BERFDAYS

i was gonna make a pearl harbor sandwich.
but, then i thought about it,
and maybe i'm just not all the way feeling that idea.
and maybe i'm not feeling a lot of things.
like my feelings.
today my dearly departed dad-type duder would've been 70?
that's something.
pearl harbor was a while ago, but also today.
i'm taking the time to think about the things i liked about my dad.
the recollection is important.
he's more of an anthology of stories than a traditional father figure.
that's the legacy he left behind for me.
a collected many volume set of intense instances.
mostly explosive.
occasionally inventive.
rarely inspirational.
and sometimes genuine in a way that surprised me.
that's what he left when he left.
...that and a bunch of tools.
honestly, that breaks my heart the most-
nobody wanted what he'd worked so hard to amass over the decades.
he had a full mechanic's shop of equipment,
and none of the surviving family could possibly care any less about it.
he was intentionally hoarding it in hopes of passing on the
usefulness of those tools.
tools are always useful....unless you don't fix things.
especially cars.
and i especially don't fix cars.
i'm sure there will come a time when i'm living on a woodsly woodlot,
doing manly farmish things,
and i'll think back to all that stuff my dad kept for us,
that i'll bet my ma gave away to whomever wanted some.
i mean, i definitely don't at the moment, so if it'll be of use,
i think that's the right way to honor the old man's accumulated wealth.
welders and sanders and grinders and buckets of bits and pieces,
as well as a menagerie of automotive ingredients from obsolete makes and models.
i've almost never used a tool on a car that wasn't supervised over by my dad,
and that was back when i was little and he was instilling his love of that stuff to me,
and it was having the precisely opposite effect.
it's funny how what we think is important is really so personal.
i mean, sure,
plenty of folks wanna eat hot dogs at sports things, so they can share that.
or go to concerts and sing along to their favorite song.
there are a lot of shared interests that can create lasting feelings of belonging.
and then there's the sad tale of the carocci curse.
throughout history, there've been fathers and sons in my bloodline,
all named albert,
all who just didn't connect with the one before and the one after.
it's a tradition, really.
and it comes from radical diversity within the species.
outlier extremists bursting to the expansive edge
of whatever is the opposite of the one before.
if i'd ever had a son,
he'd probably become a craft-beer and raw-beef enthusisast,
working 12 hour days in a cubicle, with a traffic-packed commute on either side.
why do i say that?
that's just how it works.
it's as if each son asked their father:
what's NOT what you like?
ok, then that's what i'm going to like the most.
and the thing is, that's us all being just like each other.
'i don't like what you like, but i want you to like what i like'
i plead guilty.
and although i try to be better.... and i probably am.
it can't be by a very large margin.
-
compound interest, multiplied by similarity and disinterest?
that's what my family tree branches are all about.
for real-
my great grandpa, albert, looked like an italian cobbler,
riding roughshod ramshackle motorcycles up mud hills
and blowing sh!t up with dynamite.
my dad's dad, albert, was a semi-civil servant sometimes,
in a full military american flag uniform, without any irony.
my dad, albert, was uncivil at the best of times, in crush velvet bell bottoms,
and a san francisco leatherboy captains hat,
like the heavy metal homos in judas priest and the entire cast of good times
had a jam session fashion show, and he was the model.
and that was before the yosemite selleck mustache and seven-strand ponytail.
and me?
well, between my too-tight pants and my too-small hats,
and these big hula hoop holes in my head, and all these tat-F*ing-toos,
i'm certainly no better.
and if we're being truthful,
i look like the amalgamated essence of all those sunsab!tches distilled and filtered
through a mercifully my-mom's-side body type...
they were all short and fat and bald, and i'm not short or fat, yet.
i'm the last male descendant in a direct line of bald, loud, antisocial socialite antiheroes.
factual fictional characters repeating the same patterns.
we have all been chasing the same thing.
the balance of love and legacy.
what we leave behind and who we leave behind, and if those can overlap at all.

-
me and the dude, my dad-
we spoke to each other like two total imbeciles,
really dumbing it down to the lowest of lowest common denominators,
outdoing the overall urban-accented ignorance of increasingly outrageous
and irritating interactions.
a brutal barbarian back-and-forth that's make a sailor blush.
and then we'd laugh.
because the truth of it was that we really did want to share something,
but neither of us knew how to do it like a person and not a cartoon.
these days,
without his big dumb mouth F*ing it up, i can see it a whole lot more clearly.
and i'm thinking about that on his birthday.
we shared our time as best we could and he never stopped trying to connect
it just wasn't ever going to be something different.
that's how curses work.
as a character, he's legendary.
an inexhaustible well of true stories about the wild warrior poetry
of lawlessness in the modern age.
as an example, he's a cautionary tale and instructional fable on almost every level.
i think he liked me as much as he could,
even if he was much happier being around my sisters
who resembled his vision more than i ever will.
my mornings are a whole lot quieter without his phone calls.
i wish we'd been smarter about the time we had.
i wish i had a use for one of those F*ing tools.
i wish and i wish and i wish, but the truth is that
it's easier to miss him than it ever was to be his son.
and i do miss him on days like today.
i think i've pearl harbored my heart with some sort of kamikaze nostalgia;
never quiet, never soft.....