Some on this site say “don’t have kids” and that is probably good advice for many of the scum-sucking bottom feeding shitbags of the FSA that inhabit much Detroitadelphia, New York Shitty, Chiraq, LA and a lot of the US(S)A.
There are some good dads out there but the fact that they aren’t the norm anymore and the “state” has been replacing them has created, perpetuated and intensified much of the issues and problems that ail this country/society. A society of boys that have no fathers never cease to be children. Does that not describe so much of what is wrong?
This article from ROK offers some very keen insight.
June 22nd, 2014
We Must Not Deny The Importance Of Fatherhood
By 2Wycked
Some years back, a South African game reserve was faced with a problem: they could no longer support all the elephants on the reserve. As such, they decided to move some of the elephants to another reserve. Given the enormous size of elephants, only helicopters could safely transport them. Since adult male elephants are much heavier than females, the reserve decided to only transport female adult elephants and young males to another reserve.
After a few weeks at the new reserve, the rangers started to find the bodies of rhinoceros’ violently gored to death. The rangers couldn’t suspect poachers, as their tusks were intact. So, they found out it was the juvenile male elephants who had killed the rhinos. Further, it wasn’t just the rhinos who had been stomped on and gored to death, as other animals on the reserve had been attacked by the young male elephants. This sort of behavior bewildered the rangers, as such violent behavior is unheard among male elephants.
The rangers realized that the problem was the lack of adult male elephants. They decided to find a way to helicopter adult male elephants to the reserve. Within weeks, the young males had stopped goring other animals and began to comport themselves as male elephants generally do.
While man is not a wild animal like elephants are, we both share a sacred duty to our younger kin. We both shoulder the duty and privilege of shepherding young males into the seriousness of adulthood. For human males, the ritual of ushering young boys into confident, masculine men is one of sublime gravity. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed as such back in the 1960′s:
From the wild Irish slums of the 19th Century Eastern Seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken homes, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations for the future – that community asks for and gets chaos.
On the grossest consequences of feminism and the concomitant collapse of the family is the devaluation of fatherhood. Feminism fosters and encourages “independence” from men in women. To be a single mother is a badge of pride, a social sign that you don’t want or need provisioning—of any kind—from a man. In order to make this socially tenable, the concept of fatherhood must be ruthlessly devalued in order for women to make believe their male-free families are meeting the needs of their children.
Media and academia aid this devaluation in many ways. Books like Peggy Drexler’s Raising Boys Without Men and Lenore Weitzman’s The Divorce Revolution strive to convince women that men simply are not necessary for a functioning family. It needn’t be argued that Women’s Studies and the constellation of Critical Studies programs in academia have greatly aided in dismantling fatherhood. The swarming mass of media targeted at women serve to allay any concerns that women might entertain about being a single mother or tossing out her husband out onto the curb.
While this approach is loved by society—scads of single mothers who exist purely to spend men’s money on products branded by capitalism—the effects are deleterious. Study after study finds a clear and direct correlation between fatherlessness and violence, sloth and depression in young males. Sites like ROK have to spend all sorts of time guiding, aiding and counselling young men who have no father or grew up with a weak or distant one. We see the malaise in real time, with movements like MGTOW, PUA’s, MRA’s, and even sites like 4chan give voice to the angry and conflicted souls of modern men.
A common sentiment that threads all these disparate movements together is the poverty of the modern man’s soul. Unable to properly value themselves or find solid footing in life, young men find themselves adrift in society, coping with porn, video games, drugs and—most unfortunately—violence. They stew endlessly in their own juices, much like a middle-aged English teacher who fiddles with a couple novel manuscripts when he’s had too much cheap bourbon. Unable to reasonably appreciate their place in their own life and society, they simply pass from experience to experience, none the wiser from it all nor any happier.
The bulwark against this listless melancholy is fatherhood. When fathers are present and strong, they combine both the firm hand of experienced maturity with the soft touch of love that allows boys to grow into strong, self-assured men. They place demands on their young from a place of paternal love in order for them to have clear, level-headed views on life and their place in it. They are there when the winds of cruel fate batter mercilessly on the souls of their young boys; they are there when their sons achieve their wildest dreams.
Fatherhood isn’t just a necessity for raising healthy boys, it is a necessity to prevent social destruction. One need only take a cursory glance at black America to realize the structural problems that inhere when men are not present as fathers. The violence, laziness and general indifference of the stereotypical black man speaks mostly to the collapse of black men as fathers. Unable to transmit masculine values to their sons, boys grow up dominated by their mothers and their adulthood reflects this. You get men obsessed with shoes, fashion and unable to mediate their own testosterone-fueled aggression. They grow up to be men with no grounded sense of masculinity.
Some years back, I heard some news about a friend from my youth. He grew up in the shadow a sulky, working class mother. His father was a garden-variety felon with a strong like for cheap booze and loose bar skanks. His mother moved on from unstable loser to stable douchebag without a care for his needs. Despite her constant proclamations of love and devotion to her son, it was a cloying and superficial display that betrayed her ambivalence about her son. He was a smart, capable and handsome young man, but he had no stable sense of self or masculinity. Marijuana and whiskey were his choices as an adult to cope with the depressing reality of his life.
I got a call not more than a couple years ago and a friend told me that he had cashed in all his chips with a .38. I remember sitting back, remembering playing Twisted Metal with him and listening to crappy Top 40 radio in junior high. I remember trading tall tales about where we would go in life after we stole a six-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade as sophomores. I remember graduating high school, the world before us, a world that was fit to be conquered by us.
I also remember hearing that he had taken his own life a few years later. His relationship with his mother was one of conflicted frustration, but what I remember most was his distressed relationship with his father. Being a man with an involved father, I couldn’t understand the foreign look in his eyes when he spoke of his father. Some boys are called before their time to shoulder burdens that should be carried by adults. He had to learn to be a man with no man to teach him.
I can’t help but wonder what his life would have been like had his mother and father ditched their ego’s and put their children first? What if he knew he could call his father at any hour of the night, knowing his father is always there to help him navigate the confusing tides of life? I don’t doubt for a second that he would be alive and well today if that was the case. Given his talent and smarts, I have no doubt at all that he would be a successful young man with a bright future ahead of him.
http://youtu.be/GmerFuzRNZ4
Yet, that is not the case. He lived in a society that tolerated and openly embraced men absconding from fatherhood, a society that revolves around what women want from men. If that is money, then she gets a child support order; if that is to be celebrated for having some random seed vacuumed from inside her, then break out the champagne. He lived in a society that devalued the positive value men bring to the table as devoted fathers.
He was simply one man, who is interred in a lonely cemetery in town nobody has heard of, but his story is emblematic of so many men. Listless with no substantive demands made of them by caring fathers, modern men are a rudderless rendition of their grandfathers. His fatal decision is an aberration for most men, but his personal disquiet is mirrored in the souls of far too many men in America.
Fatherhood isn’t a concept to be taken lightly in any sense of the word. Fatherhood is the capstone of masculinity in a healthy society. The deleterious consequences that result from the erosion of fatherhood cannot be understated. Fatherhood, simply, is the bedrock of society. Any society that openly embraces the rearing of youth without male influence is a society due for a serious reality check.
Original HERE.
Harry ,….don’t have kids …get a cat .
The best things you can give your kids are a good mother and a good father. Men and women have different things to bring to the table, and they are all necessary for a child’s healthy development.
In my case, having had a bum of a father who absconded on the lam from authorities, leaving his wife and children destitute with a stack of bills from his car wrecks, and with a family reputation wrecked by his drunken binges and barroom brawls, i was was blessed with a wonderful grandfather who was to pass far too early, when I was 13. Yet I at least had the benefit of a great example of what a man should be and what I should look for in a partner, and I enjoyed a close relationship with that wonderful, talented, brilliant, and loving man. I also had many great uncles and cousins, so I did not grow up, as too many young women these days seem to do, with the expectation that every man I meet will be a drunken bum or felon who I will have to support, when he isn’t doing time.
Too many kids these days are growing up without not only a decent male example, but with a narcissistic, unstable mom who is abundantly unable to either provide for her kids materially, or or in any other way. How can a “woman” who started breeding at 17 or younger, dropped out of school reading at a 3rd grade level if even, and is a sexual target for every gangbanger for a mile around, provide her children with love, stability, daily basic care, and impart to them the skills they will need to even make it through school, let alone negotiate the adult world?
I raised a son, whom is a true man and caring, devoted father, with only some assistance from his father. Whom was pretty actively involved in my son’s life, and “raised” my son the majority of the time from the ages of 15 to 18.
He tried to teach the manly arts of belittling women, hating other races, drunken brawling, scamming the disability and insurance systems, avoiding work as much as possible, continuously believing yourself to be victimized by your boss and others, and generally being a complete, farking, asshole.
To this day he credits himself with all that is good, honest, ethical, loving and hardworking/industrious about our son.
What is telling is that the moment my son was able to make the decision as to where to live, he moved in with me and avoids his father as much as he can while attempting to maintain a relationship.
It doesn’t take a strong man to raise a great human. It does take one human whom puts the child’s future personality first.
Sadly, I see lots of two parent families that have completely missed this point.
What amuses me most is that even the “strong dad” supporters are furthering the gubment agenda of prison schooling. After all, when these so-called “strong dads” fail to materialize their own words will be used to turn the kids over to the state.
Strong dads, and moms, should be demanding that ALL parents, whether male, female, or god-knows-what, raise their children to be loving, productive, intelligent, questioning, hard-working, polite humans.
They, along with the gd schools, are failing miserably at this. But damn do we know how to point fingers at one another and remain firmly divided and dissenting.
So it freaking goes…
controlled female sexuality -> paternity -> high investment parenting -> civilization -> air-conditioning and flying machines
uncontrolled female sexuality -> no paternity -> no investment parenting -> no civilization -> people living in mud huts and eating dirt
The stupid motherfucker. Oh he was there alright, in the emotional and psychological state of a 5 year old kid. You got any idea what it’s like to grow up as a boy and your “father” is a 5 year old kid? One that slaps, hits, beats with a belt, and is just every so slightly sadistic. He couldn’t even use the excuse of being an alcoholic. He was just *that* fucked up. Still is.
Yea. I know exactly what it’s like to not have a male adult to explain, reassure, and support. All through my fucking childhood.
I know what it’s like to be taught how to drive…by your mother, because they were separated by then and that fuckhead was only about himself.
I know precisely what it’s like to no know how to shave until you’re 20, and even then a female friend casually shows you how one day.
You ain’t got time for all the other endless examples. That simple, sorry son of a bitch damaged me. For years.
But you know what? I didn’t fuck up at all. I succeeded in life DESPITE having that as a father. I sent myself to undergrad, then grad school, became successful in a career, had some awesome relationships, and was a much better man than he’ll ever be.
Know what else? He’s still the same 5 year old he was then.
So fuck all you fathers. Who needs you. You fucking right it’s more than possible to succeed in spite of a male in your life. Fuck him, and fuck you all.
Game ,that rage and bitterness is going to cause you health problems. Learning to forgive takes away alot stress.
bb, orale! hermano.
unless your name was kennedy, most boomers grew up with parents like the above. ok, some boomers, not stuck and admin. those were the days before Benjamin Spock and my parents didn’t read self-help books, much less parenting books. they were pretty lenient in their own eyes considering they had grown under worse conditions at the beginning of the depression.
nowadays and since the 80’s perhaps, a parent can go to jail for dring to raise a hand to their child. i know because my sister went to jail for a few days because in her frustration, she thrw a bicycle chain at her son who was running from her in the backyard. she didn’t even make contact. i would have made contact. to the day she died, she was still scrounging money to give her ‘adult’ kids.
where did this idea come from other than a promise we silently made to ourselves, when i grow up, my kids will not grow up like this. like the day i turned 13 and my mom tells my dad, juan is 13 today and i stand in the typical fearful stance looking at the old man to see what he’ll say about that. will i hear happy birthday? i never have. a thick calloused hand comes from somewhere and slaps my face hard. get a job, he says. i hate birthday parties, i never have one. fuck that. my parents never celebrated such things.
when i was in middle school, i met a new kid who had moved into our old house. it was nice to visit the place where i grew up for a few years. i recall torturing kittens, throwing them against the wall of the house. i still have a nice scar on my hand from the kitten’s claw as he attempted to hang on to me. my new friend had no dad. he and his brother told me stories of gang fights. the younger brother had a scar across his nose. i asked why and he said, some dude hit me with a shovel. we used to get in a line, one gang facing another and we’d go at each other with chains, shovels, hammers, whatever.
i certainly learned a lot of stupid stuff from them. the only thing that saved me was that i feared my dad more than anybody in the world. he would threaten me in his poor English pronunciation, I killin you. that was it.
Bill Cosby had a story of his dad, one they called ‘the gian’t. i enjoyed his funny take on it. we didn’t find our own dad so funny. we lived in fear of his coming home as there were always accounts to settle.
my dad did one thing (a lot of things, really) that i am grateful for. he loved drinking to much to kill himself like the neighbor kid’s dad did one night. I could understand if he killed me, I would never understand if my dad killed himself, he was the one person we counted on and if he fell, well, that would have meant there was no bedrock under the ground, nothing.
I was once confronted, well, approached would be the better word, but these two women wanted a child, I was enticed, this was San Antonio, by having sex with both of them, but I told them I could not accept having a child that I knew nothing of.
It wasn’t about being gay, or them making a gay son or daughter, but that I was left out of the process of having contact with this child brought about by heterosexual matings.
After all all children are born of that and though one might prefer same sex they cannot pro-create.
Every gay is born by hetero-means.
And no hetero is born by gay means.
But they are our children.
I don’t know the future, maybe my daughter might become gay, maybe her boyfriend will, maybe they will have kids and one of them be gay.
I have to remember they, none of them, were born of gay sex.
That was a rather well paragraphed rant, with lots of periods, and from some old tv shows, from an intoxicated dingo Coyote.
what is more scary to me, two guys simulating sex (real sex is between a dick and a vagina) or fanatics who are willing to kill over their own particular beliefs? how can a man kill his own daughter to defend his honor? what kind of man could kill his gay son?
i don’t drink. I have diabetes and am under strict orders from my chinese doctor who will not put up with bullshit. it’s just me being me. anymore stupid remarks?
beautiful blonde – i don’t understand how you can say some of the things you say…
coyote – i’m a guy and i’m a beaner, you wouldn’t understand.
El Coyote, if you don’t drink, you better start injecting some insulin quick.
I’m calling bullshit on the ‘kid who moved into my old house who had a scarred nose from getting whacked with a shovel in a gang fight’ story. Besides being totally irrelevant, it is also unbelievable.
I do however, believe 100% you are a beaner. In fact,your comments always sound like Cheech to my inner voice.
PS Do you have any good home remedies for scabies?
Dad was a good man and cared about his family. He made a lot of mistakes but he cared about his family. He has been gone for 35 years and I am as old as he was then. All of his kids knew he loved and cared about us. We loved him but perhaps more we respected him. I just hope my kids think the same about me in 35 years.
“You got any idea what it’s like to grow up as a boy and your “father” is a 5 year old kid? One that slaps, hits, beats with a belt, and is just every so slightly sadistic. He couldn’t even use the excuse of being an alcoholic. He was just *that* fucked up.” ————– Game Over
I sure do.
My dad’s parents were DIRT POOR German-Romanian peasants, so much so that they would “rent out” their son (my father) to a pig farmer for months at a time, in exchange for some scraps of meat. The pig-farmer wouldn’t let my father stay in his house. Dad slept with the pigs. When dad did return home he would see his father beat the living shit out of mother on a regular basis. And then the German Army swooped in and forced him to carry a gun. And then the Russians captured him and sent him to their wonderful camps. And when the war was over the Brits took him and forced him to work in their coal mines for a couple years until he got so sick they got rid of him. The he wound up in Austria, knocked up my un-wed mother (with me), and then because of that he had to leave and go to America. And when we got to the Land Of Opportunity, for a few months we lived in the basement of an abandoned building in NYC with no running water or electricity. All this FUCKED UP my father pretty badly. Real. Bad. And he took it out on me.
I was TERRIFIED of him. One day I brought home a lousy Report Card from first grade. (Hard to get good grades when one doesn’t understand the fuckin’ language.) I knew he was gonna beat my ass. So, I hid under the bed and tried to pretend I was dead. He found me, of course, and beat my ass anyway. So, I joined the Air Force at 18 to get the fuck away from him, when I got out I went to college in NJ, and left for god-forsaken Indiana after I graduated, again, to get the fuck away.
I was about 40 years old when we took our kids to visit them. On the last day of the trip, just minutes before leaving to go back to Indiana, a HUGE screaming argument broke down between me and my father. My oldest son told Opa, “I love you”, and my dad just smiled. Fuck!! I mean, I REALLY let him have it. I told him how much I hated him for never telling me once in 40 some years, “I love you.”, and now he was pulling the same shit with his own grandchildren. I told him what a fucking loser he was, and how much I hated him.
After my 15 minute or so tirade, he simply went into the house. I gathered up the family and we went to the car. I was so shook up I just sat there a few minutes …. long enough for my mom to show up. She was crying about all this, and asked me not to leave in such a rage … that I should go and apologize. And I thought to myself, “Are you fucking kidding me??? He deserved that … a long time ago!!!”. But, I have a big soft spot for my mom, and I didn’t want to add to her misery. So, after a few more minutes, I decided to go ahead and see what my dad was doing, and MAYBE mutter an insincere apology.
He was in the basement. He was polishing his shoes. He was crying. I had never ever even once seen him display THAT emotion. I said, “Dad, “, and before I could get out another word he whispered in a barely audible voice, “I did the best I could.”.
If I recall correctly, my immediate thought was to let him know “NO!! YOU DID NOT!!!”. But, I couldn’t. I just kept my mouth shut and looked at him … for what seemed like an eternity. What I saw, for the first time in my life, was a broken and imperfect man. A man who himself had seen more heartache than I could probably even imagine. Moments later tears gushed from my own eyes like a river. I did not apologize, though. I just reached out and hugged him and said, “I forgive you, dad.”. And he said, for the first time ever, “I do love you.”. And, I said, “Yea, I know.”, because at that very moment I DID know … and that due to his fuckedup-ness he just didn’t have the ability to say it before. (BTW, he’s hardly ever said it since.)
Game Over, my friend, I am NOT preaching at you. Maybe your dad was even worse than mine. You mentioned your dad was “just ever so slightly sadistic”. My dad wasn’t that. While it seems I’ve walked the same path as you, I certainly have not actually walked in YOUR shoes. Your pain, your disappointment with your dad, is unique to you. Maybe the damage to the relationship is irreparable. But, there is one thing you can “fix” …. and, that is, yourself. I’m talking about your anger. It will destroy you, not him.
When I said to my dad, “I forgive you”, it was THE most liberating thing I have ever done in my life. It set ME free from myself. It really didn’t change my dad at all. He’s still an angry man. He’s still fucked-up in many ways.
Last week I went to my parents house to weed and lay down some mulch. Mom always wanted some pretty red mulch for years. Dad, for whatever crazy reason, is an anti-mulchite. So, I bought 15 bags of red mulch, drove to the house at 6:30AM so I could get started before he woke up. He came out around 8:30AM …. and went absolutely fucking ape-shit. He ordered me to stop. I calmly said, “No. Putting down mulch will keep the weeds away, and mom won’t have to break her back weeding. Besides, it looks pretty. I started it, and I’m not stopping until it’s done.” He can’t kick my ass anymore so, he just stormed back in the house, screaming curses, and he slammed his bedroom door so hard that the door knob fell off!! Ha! Like I said, he’s got some serious issues, and he is today the same person I hated most of my life until that eventful day.
It didn’t change him. It changed ME. There’s something really magical and beautiful that happens when a person decides to bury hate. I run into so many people who say they “just can’t do it”. Ms. Freud’s psychology practice is littered with the corpses of people who come for counseling and months later leave in the same state they started because they can’t take that final step, forgiveness. “You just don’t understand!!”, they claim, “what they did can never be forgiven!!”. And so they make the much MORE difficult choice … think of how much time, effort, and energy it takes to fuel that fire …. the choice to keep their anger. They’ve harbored their anger for so long – it’s now part and parcel of who they are — that to get rid of it is to lose their identity. It’s heart-breaking, really, when I just KNOW they could be set free with the much simpler choice of saying, “I forgive you.”
Please don’t be mad at me for sticking my nose in things you may feel I know nothing about. I’m just telling you my story, and what worked for me (and, I truly believe in my heart also for countless others). You CAN do it. Maybe you’re not ready to make that leap today, or tomorrow, or many tomorrows. That’s OK. For everything there is a season, and your timetable is yours alone. Just know that you are in my thoughts and I’m hoping, and believing, that your time will come when you see the truth of what I say. And then, you also, will be truly free.
For now, just think on these things.
Peace.
Peace.
“Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”
———- Buddha
More Buddha wisdom ….
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Bullshit Sommelier says:
1. I’m calling bullshit on the ‘kid who moved into my old house who had a scarred nose from getting whacked with a shovel in a gang fight’ story. Besides being totally irrelevant, it is also unbelievable.
2. I do however, believe 100% you are a beaner. In fact,your comments always sound like Cheech to my inner voice.
Funny you mention that I sound like Cheech Marin, I don’t speak with his exaggerated accent but if it sounds more colorful, then go for it. Billy sounds like Homer Simpson to me and that makes his writing more entertaining.
You don’t have to believe anything i wrote but, let me help you, the story is not expository, it is a tale told by an idiot. From my vantage point now, my father was right, but I looked at things differently back then. I particularly laugh at the fact I don’t remember my other birthdays but my father made my 13 birthday quite memorable without the unnecessary expense of a bar mitzvah. I offered a contrast to my father in the neighbor’s most excellent, sober and hardworking dad with a beautiful wife (she was a beautiful woman, she looked like Jennifer Lopez with all the accouterments. She went out nights. Her husband shot himself one night when she was out.) I offer Juan with a dad and I offer my irrelevant fatherless friends who had a couple of zip guns in the house. They had come from the meanest barrio in town, the old San Juan barrio. Naturally, the story of the shovel sounds incredible but he was there, I wasn’t and they were 13 yo boys and I believe the story of the fights. The point to this irrelevant inclusion is that I had my father’s threats to control me while they had no fear of anything, of any consequences. Notice the stupid kid I was, hanging out with bad kids, torturing kittens.
You have to use your noggin, bullshit, I can’t ‘splain everything to you. I suppose you don’t believe LLPOH knocked that kid on the head with a brick either.
Stuck, I hope he reads what you have written and takes it to heart.
Your story made me cry, this week I’m always easy to cry (Mom passed on 07/01/01), this just set me off today.
Forgiveness is tough, but you are so right, is not as tough as harboring hatred and anger that poisons your world.
Seems many of us here have old-fashioned, hardened, dad stories. I could add mine, including the tale of how he told my first husband to “don’t marry her, she’ll turn out a bitch just like her mother,” which is now funny, but was held in hatred for many a year.
Hugs my friend.
That is so funny, Tess. My wife said her brothers would tell their friends that she and her sisters were “the maids”.
Stuck’s story made me tear up a bit, then I remembered how macho I am. Ha. My dad cried at the drop of a hat. The former boxer was no pushover but he was emotional. I spent my youth like I was just part of my mom’s stoic family but growing older, I have reacquired a lot of my dad’s expressiveness.
El Coyote
I have observed this quality in other latin cultures (italian, spanish, beaner, there are many common threads). The men get progressively more weepy the older they become. All the machismo slowly transforms into excessive sentimentality. I know this because I am a brain surgeon/psychologist, who travels the world drinking excellent scotch.
Stucky – in all seriousness – excellent post.
The dumbshit barbarian who says he tortured small animals by hurling them against the nearest handy brick wall says I sound like Homer Simpson.
I don’t know which is worse – that you’re a self-admitted sadist who enjoys torturing and killing small animals, that you have bullshitted this whole time – trying to claim the moral high ground – knowing that this is true, or that you think The Simpsons are somehow still relevant…
Your hypocrisy is breathtaking. Well, in retrospect, no it’s not. The little bean bag sadist who tortured and killed small animals calls me a bully and a bullshitter, the whole time sitting on this information – like his shit don’t stink.
What other skeletons are you hiding in your closet, hypocrite?
I always thought Billy sounded more like Francis on Full Metal Jacket.
“Hugs my friend.” ——- TE
Right back at you girl, a hundredfold. (I’m so sorry about your mom, and this being a tough week.)
You too, El Coyote. Thank you for opening up and telling your story … which I always enjoy.
Bullshit,
Your first name is appropriate.
For the record, I sound more like Jethro Clampett than Francis…
Billy, the topic is dads, stay on subject. If you don’t care to share, shut the fuck up. Seriously, your macho schtick gets old.
BS, Francis is from Stripes, did you mean Lawrence?
How embarrassing. I meant Francis from Stripes.
My next guess would have been Francis the Mule.
I imagine Billy is busy writing his opus Opa, good on you Billy.
‘If any of you schmucks make light of my Internet postings, I’ll kill ya’
Sorry Billy, but try as I might I can’t read you as jethro.
“Billy, the topic is dads, stay on subject. If you don’t care to share, shut the fuck up. Seriously, your macho schtick gets old.”
Why doncha shove a burrito up your ass and beat some more kittens to death, tough guy? Fucking barbarian.. spawn of a drunk Mexican gravedigger and a rancid Tijuana whore..
I can talk about what I want, when I want and no fucking greasy taco nigger is gonna tell me otherwise…
Fuck off.
“Sorry Billy, but try as I might I can’t read you as jethro. ”
Sounds like a personal failure… might want to work on that.
I think about my father almost every day. He’s been dead for a long time. More than 25 years now.
He was a good man, but he had plenty of faults. He did on occasion beat my ass. He might have been an alcoholic, but he wasn’t a mean drunk. He taught me how to drive him home so he wouldn’t run off the road and kill anybody.
He grew up in grinding poverty that I can’t really fully appreciate. Fifth kid. Mother died when he was five. Mama told me one time he told her the only way he ever knew it was Christmas when he was a kid was that Grandpa bought a bottle of whiskey and put it on the mantle.
They were subsistence farmers. Lived on credit all year and paid their bills when the cotton was picked. Once a year. If they made any money. Lots of people lived that way back then, where I’m from.
When my parents got married they went on their honeymoon…to West Texas, to go boll picking. That was before mechanical cotton picking caught on…1943.
Later he would become a derrickman in the oilfield. Until he got knocked off the monkey board and broke his back. It took him a year, but he recovered and then drove an oil field truck, a five ton Mack, for four more years. That all happened before I was born.
He was a workaholic. When I was growing up he always worked nights at the factory, and in the daytime he built barns, corrals, and custom barbed-wire fence. When I was old enough, he made me his helper. He taught me a lot. Later I worked at the factory too, right before he retired. He was a master millwright, and there he was held in awe, because he knew everything about everything mechanical and could set-up, repair, install and run any piece of equipment they had. And GE had some serious equipment in that plant.
What I judged him on and found him lacking was the way he lived on the debt hamster wheel, always spending money he didn’t have on things he didn’t need, and generally not paying too much attention to whether we had stuff like new clothes, a nice home or any of the other things I thought he should have done for his family.
And he never had time for playing catch or basketball or coming to my various school functions. He mostly worked and slept, and I saw him coming and going. He was frequently cranky.
But he had many, many friends. He was the kind of guy they used to say would give you the shirt off his back.He was always going out of his way to help someone who needed it. When we buried him there were hundreds of mourners. So many men lined up to shake my hand offer me their condolences, it took more than an hour. I was deeply moved that day.
He had excellent White Trash credentials, but he was not a racist. He was a product of his time, and the N word was in his vocabulary, but when he used it there wasn’t any hate in it. I can remember going hunting and fishing and he would take fish and game and drop it off at at a black woman’s house he called Aunt Ada. I finally figured out that she had been the part time housekeeper my grandpa hired to to help him with the stuff he couldn’t do. She was the closest thing to a mother Dad ever really knew.
The last thing he ever did was to drive down here to see my son, right after he was born. I knew he was sick. He’s struggled with cancer for five years. I never once heard him complain, though, and I didn’t realize how short his time was. He literally never made it home from that trip. Passed out on the way home and went straight to the hospital, where he died a few days later, never having regained consciousness. I had a chance to talk to him and make my peace with him before that, when he was here, and I’ll always be grateful for the talk we had. He knew he was about to go, but he wanted to see his first grandson.
I think about him when I’m out on the stead, trying to do the things we used to do together. I wish I’d paid more attention and asked more questions. He never got to see my place. I’m sorry for that.I believe he would have loved it, and would have loved helping me get it fenced and buildings built. I’m by myself a lot out there, and I imagine him there with me. I have long since forgiven him for any real or imagined imperfections. He was a hell of a man, and I miss him a lot.
Game Over, your father sounds just like my father. Fortunately, I had a wonderful mother who supported us herself and managed to keep us decently fed and clothed on the kind of incomes women could make in the 60s, and provided a stable, loving home, while teaching us what we needed to know to succeed as “latchkey” kids, because she could not afford sitters in those first few years after the separation from my father, what with paying down the car repair bills for his multiple car wrecks- his insurance company had long ago canceled his coverage- for a car that was repo’d because he gambled away the payment money. She couldn’t even afford to divorce the bum, which meant that she had to pay elevated car insurance premiums because she was still officially married to him, and he was an uninsurable driver. He went on the lam when I was 10 years old because there was an active warrant for his arrest for a serious hit-and-run accident.
My mother always said that she didn’t have a husband and 2 girls, but had 3 kids and he was the biggest baby of them all. I was relieved when she sadly told my sis and I that he’d left and most likely would never return, because I was sick of being slapped and screamed at for things I couldn’t even understand were offenses, like walking between him and the teevee set when he was lying on the sofa watching it while eating cold leftovers. He spent his frequent periods of unemployment, in an era in which almost every man with a high school diploma could pull down a decent average living, watching TV and messing up the house while Mom worked to support the family, so she then could come home to a house that was a total disaster area and spend the evening cleaning and cooking. She was lucky to get 5 hours sleep a night in those terrible years. The worst blow was losing our house to foreclosure, a rare and disgraceful event in 1960, because the bum lost our house payment money at the horse tracks.
I wish I could say that all of the above were the worst things my father did, but they are not. I would much rather not discuss some of the things he did to us that were far worse, but suffice it to say that my sister and I both nursed hot, rancid hatred of him for a long time, and my sister still does. I am trying to forgive, simply to have peace. While I do not revere his memory and would never lift a finger to even contact him if he were still alive, I released the anger and hate because these toxic emotions were harming me too much. They consume the energy that could go to enjoying your life and the beauty that surrounds you, and that you need to accomplish your goals. Most of all, though, you cannot love while you are consumed with hatred.
Eddie, I love your post about your dad.
Parents don’t have to be perfect to be great in their way. After all, who IS perfect? Your dad sounds like a guy who was pretty good in most ways.
What is the old saying about great people? That their faults are of their place and time, but their greatness is of themselves. That sounds like your dad.