It is maybe appropriate to mention at the outset of this particular story that I am currently listening to the song Ringo Rines by the first wave ska band The Skatalites.
That is to forewarn you of the kind of high that I am in right now.
It's an eccentric intellectual loner kind of high. I honestly feel like if I looked in the mirror right now I would see the face of Hunter S. Thompson.
All I have taken is, I don't really know how to say it other than to say A LOT of this cannabis tincture that is mostly sativa with just a tiny hint of indica (I believe the ratio is 80/20). And when I say A LOT, I think we are just going to have to go with that as a measurement. It's a lot more than a little. That's all I can say.
And I am writing right now because I feel like I am a genius even though I am perfectly aware that is just took me four tries to spell the word "genius."
But I've got to tell you about the conversation I just had with my dad.
It feels to me like it was lifted from a lost Tennessee Williams play.
No, wait. Faulkner.
My dad is...my dad is a dreamer.
But he is Joseph who is sold into slavery but kept there, no matter how many dreams he interprets.
He is the lie of the American dream. God, I know that sounds stupid, but he is kind of. He believed, still believes, that hard work and playing the rules of the game and believing you can achieve will bring you success.
And he believes that success means wealth and luxury and the newest things. That is what will make him happy. Once he has that, then life will be wonderful.
It's a blind optimism that borders on willful ignorance. He refuses to acknowledge his present circumstances. He has never once admitted that things are bad. He just talks about the next big thing that is about to happen to them.
In the past, it was "oh, we just applied to be pastors of this mega-church in Kentucky. It has 1500 members already! And a great bus ministry! And they've adopted this tiny town in Poland and fund a trip out there to build a school."
And my brother and I would say, "That sounds awesome. Kentucky seems beautiful."
And then he would say something like, "Yeah, well, we applied about a month ago and still haven't heard back at all, but yeah, I think we are really gonna like it there. Your mom is really excited."
My mom, of course, would know that getting such a position was unlikely.
My dad was not well spoken. He has a country mannered of speech and stumbles over his words. He comes from deep poverty. He's the son of a failed New Mexico rancher. A stern Irish Catholic drinker who rolled his own cigarettes and spent a lot of his elder years in Bingo halls. A man who always confused me with his eldest son. A man who once told me that you can't trust history, that the Confederacy only sounded like the enemy because it was the winners who wrote the history. This was in response to me telling him that I loved history. I was ten.
My dad struggled. He was dyslexic but never actually diagnosed as such. He was called stupid and retard.
So he started drinking at an early age.
By his senior year in high school he was a full fledged alcoholic.
He got into trouble with the law. He was given the option: join the military or go to jail. He enlisted in the navy.
The way he tells it, the night before he was headed out to boot camp he was invited to church by the little old lady that lived next door to him. So he went. He says that he hadn't showered in weeks. That his hair was passed his shoulders. He says that he showed up late and that every eye turned to look at him when he walked into the tiny one roomed country chapel. He says that there was only one seat left and it was directly in the front row.
He says that the preacher preached about hell and hope and that one can be born anew. And my dad says he wept and wept and cried out to God and God heard him and made him anew.
In the navy, he worked for the chaplain of the ship and preached his first sermon in the middle of the ocean. I know he also worked in the kitchens as a fry cook. This was his military experience.
He started dating my mom during this time and married her while on Christmas leave. I cannot at all say whether or not this is true, but I swear I heard once that they met because my mom (then a Southern Baptist) was caught egging the Assemblies of God church where my dad was learning to be a preacher.
It's probably not true. But I always liked that story. I liked that my mother chose to tell me that story at least once.
Anyway, they married. A beautiful farmer's daughter and a handsome rancher's son. They looked like hipsters do now. Thin and shaggy haired holding guitars and leaning on El Camino.
They first pastored a church outside of Taos, New Mexico. They were right by a hippie commune that got saved through the Jesus movement and whom my dad baptized in the river.
He says that couples would tell him that they "felt the Lord tell them" that they were supposed to swap spouses with another couple in the church.
After that, he made a life of pastoring various small-town New Mexico churches, each one in a slightly bigger town then the next, but never getting very big. I believe the biggest town we ever lived in was 36,000 people.
He once took a church in Idaho for a little over a year. My mom hated it. Said she wanted to commit suicide. It was either raining or snowing and the small towns up there are basically just bases for survivalists and white nationalists. Someone told them that they would have to be there for at least five years before anyone would open up to them. Until then they would be seen as outsiders and could not be trusted.
When I would ask him how it was there, he would tell me how beautiful it was and how the people were different, but really ripe for a new voice. He talked about maybe starting a radio show.
It would be his chance to really break out into a large and successful and wealthy church. It happened for Jimmy Swaggart. It happened for Jim Bakker. And they were folksy like was. And his story was way better. It was bound to happen. He recorded his sermons. He sent them out to people. Eventually my mom persuaded him to move back to New Mexico, for her sake.
But he could never speak well. He studied hard and overcame an amazing amount of financial and mental adversity to get a degree from a prestigious Assemblies of God university. My mom would write his papers for him. He would dictate ideas to her and she would translate them into something clearer and more concise. He would mix metaphors and switch letters around in words constantly when speaking. A lot of people found it endearing. A lot of other people mocked him for it. I mocked him for it. It embarrassed me. I vowed to be eloquent and well read.
But the thing was he was actually really smart. Really incredibly smart. And he worked harder than anyone I've ever seen. He has an incredible mechanical mind. He looks at a problem and thinks of an incredibly unconventional solution that works perfectly.
He would do that with cars and construction and even people in conflict. He did it through illustrated sermons that would last months. He did one on Song of Songs that my friend Zak still swears is one of the most beautiful things he has experienced.
He did an in depth study of Abraham once. This is a story that's what? Three or four chapters of the bible? My dad spent like three months on it. It was powerful. He probably doesn't know it but it was that series that made me want to become a religious scholar. A field which I am pursuing today.
And he might have mixed feelings about hearing that because me being a religious scholar means by necessity that I will never believe the way he does. I can never be literal with scriptures. I can never exclude the possibilities of other options. Or even no option. I choose to not believe so that I can understand.
My dad chooses to believe. He is suspicious of anyone who doesn't.
He pastored churches for 44 years. Never anything more than a few hundred people in attendance. But most of those few hundred people adored my dad. He had some major enemies. One family would put a "for sale" sign in our front yard every Monday morning. Every year for Pastor Appreciation day, this family and their friends would send my dad farewell cards.
But most people in the church loved them. They loved my dad for the reasons the other families hated him. He spoke simply and directly. He did not play politics. He was fair and did not care whether you came from money or had any major influence. He was Ned Stark.
And more than that, my dad fought for justice. He fought for social justice even though he did not know to call it that. Even though Fox News has convinced him that the words "social justice" are code for socialism.
My dad took a church that was historically white and middle class in a neighborhood that was demographically hispanic and economically poor and had the outright audacity to start having worship songs in Spanish. He organized an "Extreme Home Makeover" drive where he got volunteers to completely rebuild this elderly widow's house. Not because she attended our church, but just because she was our neighbor.
That's fucking beautiful.
He told his church that servers know that you just came from church. No one else dresses that nice on a Sunday. So if you are going to bother to go to a restaurant for lunch and bow your head to pray before you eat, you better make sure to tip at least twenty percent.
I love that story about him.
But I must also say that he never tips twenty percent himself. I must admit that we only pray before meals when we have guests over. I must admit that one year at Christmas, my mom asked my dad to read the nativity story from Luke as was our tradition and my dad says, "I think we've all heard the story enough. Let's just open presents. I must admit that even though I was not allowed to watch The Simpsons, I still did but with the volume down super low in the television of my room. I must admit that I could hear my parents watching it in the living room. I must admit that more than once I would waken up in the middle of the night to get water and would discover my dad watching late night HBO softcore porn movies. Given that I was just starting puberty at the time, I must admit that I would try to silently watch them for as long as I could. Sometimes my dad would sense that I was there and would switch the channel to fishing (always fishing), but other times my dad and I would watch softcore porn together. Possibly both of us masturbating at the same time. I would spend literally hours afterwards crying in repentance, swearing I would never touch myself again.
I wonder if he did the same.
I must admit that my dad had a major temper. I must admit that my dad broke my brother's arm once because he refused to get a haircut.
I must admit that my brother was beat, but that I mostly just hid from him out of sheer terror. Whenever my father tried to teach me masculine things that how to fix a car or ride a horse or shoot a gun or how to throw a ball or drive stick or ski or whatever, I would constantly be tense and terrified that I was going to do something wrong and that he was going to be frustrated. He did not speak well. I did not always understand what he was trying to teach me. He would throw things and break things and scream at me.
So I either stayed alone or with my mom as much as I possibly could.
{I've got to stop typing. My body is in immense pain, my fingers are numb, there is a shooting pain in my wrist. I will check in on this and see if it is worth continuing. Please let me know if you think so.}
5:15 p.m. - 2017-02-12
Recent entries:
Feeling Good. - 2017-03-18
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Feeling down - 2017-03-01
I still think The Secret is bullshit, but... - 2017-02-24
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