Righteous/Melancholy

May 11--

"She says the joke is on me, I say the joke is on her.
I said: Well, I have no opinion about that.
We'll just have to wait and confer."
--Paul Simon

When I was seventeen (it was a very good year), I fashioned myself a bit of a crack investigative reporter, a four-time San Diego County High School Journalism Write-off Champion, Runner-up, or Award Recipient, depending on the category. I took that responsibility seriously, unlike pretty much every other responsibility I rubbed up against at that age, and I embraced it. Through my leadership capacity on the school paper, I volunteered  to write a "candidate round-up" article about the upcoming school board election. I arranged phone interviews with all the candidates, among them a kind of proto-Sarah-Palin Fundamentalist Christian Soccer Mom who had made "family values" a cornerstone of her campaign. I prepared a list of tough but fair questions and sprung them upon her one day from the journalism room phone. Somehow, I believe at her prompting, the discussion of abortion came up. I told her my opinion, she told me hers,we finished the interview. A few days later I received a letter from the candidate, addressed to me C/O the school paper, thanking me for being a student journalist who cared about the future of my school and then reminding me that murder was a sin in the Eyes of God, and that Abortion Was Murder, and just in case I didn't fully understand that she had included a series of photos of dead fetuses to illustrate to me the consequences of LEGAL MURDER. 

That was over twenty years ago, and it still freaks me out. Soon enough I got the fuck out of Vista, and then over time Came the Fuck Back, and now I am who I am, a guy with a family and a life who has chosen to live here, to raise my family in the place I was raised. And last last night, for the first time since I was an intrepid high school Woodward and/or Bernstein looking for The Story, I found myself deep in the thick of local educational politics. And it was UGLY. 


May 16

I wrote that five days ago. I nodded off before I could finish it, then never came back to it. So it exists now as a record of my general disposition the night after the school board voted to cut all arts funding to my son's performing arts school. There was going to be more, it was going to be epic, with lots of comparisons to Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin and what have you, but I fell asleep. And my blood still boils about it but it is not what I am thinking about tonight.

Tonight I am thinking about another night, exactly two years ago, when I stood a lonely vigil on the wall. And then the night finally surrendered and soonafter so did my father, and then everything changed. If you're looking for the "Before" chronicles, you're in the wrong spot. Click the fuck back in my "Older Posts" section. Because you're smack dab in the The After Diaries.

Tonight i feel mournful. I feel old. I feel sore. I feel blessed and battered. I feel loved. I feel tired.

I feel sad.

(Wo)Man at Work, or: Thank God I'm a Country Bear!!

My wife is home. The children are alive. Cue applause. No autographs, please, I just need some "me" time. I don't want to stain your program with the tears of a clown.

And she is already, again, still--back to work. Almost 11:00 on a school night and she is sawing away, in the garage, (on one of those kinds of saws that have to be plugged in and have different kinds of blades and are really dangerous and stuff), while I struggle through a very challenging bout of Games With Friends with this guy who went to fucking Yale Law School, for fuck's sake! And beneath her safety goggles there is a gleam in her eye. If she could hear herself think over the hum of the electric saw, she would whistle whilst she worked. "I almost feel like Gepetto," she said to me tonight, which immediately qualifies as One of the Best Things She's Ever Said and she's said a lot of great shit.

And then eventually I thought, as I always do, "How exactly in what specific way does that pertain to me?" And then I thought: Who do I almost feel like? Just think something and then say it right away. And I said: "I almost feel like Bartleby!! I almost feel like Gregor Samsa!!"

And then I thought: Oh, shut the fuck up. Don't be such a douchebag. I like to get up in the morning. I like to go to work. I like to build and create and convince and cajole and coast-when-I-need-to and, when all is said and done, cross the finish line or break my back or die trying. I feel like fucking Gepetto too godamnit.We're a couple of Gepettos here, and Fuck You if you can't handle a little gay marriage all up in your shit. Wrong century, bro.

I am built for the thing which I am supposed to fit into. I am built for the thing I find and fit into. I am made to be the man I am, or the man I will be; either way I Am Becoming. And that takes work. And us Huntingtons were born with orange vests and heavy beards and arms of steel.

Life Without You, Day 7

And we call this next piece: "I Miss Mommy: A Study of the Maternal Archetype in Wood, Paper and Ink." But we'll come back to that. First, I will give you something my wife is an artist at creating, like many other things, and something I am weirdly unable to figure out to how use and instead simply mangle and make fun of and co-opt in a kind of robot-trying-to-play-human way, like many other things: a list.

Since You've Been Gone I Can Do:

1. Whatever I want.
2. Virtually nothing right, it seems, about half the time.
3. Some things kind of adequately, some of the time.
4. Some things heartbreakingly, heroically, Rocky-Balboa-Vs.-Clubber-Lang kind of INCREDIBLY WELL FOR AN UNDERDOG, pretty much all the time in my own head including the time I remembered where the hand soap refill was, a heroic act! but in reality absolutely none of the time.
5. Any kind of dance you'd like, any kind of tune you want to hear, any kind of treat you'd like to eat, anything you want me to do if you will JUST. FUCKING. LISTEN. TO. ME. To my children, I mean. I am the dancing monkey, and I've got mantits.

Since You've Been Gone I Can See:

1. Whomever I Choose
2. Messes. Everywhere. Every minute there's another godamned mess! And nobody else sees it! Nobody else sees it but me! Come on!!!!!!
3. Why so many parents fuck up so many kids because they just can't keep on a lid on their own crazy.
4. The following scene (dig, if you will, the picture, to do a paisley mash-up): 5 year old Finnegan Joseph Huntington, sitting snuggled up against his brother, cloaked in a mosaic knit blanket his Grandma Bibi made for him (special ingredient: LOVE), sniffling and wiping away tears as I stumble out of the shower first thing in the morning. "What's wrong, Finny?" "Well, two things are wrong. I can't find my gorilla, and I had him when I woke up and I had him when I walked in here!!! And, usually, when I wake up and I'm alone in bed in the morning and Mommy is awake I walk into the kitchen and she hugs me!!!" Sweet Jesus, the hug I gave that kid then. The hug of all hugs, the primal, rocking, goes-from-standing-to-sitting-and-snuggling whole body kind of hug. The kind of hug that defines what the word "hug" means in your mind. And he perked up. And I did too.

Since You've Been Gone I Can Eat My Dinner:
1. (On the couch, in the kitchen, outside, in the dining room, in my car, at Chuck. E. Cheese, but definitely not in a...) Fancy Restaraunt.
2. With the constant perfume of cat piss in the air about my head. After finally dealing with the litterbox today and then immediately changing my clothes, washing my face, washing my hands, washing my hands, washing all the towels and rugs and clothes, washing my hands; I have come to the following conclusion: the catpiss lives forever inside my nostrils. It's just a thing that happened, and it can't un-happen, ever.

And that picture, up at the top there, that. Finny was working away with blocks in the living room while I worked on the laptop, then scurrying to get paper and a pen, then getting his child scissors, then returning to the blocks. Finally he called me over to show me what he had made: "A picture of mommy. I couldn't use wood, you know, for the face, so I had to draw it on paper."

My Bathroom...Smells...Kind of...Funky...

Blunt force. That's kind of how it goes, whether you want to believe it or not. Maybe it's a timeline like this: Innocence....Fear...Anxiety...Anger...Defeat...Sorrow...BLUNT FORCE!!! Still, the last one leaves the biggest impression, you gotta admit.

I have been taught some lessons in honesty, in authenticity, in love and in loyalty this week. I have been taught those lessons by a five year old child. MY five year old child, to be exact. The fruit of my loins, as it were (...if there were some expression like that except way less creepy and oily and "ok, thanks, nice meeting you, gotta go..."than that). And the kid has got a point.

He can't do anything except tell me the truth. He loves me too much to lie to me. He has been dealt with fairly, and he will deal with others fairly in return. He will take part in their joy, he will acknowledge their sorrow, and when their eyes meet his he will tell them the truth. He is the boy this slouchy half-man wishes he could be. He tells the truth.

At various times during the past three matriarch-less days, the Truth has been: "I love you daddy. But I REALLY love Mommy." "I ate all my chicken! I'm a good eater. But I don't want to get fat! Just a good eater, not fat!" "You should be Jabba the Hut or maybe Hagrid for Halloween" and the following exchange: ME: "I miss Mommy too, and I'm doing the best I can. We're having lots of fun! Aren't you having fun hanging out with Daddy?" HIM: "Um...sort of."

And he's right, every time. And he loves me, like a rock. Like I love him. And it doesn't occur to him to not tell the truth. It just doesn't occur to him. And godamnit I fucking hope it never does. Tell the truth, Finnegan!! Always and with pride, tell the truth! You are loved! Tell the truth!

So for my part, The Truth, tonight: I am lonely. I am anxious. I miss my wife. I worry, you know, about what's going to happen...to everyone, everywhere. I am afraid that if I lived alone I would very quickly qualify for a Very Special Episode of Hoarders. I feel like I've spent a fair amount of my life pretending I was toughening up, only to discover that I had really just been getting more fragile. That my shoulders cannot bear the weight of the villages I have constructed atop them. That I don't know anything and everyone else knows even less. That maybe there is something I'm missing about the band Rush, or L. Ron Hubbard, or that show about that vampire who was sarcastic but still totally had lots of wounded feelings. That there is no comfort but false comfort, and my greatest aspiration is just to weave fantasies out of pixie dust.

And that my bathroom...smells...kind of...funky. After only three fucking days. Come on!!!

Why You So Fat?

I hear voices, in my head...like everyone does, right? And one of those voices is the "why you so fat?" lady. I've talked to my wife and a few other friends about her before, but basically the "why you so fat?" lady is a short, middle-aged woman wearing polyester and bi-focals who, upon first meeting me, sizes me up right away, looks me up and down quickly, and says the first thing that comes to her mind. Which is, of course: Why you so fat?

I've actually kind of really had that happen before, but the story would sound so self-pitying and racist if I told it that it wouldn't get the point across, which is probably why I created this fictional version in my head. She greets me primarily in moments of self-sabotage. Moments when, say--and this is purely hypothetical, mind you--I might be sitting at Chuck E. Cheese, 62 pounds down since last July, having walked the wall in Carlsbad this morning even with the kid scootering at my heels, having kept under WW points all day, eating a salad from the World's Saddest Salad Bar(TM)...and I reach over and inhale half a piece of picked-apart pepperoni pizza off my son's plate in less than a second flat. She appears, then, across the booth and says, simply, plainitively...Why you so fat?

There are a lot of reasons why I'm so fat. Since you asked. I have a PhD in Advanced Studies of Phenomenogical Theory on Why Tom Is So Fat. A partial list:

1. Because I'm not you.
2. Because I'm me.
3. Because I'm fat.
4. Because I don't really give a shit about all the things that most people give a shit about, all right? I can't make myself care about it, I'm sorry. I can't make myself like "Glee." I can't make myself drink Vodka. I can't make myself want what I do not want, no matter how much I'm supposed to want it. I don't care about it the way you care about it. I want to look the way I feel. I am large. I contain multitudes.
5. Cheetos
6. Genetics.
7. Because you're all so fucking skinny. Why are you all so fucking skinny? Why are you all so plastic and skinny? The runner-up to the salad bar at Chuck E. Cheese as the The Saddest Place on Earth (TM) is the pool at the La Costa Hotel Resort and Spa. You can bounce a quarter off of everyone's "skin." Bronzed plastic Oakley tight. Why are you all so skinny?????? Is this an alternate universe where bacon was never invented? Get your dirty paws off me, you damn dirty ape!!!!
8. Because I Hate Myself (TM)
9. Butter. Pecan. Ice Cream.
10. I am in a constant struggle not to lose my shit. Every waking moment is a battle, another signpost in the war. I am a valiant warrior, a leader even, and I spare no mercy for the enemy. But late at night in the foxhole I crave some sustenance. I seek relief. There are times, as the man said, when I am so lonesome that I take some comfort there. By "there" I mean "double-double."
11. I may be way fatter than you but I just know you've eaten one of those Doritos (TM) tacos from Taco Bell (TM). And I would never do that.
12. Nobody pays attention to normal people unless they used to be abnormal. I am the "Before." Watch the fuck out for the "After." Cuz he will fuck you up.

Fine, Thank You

I’m not sure how to honestly characterize my emotional and spiritual state lately. I am not, as I have in the past, experiencing something I can call “depression” or “anxiety.” I am in a pretty good mood most of the time, actually. I enjoy my working day, on average, probably more than I ever have. I take enormous pleasure from spending time with my incredible family and friends. I even manage to read a book and see a movie every once in a while. I’m productive and useful most of the time.

But just below the surface I’m a complete and total mess, in a way I can’t even really understand or explain.

It’s safe to say that I’m struggling with the idea of time and the relationship between reality and memory. I feel more and more these days a kind of disconnect between the things I experience and the way I experience them. I would call it numbness, but I don’t think that’s what it is, not exactly. I am capable of exuberance and irrationality, as quick to anger and as quick to joy as I’ve always been. But I can’t quite reconcile everything in a way that makes spiritual sense. I struggle to tie it all together, and I can’t convince myself that it’s ok if it doesn’t all tie together, or have faith that it does all tie together and I just can’t see it yet, or that everything ebbs and flows and all energy connects and all that shit. I can think it, I’ve always been able to think it, and on some rare occasions I can feel it. But not fucking lately.

I am in mourning, of course, that’s what it is. It’s been nearly five months since my father died and the shock waves are still rippling, are maybe just beginning to ripple, are maybe just gathering speed and force and forming a tsunami that will knock me down, hard. Except I think also that might have already happened, and what I’m doing now is stumbling around muttering nonsense, blinking at the sun, peeing my pants.

What I should be doing is lying on a lounge chair reading the classics and staring at the trees. Looking to Proust and Thomas Mann and Tolstoy and the way the sun peeks through the canopy of leaves in my front yard in order to find peace and perspective. I am not doing that, and the obvious reason is that I don’t have the time, which is of course true on a certain level. I’m extremely fucking busy, and I love my family and I want to be useful and available. But I am sitting here drinking coffee and typing on a Saturday afternoon instead of reading Virgil or contemplating nature. I can barely summon the energy to even do this, though, as evidenced by the increasing infrequency of these blog posts. I’m tired, all the time. And I’m tired of talking about how tired I am. And I am shoveling food and alcohol into my body as if I were the defending champion in a perpetual consumption contest, with a hungry young challenger nipping at my heels. Feeding the fucking beast, with wild abandon. That is how I’m mourning, really, through desperate gluttony. I go to work and remain productive, I am emotionally available to my friends and my family, I don’t break down crying when I hear certain songs or see certain scenes from certain movies. But I absolutely *numb* myself with food and drink at every available opportunity. And the opportunities are always available. This is America, ain’t it?

It is a kind of numbness I’m experiencing, I guess, there’s really no other word for it. Is turning into a glassy-eyed but efficient emotional cripple who is eating himself into oblivion better than pulling the covers over my head and not getting out of bed for six months? Better than rending my garments and howling at the moon? Better than shooting heroin and crashing my car into a Caltrans sign at 4:00 in the morning? Who the fuck knows?

Because the truth is, well…the truth is inescapably earth-shattering. I am, on a certain level, immune to even my own consolations, in ways I don’t even understand. I don’t think I can even let myself truly process my own reaction to my father’s death, not yet, because I don’t have the emotional and spiritual strength to confront the implications of that reaction. So in the meantime I’m broken, and the trick is learning to live that way until I can gather the strength to face it. I need crutches, and I know there are much better ones available to me than the ones I’m leaning on now. As Bob Dylan said—“You can go to the church of your choice, or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital. You’ll find God at the church of your choice, you’ll find Woody Guthrie at Brooklyn State Hospital. You’ll find them both at the Grand Canyon, sundown.”

Maybe I need to get myself to the Grand Fucking Canyon. Breathe in some healthy air, see the vastness of the universe in front of me. Or maybe I should start with just taking a walk, or putting my feet in the ocean, or writing a poem. Or maybe this is the start, filling up this blank page. I guess time will tell. But I’m not giving up. I’m not giving in. I know I have at least a fraction of the strength my father had somewhere deep down inside me, at least enough to face each day as it comes. He taught me that much.

Opening Day

When I was in elementary school, maybe 8 0r 9 years old, my dad kept me home from school one day and didn't tell me why. We woke up, went out to breakfast, then drove down to San Diego in his Chevy pick-up. We ended up in Mission Valley around noon, in front of one of those old-fashioned one-screen movie theatres that long ago were torn down to make way for Nordstrom's Rack or The Calvary Chapel, to see the very first showing of Rocky III, on opening day. Let me repeat that, in caps: MY DAD KEPT ME HOME FROM SCHOOL TO TAKE ME TO AN OPENING DAY MATINEE OF ROCKY III. That was my dad.

When I was in sixth grade and my best friend Ben Knickerson kicked me in the balls and the whole world, suddenly and without warning, looked upside-down, my dad picked me up from school and took me to see the Padres play the Astros. I fell asleep with my head on his shoulder somewhere in Poway on the 15 North, the salt of peanuts on my lips and the cadence of Jerry Coleman's voice on the radio lulling me to sleep like Frere Jacques. That was my dad.

I saw the Lawrence Welk production of "Camelot" when I was 11, after listening to the 8-track original cast recording for over a week in my dad's truck. I could handle a weedeater like nobody's business by fifth grade. I can still name the entire roster--not just the *starting roster*--of the 1984 San Diego Padres, without pausing for a breath. I know that Jameson's is better than Bushmill's, that5 Card Stud is a man's game, that a dog will always love you no matter what, that Nazi movies, Spy movies and Mafia movies are always better than Westerns, Romantic Comedies, or Serious Epics, that breakfast is the best meal of the day, and that the best way out is always through. That was my dad.

As an adult, when my father asked me a question, all he ever really wanted to know was: Is my son happy? I wish I had always said Yes. Because I realize now that was always actually the answer.

I miss my dad so fucking much.
I miss my dad.