosen, and continue to choose every day that we wake up to them. Simply acknowledge it, accept the truth, and you’ll find it so much easier to just not give a shit where the boat is going. To not care whether the captain is embezzling funds from the bullion chests. To not worry about anything more than what it will take to get you back to your family, and what really matters at the end of the day.

Until next Time

The Psycopath

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.

Lust is based on the physical. Nice body, good hair, intoxicating aroma (imagine I said that part in a british accent), and good clothes. These are the things that drive desire in a man, and from what I gather from my wife, drive the desire in a woman as well. Love is based on the mental, and spiritual. A successful marriage requires both of these things, love and lust. Oh, and a successful marriage is not one that merely lasts. My mom and step dad have been married for 18 years and they’re completely miserable. That’s not success, it’s surrender. I didn’t ask my wife out on our first date because she looked like a nice person. I didn’t ask her because she looked smart. And I didn’t ask her because I thought she would be a good mother. I asked her out because she was hot, wearing a halter top, and looked good dancing in a club. When I found out that she was an amazing person, then lust became love, and that became the last 10 years of my life.

After 10 years I find her more attractive physically than I did when I first met her. That’s post two children, and during the third. Little one is still cooking away. Oh, and I’m not saying that in a “she looks as beautiful as a sunflower on a clear summer day” kind of way. I’m saying that in  a “If I saw her in a club right now I’d totally cheat on my wife with my cloned wife from my imagination” way. Does that make any sense? It makes a ton in my head.

Sadly, many marriages are surviving on love alone, there is no lust left. I believe that is the unfortunate part. We were made to be sexual beings, and while that is not a free license to go screwing everything in sight, it’s a shame that many couples have completely denied this side of themselves. They’re propping up their marriage with love and essentially becoming best friend roommates, rather than best friend lovers.

So let’s flash forward to the end of our movie here. Both guys find their way back to their wives, and they’re all happier than ever. Here’s an interesting sidenote though. In the last happy laughing scene of the movie, Jenna Fischer is wearing an insanely low cut sun dress showing at least 3/4 of each of her boobs, and Ms. Applegate has got skin showing everywhere. Oh, and look, their husbands couldn’t be happier. Again, I know this is a movie, but the point still stands. Boobs equal happy.

My wife jokingly asked me if I wanted a hall pass after the movie was over and I told her, “Hell no.” And I don’t say this out of some chivalrous deceit, where I don’t want her to have hurt feelings. I’d rather she hated the truth, then loved a lie. I told her that I don’t need a hall pass, because I don’t need her permission to go and out and have sex with whomever I want. I’m not locked inside of some imaginary chastity belt. I don’t cheat on her because I don’t want anyone but her. The moment that stops being true, she’ll find a crisp manila envelope on the table. Inside will be our divorce papers. I won’t stay with someone if I’m not attracted to them both mentally and physically.

An intriguing point on cheating though, as that’s really what Hall Pass is about. Cheating, albeit with permission. Men who have an affair are only going after what they don’t have. Men are hunters and gatherers, we are takers. We will always seek out what we want, and don’t have. Keep in mind that most men also have it beaten into their heads at a young age that you honor your commitments. The fact is that even the most miserable of men out there probably won’t cheat on their wives, because the voices of their fathers, baseball coaches, and scout leaders ring in their heads. You don’t break a commitment. Instead, if a man isn’t getting any sex at home, he’ll turn to the wide open spaces of internet porn. If a man IS getting sex at home, but his wife isn’t a good listener, or wont’ have a conversation, he’ll befriend some woman to supplement that need. They may never touch each other, but emotionally they’ll be more intimate than he and his wife, which is another form of cheating. If a man’s wife dresses like a fat kid in gym class, you’ll find him staring at women who don’t. If his wife has no motherly affectionate air about her, you’ll find him seeking out those who do. It won’t always be so blatant as an affair either. It could be as innocent as daydreaming. Fantasizing. If I learned one thing from the book of Romans, it’s that what you think can be just as sinful as what you do.

If you’re a woman, and have managed to read to the end of this without being disgusted, annoyed, or just throwing your laptop away in frustration, then hear me when I tell you: You must be all things to your man. You must be the sinner and the saint, the ballerina and the pole dancer, Martha Stewart and Megan Fox. Fortunately ladies, that door swings both ways, so don’t put forth all of the effort to a guy who doesn’t give a damn. Your man has to be nice, but aggressive, wild, yet stable, rugged, but soft. He’s got to be Gerard Butler in 300, and Gerard Butler in PS I Love You. If you’re both EVERYTHING to the other, than what more can either of you ever want? What else is there to lust after when it’s all under your roof?

My wife and I deliberately serve to be each others fantasies. If I tell her that I’d prefer she cook dinner in a black cocktail dress, high heels, and diamonds, she goes for it. If she tells me that she prefers me in tight baby blue t-shirts (yes that was a real one), and worn jeans, rather than my normal shirt and tie, then I’m in. I tell her to grow out her hair, she tells me to cut mine. I tell her to be more spontaneous, she tells me to take the reigns on planning our dates. We are constantly changing, and adapting to fulfill the other ones’ needs, and in doing so we’re left wanting nothing that we don’t get.

Total honesty, completely uncensored, that’s love. “Yeah honey, those pants do make you look fat. So do those shoes.” Being able to say that, and know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that’s it not meant to be hurtful but rather an objective observation, that’s intimacy. That’s trust. That’s what has built a marriage that everyone has criticized, doubted, and questioned over the years, yet it has grown stronger than I could have ever imagined. That’s what has formed one of the most frighteningly powerful bonds I’ve ever witnessed.

Fuck a hall pass. I do what I want already, and what I want just so happens to also be what I have. Life is good.

The Psychopath

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.

I could always stand on whatever side of whatever battle I chose. My step-grandfather, who was a bit of a hothead, and the type of guy you would call a bastard, but say it with a smile, said to me one time, “You don’t walk into a fight unless you think you can win.” When you have no faith in anything it’s easy to take that approach in life. I could pick and choose my arguments, stack the deck, and then come out appearing more intelligent than I really am. Pad the stats a bit, and appear to be some great debater. Now, I won’t short change myself. I’ve been given the power of persuasion. It’s not bragging, or arrogance, it’s the truth. I can talk my way out of, or into, almost anything. My brother and I both were blessed with that, and oddly my most lucrative ability came from the woman that I wish I shared the least with. I’m getting off the point. The point is that having faith is hard, especially for us cynics out there. We’re not only beating the wolves from our gates, but we’re attacking ourselves from inside of the house.

Vanity is my other struggle right now, and it ties into my cynicism. You play the part of the sarcastic cynic. People know you, they expect it of you. They expect the jokes about people’s faith, they expect the mockery. You get so lost in the routine of it, that before you know it, you’re not only denying your own new found faith, but you’re mocking someone else’s. The disgusting part is that I don’t even realize I’m doing it until after the fact. My vanity runs so deep that it’s on autopilot. I can remember when I was a kid that I would attend Catholic mass almost every sunday. Every Sunday for 18 years it was the same ritual, the same prayers, the same songs. I left the church, didn’t attend for at least 4 or 5 years. Then I went back for a Catholic friend’s wedding. Even after all of that time, even after me giving up on Catholicism, when that priest raised the communion host, without even thinking, I said in unison with the crowd, “Lord I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” The words just poured out of my mouth like a mindless robot. This was one of the many moments that made me hate the church.

Similarly, like a church for the cynical, when a joke or comment is being made about a Christian, I chime right in. Without a missed beat. Worse than that, I’m actually embarrassed to admit to “friends” that I’ve taken this new path. Says a lot for how much stock I’ve put in these friendships. I’ve discussed becoming a Christian with 1 friend, 1 wife, and 1 brother. With all of the people that I surround myself with, and all of the people that I’m supposedly friends with, I could only come up with three people that I was completely comfortable discussing this with. I think that says more about me than about them. It’s an odd time in my life, and it’s doing odd things in my mind, both good and bad. I’m a control freak, I’m an Obsessive Compulsive, and suffer extreme paranoia and here I am trying to turn over control to a force that cannot be seen or proven. Life is chalk full of surprises.

So that’s the daily report from the land of the Psychopath. Hopefully there are other cynical, sarcastic, assholes out there who are finding faith, and might actually be able to get something out of this. At least you’ll know you’re not alone. We can make wisecracks together when we’re dead.

Until Next Time

The Psychopath

No matter how badly our parents screwed up when we were young, it is still ultimately up to us how we choose to be in adulthood. Let me give you an example. My brother and I were raised poor. Very poor. We’re talking Kenny from Southpark poor here. Very little food, tattered clothes, and if our town was big enough to have railroad tracks, we would have certainly been living on the wrong side of them. Our mother was uneducated and working at K-Mart, then later as a teller at a bank. To her credit, she did what she could to keep us fed, and sheltered, and obviously we survived. That being said, looking back it certainly wasn’t a fairy tale upbringing. In addition to these meager beginnings, our mother was also insane. She was the original Psychopath you could say, but I suppose she had her father before her, and her grandmother before that. Yes, yes, I may have to title the blog “A Psycopath’s Guide” since I was not the original. That being said the chain ended with my brother and I.

Granted we have both turned out crazy in our own right, but in more of a comical way than a dangerous way. What we did manage to change though was generations of poverty, ignorance, and broken homes. In fact as many generations back as any has been able to document in our family line, the children have grown up without one of their parents around, if not both (in the case of my grandfather). My brother and I both committed to never letting this happen. We would be there for our children, we would raise them as best as we possibly could, and we would also provide for them a better life than what we were given. We both set out to find careers, have children, get married, etc. We succeeded…or at least we have thus far. Despite having come from what can only be described as a fucked up childhood, we both made the decision to not let it rule our adult lives. We could either be defined by our childhood, or we could overcome it, so we chose the latter.

Unfortunately many don’t. Many let their childhood experiences rule their lives, and affect them in a negative way. They dwell on past experiences rather than focusing on the present and making the most of that. The point of this is to say that regardless of how good, or bad, you raise your children, they still may turn out unexpectedly in the end. I’ve known many a good catholic boy, who were raised in the strictest of households, but turned out to be absolute hellraisers. Similarly everyone was convinced that I would turn out to be a complete loser. I showed no signs of ever growing up and truly breaking out of the mold that had been cast for me. But with the chance meeting of a girl, I did just that, and left all of that baggage behind. You never know. That’s the excitement, and ulcer inducing anxiety of parenting.

The Psychopath

Take my childhood for example. Anyone who knows me, or who has followed this blog for a while, knows that my childhood was no gleaming example of excellent parenting. I believe, sometimes in spite of my own better judgment, that my mother was doing the best that she could. That being said, I turned out to be one messed up guy. Depression, anxiety, paranoia, fits of rage that scared the hell out of my wife…yeah these were just some of the tasty morsels leftover from a childhood that, in retrospect, was awful. In the thick of the battle though, I didn’t know any better as a son, and I honestly don’t believe my mother new any better as a parent.

So how do we know that what we’re doing now isn’t going to screw up our kids royally later? We don’t. You have to trust your instincts, do the best you can, and you’ll get your results in the mail in 18-21 years. This leads me to the topic of the day…the censorship bell curve. Many times I have debated censoring media in regards to my children. I’ve had several people, both parents and non, tell me that I should censor what my children are exposed to games, movies, music, etc. I always disregarded them. I’ve had many reasons for doing so over the years, but I’m not going to get into that right now. My main argument, and one that I still believe, is that inappropriate media is like another language. If someone were to come up to me right now and call me the worst insults imaginable, but do so in Latin, I really would have no reason to be offended. I would smile incoherently and stare blankly. What other response could I give to something that I don’t understand? The same goes for children and media.

I can remember my daughter watching The Dark Knight for the first time. A fellow parent had warned me ahead of time that some kids had found it scary…granted Heath Ledger made a pretty twisted Joker, but guess what my daughter (then 3) said when she saw his face for the first time. “Look daddy, he’s funny.” She was under the impression that he was celebrating Halloween. What other conclusion would she reach at the age of 3, when seeing nothing but people dressed in costumes? Her only exposure to this type of behavior was during Halloween so she naturally put the two together. And so goes my argument. If you’re ignorant to something, it will glaze right past you. If no one ever told you to fear snakes, would you be too worried if one dropped in your lap? Have you ever been terrified of a puppy? No? Ah, could it be because you’re conditioned to think they’re cute and lovable? What if you were bitten by a rabid puppy when you were 3? Would you react the same way to a puppy in the future? Would you be scared?

So my daughter proceeded to be exposed to everything that we took in. She listened to the music that we did, she watched the movies we did, and she saw her father digitally kill a quarter million people on various video games. All the while none of this registered in her mind as good, bad, or ugly. It was all simply shapes, sounds, and Latin. But as you have guessed from the theory’s title, this is all a bell curve. You can pinpoint the moment when the light bulb in her attic turned on…Enter Lord Of The Rings. My daughter has sat through 300, she has sat through the Dark Knight, she has sat through countless scores of movies in every genre, but the Lord of the Rings was the beginning of the rising bell curve. We were just finishing up watching one of the three movies, can’t remember which, and Gollum had been introduced. She reacted strangely, seemed to tense up at the sight of him. That night she complained of having bad dreams about Gollum. I reminded her that he wasn’t real. He was like Santa Claus, just make believe. She persisted. She would complain of not wanting to go into her room for fear that Gollum could be hiding in there. Finally I reminded her that she was safe with me, and that in the end Gollum died, so even if he were real (which of course he’s not), there’s no way he could come for her. This satisfied her and the Lord of the Rings problem had been solved.

But the damage, if we can call it that, was done. I now noticed that she seemed to be picking up on more and more in movies. Even more innocent movies, like comedies, she was picking up on more and more mature themes. Things relating to sex, or crude humor seemed to click on more and more lights in the attic. So for the first time ever, for our living room’s premier of Black Swan, we actually sent our daughter to bed BEFORE watching the movie. At the age of 6 she has now been censored. It happened again recently with Blue Valentine (didn’t realize how much craziness would be in that one, so it was a surprise). Our son however, couldn’t care less what’s coming out of the flickering box. This finally spawned the bell curve theory in which we realized that all children have a point of awakening where they start to be affected by, and truly absorb, what it is they’re hearing and watching. When they’re young, they’re basically ignorant to themes of good & evil, sex, drugs, and violence. It passes over them like someone speaking latin. But as they get older they start to pick up more and more of it until most of this material is going to be completely absorbed, therefore making it inappropriate. Then as the curve declines, they age and this material becomes more and more appropriate, or at least acceptable.

Another thought had occurred to me though and it was finally my light bulb moment. This curve happens and different ages for all children. It seems that my daughter is fairly late to the game, ans most kids younger than her seemed to have gotten scared more easily, or agitated more easily by some of these movies. As she got older, she finally started to catch on that she should be scared. As of right now, my son being 2, he’s still oblivious to it all.

So we are finally on the censorship bandwagon, and actually screening (pun only slightly intended) what will be consumed by our daughter. It’s an odd place to be, considering that very little of what I watched as a kid was screened. However it was presented to me that by not doing this we may be robbing her of her innocence. I find myself disagreeing. After discussing it at length with my wife we realized that we’re not trying to rob, or prevent ourselves from robbing, innocence. We are merely responding to it’s existence. With our daughter too innocent to fully understand why two women might be having sex in a movie (considering her model for love is her mom & dad), exposing her to this would only confuse her in a way that I can’t explain away. She’s too innocent to understand the explanation. The same goes for scenes of domestic abuse, drug usage, etc. I can’t explain these things to her, because she can only understand what she knows, and all she knows is us. Her innocence is ignorance, and I don’t wish to preserve, or destroy that. I can merely respond to it. As more and more light bulbs come on in the attic, that ignorance will fade, and as it does I will be able to explain more and more about the world.

It’s similar to, in my mind, the way that Catholic parents force their children into decisions they are far too young to understand. Forcing them to make life decisions about salvation, good & evil, the existence, and specific form of god. Their minds can’t begin to comprehend what’s being presented to them, yet parents force it upon, trying to eliminate their ignorance, and therefore their innocence. If they would merely react to that innocence/ignorance then their children would naturally come to these crossroads, and could be helped to navigate them.

Again, it’s all trial and error, but for now we don’t regret anything that we’ve done in regards to our daughter. Our family grows together as a unit, and the overwhelming power of us resides in the fact that our love is unwavering, and therefore an unlimited protection. In the end I think that will guide the path of our daughter more than any movie, or song could.

The Psycopath

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

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.

Am I the only one who is getting scared? Am I the only one who was given a limit on the number of hours of television I could watch per week growing up? Am I the only one who isn’t allowing my kids to be glued to media 24/7? It’s not just movies of course. We can access Youtube, TV shows, news, facebook, media, media, media. We’re never unplugged. I spent 9 hours per day at work in front of a computer. I then come home and will usually spend another hour on a computer blogging, and recording music. Almost half of every day that I’ve lived in the last decade has been spent staring at a screen. Another quarter is spent unconscious. That means that I can expect to have REALLY lived less than one fourth of my entire life by the time I’m dead, if I’m lucky. that really scares me.

Of course I, like most people who complain, am doing nothing to change the majority of this. The truth is that I can’t think of another job that I could do that wouldn’t involve me staring at a screen all day. I have a limited set of skills, and those skills place me in front of the flickering box in one setting or another. I am able to limit the time spent there while at home. I’ve tried my best to do this in the last year or so. I try to only use a computer at home to create. That may be blogging here, or one of my other two blogs that I keep, or making music as I mentioned before. Of course I stray from the path, and do get on Facebook about once a week, and I found time to watch the “Double Rainbow” video about a year after it was cool.

What really worries me though is how much time we are willingly planting our kids in front of a screen. In my daughter’s lifetime we have never had television service in our house. We have a TV, we have a DVD player, and have finally just jumped on the Blu-Ray wagon, but she has never had cable or satellite in her house. I can still remember the first time that she saw an actual television commercial. We were in the hospital during my wife’s second pregnancy. She was having some minor issues and so we had to spend a few hours in an exam room. They had a TV in there, and in order to help distract our 3 year old daughter at the time I suggested that we turn it on. She was getting restless, and was a little freaked by her surroundings so it made sense. I think an episode of Family Guy or The Simpsons was on so we let her watch that. She’s seen both shows before as I’m a fan and have the box sets on DVD, but when the first commercial came on she thought we had changed the channel.

“I don’t like this show. Turn it back Daddy,” were my instructions. Have you ever tried to explain commercials? It’s not easy. But my kids live a somewhat unique life. We have no DVD players in our car, they don’t have a TV in their room, they don’t get to watch movies on a smart phone, and we limit the amount of time they can watch movies on our living room TV. Do you know what they do? Play with my old toys. Legos, ninja turtles (before they got weird and futuristic), GI Joes (the old crappy ones with the rubber band holding their torso together), Knex, etc. They’ve got some new toys like barbies, and transformers, but they spend their time imagining. Daydreaming. Fantasizing. All of the things that a TV would do for them, preventing their minds from ever having to grow.

I’ve noticed that after 28 years of living, our species basically thrives on distraction. The majority of our lives are spent in pursuit of distraction from our lives. Odd loop, I know. We work jobs, to make money, to buy what? TV’s to distract us. Cars to take us to places to distract us. Music to distract us. Toys, games, instruments, random hobbies. They’re all a way to block our minds from the one nagging question that no one can, or really wants to, answer. Why are we here?

Why does the mind learn to pretend? When we’re born we are like animals. We accept what is around us as what is around us. We have simple needs and thoughts. I’m cold, how do I get warm? I’m hungry, how do I get fed? I’m in pain, how do I make that stop? As we become self-aware the question is no longer how, but why? Why is the question that all of us have been running from since we were kids. The mind is an adaptive and survivalist beast. In order to protect itself from going mad, it develops little distractions and getaways for us in the form of pretend. As adults we call it dreams, goals, fantasies, etc. My daughter imagining herself as a princess waiting for her prince is no different than me imagining my wife and I renting a small villa in Italy for 2 weeks and spending our time enjoying another culture, and the sights around us. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s another detour to prevent me from having to ask why. It’s easier for me to work my job, to save my money, to pay for my trip, to get to Italy. Then what?

I’ll work my job, save my money, pay for my trip, and get to Ireland. Then to Paris. Then to Scotland. Then to a tropical island. Then somewhere else. Eventually, I will die. Being a teenager in the 90′s, the song “Ironic” by Alanis always stuck with me. The line about the old man who waited his whole life to take a flight and then the plane crashed and killed him when he took it. That always got to me. What if I spend all of this time saving for a trip, and die before I reach my destination? What if my wife dies? What if our house burns down and we need that money? What if the economy dies out on us again and my money is worthless? What if I spend my whole life waiting to live? The what? Then I’m left with nothing but the unanswered question of why.

In one of my more frightening moments, I decided to stop distracting myself and finally consider this question of why. Really stop to think about it. I had mentioned in another post that if you really wanted to see God, you had to witness childbirth. To see life begin is indescribable. The problem with the question of why is that it inevitably assumes the existence of a creator. To ask why we were created is to assume that there was motivation, or conscious thought behind our creation. So when asking myself why, I had to come to the realization that despite my best efforts, I believe in God. Maybe not the God that was shoved down my throat for most of my life, but rather a force of life. Some type of being that is beyond what we are. I used the analogy of an ant farm with my wife the other night. The ants inside of the ant farm have no idea there is anything beyond them. They move the sand, they live the life, they die. They accept it because it’s all they are capable of. It would stand to reason then that if there is some higher form of life, we would be comparable to the ant farm. He watches us live our lives in simplicity, knowing that there is another world around ours that we can’t see. We can’t grasp it because it is beyond us.

From this rambling train of thought came a theory. To understand, and to appreciate, are different things, but I believe understanding can be born of appreciation. Appreciation is the spark that can light the fire that will lead to understanding, and I didn’t really appreciate life until I had witnessed its beginning. I also believe that I won’t FULLY appreciate life until I witness its end, or rather my own end. I then moved to the idea that maybe once I have learned to appreciate this life, I can begin to understand its purpose in the context of my next life. You can call that heaven, or hell, or reincarnation, or any number of things. I believe that there is something after this, and I believe what happens here will somehow carry on to what comes next.

So did I answer the question of why I am here? Yes, and in two different ways. I believe that I am here to gain a real appreciation for life, and more importantly, my life. This leads to the more tangible reason of why I am here. To truly engage in my life, and the lives of my family, to lead to an even greater appreciation of them. Stop distracting my kids from the world around them, stop distracting myself from my children, stop distracting my wife and I from our marriage. Dive head first into all of it and let it cover me. I feel like we’ve always done a good job of this in our little family. My wife and I have always preferred long conversations, and debates, over a good movie. My daughter and son have always preferred listening to me play music, or having our “dance parties”, or just pretending in their room. Our family has always been very engaged but I think we can take that even further and become truly aware of who we are as individuals and as a whole.

I worry that the more distractions we provide for our kids the less likely this outcome will be for other families. I think we are raising a generation of distracted, unimaginative, and ungrateful children and I don’t think anyone will see the consequences of this until our own generation is on their way to the grave. It will be frightening to see our own mistakes echo through the next few decades, but I’m simply hoping that my thoughts on the question of “Why” can continue, and I can keep shaking my fear of them.

Until Next Time
The Pyschopath

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

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

“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