Fathers and Sons

 We all know what Oscar said about stealing rather than borrowing and while inhabiting the delusional world of a shut-in like myself i pretend to be a genius in my own mind while the rest of the universe knows, factually, that i'm a fucking idiot... luckily that doesn't stop me from getting out of bed in the morning but that's more because i have to than actually want to... if it was up to me Fat Paco and i would lounge about scratching our nuts and staring at the ceiling... so what, pray tell, have i stolen? mainly it's the title of this post but even that wouldn't be entirely correct... there's an excellent book written by Larry Brown titled Father and Son, hence where this title sorta comes from, there's also and equally excellent sequel to that book titled Fay... Brown was one of those writers that was classified as Grit Lit, a genre i didn't know existed and basically consists of writing about the working class... (unlike the previous post which references Easton Ellis and my own made genre of poor little rich kid lit)... Brown was a fireman turned writer who set his stories in the South and had a knack for writing about the plain spoken everyday fucking mess us commoners can make of our lives... something a great many of us can relate to...

But this bit is not a book review... it's about fathers and sons or more to be more specific a certain father and his two sons... and the trials, tribulations, joys, laughter, pain and the rest of the shit that goes along with said gig... to steal another line from a guy in an over-sized suit... sometimes i wake up in the middle of the night in the chilly dark of a downstairs room and wonder, well? how did i get here? which to be honest is not a question i spend a lot of time thinking about... you is where you is or more correctly i be where i be and what else is there to really know? it's been stated ad nauseum here on the lounge how the boyos basically saved their old man's life... it's no secret that over the years i've battled a variety of demons (see substances) that i've had a predilection for but luckily for me (and dare i say you dear reader... that's a joke) i'm as stubborn as i am stupid... having kicked all those habits not entirely unscathed but more or less still intact... taking stock of the situation i understand that had i not made the questionable choice of a wobbly union followed by the birth of the boyos i was most likely drastically increasing my odds of finding myself in prison or the morgue... given my activities at the time those two destinations  had much higher percentages than i would admit or even think about way back when but realize now how attainable they actually were... and yes i sometimes get that cold shiver followed by that belly laugh that says... life's a fuckin' trip innit? 

So here i am, ensconced in the suburban bubble, attempting to raise the boyos so as not to be assholes, so as not to act or be like some of the privileged shits who roam the tree-lined streets filled with McMansions, a conglomerate of whiteness where the children are all "special" and the autos all high end... how does a working class kid from the West Side of Cleveland acclimate to a place which is the antithesis to his strange and warped ethics while also trying to instill into his sons the same such moral code... a code that can be simply stated as such... don't be an asshole, don't dwell on the material, remember you are not the center of the universe but a miniscule part of it, that your existence is but the blink of an eye in the cosmic scheme of things so make the most of it and most importantly enjoy it... there are so many people shuffling through this life not seeming to grasp the finite, hung up  on the most trivial bullshit a culture can muster, head buried in the proverbial sand... i try not to make it too heavy because it really is all just a laugh... the alternative would be to try an indoctrinate them into a cult that believes in an all knowing, all powerful being with a silly set of rules, many of which pertain to said "being's" own vanity... or i can try and teach them not to be an asshole, seems the latter is the more pragmatic solution... 

There is nothing which drives home one's own mortality like their children... since the birth of the I-mac and Disaster it seems that time has been speeding up... yes i know it hasn't but as i watch the boyos grow up it seems like it wasn't that long ago when i was changing their diapers and feeding them from a bottle, watching first steps, hearing first words, and now here i sit with both of them in high school, the I-mac soon to be graduated and dipping his toes into the waters of independence... well with any luck, the I-mac isn't exactly excelling in the responsibility and accountability department but we're trying and it has been and ugly and frustrating process to say the least... it's something that the BW and i take full responsibility for, in short... we fucked up, not for lack of trying mind you but we've made mistakes and have done our best to learn from them... i've always had a theory about the first child (though i'm not sure if it pertains to the only child), the first child is the trial run, the experiment, one day they hand you this squirming ball that does nothing more than cry, eat and shit themselves, walk you to the car and say have a nice day... for those of us attempting to do a decent job at this endeavor it's fucking terrifying, i had no fucking clue what to do, one can read books and the like but until faced with it there really is no way to prepare... said child is showered with attention, most of it positive, very little negative, all the phobias, worries, concerns, quirks or what has commonly been dubbed, helicopter parenting are heaped on Kid One... note the difference between the first and second kid, not the difference between the first and fourth kid (if one is so procreationally inclined), it's staggering... 

To be clear the 16-17yr old Kono was no saint, in fact i too was a major shithead it's just that my shithead phase lasted a couple months not a couple of years... the spring of my junior year in high school i was dating Wendy da Wabbit (there's a lovely post somewhere about Wendy and how we used to screw in her blue Chevy Caprice after she got off work from Taco Bell, fucking young lust!), i had begun drinking and smoking weed, i was in a serious hardcore phase listening to nothing but Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Suicidal Tendencies and the like... i was acting up and spreading the wings a bit and i was a right dipshit... i came home fucking blotto on a Tuesday (school night) and Pops was none to impressed or amused... shortly thereafter he sat me down and gave me a talk about me being an raging idiot and then stated that if i thought i was a man to let him know and we could go out back and he'd show me, the exact words were, "you think you can take me?" and he looked across the table with his steely gaze and i looked right back... ah the Gen X kids, the last of the feral children, the kids raised without seatbelts or bicycle helmets or cell phones to track us... yes i sound like the old man yelling get off of my lawn but it's true, it's how we came of age... when you got your ass kicked you didn't call from your cellpone you had walk to a payphone to call for a ride and explain what happened... the thing was i had massive respect for my dad, even as a shithead teen i knew he'd put himself through school and sacrificed a whole lot to provide the life i had... and that's the difference. Respect. 

I've been warned repeatedly by the BW not to ever talk about the Wilderness Years... sometimes i wonder if she thinks i'm stupid... maybe when the boyos are old enough i'll steer them towards the old man's ramblings but until then the less they know the better, particularly the I-mac... he may be the poster boy for what is commonly known around here as the Lebo Douche, a species of privileged suburban teen (and sometimes adult) who believe the universe shines out of their ass, horribly superficial know-it-alls who think they're hard guys when really the more apt description would be cream puff or marshmallow... the BW has spent countless hours worrying about him while i have tried to explain to her that helping him, see actually doing his schoolwork/projects, is not a remedy... failure is a remedy, failure teaches far more than success, failure will teach him that he can't just fuck about and think the world will lay down for him... i tried to explain this to him when it came to football (soccer) but it fell on deaf ears... and it wasn't like i didn't know what i was talking about, his old man played hoops in college until injury and frustration taught him it's more fun to go to school and enjoy it than be beholden to a coach he couldn't stand, but the fact was when i was in high school there was no doubt in my mind i'd play in college and i worked at it, on my own, to make sure it would happen though even i don't think i realized it... i was just driven... i played a sport in college that takes less than 5% of the players that played in high school, and that's all levels, i was recruited to play at the top and had offers from Division 2 schools as well... in short, i know what it takes... 

If there is one thing i can't stomach though it's the excuse machine... i was lucky, i had a coach in high school, that i later realized, believed i had a ton of talent, i should have been benched for my mouth and attitude at times but i never was, he also told me, well more correctly yelled at me, an important bit of advice one day, he said "i don't want to hear your damn excuses just get it done." It was my junior year... it hit home... and those words have stuck with me ever since no matter what i'm doing... i used to talk to the I-mac about practicing on his own, not in the pushy parent vicariously living out his dream but because he stated he wanted to play in college and i explained so did a lot of people and to get to that point one had to work at it not talk about it... that he had all the physical gifts one could want but that really it was up to him what he did with them... he ended up doing very little other than talk about it... 

The problem is this pattern of behavior permeates every aspect of his life and then when shit goes pear shaped he feels bad about himself... a classic case of the cover-up, he acts like a confident kid with high self-esteem but he's lying to himself... and sometimes he admits that to himself, the issue is he doesn't try to change it, he pats himself on the back for recognizing the problem and then does nothing to fix it... other than fly into rages, teenage temper tantrums that often have him lashing out both physically and verbally... it ain't pretty and i've now had him throw things at me, throw punches, spit and hurl any number of insults that would most likely bother a normal parent... but i ain't normal... i know what he says bothers his mother and since she spent her childhood dealing with an abusive father i'm not about to let her kid do it as well and so when he goes after her i make sure to draw his ire towards me... as my father once said to me, "you're a different animal kid", i know i am and i can be a hard and cold motherfucker, sometimes that's what it takes... ultimately what i've told the I-mac is what what Pops told me... it's his life and the only person he really owes anything to is himself... if he wants to do something or attain a certain status (a phrase i find nauseating) then he has to put the work in to do it, it doesn't just magically happen, in less than six months the bubble of the lily white high school pops and the beginnings of the real world will begin to beckon, his mother is worried sick, i'm what you call concerned but also of the opinion that when life kicks you in the fucking balls a few times one learns.. or at least they should... but for every yin there is the yang...  

Disaster is a typical teen and sometimes i worry that he feels like he has to be perfect because his big brother is such a raging pain in the ass, i also worry about what the outbursts and stress do to him when his big bro flies into one of his toddler-like shit fits... Disaster is his dad's boy, always has been, when we moved out to the burbs and the Big World Bank Machine laid me off i became the Big Hairy Carol Brady for a bit, (until the pandemic when the BW decided it would be good for me to become a gig economy serf), for a couple of years it was just me and him all day, he was a mellow kid and i was a mellow dad, we'd go to the park or lounge about at home, one can check the post about the night he got lost at the high school football game and the first words he spoke when we found him, "i was afraid i was never gonna see my dad again...", i honestly believe the boy loves basketball because of his old man and that he gave up soccer, which he was pretty damn good at, because he wanted to be like his dad... as anyone with multiple offspring knows it's a different relationship with each kid, you love them both the same but the relationships can be night and day... 

If there is one major difference it's in the sense of entitlement my two sons possess... the I-mac seems to think he deserves everything handed to him while Disaster is much more cognizant and appreciative of the the things people do for him, not that the I-mac is completely oblivious but one would be hard pressed to know that by his behavior... Disaster on the other hand is the polar opposite... how it happened that way? no one knows... or maybe we do but that's a lot of family therapy to sit through... one thing i can point to is a basketball camp Disaster attended over the summer, the camp was excellent on teaching the mental aspects of things and one of the things it taught was to appreciate and respect what people do for you, there was a session that discussed the cost and the time involved in said camp and how someone had to spend the money and take the time to get the player there and how that each player should recognize that and thank those people and how that just wasn't about the camp it was about life in general... Disaster was always a good kid but that lesson seemed to really hit home and since then he's been even more appreciative in a truly genuine way that is brilliant to see...

Recently Disaster had been hanging out with some kids from the next neighborhood over, there is/was a girl involved and one weekend when i was supposed to hang at Dub and Dab night with my friend (where his old man brings his dub and reggae records to his friend's place and they smoke/dab copious amounts of ganja) we had it set up that i would get him before i went over and drop him off at home... as things do sometimes it got a bit messed up, Disaster asked i he could stay later and i'll admit i felt bad about saying no, he's in high school now and should be able to hang and so we discussed things and i told him that sometimes when you make a plan you have to stick to it, i asked how he'd get home and his explained his friend would be able to take him back to his house which was right around the corner from where i was... i agreed and said to keep me posted... Disaster is more reserved than his brother but if there is one thing that bothers him if it's his old man is mad at him... not that i ever get that mad at the boy but it's funny how he worries about it... i've explained to him that he's a good kid and that it's cool but on this night he even stated that he didn't want me to be pissed and wanted me to go hang with my friend... it's an attitude of consideration and thought rarely seen from his older brother... 

So the plan was made and i waited to see how or if it would work out.. Disaster and his friend caught an Uber back to his friend's place (fuckin' kids these days, used to be we had to walk, ride a bike, bum a ride from someone or take the bus), his friend had already set it up and so Disaster caught a ride back with him and texted me when he arrived, when i pulled up ten minutes later he was standing out front and as i pulled up all i could think of was what a great kid he was... he got in and smiled and i told him i was proud of him, that i knew he was relying on other people to get back and that sometimes people can be unreliable but that he did what he said he would do, that it showed responsibility and maturity... i could tell he was quite chuffed at the compliments and we drove home and he talked about his night, how funny the Uber driver was, the girl he was hanging with, Disaster loves his drives with his dad, he'll even ask to go with me if i'm picking up food or what not, just to hang and talk and sometimes play songs, some made by his friends, which i good naturedly indulge... to steal from Bobby Pollard again, the things that i will keep, these conversations, these moments in time... i have a feeling it's what Disaster will remember too... and what i really hope is that Disaster and i maintain this relationship until i step into that void... 

It's a strange thing how two brothers can be so different in so many ways... raised by the same people, instilled with the same values, i understand the outside influences that creep in and how they can alter said kids' views and attitudes... and yes mistakes were made but as previously stated there is no handbook for doing this shit... one learns on the fly and hopes they don't fuck it up too badly... my research has given me the glimmer of hope that the I-mac will get his shit together at some point... most likely after good old life kicks him in the nuts a time or two... if he doesn't learn then? well i guess we'll take it as it comes... as for Disaster? i don't sweat it as much... i know they'll be trials and tribulations along the way but the kid reminds of someone i know... mainly his father... which does worry me a little bit knowing his old man like i do but i also know that his old man will do his best to help him steer clear of the dumb shit he did... or at least he's gonna try... (to be cont.)