My father died when I was four years old.
Happy Father's Day.
He used heroin.  He had apparently been diagnosed with manic depression and schizophrenia.  He was a black man in America and he lived a financially impoverished lifestyle.  He was from the inner city of Detroit.  He was the product of a long line of black people in America.  The people who probably lived their life on the wrong side of a whip.
I say probably because I don't really know anything about my father's side of my family.  My mother is white.  It doesn't take much more than being black and white in America to make relationships tenuous at best.  She was from the country.  Her father was relatively well-to-do for his area.  He didn't like black people for anything more than a conversation tool on which to center moderately racist jokes.
I don't know much about my father, but Happy Father's Day.
I have this notion that my father was a good person.  I imagine that I understand what he went through.  I also imagine that he saved my life when I was involved in an 80-mph car accident in 1991.  I imagine that he loves me.  I also imagine that I love him. 
He had a hard time adjusting.  He didn't fit into the system in the 1970's.  That was the moment of tension resulting from the Era of Moderation established by the Civil Rights Act of the 60's.  The 70's was the period of crackers living with niggers.  That was an era of questions.
How do we think?
How should we talk?
That's the era of a Don Imus.  Why is it surprising that he would call black people offensive names?  He's a sign of his times and it's really not his fault.  The things acceptable to say prior to Imus were unlimited and unregulated.  Any cracker with the gumption could refer to a black person in any type of derogatory manner without consistent consequences from society.  There was a time not long ago when federalized propaganda was not heavily marketed through a soft sell and the loudest voices were more honest with their intentions.
That is the time my father grew up.
He died at 25 years old.  He was shot in a pool hall in Detroit.  I don't know if I've heard this or made it up (it doesn't really matter because this is the story I will tell on my dying bed) but my father was shot running out of that pool hall.  My mom tells me he was having a real bad time.  Paranoia and heroin were killing him.  I think he had probably stolen some drugs from a guy in the pool hall.  It was late at night.  He knew they were going to kill him.  He wanted to die.
I think my dad thought life sucks.
And it did.
You've got to get up in the morning to go and answer to the Man.  The Man directs your day, mostly, if you want a good chance at succeeding.  Go and answer to the Man then decide what to do with the free time that the Man has now given you.  You agree to it, but it is only out of necessity.
In the beginning, it really doesn't look like you have much of a shot.  Everyone tells you to specialize your dream. 
What do you want to do? 
What do you want to be?  As if, there should be an answer to that question. 
What the hell do you mean?  What do I want to do?  I want to have a good time.  I want to relax.
The unspoken question to that answer is, what do you need?
I need money.  I need money because I need air conditioning.  I need air conditioning because I live in Phoenix.  I imagine I need some food too.  I need the food and I need the air.  I've got to have someplace to contain that air as well, once again because I live in Phoenix.  Also, because I live in Phoenix, I need a car.  The public transportation around here sucks because the city has expanded out rather than up.
All of these factors lead me to: I need a job.  That leads back to: what do you want to be?  Specifically what do you want to be?  If you say "cowboy" that will only be taken seriously in states like Texas.  The location matters, so if you take all the factors I've been writing about and place them in Phoenix, it is a different existence than living in Detroit.
I don't know Detroit.  I would like to see where my father grew up, but I don't even know where to start.  Then there's the question of do I really even want to go there?  I may be black or white to the unperceptive.  The unperceptive see what they are most comfortable with seeing.  I don't know that I wouldn't stand out like a turd in a punch bowl on my father's block.  I have hesitance in discovering the past.
Happy Father's Day.
The weirdest part of it all is that now I am a father.  I never thought about or imagined one day I would be here.  I'm experiencing it in the moment on a daily basis.  What does it mean to be a father?  I am discovering that everyday.  It means dirty diapers for a while.  Then it means taking abuse from a little version of you that doesn't respect fear yet.  It means listening at least well enough to recognize true angst from chronic pissing and moaning. 
Being a father means being attached and listening for signs. 
Being a father means demonstrating a modicum of care and respect for the life emerging before you.
Being a father means sharing the knowledge you've spent your life accumulating.
Like my father, I check out from time to time.  The voices in my head are stupid and funny and I've found a way (as I assume most people do) to keep them in check.  The voices just are what they are.  Sometimes helpful.  Sometimes perverse.  They simply are spasms of the Universal Mind. 
That one great source of all our essence that makes us capable of functioning with one another as we do- for better or worse.
My father gave me life.  My father gave me a sense of being a man.  My father also gave me a hit off a joint when I was four years old.  My father was cool.  He was a junkie.  He was undependable and sad.  He was a fighter who gave up too easy.
Happy Father's Day.
My father gave me the seed of something that makes me want to continue.  There is also something about the time in which I was born.  I have to show that it can be done.  The 60's and 70's weren't tumultous for nothing.  Our country took a tremendous step of which I'm a result.  We don't have the same sense of why things matter anymore.  Maybe were just tired from the last major fight.  Collectively we just need to rest before tackling the next set of injustices perpetrated on the majority for the last couple centuries.  In the 60's and 70's, there was a moment when we transcended everything we had been capable of before.  I imagine that my father instilled a sense of transcendent importance within my mind.  Then again, that may just be an inherited aspect of the manic depression my father passed along to me.
I believe this would've mattered to my father. 
My father died when I was four years old.
Happy Father's Day.