analogy

you make me real, and when we’re apart, I feel sorely the sense of something missing

living with you is so magical. every day i want to live. every moment i want to live. i want to feel the pain of fighting with you a thousand times more than the agony and sleeplessness (and simultaneous sleepfulness) of being separated from you. my space is so empty without you. my body is so empty without you. i pace frantically, filling my ribs with shapes and my belly with blocks and nothing fulfills me the way you do when you grin and your fireball eyes explode like marbles shattered glass all over my floor, cutting my feet and we bleed ice cream.

even when I try hard I still fuck it up

Nate,

I thought I’d send you a message to give you some words of encouragement. I kind of flipped out at Dad and tried to say as delicately as I could that I think he sucks for being ruled by pathos the way he is. Always try to remember that people usually live at the whims of their hearts and that beneath all that neurotic anxiety and irritability, our Dad is a good guy.

One of the best things about being an adult is that you get to deal with other adults, and especially your family and parents, on your own terms. I don’t think much of the other things about adulthood are very important. Staying up late, access to things forbidden to children and casual sex are all pretty overrated, but being able to put your parents on ignore is freaking chocolate covered golden diamonds. Now that I’m grown up, I get to do whatever I want and make my own mistakes and nobody will reprimand me, but that comes with the responsibility to do the right thing, and I try my very best to. I want to live a just and ethical life, leaving as small a footprint as I can and allowing the people around me to do as they please. This wisdom was hard won, and I made a lot of mistakes, but the benefit of that is that I can share my experience with you so that you don’t have to make those same mistakes. Hah, yeah right. Like anyone telling me anything when I was your age would have made a difference! I feel for you, kiddo. I’ve been in your shoes before, and it isn’t easy to be the bad guy.

So I guess I’m coming to you with advice. I’m only 26, and I still feel very young, but I notice how much faster the years go by, and this year I noticed for the first time the passage of a decade and realized kind of abruptly how precious little time we have in life. With that said though, the years between 14-18 went by in an instant in retrospect, and I tell you that in the hopes that it will be of some encouragement to you.

Before you know it, you’ll be old enough to do whatever you want. I really don’t think giving advice is ever really a good idea, since we’re so fallible, but if I were in your position, I would do my best to hold out, hunker down, suck it up and count the days. When you asked me if there was a Dave & Buster’s in Seattle, I laughed and Johannah and I talked about it, because it betrayed how precious little knowledge you have of the big city. Sure, there’s Dave & Buster’s here, but there’s a million things that are ten times better. There’s priceless jewels of experience here, and the same thing is true in every great American city. There’s places in Chicago, LA and NYC that blow Seattle out of the water, and just about everything in Seattle blows Dave & Buster’s out of the water, so you’ve got a lot to look forward to if you ever decide to get the heck out of Dodge. That’s what I would do, kiddo. If I was in your shoes, living in Key West with my father as a teenager, I would study hard in school, try to get a scholarship to a big university in either Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago or New York, and stay out of trouble until I could skip town.

I know you’re good with machines. I know you’re a clever kid, because you’ve got my blood. Maybe you could study electrical engineering. My friend up in Vancouver is doing that, and he’s a hiphop producer. Well, not hiphop in the strictest sense. It’s got guitars and live drums and, at first glance, might be considered kind of rock-oriented, but it’s just cooler than anything on the radio, and anyway he’s taking the knowledge that he gains with his electrical engineering degree and building synthesizers and other kinds of musical instruments to help him with his art. You could probably build some neat things, too, if you tried. I heard you like noise makers, and I like ‘em too. I’ve used a kind of musical instrument called a sampler, which is like an array of big buttons that each trigger sounds you record, and you can program the sounds to play in patterns. You could totally build one by yourself, dude. They’re easy, and you’re a smart kid who can build stuff. I’ve come to believe that most people are more capable of that sort of thing than they give themselves credit for. You could totally do it. You can totally do it. I think you should!

Anyway, kiddo, I better wrap this up. I’m pretty pissed at Dad right now, because I feel like if you were acting out, it was totally about him and has precious little to do with you. I’m glad you’re going to get some medication and therapy and stuff though, because God only knows what I would have been like as a kid without being heavily medicated.

I want you to know I care about you. I think you’re an interesting person, and I’d like to see you do well, but it’s totally up to you. Again, my advice to you is to hold out, hunker down, dig in and try to engineer a way out of Key West and into your own, independent life. Become a fully realized individual. This shit that’s going on in your life right now isn’t your fault, and you can totally find a pathway that will lead you to your ideal. Be well.

Love,
Chris

I am probably going to need to ban my dad.

I’m afraid.

The first time I ever heard Joy Division was on Are-Oh-Vee, which was a video request show on a UHF channel in Los Angeles. I was in junior high and into Marilyn Manson, and I had called in asking them to play something “gothic”. They played Love Will Tear Us Apart.

she touches the most virginal parts of me and I feel like a newborn baby when she loves me