My Dad passed away last week. It’s a weird one. We weren’t close, but he wasn’t a villain in my life. He and my Mom split when I was a baby and he hightailed it for home (Detroit). In the arc of good dads/bad dads I had it better than a lot of people and knowing what I know now, I think if he’d been forced to stick around things would’ve been a lot worse. I ended up with a fantastic mom and a pretty good fatherhood template to ignore in raising my own kids.
When I was younger, I resented him. Then I did some digging/therapy/questioning in my 30s in which my Mom revealed to me that Dad had more than a few mental health issues. Since then I’ve been at peace with it all. He didn’t have the tools to be a father, that’s not his fault. Sidenote: Also, very impressed with my mom for being extremely diplomatic about that when I was young and impressionable. She could’ve used that information when I was growing up and it probably took a lot of restraint not to.
Anyway… thinking about my Dad and his passing has been surprising. I was completely caught off guard by how emotional i was when I got the call to get on a plane as soon as possible. Then I realized it wasn’t my dad I was mourning, although I am sad that he’s gone. I think, despite everything I knew about him, I was still mourning “what could have been.” The door of “good dad” whatever that means was closing permanently. The sliding doors scenario where he called me one day and we spent a few years having a cool as hell father/ son relationship where we did a lot of cool father/son shit (golf? smoking meats?) and he maybe, just maybe, just mmmmmmmaybe said “hey, sorry about that” was never happening. I didn’t think I needed to hear that and in the long run I didn’t, but in the moment, I really did.
Ultimately, while sitting in the hospital next to my unconscious father, my step-mom gave me that sorry on his behalf. She told me more about his mental health journey, though not much and I reflected a lot on how lucky I was that she came into his life and MY life as a kid. The awkward visits to Detroit were made better by having a third person there who wasn’t guilt riddled or a little kid who didn’t understand.
When asked about my dad I’ve always told people he’s a decent guy who happens to be pretty odd. He was very funny and I think I got a bit of that from him. Once while waiting to meet him for dinner, a girlfriend who had never met my father, pointed across a busy courtyard and said “that’s him.” So I look like him, too. He gave me a lot. My life has been good, exceptional even, and all of those things change if my father was a different father. I don’t really want for him to have given me “more” because I got so much and there would’ve been different kinds of pain if he had.
I used to joke that for every 2 days I visited my dad we’d watch 3 movies. We both had a lot of trouble getting a conversation going and movies were at least something that could inspire conversation: “I liked it.” “I didn’t.” We once watched a Canadian movie about a kid coming home to see his estranged dying father (I cannot seem to remember the title) and that was a pretty short conversation (“the Canadian independent film scene is turning out some interesting stuff!”). Anyway, sitting in the hospital with him knocked out I sent a text to my wife: “One last awkward silence with my father.” I always felt so weird when I visited, though I tried my best not to. I think he was trying his best, too.
I don’t know that I have a point, I just felt the urge to write SOMETHING about him. He was a decent guy with demons who gave me a life that I am so grateful for having. I hope he was happy, too. I was never really sure.
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I watched twenty minutes of a soccer game yesterday. I watched 40 minutes of a Japanese movie from 194-something. Also yesterday. Yesterday, I think I read five or six pages of a book. Sometimes the consumption of art (entertainment?) is broken down into smaller chunks. That still counts! Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I could only get a few minutes “FOR ME.” But in reality, I consumed things I was interested in even if I didn’t get to consume them in their entirety. Do I have a point? Not today!
(Tottenham vs. Brighton; London Rules by Mick Herron; The Only Son dir. Yasujiro Ozu)
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I started this site with the idea that I’d use it to talk about whatever was on my mind, but the specific idea was to talk a little about my relationship to sports… “what if we win this game” has a meaning to me, that I intend to write about at some point… Unfortunately, I haven’t been watching sports at all. It’s a big sports watching time of the year for me: baseball playoffs, hockey season starting and the less interesting to me but still sort of interesting and extremely omnipresent FOOTBALL SEASON. However, the nature of my parenting journey has rendered me unable to watch anything. I love to wake up Saturday morning and throw on whatever Premier League game is on (or La Liga, Serie A, etc), but now if the TV is on and one of my descendants is nearby there are demands for ninjas (“injas”) or Mickey Mouse. Playoff baseball rules, but those games start at 5 and dinner is at 5 and dinner is just the beginning of a four hour bedtime process that tends to end right as the games end.
So yeah, I started a thing to write about sports right as I have entered a phase of my life where I don’t really get to watch about sports.
I guess I’ll write about my kids?
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I’m writing a letter of recommendation for a friend to a program I don’t know anything about. That friend generously offered to write the letter for me and have me do any edits I saw fit. That seems fair. He writes a glowing review of himself, I do no work. Everyone gets what they want.
One hitch… the letter my friend wrote about himself on my behalf is terrible. I think maybe he used AI.
Earlier I said i didn’t know anything about the program he’s applying for and that’s not true. I do know one thing. It’s a writing program.
Writing a recommendation letter is a weird thing, having one written for you about someone else is maybe weirder. You find yourselves quibbling with things… “I wouldn’t say it like that.” You ask yourself, is it that I wouldn’t say that in that way, or that you wouldn’t say that type of thing… or scarier, you wouldn’t say that thing about the person you’re recommending? You end up in this territory where you’re asking yourself if you’d recommend this person for anything at all. You even start to wonder if you’d recommend ANYONE for ANYTHING
Would I recommend anyone for anything?
I think the answer is no.
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Spent a lot of yesterday afternoon watching the Chargers game. Football is weird for me. I spent a couple years away from caring at all after caring way too much in my twenties. It’s drawn me back in and I like it now, but in the way that I like jazz… it sort of fades into the background of an afternoon. It’s more of a mood than anything else.
Notable from the game (according to headlines) is that The Vikings couldn’t get a play in at the end and ran out of time. Shows what I know because I was wondering why the Chargers weren’t using timeouts to stop the clock. Then I stopped thinking about it immediately after. Will probably never think about it again.
What If We Win This Game 