You Continue to Let Me Down. Again. I am Getting Up.

What legacy will I leave my children? You know, as they are left with this brutal, and yet, all the while, cripplingly beautiful world? Will I have been able to impart the microscopic shards of wisdom that I have been so lucky as to dislodge from the cliffs of monotonous and finite daily life? Fuck, I sure hope so. I hope the relationship they have with who I am for them - in my remaining life as well as after my death - is one that allows them to see the blip on the radar that is human life as a time to take in the scenery and never, ever shut their eyes, tune out their ears, or turn their backs on what it means to be whoever they are at any given moment.

Beyond that, what more could a father really want?

We have traditional ideas instilled into our minds that come from our station in life. It might be sourced in heredity, culture, history, and simple temporal interaction. We have a fairly distinct idea in this country of what it means to be happy, and to be successful as a man, as a woman, as an American, as a _________ (fill in the blanks).

Anyone who knows me at all knows that not only am I not a subscriber to traditional American values, I find them to be completely abhorrent.

While I am not so arrogant as to assume there can be nothing more complex than the human mind, I can also admit that there is also nothing more presumptuous (not to mention offensive) as assuming that whatever is out there, beyond our comprehension, is not only sentient but all-powerful. Don't we deserve better?

My children do.

My mother left me with some invaluable gifts.

Through my mother, I learned the value of unconditional love. Maybe this is something rare, maybe not. Either way, to know what it means to be raised snugly within the heart of someone who will always love you for who you are despite all your weakness and stupidity, well, this, my friend, this is something so essential that without it your life is virtually over, and you are virtually a fraction of a man and little more.

My son struggles. He's five; five-year-olds struggle. But what is he struggling over? Is he a walking indictment of the past and a walking testament to an uncertain future?

I sure as fuck don't know.

Do I want him to have money in his pockets, a degree under his belt, a nice car in the driveway?

Honestly?

Honestly, I don't give a fuck either way as long as he is confident in who he is, conscientious of what we all foster in potential, sensitive to the will of those around him, and most important of all, able to find beauty under the heaviest rock, behind the ugliest monster, in the pockets of the most crooked fool, because maybe these are the places of purity and we are too busy searching out the obvious in front of the brightest lights. It's amazing what lies in the dark, as hungry as anything you could imagine, and just as beautiful if only you know how to see it.

I am a lover of film, a lover of music, a lover of the word.

For me this is art. For me art is nothing more that the appreciation of what is beautiful.

Define it as you wish, and then throw it all away and start again. Go back to where you started. Forget it all. And again, and again, and again...

Life, in all its horror, in all the empty terror that I have never been able to shake, in the face of all of the above, still, and more than ever, is beautiful. Life is the very very idea of beauty, so intensely pure and unyielding that there is only one way to grasp it at all and that is through diversion.

Diversion?

Yes, the distractions of time, the clouds of place, of routine, of cyclical rebirth. In only this way can we be able to take what is essentially nothingness on the grandest of scale and see it as the source of all that is not only good, but all that is. Only a man could be so bold, so stupid, so weak, so vulnerable, and so very, very doomed.

I will never forget it and when I do, I am dead. When I forget this I am reduced to less than nothing.

What legacy am I handing down to my children?

A world that is dying, or a world that is perfectly willing to use us as blind and mute fodder in the place of tripping and losing the plot.

The legacy of loneliness, of emptiness, of fear, and of impossible separateness.

This is the life I have passed on to them.

Is it worth it?

In light of murder, of rape, of hatred, of rage, of apathy, of loneliness, of failure, of doubt?

You better fucking believe it.

Someone is reading this, someone wants to say something. Say it, whoever you are. Send me a post. Put yourself into it. Stop being a worthless fuck for one moment and make something real happen. Do it anonymously if you have to, it's only important that it gets done.

It won't.

It doesn't matter.

I hate this life.

It's the only life worth living. I'll keep it.