would you have?”
He made up fantastic stories all the time, and I always wanted to believe him, and there was part of me that felt like he wanted me to as well, but it was always the same outcome. There would be a few seconds we’d share in the moment, and then he would either claim it was a joke or he would simply change the subject to something more practical. It was left to me to assume the prank had lived and died, and it was time to return to reality.
I’m about two years out of high school. The nice part is Dad and I still lived together. The sad part is we hardly ever talk anymore. I went through an angry phase that started about midway through my teen years. He says I’m still in it. When he says that it does make me mad, and then I argue that I’m not, which then starts an epic “chicken or the egg” discussion about when and why my anger arrived. Frustration continues to abound.
Angry or not, I did stop listening to the stories. They only made me long for what could never be. When you hear about greater things, beyond the proverbial reality of death and taxes, it makes you hope, and when you’re a wide-eyed hormone-raging teenager who longs to stand on top of the world as throngs of girls squeal to touch your buffness, the cold reality of small Christmases, crappy second hand clothes, and decade old “new” electronics, brings you down into the pains of “what is” pretty quickly. And “what is” was that we were nobody, and my janitor father and I were always going to be that way. Since then it’s been something I’ve wrestled to accept every single day of my life, and I hate feeling that way, but it’s there.
Do I believe his stories? Not a chance. Do they make me want to get outside this little Alabama town and see for myself? You bet it does. Not to go looking for gryphon feathers or living computers, but to see what the world looks like through eyes that aren’t always constantly making up some line of fantastical bullbutter to entertain children. As the man said, “I want the truth.”
But sometimes I hear Life sniggering behind me aptly replying, “You can’t handle it.”
STUPID ME
The night was mine. I was off from work, and I was in the mood to do something. I had finished the modest cleaning and put everything away. Dad and I had two polar opposite schedules, so when I worked he slept and the other way around. While Dad and I didn’t hang like we used to, we still loved and cared for each other, but his fantastic version of every single event made anything but the most surface of conversations possible. I liked to do the cleaning since that’s what he did all day at his job, and he respected the fact that I was around food all night, so he handled most of the cooking. For breakfast I shoveled down the last of some lasagna that had reached a pre-fuzz state, and then started in on a monster BBQ meatloaf that made you want to fornicate it tasted so good.
Gorged on food I spent most of the afternoon sitting in defeat and listening to the rain. I was depressed for yet again not following through with my nightly vow to hop in my shite colored hatchback and take off to see the world. I took solace in the comfort of my steaming black cup of coffee. I usually stop counting the cups somewhere around the second pot. I was a machine. Caffeine had long quit working on me. It was nothing to drown myself in a couple cans of kidney destroying Sugar Bomb energy soda before bed. I think I actually slept better when I did. The chagrining question I asked and the crux of why I had to stay: How could I leave my coffee pot? I couldn’t. Besides a single photograph of my mom and dad which had been taken some years before I was born, the coffee pot was my favorite possession. I could never leave Flip. Don’t ask me why we call it that, it’s just the random name we gave the coffee pot because of the little flip water door. For all our differences my Dad and I still take an odd
He made up fantastic stories all the time, and I always wanted to believe him, and there was part of me that felt like he wanted me to as well, but it was always the same outcome. There would be a few seconds we’d share in the moment, and then he would either claim it was a joke or he would simply change the subject to something more practical. It was left to me to assume the prank had lived and died, and it was time to return to reality.
I’m about two years out of high school. The nice part is Dad and I still lived together. The sad part is we hardly ever talk anymore. I went through an angry phase that started about midway through my teen years. He says I’m still in it. When he says that it does make me mad, and then I argue that I’m not, which then starts an epic “chicken or the egg” discussion about when and why my anger arrived. Frustration continues to abound.
Angry or not, I did stop listening to the stories. They only made me long for what could never be. When you hear about greater things, beyond the proverbial reality of death and taxes, it makes you hope, and when you’re a wide-eyed hormone-raging teenager who longs to stand on top of the world as throngs of girls squeal to touch your buffness, the cold reality of small Christmases, crappy second hand clothes, and decade old “new” electronics, brings you down into the pains of “what is” pretty quickly. And “what is” was that we were nobody, and my janitor father and I were always going to be that way. Since then it’s been something I’ve wrestled to accept every single day of my life, and I hate feeling that way, but it’s there.
Do I believe his stories? Not a chance. Do they make me want to get outside this little Alabama town and see for myself? You bet it does. Not to go looking for gryphon feathers or living computers, but to see what the world looks like through eyes that aren’t always constantly making up some line of fantastical bullbutter to entertain children. As the man said, “I want the truth.”
But sometimes I hear Life sniggering behind me aptly replying, “You can’t handle it.”
STUPID ME
The night was mine. I was off from work, and I was in the mood to do something. I had finished the modest cleaning and put everything away. Dad and I had two polar opposite schedules, so when I worked he slept and the other way around. While Dad and I didn’t hang like we used to, we still loved and cared for each other, but his fantastic version of every single event made anything but the most surface of conversations possible. I liked to do the cleaning since that’s what he did all day at his job, and he respected the fact that I was around food all night, so he handled most of the cooking. For breakfast I shoveled down the last of some lasagna that had reached a pre-fuzz state, and then started in on a monster BBQ meatloaf that made you want to fornicate it tasted so good.
Gorged on food I spent most of the afternoon sitting in defeat and listening to the rain. I was depressed for yet again not following through with my nightly vow to hop in my shite colored hatchback and take off to see the world. I took solace in the comfort of my steaming black cup of coffee. I usually stop counting the cups somewhere around the second pot. I was a machine. Caffeine had long quit working on me. It was nothing to drown myself in a couple cans of kidney destroying Sugar Bomb energy soda before bed. I think I actually slept better when I did. The chagrining question I asked and the crux of why I had to stay: How could I leave my coffee pot? I couldn’t. Besides a single photograph of my mom and dad which had been taken some years before I was born, the coffee pot was my favorite possession. I could never leave Flip. Don’t ask me why we call it that, it’s just the random name we gave the coffee pot because of the little flip water door. For all our differences my Dad and I still take an odd
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