April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Yeah.

Three years ago today, my dad, after an epic and days-long struggle with chemo-related pneumonia, breathed his last breath. In true Joel Dobbin fashion, it was as much on his own terms as he could swing it. He didn’t want to die in a hospital bed. By dint of sheer will power, he kept himself alive long enough for us to get him home. It was a mad rush of logistics; arranging for medical supplies and oxygen generators. I spent the night previous at the ICU with him. All night. He was lucid and aware, even though medical science said he should have been far from it.

April 17th, 2009. It is really only now, with this much time and distance from that day, that I can honestly examine the memory of it.

I’ve got moment-memories and snapshots that crop up from time to time, but I generally don’t go back to that day. In the confines of my head, I mean. It has been too white-hot, all the actual reality of it. My daughter, 4 years old, crying in the bathroom. The hollow sound of the car-door closing as I walked to my parents door, now for the first time in a world where he no longer lived. Stepping outside in the night air with my brother, quaking from the mind-bending unreality of the then-current reality.

Time and distance. Here’s something. Think about it this way.  Givens: that the Earth revolves around the sun at 90 miles a second or so and that the solar system travels at 136 miles a second in the revolving of the galaxy and that the galaxy itself moves at 185 miles a second.

So along the Universe’s timeline, the you that existed a second previous, reading that last sentence,  was at least 411 miles away from the one in the current second. Physical distance traveled, just by sitting perfectly still.

Conclusion: The me that arrived at my parents house to sit next to my dead father’s body is (if my math is correct, which is always a questionable proposition) physically distant 38,883,888,000 miles from the me typing at a keyboard right now. 38 billion miles.

And there are times when it seems that far and then some. But not today. Today it is as close as the next breath. Tomorrow, it will go back, but today is different. Today I mourn my dad.

See, here’s the thing. I don’t mourn all the time. Even when I remember or summon up moments and events to turn them over in my head and try to see them from this or that angle,  I don’t actively mourn. I also don’t have the time or luxury; there are two little girls and a beautiful woman in my life that need me present in the present moment and I am very glad to ride it with them, most of the time. And all of my littlest one’s care and her journey, this past 3 years have been their own epic. And one that does not allow for a split in attention. This is not to say I don’t feel sadness from time to time, or the piercing of the sudden bittersweet moment– there have been many instances of one of my daughter’s numerous triumphs  where I’ve been acutely aware of just how much joy my father would have had from sharing the moment. Still. That is its own thing, and those are moments: it is not mourning. I feel a sadness then, in those moments, not expressly for me, but rather for him, that he did not get to see enough or know enough of them.

There are those who will not believe it, but to be honest, I very seldom mourn for me. 

I cannot and will not mourn every day. It is neither seemly or healthy or beneficial to me or those that I love. N or a particularly good way to honor the legacy of a man I loved.

But today, I let myself really mourn. For me.

I’ve mentioned the notion of a timeline; a kind of model of the universe wherein individual keyframes are strung together- a collection of instances in motion.  In musical graphing, it would be the space from the first note to the last, along the measured lines of notation.

So what I do today, on April 17th, is this: I play the song again, as best I can. I head out alone in a car and go to every house I remember living in.  The first is easy; it is not too far from where I live now.

Stop one: 1974-1978. I sit in the parking lot and I breathe in and out. A barrage of different images and moment memories rise up. It is like a magic spell of sorts; the ritual act of location and the angles and geometries of perspective unlock sympathetic, dimly lit neurons and unfold and unpack the compressed years encoded somewhere in the folds of electric maps  some few inches into my skull.

A Mattel big wheel, pulling the plastic lever to perform a 180 spin and stop. Sitting on a bed, watching my dad change the snakes newspaper lining in the cages. A brown truck delivering a large tin of Charles Chips. The Wizard of Oz on TV. Battle of the Planets. A blue toy robot on the stairs.  Red berries on green shrubs that run with a clear and sticky sap; the neighborhood kids using them in impromptu games of tag– squeeze one and throw it, if it sticks, you are “it.” Word around the neighborhood is that they are poisonous.  Driving with my father to a play rehearsal; ZOO STORY– I play with the thick rubber prop knife as they run lines. I mouth the lines as they speak them; I’ve memorized the play before my dad. I look again and suddenly I see a sort of overlay of the same area, now blanketed with a blizzard’s worth of snow. I don’t see-it-see it, but you know. I see it. His yellow car pulling up on a Saturday, early afternoon, delivering my brother and sister for the weekend. I must be two. I am pushing open the metal storm door (the  narrow galley kitchen is to my left; faux brick) and yelling, “Do you want to hear me count to 100?” to my sister as she climbs out of the car. “No!” she answers cheerfully.

And then I’m off.   Now across town. We didn’t live here too long.  Just kindergarten, and not all of it. I was afraid of the house; it was old and smelled old. I was afraid of vampires. My dad poured “magic powder” across my windowsill to act as proof against them.  Here we ordered SEA MONKEYS from a cut-out advertisement in a comic book. He warned me they would disappoint, I refused to believe him. He was right.  I breathe in and out again.  This isn’t exactly how I do it, but it serves as the best analogy I can think of: imagine a chest. Pirate’s chest; old wood and curved top– heavy and serious metal bands and one of those skeleton-key style keyholes on the lock mechanism.  I look at the place, the house, the geography, and I let the box click open. I don’t know what will be in the box, I just let it open up.

A bus ride, the humming, bumpy nature of it, holding onto my Quasar, MAN OF ACTION action figure.  A collie dog; the dog smell of him; long dog fur that has been wet with rain and dirty puddle water, then dried in the sun. Fritz, that’s his name. My grandfather’s dog. My first bicycle ride: my father is running behind me, holding on to the back of the seat. Then he is not and I’m doing it all by myself. Then I fall. I’m still happy, though, because now I know that I can. My father, digging a garden,  forehead wet with sweat. I bring him iced tea; I mixed it myself.  It is almost a 50/50 solution of sugar-powder to water, but he downs it in one long pull, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down with each gulp. Boxing gloves in the kitchen.  Show and tell! I bring an Eastern Hog’s Nose snake in a pillowcase and my teacher shrieks in terror as it moves after I spill it onto the floor in the middle of the circle of kids. A tent my dad sets up in the lawn because I want a fort.  It is tan and has red panels. 

The lid closes, or I close it, I don’t know. I’m done here. I drive off.

Now, we’re getting somewhere. Oxford: 646 Chestnut Tree Hill Road. 1979-1981. Not a long stretch of time objectively, but these two years occupy a decade’s worth of space.

Here, in this tiny little house, is where I started to actually grow up.

Oh, it is so small. It was green, then. It is white now. There was a weeping willow out front and a tarpaper shack to the side; both are gone. Gone too is the cow-fence behind the house. But it doesn’t matter. I can put it there. That’s how it works, it seems like.  Who was it, Thomas Wolfe? The guy who said, “You can’t go home again.” He wasn’t right, exactly.

It is all different and I can’t even begin to imagine the number of miles distant I am from the Josh-Dobbin who played here, it would show up on a calculator as one of those weird series of numbers then an E. But still: driving up this rambling, twisty road with new green leaves and fronds of fresh spring growth– it isn’t that it feels like going home, but rather, I am transported in some respect to a space and time when it did. There’s a difference there, but I don’t exactly know how to describe it.

My oldest daughter is the age now that I was here, then. I’ve got a storehouse of memories already associated with this place: where my father brought me into the world of karate; he enrolled me with the adult class and told the teacher to “treat me like a Korean.” They were old friends; they had both been in Korea at the tail end of the war. My dad takes the class with me. But these are not what I came here for. I pull the car over to the side of the road and somewhere, I find the latch to the chest that this place holds. It is all over in a matter of seconds, this unfolding. But there are years in there.

A peeper frog in a plastic collection jar; the jar is fluted and has holes like a cassette-player speaker on top, to let air in. We put a leafy stick in there and bunch up wet paper towel. We keep him for a day, then let him go. An orange sweater with a palm tree; capital letters in an arch across it: MIAMI BEACH. Under it, straight across: FLORIDA. A 45 record, being played in my room: it is a Superman story, in the style of a radio play. A spear on the wall; a boar-hunting spear. A slot-car race-track. Kittens in the bottom drawer of my dresser; it is lined with blue paper. Walking through the woods, my dad fashions an aboriginal throwing stick; we spend time trying to figure out how to use it. A game with his Buck knife he teaches me; throwing it at the ground into an ever-decreasing set of scrape-drawn squares in the dirt. Milkweed. A rock collection. Running with a butterfly net, catching fireflies and collecting them in a glass jar before letting them go. Listening in the morning, from my bed, to his cough from outside as he walked the dog. It was comforting; the cough– I knew he was there. Throwing I-CHING coins after school. (That one surprises me and I question it: I was in 2nd grade? But yet, there it is: I’m home after school– I’m a latch-key kid, the key is on a leather strap around my neck, and my instructions are to go inside immediately, lock the door behind me, and call my mom’s 1-800 number to let her know I’m there. I lift up the I-Ching kit box’s cover and there’s an incense smell and the book is bound and tied by fancy strings. I spend my equally time transcribing hexagrams and then tracing Hank Ketcham DENNIS THE MENACE drawings from thin paperback books. 

There are more. I guess I don’t need to put them all here. This place is packed with memories. It is all a matter of seconds. I drive away and  process them. I cry a little bit. I went to other houses and places, too, but it is all essentially self-referential, so I’ll write only about the other places I go on this day.

The next place is weird.

See, my dad was cremated. There’s no gravesite to visit. But still, I feel like there should be some place to go to acknowledge the idea of death-in-life. So I borrow a grave, kind of. I drive down the road from our old house to Gunntown Cemetery. It’s a colonial-to-1800s old boneyard and my dad used to collect snakes there when he had lectures to do. See, a nocturnal hunting snake will often warm its body by a headstone, which has retained more heat from the day’s worth of sun than the surrounding grass.  This cemetery in particular has some history. Here’s a fun story:

Sometime in the late 70s. My dad has a lecture at a school booked in a week or two. So his MO is that he spends that time collecting wildlife samples from the area to demonstrate the biodiversity of the places right in the “backyard” (so to speak) of the lecture. This means midnight graveyard runs for black racer snakes. Now, one of the best and most economical snake collection tools is the common cotton pillowcase. Breathable, easy to tie and untie. So he’s there, with a flashlight, a pillowcase and, because he’s Joel Dobbin, a pack of cigarettes. He’s collected a goodly number so far, and he’s resting, leaning up against the back of a large headstone, wondering if he should call it a night when he hears a car pull up.

“Oh shit,” he thinks. “Cops.” How to explain this set of odd circumstances in a way that won’t get him arrested or shot? He begins to mentally prepare the speech and figure out the best way to seem and sound “normal” for being in a century’s old graveyard in the dead of night with a bag full of snakes. No easy task. But then, there’s nothing. No blue and red lights, no wash of flashlight beam. He dares a peek from around the stone.

There is no police car. There are teenagers. A boy and a girl. Suddenly, it all becomes clear to him. This boy has brought some girl here with tales of haunted legends and roaming ghosts, and he’s going to scare and impress her with her bravery and use the adrenaline rush of fear to speed the process of getting to as many bases as possible afterwards. My dad is not unsympathetic to such a move, so he waits for them to leave. But they don’t. And he wants to go. And they don’t leave. This is a logistical problem.

Then he looks down at what he has and a plan forms. Pillowcase. Flashlight. Snakes. Cigarettes.

And he acts. It means losing the snakes he’s collected, but hey, when does THIS opportunity come along? He dumps them out, puts the pillowcase over his head, lights a cigarette for “mood smoke,” and clicks the flashlight under his chin in the pillowcase and rises slowly up from behind the stone. He intones in a gravelly and horrible voice, “WHO… DISTURBS NOW.. MY SLUMBER?!”

They, as you may imagine, left the graveyard. With a quickness.

So, now here I am, 2012 and it is sunny and brilliant and everything is just about as close to how it was in 1979 as you could think. Also, 1879.

Here’s the thing about old graveyards. They’re different than the modern ones, with impossible rows and fields of neat and even stones and crosses and monuments. Those kind of places, to me, tend to overwhelm with volume; you can’t begin to consider the actual people associated with each rock. At least, I can’t. It all becomes an abstraction.

But in an old, old graveyard, just the size of a large lawn, there’s an intimacy, if that word isn’t too macabre; which is to say: it is a number you can wrap your head around. The names and numbers become, for a moment,  ideas of  actual people. You become aware, by a series of different things, of the juxtaposition of death among life, life among death. Time and a series of frosts have thrown the earth this way and that; some stones are worn to nubs, others covered with cruel and obscuring moss and lichen. It gives lie to the notion of a “permanent” monument, the idea that carving in stone is an act that defies time. Time is a sonofabitch and he’ll win eventually.

I guess this, too, is an abstraction, but at some point, what isn’t? In any case, here is what I do:

I get out of the car and I walk the graveyard. I don’t have a place to go, so I borrow theirs, these once-ago people. I stand over at the stone where my dad once hid and I try to imagine the scene. Then I do something I’ve been doing on this day for the past two years, and I suspect I will do it again if I’m allowed the opportunity.  It just seems like the proper and right thing to do.

In exchange for providing me this place, I look at the names, and, if they’re legible enough, I speak them plainly aloud. I push borrowed air across my living throat and speak their dead names, just for this one moment, this one time a year. When I leave, I say “thank you.” But I don’t say my dad’s name. I wait for that.

Then I go for a walk into the woods. Like my dad used to.  I find a place we used to go, or a place he used to go, and because he can’t walk there now, I walk there. And I go far into them enough so that there’s nothing but woods.  Today was especially nice.  Warm and breezy. The only sounds anywhere are the crunch of my own footfalls, the occasional call and answer of a bird in the distance and the sometimes buzzing of insects near my ear. I try to pay attention to everything and not think at all; not with words, anyway. Here’s a moment from today:

I came across a split and fallen tree; looked like a lightning strike. The long pole was forming something of a triangle with the part of the tree still standing. There was an odd vine-growth attached to it, and it made an unusual bend outwards; something approaching a ninety degree angle, which is not a familiar one in the surroundings. And I noticed a rainbow-bend of light, there in the crook.  I got myself under it and looked up. A spider’s web. So intricate and well constructed, this latticework of lines, all liquid and solid at the same time.

I stayed there for what may have been a long while, just looking up at it. I’m not sure. Maybe it was only a little while. It felt long.

It all seemed to make a certain amount of sense, in a way that began to slip away as I tried to attach words to it. The fleeting nature of imposed structure, the insistence of Life asserting itself where ever it has the opportunity to do so. Our various houses, all spiderwebs, of sorts, lasting only so long, changed or broken down by time, but continuing on, down the line. I don’t know, it is hard to sum up. So instead of trying, I chose that moment to say my dad’s name, out loud, to the open air; to have it be formed and sounded, if only for a moment.

Here’s the thing. If there’s a “the thing” to be had. It is, all of it, so very beautiful. Time, space, cycles, life, death, birth, spring, memory, all of it– everything. Time is beautiful. There’s not enough of it, but that’s beautiful, too.  There’s a moment when you realize “Holy fuck, there’s nothing but beauty, everywhere!” You can’t live in that moment all the time, just like you can’t mourn all the time. But you can get there, I think, at some point, in mourning. Like a Moebius Strip or a Klein Bottle; you go far enough and somehow, you’re on the other side and back again.

Today I mourn my dad.  His name was Joel Dobbin, and my god, did I love him so much.

There are a million things to say about the Trayvon Martin killing. There are political and racial angles, there’s gun issues, there’s notions about how all of these things intersect with gated communities and homeowner associations (HOAs). There’s the reactionary politics and the need for “side-taking” in increasingly polarizing times when everything ultimately breaks into camps along “right” and “left” factions.

But all of these millions of things have been said and are being said. And they should be.  They need to be said.  What I want to express here, however,  is a different thing.

For all of us, on whatever side we fall, Trayvon Martin is ultimately an abstraction. His death and the official police reaction (or non-reaction) to it are viewed, as a matter of necessity, through our own personal filters and the  attitudes we hold and therefore the actions we take.

For many people on the right who feel, on a  territorial level,  threatened upon any discussion of issues involving citizens and firearms and have an almost reflexive need to gainsay what they perceive as “left-wing thought”, the reality of this young boy’s life  has been reduced to an abstraction of media overplay and hysteria and it aids their confirmation bias about a “left wing media.

A loose collection of facts having precisely nothing to do with his shooting,  concerning school suspension or pot use* along with an article-of-faith style belief that “mainstream media” is  a de facto biased and specifically hostile force acts as some kind of totem to transform him into an unknowable uncertainty; he exists  a potential  thug/criminal/menace and blameworthy in some respect simply because there is a conditioning to think every story HAS to have two equal and opposite sides.

The boy who died is lost in the shuffle there.

And on the part of those moved to anger or tears or gut-churning frustration and rage at the situation, we too engage in a form of abstraction. By necessity, but still.  For as much as it is a heartening and proper thing to see young people proclaim, “I am Trayvon Martin,” together, as much as it seems like the proper and correct response to don hoodies and act in solidarity– on a fundamental level, they/we are NOT Trayvon Martin. Metaphorically, symbolically, as an poetic expression, we are LIKE him or those that we know and love are LIKE him and “there but for the grace of god” and all that– but the I AM construction is a poetic device.  You are not. I am not. I am not saying that these marches, these discussions are all not needed or important. They are.  But there’s something being lost here that I think needs to remain.

Trayvon Martin is dead and only got to see seventeen summers and will not see an eighteenth. No one image of him is going to sum up who or what he was: He was, like all of us, an accumulation of time and images. But unlike us, his accumulation is done. He is dead and his father will never get to hold him again and his mother will never get to hold him again. We get to talk about it all and get to be angry and sad or outraged.

There are a million intersections into a million different sticky areas of society contained within this set of circumstances and you can get lost in the weeds depending on who you are talking to and what branches you start down. But they are all abstractions from the reality of this very simple set of facts:

A young boy was walking to his father’s house and he was mistrusted a priori by an overzealous, twitchy man who confronted him for no defensible reason at all and then killed him.

Everything else is commentary. We engage through metaphor, we abstract and discuss broader issues, but the reality is this: A boy went walking one night and didn’t make it alive to his house.

Here’s where my head is at, at the moment, when I think about this.

No matter who you are, on what area of the political spectrum you fall, this is what I want you to consider, when considering Trayvon Martin and his family.

Each and every parent out there can tell you a laundry list of near misses and childhood scares that act as a narrative thread to describe a child’s first ten years.

Ask them. If you don’t have children, ask your parents.

Late nights with high fevers, falls from stairs or monkey bars. Waiting on test results, the existential shaking with relief when they came back all OK.  Ask any mother or father: there was the time they got lost at a fair or an amusement park for ten panic-filled minutes. There was the time they fell into the pool and didn’t know how to swim; the aunt or uncle who pulled them out by their hair. The broken arm that, for a lucky chance of angle and momentum could have just as easily been a broken neck. The car accident where everybody was somehow OK.

Every one of us here, our first few years are a collection of near misses and close calls. Every one of our kids.  Your kid. My kids.

Consider, before you abstract Trayvon Martin in one way or another, that for two people, he was not an abstraction or a political football or a cause or an exegesis on racism and assumptions about black males. He was their little baby who survived all those fevers, those falls and tumbles, those million and three lucky breaks that early childhood give us.  He, like us, made it through all that and, if I am allowed here to be guilty of the act that I am naming, I will imagine that his parents may have breathed a sigh of relief when they looked at their increasingly grown young man that those days, for all their moments of parental terror and uncertainty, were things of the past.

But he didn’t survive his walk home to his dad’s house.

———–
* about the pot use:  If you were to shoot every 17 year old boy who smoked pot when I went to High School, there would be no graduating class. When you see conservative media discuss young black kids and pot, there is always the language of “dealer.” You know what they called a 17 year old who smoked pot in my school? A 17 year old.

And yet she still believes in Santa Claus. It is a magical time. I use that word advisedly; it is specifically magical;there are instances of magical thinking, the first steps in parsing the universe with a small but accumulated body of knowledge.

In the world of photography and filming, there’s something called “the Golden Hour,” or sometimes “The Magic Hour.” It is usually the first or last hour of sunlight; when the sun is nearer to the horizon and spreads out light in a more diffuse way. It bathes everything in a beautiful softness that only lasts so long; shadows are less dark and colors are warm and painted with edges of gold.

It got me thinking about my own “golden hour” of childhood, and the things I believed in, as articles of faith. I wrote them down in a quick list, stream of consciousness style, more for personal reference than anything else. It ended up sounding almost like a poem, as I said it out loud, although I didn’t intend for it to be one.

In no particular order:

Quicksand, lasers, blood brothers and pinkie-swears, dim mak death touches, Muhammed Ali Marvin Hagler and Bruce Lee (my holy trinity), magnifying lenses as superpowers, plastic surgery as spycraft, radioactive spiders and cosmic rays, elves and little folk–always ducking just out of sight in walks through woods, wish-granting lamps or rings to be found at tag sales, whoosh sounds and cracks from kung-fu movies- practice hard enough and they would happen, King Arthur and Excalibur, ninjas and samurai, might for right, the good guy always wins, a hidden island soon to be found teeming with dinosaurs, Cropsy the axe-killer and his lame dragging leg-listening for it from inside a tent, fighting sleep, indelible ink triggered by fire-alarm levers, urine-activated dye in pools,no matter who your dad may be: my dad could beat up your dad, the danger of swearing on one’s life, the *possibility* of a hand appearing under the bed and the dark thrill of lowering my head over the side to peek down, that drinking from Nostradamus’ skull leads to powers and curses, registering hands and feet as deadly weapons, ventriloquist’s dummies being inherently haunted and not to be trifled with, the lethal combination of Pop Rocks and Soda  and the untimley demise of Mikey (a kid I knew knew a kid who knew his family, so he said; he swore it was true), prisms and pendulums, pulled flower petals as divination to peer into a girl’s heart: she loves me not, three-time widdershins walks around churches leading to lands in universes next door (but only so long as you knew your widdershins from your sunwise), dwarf-crafted swords somewhere in Norway, Hitler’s quest for the Spear of Destiny, the existence of mithril, later adamantanium, twenty sided dice, Batman, Superman and Green Lantern but never Aquaman.

Magic words and spells: sounds of power to be uttered like Shazam that could transform the weak and worthy in a flash of light into the strong and destined; a secret language of the apes hidden in the pages of paperback Tarzan books, unknowable ancient Hebrew letters in arcane configurations that could spell secret divine names to work magic best left unworked, Witch Mountain and returning to it; staring hard at a pencil and willing it to move.

My parents as invulnerable and immortal; always adult but never old.

Are you like me? In the absence of any information about him, did you entertain a weird moment of hope that Kim Jong Il’s son was maybe going to be somehow more grounded and in the real world and might be like some sort of storybook prince who makes up for the evils of his father, the wicked king?

Like how, in myth, Arthur was good and virtuous, following Uther Pendragon, who was not?

Who knows, he may well yet be. Here’s hoping. But I gotta tell you, wrong as it is to judge books by their covers and all, when I finally saw a picture of Un, my hopes on this score were deflated. He looks like a Korean Francis Buxton from PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE. I fear he may be intent on stealing South Korea’s awesome bike. “It’s my birthday, and my father said I can have anything I want.”

I had wanted to write a timely article about Hostess snack cakes, with Hostess filing for bankruptcy being in the news.

But between trying to get the kids fed and to sleep and then trying to finish the book I’m writing, it seemed sort of superfluous. But it reminded me of something I had written a long while ago, about snack cakes and grade school. It was something I had posted on my old site for a long while. That site is offline and, I realized, that this story no longer had a place in the world. So, in honor of the memories of Twinkies and Choco-Diles and Fruit Pies past, I offer it up here, only slightly edited. (This was done in 1999, in a world and an internet without Facebook and Google-as-a-fact-of-everyone’s-life, so I have taken out last names.)

Also, speaking of Facebook, the story ended up finishing itself in a very magical way, decades after it happened and was told and retold. Below are the opening paragraphs, but clicking on the “read it all” link will bring you to a recreation of how I formatted it back in 1999, on www.itsthecatsass.com (ITCA to those in the club).

Here’s how it went down.
The year was 1981. Gil Gerard ruled the airwaves as BUCK ROGERS. The Atari 2600 was in its heyday, having yet to disappoint the gaming public with its anemic version of PAC MAN. Dudley Moore was winning America’s heart with his whimsical onscreen alcoholism and wacky drunk-driving antics in ARTHUR. MAD MAGAZINE was having a grand ol’ time parodying Ronald Reagan and Ed Meese, leaving me, in third grade, trying to memorize Al Jaffee’s “Snappy Comebacks to Stupid Questions” baffled. Who the hell was Ed Meese? And my family was moving from a small town called Oxford to a small town called Southbury.

My dad had, in a surprising twist of career-fate, been offered a job on a 300-cow dairy farm. (Long story, please don’t ask. My dad led a weird charmed life.) Part of the perk of this position was that it came with not only free lodging for the family, but free lodging in a beautiful, 250 year old Colonial house, with a crazy amount of rooms. Being used to living in apartments and small places, this sprawling manse with its hardwood floors and honest craftsmanship offered my folks a chance to save money, while living in spacious and bucolic accommodations. A deal too good to be true. And, like any such deal, it turned out to be just that.

But at least AT FIRST, it was a joy for my folks.

For me, however, it was not so much wine and roses. Moving, when you are going into third grade, is playing what may be called a kind of emotional Russian Roulette. It’s altogether possible that the barrel will spin onto an empty chamber, and the trigger-pull of uprooting your established friendships and replacing your familiar school hallways with new ones will, in the hollow click of disaster averted, give you a second lease on life, and a new, better perspective.

Or, as in my case, the thing can end up blowing your mind, and leaving chunks of your soul on the walls and carpet.

READ IT ALL….

The blog is sleeping, not dead. Just trying to finish the book I’m writing, so free writing-time goes there and not here.

This is the first “Look, ma, I made a meme!” things I’ve done. I’ve often wondered who and where these things come from. So, if you are of a mind, spread it like it was herpes and/or something cute and cat-related.

A while back, after a punishing rain, I helped clear out my mother’s basement of damaged boxes and old and useless things tucked down there for convenience’s sake, which had grown to an inconvenient tangle of things. Artifacts of our life, of my dad’s life. Important things.

I was uniquely qualified to do this because buried among the junk and boxes of papers were treasures that only I could know were important. Letterhead from his TV days; an ancient jacket patch from his stint in Korea as a rabies control soldier in a combat zone. There was lots of chaff, but there was some very, very important wheat to be found. And, thanks to my folks’ habit of clearing away clutter into boxes and tendency to “sort them later,” (read: never) many pieces of treasure were scattered here and there, hiding between old bills or restaurant fliers across multiple boxes.

The word “journey” is overused in pop psychology to lend an instant air of gravitas to any set of events. But this task really was  something of a mythic journey: part descent into the underworld, part cleaning of the Aegean Stables, part father-quest. In sifting through both the detritus and the documents that spanned back through my whole history as a person, in scattered order, I found that I was also unpacking and sifting through my own internal landscape of memory and seeing how it fit in with these artifacts. Or seeing how they unfolded memories and informed them.

Then magic started happening. For real and true. Real magic isn’t the kind you’ve been led to believe, with arcane vapors and mystic lights appearing and things floating. Real magic is, I think, the intersection of will and action meeting with chance encounters made possible by that will and action, wherein those “chances” show you things that you’re willing to see. Real magic is a dialog between you and what you are doing and perceiving. I chose to make the the task more than a task: I was open for it to show me and teach me. And also hurt me, if it was going to. It did all those things.

I learned (among other things) through a history of lawyer letters and correspondence- once again, pieced together across many containers and boxes– that I was never privy to, just how hard my father fought to keep contact with his children from his first marriage. What he sacrificed, how he struggled. I never really knew the extent. I mean, I was a kid, I was aware in a peripheral way, how kids soak up things and overhear conversation snippets. But now, I was aware.

I learned, too, how spiteful and how deeply cruel his former wife had been, both to him and to my brother and sister. It informed me, now, as a father myself, of the nature of the pain that he held, all throughout my happy childhood adventures with him and showed me a hidden aspect of the man who taught me what it is to be a man.

Then I found this. It is a letter my dad wrote to himself, to organize and figure out where his head was as he turned 50. I had no idea my dad did this sort of thing. I do this sort of thing; I did not know we shared that trait. It is a “letter” he wrote and filed away, being read by no one.

But there is magic in intention and magic in doing, and this letter traveled through almost 22 years in time to be delivered to my hands, just when I needed to read it. The will and intention of the writing in one point in space and time meeting the will and intention in another, to take on this daunting, cluttered space with a paleontologist’s sense of delicacy and together, creating a “new” conversation, a “new” communication with my father, almost two years dead. In reading it, in being the only person in the world to ever read it besides him, I realized it was meant for me. Not by him in that moment, but certainly in this moment, here, in this basement, underground and digging through time to find it.

If that isn’t magic that puts vanishing handkerchiefs and mysteriously floating orbs to shame, I don’t know what is. Here is my father’s letter to himself, written to himself when he was 50 and I was 15, turning 16. It is also, as it turns out a letter to me, delivered to my hands when I was 38 and ready to hear it. It is about life and living and death and grieving and I choose to take it as an act of a master magician that I received it as I did, when I did, and how I did. Maybe a joint act of two magicians.

Letters To Myself
By Joel Dobbin

I was thining about John Lennon the other day; about his life, and about his death. Mostly though, I was thining about his life. It started me thinking about a lot of other things. Thinking about artists and how they’re viewed by the rest of the world. In that respect, Lennon’s life wasn’t all that different from the lives of other artists throughout history.
Conventional society, whatever that may be at any given point in time in the history of man, has some strong dichotomous feelings about art and artists. It’s sort of a case of “Love Art, Hate Artists.” Well, maybe not really hate artists; more like being scared shitless of them.

I think I understand it. Artists aren’t safe. They make regular people uncomfortable. Artists just don’t play by the rules. Shit, they don’t even play by their own rules. They just play the game as it comes, making up the rules as they go and them breaking them just as easily as they fabricated them in the first place. That could be very scary for the majority of humanity, who live out their lives utterly bound to rules that were created for them by people they’ve never met.

Most people are so fucking preoccupied with dying that they wind up scatred to death of life and living. Religion has ‘em by the balls.

It really doesn’t even matter what religion, basically they’re all similar. Most religions, at least those of the Western Civilization genre, are nothing more than thinly disguised death-cults, which doesn’t make a lick of sense when you look at it dispassionately.

I mean, here’s life. That’s a tangible.

Except for a lot of philosophical, semantic horseshit about questioning the reality of one’s own existence, an individual’s life is the only tangible that he or she really has. Life is REAL! If you don’t believe it, stop breathing, stop eating! Or try jabbing yourself in the genitals with a rusty serving fork. That should answer any questions you may have about the reality of your own existence.

And then there’s death. Now that’s a tangible as well. Basically, an unpleasant prospect, but nevertheless, an absolute. It’s the period following death that’s in question.

Come to think of it,the big question is whether or not there’s any period of existence following death. Yet the vast majority of humanity finds themselves led around by the nose over the issue of what the period following death is all about, whose version is correct, then preparing for it.

Throughout history,the shamans have had so thoroughly bullshitted over an alleged life following death, very few of the masses have ever learned how to live completely in the only real existence that they can ever really be sure of. To further compound the stupidity, any one group of believers has always been only too eager to slaughter any other group of believers to prove their point.

So, here come the rules. Most of which are dedicated to a promised payoff in the great bye and bye.

Shit, like George Bernard Shaw said, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard!” Any schmuck can die; it takes a certain amount of courage and even pain to learn to laugh with guiltless joy.

That’s why artists are the true enemy of the people. They make everyone around nervous. They do things, they say things, they sing things, they write things, they create things that all the rest can hardly even dream about. Artists find within themselves the secret joys, fears, hopes, and dreams that exist in everyone and they go public with them.

Artists laugh with guiltless joy and then go play fuck all with the rules. And to make matters even worse, these creative sons of bitches live forever while the rules-players memories are nearly always interred with their bones. No wonder everyone hates their guts. By their lives works, they wipe humanity’s nose in the excrement of humanity’s own foolishness.

You disagree?

Most everyone with over an eighth grade education knows that Michelangelo painted the “Creation of Man” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was a drunkard, homosexual, and by all accounts, a most unconventional and unpleasant fellow. He probably lived down the street from a good, solid businessman who devoted his life to following the rules and preparing himself for an eternal existence in the “great beyond.” If you can tell me his name, I’ll admit my error.

Shit, I’ll bet that nine out of ten rules-followers couldn’t even name the Pope who commissioned the Sistine Ceiling, let alone our pious hypothetical businessman.

When I was fourteen, my grandfather died. Now, to a fourteen year old, life has a certain sense of immutability. At least, it did to me, back in 1953. So, wen my grandfather died, the fabric of that immutability was suddenly shredded.

I mean, I always had a grandfather, ever since I could remember. Just like my father and mother were always about forty five or so, at least, ever since I could remember. And now, here comes this shit. Death.

It made absolute mincemeat out of my little adolescent sense of permanence. It was in the summer, I was working on a chicken farm in a little town in New York State by the name of Cuddebackville.

 

 

I had lied about my age and told the farmer I was sixteen. All this, of course, with my parents’ approval. The farm was situated right down the road from a summer resort owned by my mother’s great uncle, so I was able to spend the summer gainfully employed and still remain under the watchful and protective eye of the family. Besides, the experience would, as far as my mother felt, get me away from my “hoodlum” friends for a while. (One of the things that used to piss me off the most when I was a kid was that my parents would always blame my friends for all my wildness; they never gave me the credit due me for initiating most of the trouble I got into all on my own. I always took it as a lack of respect on their part.)

Anyway, Hy Fromowitz, the chicken farmer, woke me up about six o’clock on a Friday morning to tell me my mother was on the phone. I hadn’t lived long enough at the time to realize that any phone call you get between the hours of two and six in the morning is always trouble.

Mother had called to tell me that Grandpa Dobbin had shuffled off the mortal coil late the night before and that I was expected in Brooklyn by eleven that same morning to attend the funeral. Now, thirty six years later, I can remember vividly getting dressed hurriedly to make the eight o’clock bus to New York.

I remember being kind of excited about the adventure of traveling to New York by bus, all alone, and then finding myself the right subway train to take me to the Avenue U stop on the Brighton Beach line. I remember feeling just a tad guilty about not feeling an awful lot of grief. I know I was more excited about buying a book and reading it on the long bus ride home. Also, I had lost a lot of baby fat during the month that had passed since I left Brooklyn and I was kind of eager to show off my new, lean body.

It was almost as if my grandfather was merely a prop for a new scenario for me to play out. I made it safely to Brooklyn, and, to make my new sense of adulthood and self-importance complete, I met my family at the Funeral Home.

God, how it appealed to my sense of drama to make my theatrical appearance in the door of the undertaker’s establishment. It was like the hero home from the war.

It wasn’t until we were at the cemetary that my moment of truth came. The cemetery was located almost on the border line between Queens and Long Island and was adjacent to one of the busy expressways that served as a vehicular aorta to the heart of New York City. The roar and whine of countless scurrying cars and trucks almost drowned out the sound of the Rabbi’s low pitched chanting as the family gathered around the gravesite and suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, the realization struck me:

NOT ONE OF THE FUCKING CARS WAS STOPPING!!

Shit, they weren’t even slowing down. I mean, this was my grandfather. MY GRANDFATHER, DAMNIT! One of the pillars of my immutable fourteen year old existence was being planted in the earth. Buried in a shiny, massive, dark-wood coffin, with a Jewish Star engraved on the lid and he was being buried all encased in that fucking darkwood coffin and my grandmother was wailing and my father was looking stoic and sad and people, grown up fucking people, most of whom I had never even met before, were crying, fucking crying, I mean with real tears and all, and not one of those fucking cars had even slowed down.

Now where the hell is the justice in that shit?

That’s when it all dawned on me. About what life is really about. You know, stripped of all the bullshit and the good words and the pious hand-wringing. With all the rules and values that other people surround you with torn away. There I was, fourteen years old, standing in some cemetery in Queens, and I FIGURED IT OUT.

THE ONLY THING THAT REALLY MATTERS, I MEAN, REALLY MATTERS, IS THAT THE CARS STOP.

Not forever. Nobody stops the cars forever. It’s enough to just make ‘em slow down for a moment.

They wanted me to staty home for the rest of the summer. Or at least spend a week at home, joining in the ritual mourning ceremony that somehow is supposed to substitute for failing to stop the cars.

But I couldn’t do things like that anymore.

I took the subway back to Manhattan that evening and caught a light night bus back to Cuddebackville. Down deep, I really wanted to stay, to sleep in my own bed, to get up late and hang out with my friends. But even at fourteen, I knew the value of a dramatic exit and who the hell could pass up a chance like that.

Now, I’m fifty. And frankly, I’m not sure I’m a hell of a lot smarter than I was that summer’s day in 1953. I’ve produced three children, one of whom has a real shot at being a car-stopper.

I’ve got a terrific lady who loves me completely, mostly for what I am, not what she’d like me to be. I’ve sort of meandered through the pasture of this life, with no particular destination in mind, but with few exceptions, I’ve enjoyed the view.

And I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.
All in all, I guess I’m doing pretty good.

I had no idea this cartoon existed until the other day. The opening theme song is quite possibly the best thing you will hear all day.

Or year. Or century.

It is just so shameless and presentational. If you go that route, you have to go hard and pass through a barrier of “bad” to get to “awesome.” This busts through that barrier with a macho war-cry.

I’m really not into the whole spin-the-bottle-mock-o-tron-3000 thing that goes on with stuff like Rebecca Black.

My only real take-away from that big, momentary Warhol-fame-bomb was that her parents, society, and people’s general sense of decency failed this poor girl. All in that order.

A lot of the mocking people who mocked her awful song and awful video seem to miss the larger point of the shared awareness of her being the ultimate meta-joke on all of us in a scheme where fame is a goal unto itself and not a by-product of doing something worthy.

ALL THAT SAID, this parody is friggin’ awesome.

I’m a science booster. I’m a robot booster. When it comes to advances, I’m on Team Boost.

But I gotta say, I have a kind of pit-of-the-stomach uncanny valley reaction in my gut and spine when I see robots veering toward anthropomorphism like this.

Scientists at UC3M are joining together in a shared project to work on endowing robot hands to….

replicate [the human hand's] grasping and movement abilities in an artificial, anthropomorphic articulated hand, thus endowing it with greater autonomy and producing natural and effective movements.

I’m of two diametrically opposed minds on this.

On the one (robotic) hand: It is all too often the convention of sci-fi movies to sell a secretly conservative, anti-progress message of “there are something mankind is not supposed to know...” or to show the folly of hubris in “playing god,” with the implicit idea that we have what we are supposed to have, and that creating new possibilities is taboo.

On paper, I don’t like that idea.

Jonas Salk “played god” and eradicated polio and eased human suffering on an almost unimaginable scale. Space telescopes are peering into the Universe’s past and unraveling the mysteries of all of creation, adding to human understanding in ways never dreamed of before.

The scientists of CERN, with the Large Hadron Collider search for elusive, theoretical particles that could bridge together a grander understanding of the origin of mass. With only 27 kilometers worth of innovated construction, they may just discover how all of space and time were formed.

That’s all awesome, in the old sense of the word, usually reserved for religious apprehensions of gods. Full of awe. Also, in the newer sense of the word; the “dude!” flavored meaning of “awesome.” Because seriously; how awesome is all that.

YET!

When I see a robot hand like this, in its infant stages, rudely approximating the fluid gestures of its human builders, I want to throw it into a pool of molten steel, TERMINATOR 2 style.

What causes that gut-level reaction? Is it a learned, Pavlovian involuntary response from so many books and movies cautioning against the unforeseen consequences of too much advancement too quickly?

Or is it a more primal, instinctual urge? Like the Darwinian practice of a lion destroying the cubs of a competing male?

I dunno. Either way, it all comes to the same thing: I see this hand in this picture and I can only imagine it, after some Moore’s Law driven iterations.

It’s all cute and fun now, with the oohs and ahhs and the safe 15-year projections on when some piece of tech might be able to naturally know its way around a screwdriver. But the same hands that we use to hold and manipulate screwdrivers also do some shady business.

I see this thing, in its future incarnation, all too easily and effortlessly pointing and firing a sleek machine-gun at its meat-based, wetware, legacy-version progenitors.

Which is to say, us.