Fathers Day Jawnz.
It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
- Anne Sexton
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jawn one.
Maybe it’s because I ended up without a dad of my own that I became a keen observer of other people’s dads. It’s a thing that continues to this day. My favorite is spotting older men with their grown up sons and daughters. I sit on my car bumper at the flea market sometimes and seek them out with my eyes and my brain. Older men walking slowly/ simply/ not in a rush, alongside other adults who are distinctly younger than themselves/ that really catches my focus. I don’t know why either. I just like spotting these sorts of dads out in the day with their grown-up children. There’s something soothing about it, you know? There’s this inarguable kind of idealism that’s hard to shoot down. It’s very possible that it feels safe to me, to watch a dad beaming/ authentic/ at something his grown-up daughter just muttered to him as they both lean into locally-made ice cream. Innocently it goes, into their mouths, off a drippy plastic spoon. It fills me with longing: like that could be me someday. But devil’s advocate: I’m not so sure. I often wonder if poor dads or working class dads get to do this as much. Or if they even think of it. A lot of the dads I see strolling along with their mature sons and daughters, they appear to me to be fairly well off. And typically the kid does too. Not surprising. Knowing how to earn and having deeply held convictions about how money matters really seems to be a softly-spoken but adamantly taught thread between a lot of really good fathers and their kids. And if that’s the case, then I will probably end up eating ice cream all alone, standing at the kitchen island after Arle goes up, straight out of the cold cardboard tub. Just like I do now.
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jawn two.
If there was a Dad’s Hall of Fame, who would be in it? I’ll tell you one thing, it wouldn’t be void of surprises, I know that. Here in the US of A, we each have our own ideas about what makes a dad great but a lot of that is systemic horsedump. Just admit it. Everything about dad life in this country is more or less tinged with weird marketing and bad poetry. Dad fishing. Dad standing at the grill. Dad golfing. Dad driving the whole family in a new Subaru/ mom in the side car seat/ kids in the back/ everyone laughing cuts to a drone shot of our 2026 vehicle moving on a well-maintained alpine road/ dipping down past a mountain lake with no other cars for miles (probably Canada)/ a big money song playing. (Has Magic Carpet Ride been used for this kind of thing yet?) Dad coaching a bad little league team. Dad tearing up watching his daughter get married. Dad weeping with diligent strength as he dances with his ‘little girl’ at the reception. We could go on and on, but you get what I’m saying? These boring run-of-the-mill Hall of Fame fathers are fine, but they’re also tired as hell. Screw all this sentimental crap, I say. Let us turn our attention to the new American dad, to the real man who does the job but has no goddamn idea how he manages… or even what the hell the job is to begin with. American manhood, and more specifically American fatherhood, shouldn’t always be seen as kind spirited fellows grilling hot dogs on an open fire anymore. We need to explore our other options here. Let’s shake stuff up, move the needle. How about Iron Maiden dads with pencil thin mustaches? They still exist you know. They are in trailer parks and also in big cities: so what about them? Why pretend they don’t qualify? And what about the MAGA dads?! Jesus, I mean, are we going to let politics ruin the Dad Hall of Fame too? Come on. You think there aren’t some damn fine men out there loving their kids right while also spreading Newsmax conspiracy theories all day every day at work? They’re bonkers maybe, but still. Is it fair to exclude them from the DHOF? I don’t see how we can. They need to be included. My point? You know my point, dipshit! It’s late in the day. America is fading. Freedom is waning. The good old days of bobbers going down while grandpa holds his grandson in his lap and urges him to REEL, REEL, REEL! with a big goofy grin on both of their adorable faces are still here, but they are also totally over. Here’s some food for thought. I just asked the AI/ I said hey, “Name me some dads who should go into the Dad Hall of Fame if such a thing existed.” It mentioned Mr Rogers, Barak Obama, Atticus Finch, Bob from Bob’s Burgers, Mufasa from The Lion King, Uncle Phil from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And Prince Harry. This is AI now. The smartest person who ever lived. And I don’t see you or me or your dad anywhere near this list. Which is what I’ve been trying to tell you all along. We’re seeing love wrong. Dads and everything.
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jawn three.
My dad smoked Parliaments and kept a big john boat in the rafters of our garage. I remember him laughing like a hyena when he was excited or drunk. Or both. My dad played the drums when he was a young man but always acted as if he could get behind any kit any day of the week, even as a much older person, and still kick out the jams like he did when he was 23. My dad was wrong about that but it sits better with me now that that’s how things went. My dad didn’t wuss out about the drums. That’s not good dad form. Look, if you shot men dead way back during the war/ you need to keep telling yourself that you could pop them off from a half mile away right now/ even today/ if you had to. My dad didn’t ever seem romantic to me. I never saw him do anything nice for my mom. He must have at some point and I know we only lived with him until I was like 8 or 9, but that’s what I recall. I never saw him hand over flowers or anything. I did see him catch a lot of smallmouth bass from dark morning rivers though. He could fish, my dad. The man could fish. He couldn’t talk without tripping over his own tongue though because he’d been born and raised in Northern France and the French stuck to the roof of his EuroMouth like a spoon full of peanut butter snails. All of his English sounded immigranty right up until the end. It was awesome. My dad had a very funny side that he wore so well. But he also had a nasty awful side that stands out to me now. By the time I was 5 or 6 he was a compulsive alcoholic who drank in the daytime and drank in the night. My dad would pass out at the dinner table. Not just once or twice either. My dad would pass out at the dinner table, his face going down into a heap of mashed potatoes or onto some skimpy fried flounder pillow, and his head would stay there and he would snore. It was not unusual. But it did mean that three of us (my mom, my brother, and me) could probably relax. He wasn’t going to wake up until my mom had to wake him up to go up to bed. Until then, we could watch him, make sure he didn’t drown in the tartar sauce, watch his glass of burgandy ripple with the vibrations from the table from the quaking of his dish which was quivering whenever he was drawing a long snore in. My dad held a shotgun to my moms head once. She forgave him, I guess, but I never did. He had the tip of one finger missing from a saw accident once upon a time. I remember touching his gleaming silver wedding band while we sat together watching Sanford and Son. He would rock with laughter. I would touch my whole fingertip to his smooth short nub. I thought it was so cool. I though he was such a man’s man back then. Now he’s dead and I only every think about how much it hurts that he was a such colossal fucking selfish cunt.
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I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it.
- David Mitchell
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jawn four.
Love, in the eye of the beholder, is all there is. In the end, perception is everything. The paradigm/ varied as the summer breeze/ holds everything in place for you. For me, maybe I see it otherwise/ say, different than you/ but every night we are both staring at the same silvery moon. Only you are out there in your yard seeing it your way and I’m out back my place seeing it mine. Our hearts are attached to chains made of stars and the anchor for the weighted pull is way up in the sky. At night, I can feel the upside down resistance of mine when I move the thing around/ like a tiny bluegill tapping a fat wad of camp kid bologna. Something on high is waiting. Some scoundrel, I’m thinking, up there messing with me. Curious rascal looking at his reflection in the pond below/ trying to decide if I am real/ if I’m really there. That is love as far as I’m concerned. As a dad, I try to make sense of the insensible. By attempting to recall my own father and how he may have loved me, I take risks. But still it isn’t clear. There are compelling reasons I could lay out that indicate he did not care that much about me. But my saving grace, I think, might be that I’m a dad myself. As such, I understand that once upon a time, when I was born again in this world as a man with his own child, I could not escape love nor run from it successfully any longer, even if I tried like hell. Not that I ever wanted to. But some do. And some did. Like my dad. I think I tell myself that he had to have been the same as me somehow. Despite the addiction and the depression and the unusual madness that seemed to plague my father, I tell myself that somehow/ somewhere/ he must have had true love for his sons. The alternative is impossible to fathom. To have been truly unloved by him is just too much to try and wrap my head around. So I don’t even try.
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I told them I failed my draft physical. My dad, who often dismissively uttered the words "I can't wait 'til the army gets ahold of you," sat at the kitchen table, flicked the ash off of his cigarette, took a puff, slowly let the smoke escape from his lips and mumbled, "That's good.”
-Bruce Springsteen
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jawn five.
My stepdad is a good man and I love him and miss him more than I miss some of the others. We met when I was 16 and he was in his 40’s. He also had his own sons then. Things often become hard to connect with the connections we intend to plug them into. Or simply the ones we only imagine. But I was so grown by the time I met him and that could have been the end of our world together right there. A teenage boy might shut down a stepdad coming into his world and no one would ever not understand. It doesn’t make it pretty but it sure doesn’t make it wrong either. But me, I was also needing things. I was in need of son-type things you can only get from a dad. And he brought them to me. He did. He never asked for much in return either. He wanted me to respect my mom and not to mouth off to her and that was good for me to hear and to understand. He also wanted me to not be a lazy little baby bitch and that helped me tremendously. All my life since I was a teenager I have always worked… and secretly between me and you, I always felt really good inside when he would answer the phone or corner me at the 4th of July and tell me he was proud of me. He took me hunting and although I could always sense that there was blood spark missing somehow, I also came to understand that it wasn’t his fault or mine. Being alive is hard. Being a parent or a parent’s child is hard. Step stuff is awfully difficult to navigate. That’s why there’s so much mileage in the Disney mean stepmother character. Literature and cinema is brimming with stepparents who rule with an iron fist and love their own blood children but despise their step-kids. It wasn’t some narrative fad either. It’s all there in the script because it has been there in the lives of the people who wrote the scripts. Art has taken the evil step parent (usually the step-mom, I have no clue why) and lifted them into this rarified light. Ironically, whenever someone has a loving, decent stepparent the people who have never had a stepparent seem to have a hard time processing that. Why? Because the image of the nasty fictional stepparent is burnt into our minds. And aside from that, in reality it is nearly impossible for anyone who has never been in a blended family to imagine what that is like. Or what it could be like even. With me and my stepdad, there were a lot of holes, a lot of things we missed out on because of timing or because of who we both are: caring men who have no idea how to say what we would love to say. Doesn’t matter though. He is a better man than my own dad was by galaxies. That much I know. We don’t speak now because of things we can’t even explain. It is what it is. But if there was ever a reason in my world for stupid ass Father’s day to exist, I guess it was him. From where I stand now, I’m sure I was lucky. And who knows/ maybe he was too.
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jawn six.
After my dad died, he got the cremation. My family, who I am not on great terms with, they barely responded to my questions about how he died or whatever. It was typical of them. But surprise, surprise: they did let me know when they had his ashes. I think they made sure they told me they had him and where he was so it seemed like he was their’s to take care of now. Not mine. Like he chose them to guard his stupid ashes. Whatever. They told me I could have some of his ashes if I wanted them, like he was a gift for me that they would share if I came to them to receive their kindness. It irked the fuck out of me. It felt possessive and wrongheaded and lame. It felt like when someone down the road has way too many zucchini so they just put them on your porch without asking. You won’t question their motives. They know that. You will have to say thanks and even if you don’t say it, you won’t say anything else. You’ll just deal with it. You will eat their excess zucchini or you will let it rot on your kitchen counter or you will throw it in someone else’s field, no one cares. They just know you won’t do shit or say shit and they are dealing with less zucchini and why do they even still plant that son-of-a-bitch anymore? Except this was my dad. Our dad. Or her ex husband. Or his wife’s ex. Or her ex-husband’s dad. Whatever. Fuck off. Death is a shitshow for the living. Everyone involved in my dad’s dying was packed into a clown car of narcissistic death money. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. So I waited until certain people went to the beach and then I drove over there and the key was still right where it always was. The dog was at the kennel. It was early on a weekday in the middle of a slow old week. I looked around and it wasn’t that hard to find him. I think a certain someone was oddly tickled having him there. I suspect she got off on forgiving him and cherishing him even though he had been a colossal monster to her back when things actually counted for something. But after you die all that counts is what the living say counts. It’s fucked up, but try and remember that. Anyway, I surveyed the scene/ found what I was after/ processed how the ashes were contained/ made some notes to myself. I took a few pictures with my phone so I could replicate and recreate. Then I drove to Lowes, listening to jazz, and got what I needed. I went back. It was still before lunch. I talked to my dad a little as I rescued him, as I replaced him with substitute ashes. I had big soft scoops leftover from doing up dozens of Amish-style chicken thighs on my charcoal grill all summer long. The day before I’d slapped the chicken ashes around in a thick paper bag so they broke down nice. Then I pounded all that into what you would expect to have. Ridiculously expensive funeral home powder. It was so weird. But it was also ridiculously easy. I soft hammered it all with a small rubber mallet on a marble pizza stone. Straight up, you can find out how to do anything on the internet anymore. You don’t even need to go on the “dark web” or whatever. I don’t even know how to access the dark web. I just went on Reddit and searched how to replace a dead person’s ashes. There were way more threads and comments about the subject than you would think, too. It was validating, if I’m being honest. When I was done, I’d replaced my dad with the Walmart chicken ashes and everything looked good. The seal was authentic. No one would know because they didn’t want to know. When it comes to dead men and their money, people lose their goddamn minds. They only see what they need to see, trust me. I didn’t make a big deal out of me and my dad reuniting like that. It seemed overzealous. I knew I could write a whole memoir with this as the centerpiece if I wanted to, but I don’t have it in me. I drove home with my old man riding shotgun. I had him in his sack in a big silver coffee can. I don’t remember what I said on the ride over the mountain. Nothing prolific, I guess. I do remember that I purposefully played Karma Chameleon because I’m sure he would have hated that song and that was kind of my vibe here. There was love involved, I guess, but you know how it is. Complications and all. It felt powerful to jack that song up as loud as my bluetooth speaker would go. Fucking Boy George. So perfect. I never told anyone/ not Arle or the kids. This was my thing. My dad. I know he would have liked this, actually. I took his entire being to the lake over in Poe Valley and I walked out on the dam and I shook his ass out on a bright blue October morning. He always said he wanted to live on a lake. Fucking idiot.
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jawn seven.
Charlie is 11 now, and me and Arle moved in together on August 1, 2018 so that’s how I know how many years I was a single dad. I go by Charlie’s age. He was born on March 2, 2014. His mom and I had split up not long before that. A few months, I guess. And just prior to his arrival, in January, my ex stayed in the big farmhouse we had been living in while I shuffled over to my mom and stepdad’s tiny place. The world seems so different to me now than back then. Even though it wasn’t all that long ago, it seems an endless eternity now. Therapists and specialists have spoken to me at length and in depth of the trauma I likely endured during that time period. And listen, cringe all you want. I get it. I cringe at it too. Hell, I have had to punch myself in the face many times just to stumble past the stubborn parts of me which snarl at the notion of being included in the modern trauma parade. Yet I flirted ultra closely with Tragic End quite a few times since that Day 1 of my immersion into single parenthood. And I have found that I am impacted forever by people and events that took place during the years I was trying to create a new life. Because of that, I ultimately had to choose: either I finally set foot down in the dark woods of my realistic past and recognize it/ or I had to bite my lip and just get on with things, whatever that meant. In the end, I sought help. A lot of it. And give me more if you got it, man. That said, I’m really happy that I’m still here, still trying. These days, as Charlie flops through the kitchen/ moving like a 5th grade Bill Murray with his shaggy head of hair and his Hawaiian shirts/ I see him slump-stepping to the fridge for cold fried chicken from the Mennonite supermarket, and I watch him out of the corner of my eye and here’s the thing. Sometimes I feel like I did pretty damn good, all things considered. I almost never pat myself on the back. I hardly ever give myself any credit for having stood up in the face of so much madness and so much pain and fear. But you want to know something? I did that. Me. Serge. Dad. I did that. I survived it all. And I did it time and time and time again for the right reason, because I wanted the kids to be okay. To live and survive and have me in their world no matter how very destructible I had found out I was. No matter how blue or broken or silly or lonesome or fucked up or unhinged or sad or goddamn incredible I was on any given day, I persevered. I did what I could. And I found a way to stick around.
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Sentimental Moment Or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road?
Don’t fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge
My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
Did you really just
say that to me?
What he doesn’t know
is that when we’re walking
together, when we get
to the curb
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand.
- Robert Hershon
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jawn eight.
Father’s Day is distressing. I think I hate it. I used to like it back in the day but now I feel like putting an axe in its forehead, watch it bleed out all over the backyard as I drink a glass of wine by the fire pit. What is the point even? Why have a single day to honor a figment of our imagination? Real dads aren’t real. Are they? If you ask me, real dads are overwhelming and vital and messy and temporary. And name a single dad across human history that ever got it all right? Or even mostly right? 60% right? 50? And before that, before you go ahead and give me your two cents, tell me this. What kind of a Sunday morning is it for all sorts of men to wake up to, rub their tired eyes, and be forced to reckon with both his own dad and his own dadness? Christ on the Cross. That’s a lot for one brunch hour, dude, ain’t it? My kids are relatively good people and I love them no matter what but I’m telling you the truth when I say this. They don’t give a possum’s pecker about celebrating any Father’s Day. Not for me, probably not for their real dad if I ain’t him, and probably not for their step-dad either unless they love him different or more than me, which actually wouldn’t surprise me. Last year my kids didn’t even know it was Father’s Day. Or if they did they didn’t say anything. And they never make me cards anymore like they did when they were younger. Why? I don’t know. I always made my mom a Mother’s Day card no matter what. I spent a lot of time doing it too, with crayon and black marker and heartfelt words that were personal and artwork that included things she liked like cocaine and whiskey. Haha. Joke. But did you do that too? Did you make cards for your mom and dad if you had them? Or for the stand-ins even when it was Mother’s Day or Father’s Day? If I seem jaded about it now and it makes you uncomfortable reading this, I don’t know what to tell you. If you love these Mother/ Father’s Days then it must mean either your kids make it special for you or you don’t mind that they don’t. And by special, I don’t mean that they are past age 4 and some other parent is ‘helping’ them by making sure the kids draw a card or whatever. I mean they do it on their own. Maybe a little reminder and a slight prompt but thats it. Why is that too hard to manage? Is it too much for a dad to only want that? I don’t know. The whole day is fucked up. I want to destroy it forever. I want to hold it underwater while it flops and splashes. Then it slows down, big dog. Then it goes limp. Cold creek water at my goosebump wrists.
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jawn nine.
My dad was so good with his hands, he built a massive full wall book case with a built-in 55 gallon fish tank in our old house. He didn’t care about American baseball or football or any of that. He never watched a single ball game on TV. My dad would drink until his eyes went so bloodshot you could see the crimson veins emerging out of his pinky whites. My dad could use his European tongue to fish a #6 pellet of lead shot from the self-killed pheasant meat in his mouth and spit it casually into his thick strong palm without even mentioning it at all. Then he could let the tiny bead fall down from his sly release onto a bare spot between his scalloped potatoes and his creamed corn on one of our dinner dishes so that it made a ping louder than any shotgun blast there ever was. My dad was fanatical about boxing and never missed the Joe Frazier Muhammed Ali Leon Spinks Gerry Cooney Larry Holmes Roberto Duran punches fly. My dad must have not wanted any of us around when he watched the boxing because I only have like one or two memories of me sneaking through the downstairs and him in his chair in the dark with his open can of beer, his silver filling flash, the glow of the television all over him like movable paint. My dad preferred the dark meat of bluefish. My dad took me deep inside the darkest coldest taverns and tap rooms in the brightest parts of the hottest afternoons in history. My dad was flagged from all the local bars in our town because he would get so plastered and belligerent that even the drunks of the town found him offensive. My dad loved cartoons and cartoon characters even more than I ever did. He loved Foghorn Leghorn. He loved Elmer Fudd. He loved the Roadrunner and Wile. E. Coyote. He loved Mr Magoo. My dad would watch Mr Magoo on Saturday mornings, sober I guess, and his laughter would shake our home. My dad would have his mom and dad over from France every couple of summers and they would arrive with massive suitcases from the Philadelphia Airport and they smelled like faraway lands and they brought me exotic cheeses and chocolates and I ate them at the kitchen table as all the adults drank red wine and talked in French and I just smiled at my Pepe who was a man from another planet to me because he was an old Ukrainian coal miner who smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and never ever tried, even once, to talk to me in English. I still love red wine and cheese and chocolate and cigarettes (even if I don’t smoke them anymore). My dad would pee right in front of me with the bathroom door open, talking to me as if we were on some street corner somewhere, and I never thought twice about it at all. My dad had a silver watch that looked so cool with his thick black arm hair and his strong healthy skin. My dad would lay in the air conditioning of his bed, snoring, on one side of me, my mom in her cheap nightgown on the other side of me, and I felt so safe and lucky and comfortable and sleepy and good. After dinner, my dad used to lay on his belly on the living room carpet and watch Archie Bunker. His laughter was explosive/ reeking of wild masculinity/ and I would sit myself on the undersides of his feet/ his knees bent so that his legs became a chair for my young body/ and I would perch there and he would sway me/ pitch me slightly/ this way and that way/ holding me in perfect balance/ his eyes fixed on the boulder in the corner/ our heavy floor model TV/ my little heart pumping fast and my tiny insides and my skinny legs and my thin clean hair/ so young/ so delicate/ bucktooth naive boy floating on a cloud/ brown-eyed average kid overcome with wonder/ connected to my dad/ so rare/ but this I could count on/ for a while at least/ tilting and swooping/ like a wild hawk effortless up there/ looking down at all the people/ feeling so proud/ so decent and true/ because I could not fall/ because I would not fall/ because I was good at this and he was good at this and together we moved me/ threw me/ dipped dived and flew me/ him cackling his smoky laugh at the TV/ me loving him from deep down in my fragile kid bones/ never knowing he would break me like he would/ never knowing/ thank god/ that such things are possible/ ever there/ in the twilight of a the evening/ late summer/ 1978.
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“I wonder what Piglet is doing," thought Pooh.
"I wish I were there to be doing it, too.”
- A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh’
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jawn ten.
Where did he go? What did I do? Why me? Why us? How could a dad just disappear like that? I was a good kid. I’m no pussy. I’m not blaming him for me. But I can’t understand any of this no matter how hard I try. And I’m really truly sad inside. Broken even. So motherfucking angry.
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jawn eleven.
A couple nights a week I’ll stop what I’m doing and just stand in the kitchen and listen. The sounds of a house are stairs creaking, pipes rattling, but the sounds of a home are much different. From where I stand in the kitchen, at the island, towards the center of the worn out room, I can make out several voices at once. Each is a child/ a young person with their whole lives ahead of them, as people like to say. Charlie, I can hear him in the living room chattering on about Roblox. The YouTube is loud so Piper has to be loud as well as he interrupts him to disagree about something. Or is he agreeing, maybe? Things are never clear. Milla is singing in her room/ some song I don’t know/ maybe one she’s making up as she goes? I kind of hope so. Henry’s voice booms from his room. I hear his laughter and his bad language as he goes back and forth with a buddy on the phone. His bedroom door is closed though so it’s only when he raises his levels with cursing or cracking up that I can actually make anything out. Milo passes behind me with their omnipresent bluetooth headphones straddling their head. In the 2 seconds it takes them to move through the kitchen on their repetitive loop walk through our downstairs circuit, I hear them emit a high-pitched squeal as their Crocs squeak the dirty floors that hold us all suspended over the dank, mildewy basement lurking just below. Their mind is awash in the music that travels, both wirelessly and miraculously, from the edge of their iPhone 16 to the tiny holes in the ears of their headphones. Beyond my range of audio capacity, Arle, is, I suspect, laying on the bed in our room. Resting a while, shifting gears after work, in the loud comforting din our AC unit blending with our two box fans. I know, too, that every pop or growl I hear is ephemeral. And a gift. I understand that it’s later than I think and that I am a man being flooded by love, washed away in the crashing overflow of a country spate. Tiny feet, breathless giggles, they’ve all given way to sneaker thump and middle school timbres. Voices, once shrill and green, now they find me unprepared/ run into me with these deeper tones/ slip up on me in my kitchen pose all leaned up on the old Ikea butcher block. The voices now, they are these aging hollows of a sound matured/ all carved into the wall of the very voices I never ever wanted to lose. But go they must and go they do, off into the back meadows of my memory. It’s a wonder what I manage, keeping all these freshly gone summer days locked up like the kidnapped. Resonating through my aging skin, seeping down through my Pennsylvania blood, I realize that I have been showering in starlight and fortune for a long, long time now. Chaos is my old angel choir, sweet as any in the land. Chaos and laughter and voices seeking me out, reaching me whole/ the words so unimportant/ the familiarity all that matters. You know, I recognize a certain voice dropping down from upstairs/ slinking down the busted steps/ slithering down across the muddy dog prints and the chipped paint and the legions of dust blown to pile up in corners like autumn leaves. The true measure of a man isn’t how many whiskeys he ever drank or how many brown trout he ever took. It’s less than that in the eye of the beholder, but more than that in the passing of a train. A man’s life is measured in miniscule increments of time called days. He only gets so many of them. He wastes away more than he ought to. But in the ones he holds onto, there are things that come down/ things that unravel on the doorstep/ things that step out of old graves and wander in through the back door just to walk beside those who live within. As I see it, the measure of a man is how he handles the clear cold night. Because it is there he came from and it is there he’s bound. That and how he listens, unimpeded, to the loose gravel of voices breaking free/ crumbling down like landslide off the mountain he calls the sky.
When one has not had a good father, one must create one.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Thunder Pie is edited by Arle Bielanko
Photos: Arle & Serge Bielanko
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Etsy.
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.
-William Shakespeare, Macbeth
As usual, these are all beautifully written. Bold and brave and heartbreakingly real. You’ve laid it all out with such raw clarity and nuance and there’s a quiet kind of grace in that. The kind that lets other people exhale because they are allowed the opportunity to see themselves reflected in someone else’s human story. To recognize themselves in someone else’s unwashed truth, not just the neat and tidy highlight reel shit that so many other people put out into the world. I hope this post finds the people who need it most. It deserves to. You’ve done something powerful here. I love you a lot!
The good, the bad, the ugly; you always see it and feel it all. This one came full circle back to the good in Jawn 11. I agree with Arle. There’s power in this one.