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Chapter 13
The Forty Year War
"Each consciousness seeks the death of the other"
--Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
"I tried hard to have a father, but instead I had a dad"
--Kurt Cobain, "Serve the Servants"
February 2025
This morning, I finally started writing the hardest part of this book. The visceral reality of my origin,
a story that starts with a father and a son. It's easy to talk about whacky adventures,
opaque philosophy, psychedelic mysticism, and the futile pursuit of higher meaning in a transactional
world. It is really fucking painful to discuss the deep personal wounds sustained over a
forty year battle of attrition with my father. Dad is the architect who shaped my inner
labyrinth and the terrifying minotaur that patrols its corridors.
I got started with this chapter, writing about my father's death, but after only a few lines, my iPad battery died.
I'd been feeling like a raw nerve the past couple of days, either because of my natural cycles or because
I knew this was coming, or more likely the symbiosis of the two. I went to the gym to get in
some cardio to clear my head. I got on the stair master, put my AirPods in, and I put on the first
YouTube AI generated playlist that came up.
Glenn Danzig, punk rock's demonic emanation of Elvis Presley, began
singing words that nicely summarized my relationship with my dad:
There's some kind of love
And there's some kind of hate
The maggots in the eye of love
Won't copulate
It was another synchronicity. A coincidence that feels too perfect to be random.
I was used to these experiences by this point, so I observed it and let it be. The universe
fucking with me, or my mind fucking with itself, or no difference at all because we live
in an idealistic reality where the mind is the essence of all existence, and like the
identity of the dumb passenger in the car in Mrs. Dalloway, the truth would only be revealed in death.
The next song began. I started to relax with exercise and let the playlist do its thing.
When I was getting close to finishing up, I had a sudden whim to listen to "Romeo's Distress" by Christian
Death. This song doesn't speak to me personally: I just like its sound, in line with the best of Joy
Division. After it wrapped up, YouTube synchronicity struck again. My phone started
playing "My Old Man's a Fatso" by the Angry Samoans for the last song of my workout.
"Some Kind of Hate" gives a poetic, emotional impression of how things were with me and my dad.
"My Old Man's a Fatso" is a crass, literal synopsis:
I'm locked inside my bedroom lookin at the pictures up on the wall
I need a little elbow room, I need space and that ain't all
Get home first thing you know my folks jump on my case
Get a job put the dishes out put the trash bag in its place
Someday when I'm a man I'm gonna put them in their place
'cause my old man's a fatso
He's got a potbelly for a mouth
Baby my old man's a fatso
But you know he owns this house
Yeah
I'm locked inside the classroom starin at the dots up on the wall
My teacher's all the retards, I need out baby and that ain't all
I don't care about textbooks or the Jews and discoveries of Spain
I gotta gotta gotta leave this town I'll take a bus, catch a plane
Cause my old man's a fatso
He's got a bathtub for a mouth
Baby my old man's a fatso
But you know he owns this... house!
Two three four!
I'm cruising on the highway, feels so good to see open space
I don't feel like a prisoner, I don't feel like a basket case
I turn the radio up to ten and you know I found my place
Yeah get a job put the dishes out put the trash bag in its place
Now that I'm a man I'm gonna put them in their place
Cause my old man's a fatso
He's got a bathtub for a mouth
Baby my old man's a fatso
But you know he owns this house
***
The End of An Era, November 2017
I had taken off work up in the midwest and come home to the south because my dad was dying.
He was living out his last few days at my brother's house, resting on a bed in an alcove off the
living room. For most of his adult life, he'd been a whale of a man, averaging around 350 lbs.
On his deathbed, he had dropped to below 200 lbs. At 67, he appeared ancient: his bones
rejecting life, his skin prepared to slough off with the slightest touch.
His mind was practically gone, lost in a whirl of pain meds and terminal delirium.
He couldn't speak coherently, only a couple of words or nonsense syllables here and there.
The person I had feared most in life had been reduced to a pitiful lump of flesh of liminal life.
I am thankful that he at least had the presence of mind to recognize me, and he was
glad that I had come. We spent his last day at his side in my brother's living room.
My mom came by, and we looked at an old family photo album together. Mom came because she
knew this was important for me, my brother, and my sister. She was all smiles, seemingly
unaffected by Dad's imminent demise. The rest of us were drinking to dampen our nerves.
That night, I told my dad that I loved him and that I'd see him in
the morning. I went in to see him right after I woke up. I found him
still, eyes open in a lifeless stare into the void. I couldn't make myself believe
he was gone at first, even though there could be no doubt about it.
I turned and fumbled around trying to get a cup of coffee, my first reaction being socially awkward shock
and avoidance rather than sadness. It took me what seemed like a couple of minutes to get
myself together, but it was probably a lot less than that.
"Um....I..think..he's...dead," I whispered to my brother.
My brother took a look at Dad and did some poking and prodding.
"Oh, yeah… he's cold already… He's gone," he said.
Later that morning, I had one last private moment with Dad.
"You were a good father," I said. "Good luck on your journey."
I was bloody rawness for the next couple of days. I took the edge off by drinking and keeping
my hands busy, running scales on my electric guitar.
Dad didn't want a funeral with a preacher, so we had a wake for him at my mom's place.
A few of my friends came to be there for me, but most of the guests were my mom's relatives.
My sister got pissed off about this, and she later complained that most of the guests had never
liked or respected Dad. This was more or less true. Apart from us three siblings,
none of Dad's other family came. All of his other relatives that we had known had died long ago.
My brother told me that he had been looking at a picture of my dad as a boy.
"I'm seeing him as the little boy in the picture, and I just want to take care of him," he said.
We had been planning to end the evening by having everyone share old
memories of my father. My brother and I were hoping to hear some new funny stories.
My uncle started by telling us one about a time Dad had cheated when they played golf
together, and it was hilarious! But my sister was drunk and unable to tolerate silence,
so she filled up the rest of the evening babbling and telling the same old stories that
everyone had already heard before. So it goes.
***
2015 to 2017
Dad was showing dementia. It wasn't the kind of dementia where a sweet old man starts gradually
losing his memory. It was the nasty kind that makes people fly off the handle.
The doctor's called it Alzheimer's, but I'm pretty sure it was behavioral variant Frontotemporal Dementia.
I really started to worry about him when he stopped his longstanding tradition of calling me once a week.
I didn't see much of Dad during this time, as I was living a few hundred miles away, so
I mostly heard about him from my brother. He told me about how Dad was blowing up all
the time like when we were kids. My brother also found out that he
couldn't manage his finances, and he had taken to sleeping with prostitutes.
Rather than trying to step up and help my brother deal with the situation, I was really thankful to
be so far away. Between work, marriage, and little kids, I wasn't in a good headspace to deal with
my father's renewed wrath and relive my childhood trauma.
Then, in summer of 2017, I felt stronger and wanted to help my brother.
I don't know if it was the summer sun elevating my mood and making me go fast like it had
so many times before or if it was improved mental clarity and resilience from Buddhism.
I got a job offer in my hometown, and I began preparations to move home. But it was too
little too late. Dad died before I moved.
***
2006 to 2015
Dad gradually adjusted to being divorced, but he never stopped loving Mom.
Living on his own, he started to become a pretty decent guy most of the time.
Maybe there really had been something true about us being the cause of all his problems.
He would still have temper tantrums now and again, but for the most part, he mellowed out.
He became a fairly nice guy who would take me out to dinner once a week where he would
bore me with stories of the latest antics of his cats. He was still a terrible listener, and
I'd get derisive with him, but for the most part, we would content ourselves arguing politics
rather than ripping each other apart. When I finished my professional training, Dad wanted to
tag along with me on road trips for out of state job interviews. He would drive, and I would
man the GPS to navigate. We had a nice time together.
I spent the next few years getting established in my career, living in
the midwest a few hundred miles from home. By then, I was married, and I had two little rug rats of my own.
I'd gotten us into a nice house in a small town. Dad came up alone to visit me, and that
was the last time I saw him before dementia ate his mind. I remember one night where we
sat next to each other on the couch watching boxing, his arm over my shoulder.
"The thing I had to learn about you son," he began, "was that you had to do things your own way. It was
hard for me to accept, but you've done well for yourself. I'm proud of you.”
***
Early 2000s
I came home after working in a suburb of Tokyo for 2 1/2 years, planning to go
back to college, this time for career training rather than to avoid the job market.
My first order of business was to go to a bank that was big enough to cash some
Japanese money orders. Dad lent me a clunker my sister had been using.
I got my business taken care of, but the car broke down. There's no way it
could've been my fault--it was the first time I'd driven it. Be that as it may,
Dad made it my fault when I called him.
"What?!!? Now look at what you've done! Look at all this shit I'm going to--"
I hung up the phone. I wasn't going to take his crap anymore. I called my grandfather
and explained the situation.
"Sure, I'd be happy to help out," he said.
He came downtown and helped me get the car situation squared away, and gave me a ride home.
He was really nice and helpful the whole time. I told him that I didn't think
I could take living with Dad anymore, and I asked him if I could stay with them.
He agreed and dropped me off at home so I could pack.
Dad was still raging when I got home. I told him calmly that I was going to get my
things and move in with my grandparents.
"No!! You can't leave!! If you leave, your mother is going to divorce me!" he
screamed, "you're all just abandoners!"
I ignored him and started packing my things. I could overhear Dad yelling at my sister over some
nonsense that I didn't want to get involved with. A little later, Dad knocked on my door and passed me the phone.
"Your mother wants to talk to you," he said.
It turned out that for once, my father's intuition had been correct. My mom told me that she'd had enough.
When she got home from work, she planned to get a few things and leave him after twenty-something years of
marriage. I tried to talk her down, but she was firm. I didn't want to be the cause of my
parents divorce--I just wanted to be left alone.
About an hour later, my mom, my sister, and I all moved in with my mom's parents.
Dad was quick to call, not wanting to let us escape.
"Look what you've done to me! I'll show you! You've seen my guns! I'm going to shoot myself!"
My mom and my grandparents didn't know what to do, so I called 911 and
explained the situation. We met the police back over at our house, and Mom and I
filled out witness statements. The police put Dad in a psych ward where he cooled off over the next few days.
A few weeks later, Dad came to my grandparents house to visit, all laughs and smiles. I could see through him.
"Dad, it's not happening. Mom doesn't want to get back together with you," I said calmly.
He snapped and went into a temper tantrum, again talking about all the things he'd
done for us and how ungrateful we were.
"I sure saved your butt once," he said, referring to the time he had stuck me on a psych ward.
"From problems that you created through bad parenting," I retorted.
Something in Dad broke with those words. His eyes got watery, and he tried to maintain a
front of indignant wrath, but he was crumbling inside. He turned his back and walked out to his car crying.
***
Late 90s and early 2000s
In my late teens, I stopped seeing Dad as my father, and more of an obstacle to avoid.
Dad was always on my ass to get a job, and he made me look for "opportunities" in the
daily paper want ads. Nothing quite epitomized the shithole of a world I grew up in as
well as those classified ads, laying out a variety of life paths of bleak, low-wage menial
servitude, neither for the betterment of the individual nor for society.
I got more and more into punk rock, and those job ads made the traditional
battle cry of "no future" ring all the more true. Dad would rage, but I was
better at ignoring him, and since everyone my age had a driver's license, it was easy to get away when I wanted to.
I got a GED and started college right after my 18th birthday. My life's ambition was to play
guitar in a punk rock band, but taking a minimal load of classes would get Dad to ease up on me.
It turned out that I liked college. The professors seemed way smarter than my
public school teachers had been, and no one gave me a hard time. I floundered
around, changing majors regularly, taking whatever interested me, mostly literature,
philosophy, history, and the humanities. I also went to countless local punk rock shows and
discovered the joys of alcohol intoxication and a variety of mind altering substances. I came
out cum laude with a worthless degree in general studies, which is basically designed to let
people graduate if they hang around for 4-5 years, passing classes without getting their shit together.
The summer after I got my bachelor's degree, we went on a cross country family road trip
to New York and D.C. On the way, we decided to stop by Lebanon, Illinois to take a look at the
great retaining wall that my father had built as a boy. He had been telling us about this Herculean
labor of his for years. In my mind, it was going to be 10 feet tall, stretching a mile up a steep incline. It
was an utter disappointment. It was less than a foot tall, and it was barely as long as the yard it guarded. Plus,
it was on flatland. Dad was embarrassed.
"Something must've happened. I swear the thing was bigger."
I laughed in derision. My college education had made my father my intellectual inferior, and
seeing that his great retaining wall was nothing compared to the labors of my childhood, I
realized that Dad had always been a ne'er do well. Mom shared some of these sentiments,
but she kept her contempt to herself. She made me and Dad pose for a photo in front of the
pathetic excuse for a retaining wall.
After summer, I tried graduate school, hoping to make the undergraduate years last, but I
left after a couple of months. I was depressed again, and I hated reading boring academic
articles. Dad started coming after me with the job ads again, but I found out that
anyone with any kind of college degree could get a job teaching English as a Foreign Language in Japan, so
I went for it.
The thought of the problematic son working and supporting himself over a thousand miles away from home made Dad happy.
Before I left for Tokyo, he got teary and melodramatic.
"You're never going to come back. You'll get caught up in the culture there, and you'll never
want to come home," he fantasized. "Today is the day that you finally become a man."
I had an adjustment period, going from lazy punk rock college kid to tie wearing English teacher in a
completely different world where you have to learn 2 phonetic alphabets and a thousand Chinese characters just
to read a newspaper. But I did adapt, and I learned to act like a professional. It was alright, but
I didn't want it to be the last chapter in my life.
In Tokyo, the supply of books in English was limited, so I talked Mom and Dad into
picking up a few titles for me and mailing them. They sent me the books I wanted, along with
an unexpected title. It was The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian. Inside, Dad had
written a message, saying that the title had reminded him so much of me that he couldn't resist sending it.
I got mad, and I had something to prove. I got my shit together and started studying science
and math in my free time. I would show that fat bastard who The Fuck-Up was.
***
Junior high and high school, 1990s
When I was 12, I had a dream that left an impact on me. I was half in the middle
of the action and half watching. I was trapped in some kind of futuristic boarding school, and
I would shift from being a student there to being a barbarian roaming a post-apocalyptic Mad Max wasteland.
I would sometimes feel elated, defeating a bully, then riding him down the stairs like a sled,
off a ramp, both of us flying through a window, shattering it, escaping.
Then I would be severely depressed in the wasteland, lighting a funeral pyre for the person I had been.
Shortly after this dream, I turned 13, our family moved, I changed schools, and I started junior high.
I fell into my first depressive episode.
I didn't have the first clue how to adapt to junior high. My mind was still
full of the magic of childhood, mixed with all the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror I'd read.
The playground had vanished, and in its place was a big patio where adolescents put on airs,
pretending to be mature, weaving soap operas with their gossip, lost in a labyrinth of
teenage social status that would never bridge to mine. In short, I was friendless and easy prey for bullies.
I would take shit all day at school, and then I would have to deal with
Dad's unpredictable temper tantrums at home. I would try to tell him about my problems,
wanting help and support. He'd listen to me for a couple of minutes, then he would explode
and yell at me like I was the problem. To his credit, he eventually went to the school to
complain about the bullying problem. It didn't change anything, and my mental health deteriorated.
I got taken to different counselors. Some were good and others just pissed me off, and
when Dad inevitably got on to me, he would yell at me over the things I had told the counselor in mock-confidence.
It's not surprising that counselors didn't help much. They're more equipped to help with
simple personal problems than to dig a kid like me out of a complicated sociological quagmire.
If things are going rough for a typical adult, you typically have scorched earth
options like quitting your job or getting a divorce. I didn't have those choices.
But things would get a lot better in the summer: I just had to avoid Dad. But like clockwork,
depression would come back when it was time to start school again.
By the time I was 15, a freshman in high school, I was close to breaking.
Testosterone, a beard of pimples, heavy music, fantasies about a fuck-everyone rebel lifestyle,
and I had stopped doing the majority of my school work. I wanted to fit in with the
other rebels, but the core of the problem was that I really wanted to rebel and
drop out of life, not just play dress-up and make-believe. This was before I
started doing drugs. My experience with altered states of consciousness was limited to smoking
marijuana once and a placebo induced pseudo-trip from fake LSD.
I had also discovered a phenomenon called pareidolia. Pareidolia is a normal
psychological phenomenon where you recognize a pattern or image in a random stimulus.
It is not a mental health symptom. I noticed that if I would let my eyes go out of focus,
I would start to see a variety of images in wall and carpet textures. I became fascinated
by this, and I would do it all the time. Then I worried what would happen
if I started to see images of a prehistoric sea snake from a picture book that had
scared the hell out of me as a child. That auto-suggestion was all it took to turn all
the images into giant serpents, and I saw them all the time.
One day, in geometry class, I decided I'd had enough. A short teacher with dark curly hair, a
stern voice, and a world weary face prattled on about the congruency of different angles
in a realm far above the shit and grime of the teenage drama that the rest of us lived in.
I decided that after school, I was going to walk away. I would roam the city without a
clear plan and see what happened. Anything would be better than being imprisoned in a
toxic school all day and going home to Dad. But I never got a chance to go full Holden Caulfield.
Dad picked me up early from school that day and stuck me in a psych ward.
At the intake, I told the psychiatrist about the pareidolia, and he put me on an
old school antipsychotic called thioridazine. Back then, I thought doctors knew
everything, so I took it without question. I got put in a quiet bedroom by myself,
and everyone was nice to me. Free of Dad and school, life was good.
One day when I was in the psych ward, we had a group therapy session
that included kids and their parents. Dad was one of the first parents to talk,
and he took the opportunity to tear into me.
"You used to do great in school, and everyone thought you had a bright future,
but now look at how you've messed everything up! Look at the crap you make me deal with! What happened?!"
To my surprise, the other kids and families stood up for me. They told Dad that I'd been
struggling and that he shouldn't take his bad day out on me. It is one of the only times
that I remember anyone defending me against him, and it stuck with me that maybe things weren't all my fault.
I was in the psych ward for a week, and after that I had another week of day treatment.
It was a nice break from everything, but that's about all it was. Afterwards, I had
a comfortable limbo where I wasn't in school, just reading and messing around on
the PC in my bedroom, laying low when Dad was around. My PCP got me off the antipsychotic,
noticing that it had zombified me over time, and I felt better.
One night, I had a dream where Dad took off work early to put me back in school. Everything
felt wrong when I woke up, and I told Mom about the dream right away. A few minutes later, Dad
walked in the door, announcing that he had taken off work early to get me back in school.
Everything turned to shit again when I had to go back to school, but there was a
light at the end of the tunnel. I made it to summer and dropped out of school just after my 16th birthday.
***
Elementary school years, 1980s
From the time I was five years old, Dad started conscripting me for
forced labor on a regular basis. I'm not victimizing myself over routine household chores.
Throughout all his life, Dad always had some kind of home improvement project that
needed to be done, and he demanded my help with all of them. A new project could instantly
darken my father's mood, and enlisting my help typically involved screaming and berating,
telling me how weak, lazy, and worthless I was. He would have me examine all of
the wonderful things he had done for me, so that I might understand the debt of servitude I owed him.
One evening, I was sitting on the porch having a relaxed, pleasant conversation with my mom.
My dad got home, pulling his old baby blue Nissan truck in front of the house.
He slammed the door and stormed towards me, maelstrom of rage, a 350lbs minotaur.
"You aren't good for anything! You're so damn lazy and worthless. Get off your ass and mow the lawn!"
he ordered. I was 7 years old, and that was my first time mowing a lawn.
But Dad's rages would disappear as suddenly as they would come on. When I finished mowing,
Dad gave me a hug, apologized for yelling at me, and even paid me for doing it.
Most of our projects involved tangling me in confusing clouds of rapid mood shifts,
Dad screaming at me for not holding a board, level, screw, medieval adze, or whatever the way I was supposed to.
I'd be scared to death and not really understanding what he wanted from me.
A short time later, the clouds would part, leaving Dad all apologies, jokes, and hugs sometime later that day.
Sometimes at night, when things were done, and he was in good spirits, he would
tell me and my little brother an inspirational story about a retaining wall he had built as a teenager.
The retaining wall was meant to have been a two man project, but my grandfather hurt his hand mixing concrete, so Dad had to do the whole thing himself. He mixed bag after bag of concrete, pushing a wheelbarrow a great distance uphill, over and over again, erecting a giant wall. He made it sound like he had single-handedly constructed the Great Wall of China. Hercules had cleaned out the Augean stable by redirecting a river to flood it out, but could he have built this monstrous retaining wall? Depending on his mood, Dad would either insinuate or bluntly state that we were weak and lazy, no match for the ubermensch boy he'd been.
And so it goes. I helped Dad with all kinds of shit. We laid down a driveway, erected wood
fences, put up crown molding, built a shed, and did all kinds of other stuff. The funny
thing is, that in spite of the never ending projects, Dad was a terrible craftsman.
Once the job was barely functional, he would declare it done with his mantra, "It'll have to do."
I had no choice but to help Dad, but I barely learned anything about home improvement.
Instead, I learned to keep my mouth shut (when it serves my purpose) and to hate working with my hands.
Dad's unpredictable moods were not just related to manual labor. The smallest
stress at work could bring him home ready to kick the dog and to blame me for the world plotting against him.
Once he worked himself up into a fit of paranoia, yelling about our family and
everyone else trying to do him in. He cornered me in the bathroom and slapped me across the face hard.
I cried. I was bewildered, as I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong.
At the same time, I couldn't help but feel sorry for Dad, as it must have been really
hard for him to get by with everyone trying to thwart him at every corner.
Dad realized that he had gone too far, and his anger turned to tears. He apologized and
told me that I was the best of all of them.
Sometimes, when I was afraid of Dad's wrath, I would run away from home.
It was never planned: I would just take off and start wandering around the neighborhood,
dreaming of orphan adventure. Mom and Dad would come looking for me, or I would come back
on my own after an hour or so. Dad would have cooled off by then, so everything was okay.
At the end of the day, Dad didn't hit me a lot, and the corporal punishment I
received was within the norms of 80s parenting. He never took a belt to me, and with that
alone, I knew I had it better than some of my friends.
Things weren't always bad with Dad. When he was free from self-imposed projects
and daily responsibilities, Dad could be a great guy. He would sometimes check me out of
school early to take me to see movies like Ghostbusters, The Goonies,
or Rambo First Blood Part 2. He'd still tell me stories spun off the top of his head,
and he also talked about the wonderful adventures he'd like to have if he ever came
into money or lost 150lbs. He would talk about wanting to travel to Egypt to see the pyramids,
and he would tell me stories about the legendary treasures of Tutankhamen.
He would talk about wanting to go scuba diving and that we would need to be wary of
great white sharks. He never got around to doing most of these things, but he inspired my later adventures.
No one could ever accurately distill their childhood relationship with their
father into a few paragraphs. I'm trying to be fair to Dad by leaving a nuanced
impression that captures both the good and bad. He would probably take issue with what
I've written, saying that I'd left out parts about me being a mouthy little shit from time to time,
but what can I say? History is written by the winners. "It'll have to do.”
***
Early 1980s
My daddy likes to draw me pictures of scary monsters! He's the best! I want to draw like Daddy.
He tells me stories where me and my best friend Artie go hunt monsters!
His stories are the best. He took me to 7-11 and bought me a Chocolate Soldier.
It was really good. I love my daddy!
***
Mourning period, 2017-2018, in my labyrinth and dream world
My dad was an asshole, and he could make life hell for me, but he was still my dad, and I love him.
If a father sticks around, he becomes the most important man in your life, for both the good and the bad.
I had a mourning period with uncontrollable crying spells. His final act in life, the act of
dying, was to give me grief one last time… but I recovered, day by day.
In many ways, I had already been free of him for several years, physically distant in
foreign countries or the wintry midwest, and mentally distant, wrapped up in study, work, and
taking care of my own family. But he always was, is, and will be inevitable. As the slave defines
himself in opposition to his master, so my father forged many of the foundational bricks of my inner labyrinth.
He will continue to haunt its corridors as architect and minotaur until the day
that simulacra of my ancestors spray paint my stories on the corridors of existence at the end of time.
On his first birthday after his death, I tried to invite our old family together to celebrate him.
My mom and brother showed up, but my sister didn't make it. We had a homemade pizza and
watched an ALF rerun, just like we would do on Monday nights back in the 80s. I wanted to keep up
the tradition, because I knew that Dad wanted to be remembered, but I couldn't get
anyone to come to celebrate his birthday the next year. So it goes.
Dad had requested to have his ashes kept in a bronzed hospital urinal, so that
people could have a laugh over it. This wasn't a one time joke, but something he'd
said over and over again. My brother followed through, and my Dad's ashes were split
into 3 bronzed hospital urinals: one for me, one for my brother, and one for my sister.
My brother and sister have talked about going to the lake to scatter the ashes, around
the same place where we sunk that little boat. But I remember one time I had asked
Dad about scattering his ashes. The thought scared him, and he'd said that he'd
rather hang around, so I've decided to respect that. The bronzed urinal containing
his earthly remains sits in a little memorial shrine in my home office to this day.
After Dad died, he remained with me as a recurring character in my dreams. In one dream,
I was a little boy sitting in the car next to him in the backseat. He was trying to comfort me,
and I was hitting him, screaming and crying at him for leaving me. In another, it was
Christmas morning back at our old family home, and I was overjoyed to see my Dad come
out in high spirits laughing and joking, making silly melodrama over all the gifts we were to receive.
When your dad dies, the mind initially tries to turn him into a perfect ideal, a platonic form of
a wise and loving father, and it is hard to remember the nuanced, flawed human being.
A little later, I had a different kind of dream. I was depersonalized and watching
from the third person. There was a mute boy in a hospital gown, sitting in a room at a
psychiatric facility. I was the boy, but I was split off in myself. I was sitting on an
exam table in a dark room. Flat panel lights lit the hallway outside. From beyond
the cracked door, I heard a doctor saying, "The boy is upset because he thinks he lost his father.
He doesn't know that his father only existed in his imagination."
The truth of the dream shocked me. My perception, my relationship, the person that I called Dad
only existed as products of my imagination. He saw himself as a normal downtrodden
guy with "concrete experience", trying his best to get by with a fuck-up oldest son, a good
middle son, and an erratic younger daughter. And my brother's version of my dad,
stored only in his mind, is also completely different, as are the dads forever yelling,
joking, crying, loving in the minds of my mom and my sister.
Deconstructing my father leads me to the deconstruction of the self. I can't even
say that I see my own identity in one certain way, the perspectives are ever changing,
as are the imaginary versions that everyone else has of me, each one constantly evolving
with time and further convolutions of the imagination. The real me is an illusory epiphenomenon,
a reflection of light off the surface of a sea of echoes. Beneath the waves is a labyrinth of
mirrors where an infinite number of refracted identities scream at each other and
alternate versions of themselves...The ones that others have seen like the boring working family
man and the teenage punk rocker...and the internal selves--the voice that tries to narrate my
mundane life as high adventure and the voice that seeks to understand, staring into the abyss,
hoping to walk away with some transcendental higher meaning... And that's still a gross oversimplification.
My head is going to implode. Fuck it. Let's go grab a beer.
--
Quick Notes
-The songs in the first section are real punk rock songs you can find on YouTube
-The line 'So It Goes' is a nod to Vonnegut. It was the motif used when people died
in Slaughterhouse Five.
Lux Knox barely got started in graduate school for literature before he decided it wasn't for him. He floundered around, but eventually landed on his feet with a Master's and a respectable day job in an entirely unrelated field. He also feels entitled an honorary PhD in Navel Staring from the University of Hard Knox, and he prefers dreams to the spreadsheets of metrics of his daily grind. Outside of writing and supporting his family, he has diverse interests including playing guitar, pop psychology, philosophy, health sciences, and scuba diving. Despite this insane little book and the strange places his mind sometimes journeys, he is a surprisingly normal-ish, low-key family man.
Hello, and thanks for coming to look at my page. When I was a younger, I grew up loving movies and books that bended reality and played with the mind. I especially love Terry Gilliam movies like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Brazil, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I liked Phillip K. Dick's sci-fi novels and stories like Valis, A Scanner Darkly, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Some of my favorites were psychedelic books like The Illuminatus Trilogy and Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy from Robert Anton Wilson and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.
When I was in undergrad, I learned an appreciation of western civ, literature, and philosophy. I added ideas from Nietzsche, Hegel, and other philosophers to the influences of my inner life, and I started reading novels of ideas by the likes of Milan Kundera. (But part of me thinks that most other people probably read The Unbearable Lightness of Being only because of all the sex scenes.)
When I was in college, I had wanted to someday write a book in the vein of my influences. But when you hit your late twenties and get on into your thirties, life has a way of getting super busy with stuff like marriage, kids, and career consolidation. And so, I had to put the old dream on the back burner. But now, I'm closer to fifty than I am to forty. I no longer have rugrats tearing up the living room, or those delightful elementary school kids who want me to take them to the arcade all the time. Now I have a couple of nice, polite adolescents. But they're still adolescents, so they prefer to keep to themselves and play on electronics instead of spending time with their old man. And my career is consolidated. The best way for me to make more money would be to sacrifice my free time to put in more hours. A promotion would mean a very small raise in return for a lot of undesirable job duties. When my life quieted down, I found that my inner life became more restless, and old dreams came back to me.
Now in 2025, many of my favorite artists and film directors are either very old or dead. Terry Gilliam is 84 years old. Philip K. Dick, Tom Wolfe, Milan Kundera, Robert Anton Wilson, Terrance McKenna, Hunter S. Thompson, and even Douglas Adams have all passed on. I'm sure that there are many new authors and filmmakers who are rising to take their places. Unfortunately, I have not yet found who they are. (Please email me recommendations if you have any.)
And so, one night, I was in a strange reflective mood, thinking about old aspirations and how they contrasted with how my life turned out. I was feeling job burnout and thinking about early retirement and what I would do to fill my time. I thought that I might write my own book, something psychedelic and mind-bending, yet hilarious, as a tribute to the artists who had inspired my imagination. That night, I dreamed that Kurt Vonnegut came to me and encouraged me to write my book. I woke up thinking that it was just a strange dream? Why Kurt Vonnegut? I had read a couple of Vonnegut books that my friends had recommended me in college. I really liked them at the time, but I hadn't thought about Vonnegut in years. I probably would have left it as just a random dream brought about by an odd mood. But the next day, I was in the airport in Costa Rica. I got bullied by a security guard who made me take off my shirt in front of a crowd of people, all for no good reason. I was mad as hell, so I went to the airport convenience store to buy a beer to ease the sting of humiliation. After I got a beer out of the fridge, I turned around, and on this bookrack in a foreign, Spanish speaking country, were multiple copies of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I decided to take this synchronicity as a sign. I didn't quit my day job, but I wrote my book, and now it is a finished project.
This Vonnegut Synchronicity was a real experience for me, and it is the reason that my novel exists. I don't want to comment on how true anything else is in the book because the book continually questions the reliability of its narrator. I think that is a lot of the fun: not knowing what to believe. But honestly, how real are any of us or the dreams we call memories?
12/19/25
I've started playing with this website again. I have added a page for
reviews, essays, rants, and the like, The Unsolicited Opinions of Mr. Lux Knox.
So far it contains reviews of the PS5 games Ghost of Yotei and The First Berserker: Khazan.
It also has a little piece about how I got my kids to watch Calcifer Yule Log twice in a row.
This site was originally hastily put together because I needed an author page in order to
get Goodreads to acknowledge me as the author of my own book. Now, I am looking more towards
new horizons and I'm revamping the website to be more... multifaceted? I would like to eventually
get back to writing my reference guide to The Vonnegut Synchronicity and the Earth Mother, but
spending the better part of 2025 writing the damn thing took a lot out of me, and so for now, the
less I think about the damn thing, the happier I am.
9/7/25
I have made substantial improvements to the look of the page...
9/4/25
I added Chapter 2 references to the online companion for the book.
I'm trying to make the companion lively and fun to read, writing in whatever
jokes may come to me in the moment. On a typical day, I probably devote a good
deal of my cognitive reserve to thinking up funny stuff to say. Thus is my karma.
9/3/25
I never thought I would start my own domain. I would have been content with
a Goodreads page. However, getting Goodreads to believe that I wrote my own book
has been more... cumbersome than anticipated. It is still a work in progress.
However, I'm actually glad it worked out this way. I have my own customizable space,
and anyone who is curious about me or my work can come here to look around without any
annoying 3rd party ads.
Right now, I have the website such that it looks acceptable on my iphone, but I need to
review a little html so I can make it easier on the eyes on a desktop computer. I see fun
with @media queries in my future.
I have started writing a commentary and guide to The Vonnegut Synchronicity and The Earth Mother,
and I've gotten it done through the first chapter. The book is full of references to
Buddhism, punk rock, literature, and the like, so I want curious people to be able to look
up things they weren't sure about. Also, I'm trying to make the Companion funny and enjoyable
to read.
I have started two new writing projects. The bigger project is a second novel.
The working title is The Freshmen Dungeoneers. This is partly a fantasy parody,
as it will follow would-be adventurers doing dumb, off-the-wall things in a traditional
fantasy setting. The other part of the book will involve interactions between the adolescents
who are controlling the characters, and it will also follow around parts of their daily lives
outside the game. I want it to be funny, but I also want to show how cruel, crass, and
ridiculous those 1990s fantasy RPGs could get back when we were kids. So far,
I have the first two chapters and the last chapter written.
Here are a couple of my coding experiments. Awhile back, I became obsessed with learning how to code, just for fun. Lately, I haven't touched it, and just fixing up this website is challenging.
You can click on this B Movie Plot Generator that I coded in javascript to generate a fully cast 1980s-1990s B-movie synopsis.
This is a simple art program that you can use to make psychedelic artwork. You build art with shapes, and each shape is colored with a randomized linear gradient of colors. You will need to screen capture to save your work.