I'd Like to Tell You I Haven't Been Blocked - That's What I'd Like to Tell You.

Right now? So I wish that someone wonderful wanted to come and get me and take me dancing later. I listen up to the songs that I’d maybe go out to go dance at were once danced to by people who I probably now recognize as tired and old and overstimulated. I have these thoughts listening at Pandora and my station is a… fiasco. It played, or tried to play at me some terrible early 00’s noise and when I declined it launched straight into London’s best attempt at Verdi – The March from Aida – which is a pure and total evocation. See…

Years ago now, I used to go and pick up young Agatha at her mother’s mother’s house. Tidy, respectable place, but with the taped over windows and the perpetual Virginia-Slims miasma – the African Gray Parrot in the corner would always chirp at me and I’d always whistle the first part of the March, my first, and therefore favorite opera – and after a while it would respond, just a little. Anyway, the bird flew away one day. That’s something about birds and their totemically aligned people – they fly away one day. The bird flew away one day and I still whistled the same refrain – I’d trained myself you see. And then young Agatha, when she was shorter and more toothless than she is now, she’d want to learn to whistle because I whistle all the time idly and sing, sometimes, in narration of what I’m doing or will do. She could kind of sing, in an overwrought childish way – all the Beatles songs that she still loves best “Play nothing’s going to change my world again dad!” She’d say sitting behind me in the car on the long drive up from Akron and I’d play it again. Across the Universe, across interstate-77 which bears all the responsibility for my messed up shoulder and antipathy for driving. Play it again. But when she wanted to learn to whistle, she learned the March too, and sometimes still, but for a long time – Always – we’d be going about our things and tasks and then one or the other would start to whistle it and then we’d be the whistling chorus. Down the long enameled hallway, down the long downhill by the presidents’ graveyard, down the street to the grocery that I alone manage to enjoy. So it comes on the phone and it makes a world of feelings. You know, I don’t think she’s ever heard Aida – not the whole thing, not really. We saw some ethnic club’s rendition, once, of – I want to say Rigoletto – which I favor forever, the woman is changeable, the woman is inconstant. The Duke will tell you. That was under the bridge – they set up on the decommissioned streetcars under the bridge and sang while we looked at the art, that didn’t much seem like art, but we were told and believed. Because if you arrange your thrift-store purchases just so, they are alchemized into Art, just as if you sing in the stylized fashion that you think must have been the way of the ancients- why then your old story is alchemized into a permanent and True Story.

When you go to the bridge, you go through the doors of the fancy Italian place on 25^th – and just on Sunday we went there again, not for the bridge, but for the fancy Italian event – my neice, my actual Niece – who turned 1, and who walked and was beautiful. My mother in the car frets about nonsense, my daughter and I – interested in the ephemeral. I’m told over and over: “She’s getting so big!” And I look at her and say: “You’re puny, you’re a tiny miniature child.” And carry her around because I have those merits and flaws. The father must never give you indifferent praise, only scoffing mockery – or else specific, encouraging enthusiasm. Listen Kid, you’re pretty good, sure, so is everyone else, what do you really have going on? And What I like about you best is the best that’s in you, you know what’s best in you? I’m going to tell you because I noticed. You’re so big is like you’re so pretty or you’re so smart. Sure you are. So’s everyone else. This is why you’re special to me. Ferocious, maybe but I am sorry for those who don’t have a fierce and thundering father, who knows what it is to be benign and what it is to be indifferent. We do great things, even if we imagine them. The baby is 1 year old. The dear baby, I love her and she is good. The baby is 10 years old, she is wonderful and 10, and ten. She is at the last edge of being a kiddo, a child-kid. Not even ever anymore scandalized by cursing, not even anymore secretive about having secrets. Some things are secret, personal, sure. Welcome to it. I think and tell her. You can’t resent it, I can’t, when she’s grown to be a person. That was the whole mission. Sure, it’s a long way to go still, but I have some faith – now.

Anyhow I drifted through my neighborhood to a new house, it’s fine. Not so fancy and fine as the house I was able to afford with a roommate – but roommates – they fall into love and when that happens it’s all over for the dream of the finer things. Abandon. And that’s better than fine, it’s fine – it’s time, you see, that I go on and live and die by my own indifferent contributions to the social order. I accept, I’ll accept. A girl I date sometimes, she told me about living in a cave, that she lived in a cave behind a waterfall, and I thought and think about how you can have this dream – this idea of what you’d like to happen, what you want to do – and someone once did that, someone got tired of that. Life is long.

At the baby’s first birthday I sit with my father and my young cousins, all men now – they want to talk to me about which phones I think are best and what types of things they ought to know to be better employed or better capable. I’m counted wise and I don’t disagree. I know much of Xbox. My father looks lost and sad, and tired. Above all. I never had the knack for talking to him, so I don’t feel a loss, not being able to. We try – he and I – not close, never, but he is there and I am here and it is because of him. He used to go to work and unselfconsciously his coworkers called him “The Great One.” I saw a man introduce his children to him once and said: “This is Mr. Great One.” I still think he’s great, but, he was young once and an athlete, a presence – physical, youthful, vigorous. He didn’t build a life for himself inside himself, he didn’t have a thing to look forward to when his knees failed or when his charm turned dated. I am learning this lesson. Still – still there is a lot in the generations – the xylem of the passing blood. I worry for him and I tell him – pointing to the lady who everyone acclaims – ‘100 years old’ “You know, you have to plan old man, you have to plan and think – because you’re going to be 100 before long. You’ve got another 30 years to go. What are you going to do?” Because it’s true, because you’d better have a plan to live till you’re 100.

I was 16, the first time the police put their guns on me. I was punk as fuck and, soft, sure, but still intimidatingly large. I could laugh and shake a building, and I could stamp my foot and make the foundations move. I was young and coming into my strength. The police, as you know, have no thought of murdering you regardless of your age. If you are a danger to the police it is as if you are a dog, you must be executed in the street. The police are holymen, and inviolate. Anyhow, I anticipated that’d I’d be killed long before I was 21 – which wasn’t the case, and then I couldn’t imagine 30 – what with the pills, beer, cigarettes, repeat. Now, now I know that life is long, and it’s not long enough to get everything in that I’d like to accomplish and it’s long enough that you’d better have a goddammed plan or you’re going to waste a lot of time staring at TV.

My kid wants to know – she’s maybe edging into confrontation with me? “You have a hundred notebooks dad, how many are full?” I tell her: “I’m in no rush kid, I’ve got time and I’ve got a plan.”

In the end we listen to cartoons and she makes sprites for her video game she wants to design and I make scrapbooks for no reason except that it’s better to have something to do than not. The sun goes down and we talk about fairies and I tell her: “When you’re the dungeon master, you have to come up with a reason that people can’t go back, and you have to always give people a reason to go forward, and no matter what – you can’t tell the players no. You have to get them to do what they want and then go along with that.”