life in regular motion.

After some encouragement from my mother and a close friend to begin writing a blog, it took me a while to settle on something. Do I write about sports? Politics? Music? There’s a million blogs out there for those, so I was at a loss. Do I give up and join the rabble or come up with something that is my own?

Well, after some thought and chemical ingestion I realized I do have something that is, more or less, my own. My father. My batshit crazy father.

I would like to, first, clarify that I do love him like any son should love their father. However, throughout my life there have been one or two (thousand) misgivings with our relationship and his relationships with other members of my family that have provided me with the necessary information and cannon fodder to write, not one, but several pieces dedicated to his insane antics. 

At this point I just need to decided where to begin? The methamphetamine themed snowboard trip? The time he verbally assaulted a national park employee in front of my whole family and grandparents? No. I will start with what I believe is the earliest documented case of his insanity that I can personally remember:

I was awakened what felt like several hours before my usual 7AM alarm to my father asking me to step down from my bunk bed, I had to have been no more than 6 or 7. After leaving my room he moved me into the bathroom where I was instructed to pee into a cup, after I had evacuated my bladder I went back to bed and thought nothing of it for the next decade. After time had passed and my parents had separated and divorced, I felt like it might be the right occasion for me to ask my mom, ‘Hey, so what the fuck was up with this?’ And to this day, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a parent so shocked to hear a question asked.

I came to learn that at that time in his life my dad had been smoking lots of marijuana. In his undoubtedly hazy morning mindset, he set out to pass this drug test that had been glaring him in the face in the weeks leading up. But rather than get clean, or buy a system cleanser, he decided that he would just use the closest resource to him, his 6 year old son.

This is the kind of male role model I grew up with. Just let that one sink in for a minute, before you realize how hysterical it is.

Before I went to bed tonight (this morning, it’s like 4:40am) I had ran into an issue, there was something stuck to my foot. Some uppity mystery object had found it’s way to me whilst my foot was wedged beneath a pile of clothes. A minor trespass, however, in my exhausted state it was incredibly frustrating. After I had it freed from the underside of my big toe, I looked down in disgust at what it could possibly be, only to find that it was a quarter, a glorious quarter. For the first time in my life, the thing stuck to my foot was not gum, ash, beer or food, but a piece of American currency.