Dear Dad,

Ten years ago today you fashioned yourself a noose and bid the world goodbye. A large part of me thought you a coward then and an even larger part of me thinks so now.

It all seemed a little implausible – you were 35 and had four sons, aged 16 (me), 14, 9 and 3. Sure, your wife divorced you a couple of years after you walked out and moved away, but do you blame her? You refused to support your kids financially yet benefited from their unblinkered love for you, which for me bordered on worship. I know now what a fuck-up you were, but still now, looking back, it seemed to me that at that point in time at least that you’d finally come to peace with your flaws, but then you left permanently.

I mean, yeah you were seeing a strange woman at the time, but we all need an ego boost at times right? I say she’s strange, yet when you died there was an air of blame toward her wafting around. What is she to blame for Dad? You reached that tipping point and gave in. You consigned four boys to a fatherless life. And you will never know my beautiful wife or the child we’re expecting in September. You are to blame, Dad. You listened to the voice, gave in to temptation and You Hanged Yourself In Your Garage.

So anyway, what’s been happening with you, what have you been up to? Me? Wow, where do I begin…

You died in 1998, I was in Year 11. I went on to finish Year 11 and then Year 12. During this time I was with my first proper girlfriend. Never could ask you how that should all unfold, could I? I made do though. After Year 12 I spent a year in a video store haze before moving to Canberra for uni. That first year of uni was full-on! I fell in love, had my heart broken, made some great friends, learned what good writing was, got drunk a lot, got stoned a bit, lost a lot of weight and lived the stereotypical uni life, basically. Then I went home for summer and recuperated.

Second year in Canberra, 2002, I fell in love again and would spend the next two or so years in love with that girl. That was a pretty good year 2002, the first nine months of it anyway. The next year and a half I kind of stumbled through in a bit of a daze, lost interest in most things. The relationship was on-off and eventually died the death it needed to when I got blind drunk and came a cropper off a bridge, landing on a road 7m below and breaking my pelvis and left wrist. I’d been visiting Canberra that weekend, having moved back home to spend a year working and taking some time out to weigh up what I wanted to do. After that incident, I spent 3 months in bed and it was then that I think I finally laid to rest the demons that had hovered since you died. Six and a half years, and I finally felt like I was getting somewhere. Thanks, Dad.

Strangely, just as I was banishing you to my past and learning to think of my future and what I wanted to do with myself, some money of yours turned up. It wasn’t much, but it meant I could pay my mother back some money and also get a tattoo. I got a Celtic Circle Cross, just like you liked. I wanted to mark your memory in some way so that I could let you go properly.

The great amusement of this is that the very day I ended up getting that tattoo, is the day I met the woman who would become my wife. It was only that I happened to be on my way to the tattoo guy that I stopped by and visited a lady I worked with, and who had her niece visiting from Melbourne. That niece is now my gorgeous wife and is carrying your first grandchild. I guess in some way I should thank you, as when i finally started to let you go, I found my new life. And now, I wouldn’t change a thing.

There are some times that I really miss you Dad, and some that I don’t. I wish you were at my wedding and I wish you were helping me to get ready for fatherhood. I pit this, though, against the fact that you weren’t the greatest father, truth be told, and I come to believe that some of the greatest lessons that you taught me were those that I shouldn’t follow. I won’t be divorcing my wife as I will always work on my marriage if it ever needs it. I won’t be leaving my kids as I know how they’ll be if their father pisses off. Mostly, I won’t be a stubborn prick who bottles their bullshit up and lets it corrode my soul. You showed me what that can do.

Don’t get me wrong Dad, I don’t hate you. I have loads of great memories of you and in particular I will never forget the conversation we had when I was 15 and you were visiting. Those words have stayed with me and I do try to live up to them.

So now it’s a decade since you were last here, since that final voicemail on my NEC Fido mobile phone that you said was an expensive waste of money! It’s been an interesting decade, though I can see it’s made me into who I am. For kicking off 10 years of discovery and the building of me, I do thank you.

If there is something beyond the earthly world (I keep changing my mind about whether there is or not), perhaps we’ll cross paths then. You’ll be able to pick me out – I’ll be the one who looks a bit like you but who in a delicious conundrum, is ten times the man you were, partly thanks to you.

Your eldest,

Joel.

Danny Katz has it spot on – no one is happy being what they are anymore. Please read:

What happened to calling a couch a couch?
Danny Katz
March 13, 2008

Driving down Dandenong Road, and I get stuck at the lights beside a builder’s ute — I know it’s a builder’s ute because it’s got a builder’s ladder strapped to the roof, and a builder’s wheelbarrow tossed in the back, and a big boofhead builder sitting in the driver’s seat. But no, I’m wrong, this is no builder at all, because there’s a logo on the side of the ute that says “Building Practitioner”. Oh sorry, this guy is clearly a highly qualified DOCTOR OF BUILDING, a surgeon-in-residence of residences, with a PhD in the Biochemical Cardiology of Bathroom Renos (Honours, No Job Too Big Or Too Small).

What a wanker, I think to myself, and I lean out the window and give him a you-big-wanker stare, but after the lights have changed, and he’s two blocks away, and I’ve done a U-turn and am facing the opposite way.

Driving some more, I pull up at a furniture shop; I’ve come here to buy a new couch because my old couch is all frayed and limp and upholstered in a finely woven blend of take-away Pad Thai noodles and liquefied thigh fat. But I’m wrong about this place, this isn’t a furniture shop at all, because the sign out the front says “Homeware Gallery” — oh sorrrrrrrr-eeee this is clearly an Art Gallery Of Furnishings, a place where you’d buy a Jackson Pollock-spattered bookcase or an ottoman from the Ottoman Empire.

I go inside and a furniture salesman comes up to me, all Saba-suited and slick-haired — but I’m wrong again, he’s not a salesman, because the label on his lapel says “Domestic Interiors Consultant”. He says, “Can I help you sirrrrrrr?” and I say, “Why yes you cannnnnn, I’d like to look at your range of couches please” and he says, “Oh you mean our COLLECTION of urban MODULAR units”, because couches now comes in “collections”, and they’re all “modular”, so that every bit of couch can be swapped with every other bit of couch, like some kind of saucy, sordid sofa swinger’s club.

This is all too wankish for me, so I go next door to another furniture shop, but I don’t bother going inside because this one’s called The Sofa Workshop and I don’t particularly want to see sofa-beds workshopping scenes from Greek tragedies, or a Jason Recliner doing a Theatresports exercise and pretending to be a big French pouffe.

Driving back home, I pass suburban restaurants that have mysteriously re-spelled themselves into “Ristorantes”, and fruit shops that have magically turned into “Fruitisseries” and I start thinking about how nobody’s content to be what they are any more — we live in a euphemistic world where everyone and everything wants to sound bigger, better, more bitchin’ than they actually are.

Now, stay-at home parents are called Domiciliary Progeny Engineers. Council garbagemen are Civic Toxicological Hygienists. Stenchy old boozers sleeping on bus benches are Olfactory-Impaired Al Fresco Dysfunctionistas. A dog turd in a public park is a Municipal Colonic Canine Installation.

Everything’s talking itself up: you can’t just buy chocolate ice-cream from an ice-cream parlour (a Techno-Frappa Gelatorium) — now it’s called Wickkkked Heavenly Cocoa n’ Creme Therapy, but it tastes the same as the 40-litre tub of brown ice-confection from Aldi. You can’t just buy a normal pizza from a pizzeria (a Wood-Fired Peasant Mountain-Bread Trattoria): now it’s all tandoori abalone pizza or minted prunes pizza. Dominos is now doing a pizza called Seven Meats — I didn’t even know there WERE seven meats.

How I miss the old days when a couch was a couch and a pizza was a pizza and a builder didn’t practise laparoscopic pancreatic wallboard surgery.

Those simple honest days before we turned into a society of jumped-up, grandiloquent, self-important pomps living in a state of chronic WANKORIFFIA.