It’s not something I talk about often, but I had a sister who passed away shortly after she was born. I was only three years old when it happened, and for many years I thought that it didn’t have a huge effect on my life. I knew I was getting a new sibling, but was too young to really understand much and, because she died before I ever even got to know her, she was a very distant memory.
Recently I came across a show on HBO called The Righteous Gemstones. I don’t know how I missed it, but damn did this show hit a cord with me. I’ve never been too into Danny McBride content. I’ve seen a bit, but he’s not an actor or screenwriter that I’ve really seen a lot of. I think one time I saw an episode of Eastbound & Down and it just didn’t really appeal to me.
This time of year is the anniversary of my father’s death. When my father passed away, I felt a lot different about it than I thought I would. I imagined myself not caring at all, feeling free from the guilt I felt to talk, text, or help him. For over two decades after he was released from prison, a year didn’t go by that he wouldn’t hit me up for money or some other favor. Whenever I went home, I always felt that I should visit him even though I knew it would be difficult, time consuming, and leave me feeling drained.
It wasn’t until I was older that I could really understand a lot of what happened when I was younger. I have this feeling a lot when I watch Seinfeld. This is a show my father loved and I remember watching it with him back in the late 80s and early 90s. It started in 1989, so when I was 12, and it was really the early episodes over the first few seasons that bring back a lot of memories for me.
Guilt. It’s a vital tool for a person, political party, religion, or any other group to control people. It’s not just guilt about doing something wrong. It’s also guilt about doing something potentially wrong. Or potentially disappointing your leaders. You could be faced with leaders that claim a direct connection…
Watching Better Call Saul has been really strange for me. In one sense, as a fan of Breaking Bad I just really love the show. I started watching the first few seasons during the initial Covid lockdowns and it was a lot of fun. It's one of those shows that really gets you to binge, with the endings set up just perfectly to keep you wanting more.
There's a darker side to the show for me, though. The simple fact is that Saul Goodman reminds me a lot of my father. My father was a lawyer who also was a lifelong grifter and was always trying one scheme or another. The end goals were slightly different but still similar. Money. Prestige. Power. A love of all things gaudy. All fueled by arrogance and a desire to be better, at all costs, than others and to proove to all the naysayers just how much better. Saul was a bit more into women and less into drugs than my father was. But the resemblence is striking - even the attempt to cover up losing hair - that the show has resonanted with me in a lot of ways that I didn't expect.
A few scenes show a typical scene in Saul's office. A waiting room packed full of people, many of whom some may view as unsavory characters. People were waiting for hours to see Saul, but when the camera moves into his office you can see that he's not helping a client or working. Instead, he's using a leg masager, talking to one of his criminal accomplices, or bouncing a ball on his desk while he's thinking. People in his waiting room are agitated, but perhaps no one more than his secretary, who obviously loathes everything about the job but for some unknown reason stayed.
It was the same way at my father's law office. He would always double book clietns but then never see anyone until he kept them waiting at least a few hours. Most of the time while they were waiting, he wasn't actually doing anything. I got called in to his office to give him a foot, hand, or face massage on more than one occassion (something I hated to my core as a teenager at the time). If it wasn't me, there would be someone else in there doing it. Or he would be sleeping. Or claiming to be praying. Or doing anything but actually see the clients he had booked all day long.
My father had his office at a few different locations, and the second location was laid out so that the office where the waiting room was in the middle of the floor plan. At one end there were two offices with two people per office. My brother and I stayed in the far office. In front of the waiting room, there was the receptionist's office and my mother's office. Moving down a long hallway would find one office on the right, one meeting room, and my father's large office on the left. At the end of the hallway was the filing and copy room.
This was the 90s, so there was a lot of filing and copying and printing going on. Whenever I had to print or file something, I had to get up out of my office, walk through a packed waiting room, go to the end of the hall, and then walk up back through the waiting room to get to my desk. The same was true if I had to go to the restroom. Many times I just could not show my face in the waiting room because I would be accosted by angry clients wondering why they took off of work to spend three hours in a waiting room.
These scenes in Better Call Saul brought back vivid and visceral memories of the long days and even longer years I spent working in my father's law office. Instead of going to middle or high school, I was there, many times six days a week and working late almost every day. If ever I left at 6pm, my father would make me feel guilty.
But never as guilty as I felt for those poor souls stuck in the waiting room of eternity.
Breakdown is, in my view, the most underrated Guns n’ Roses song ever written. From what little I’ve been able to learn about the song’s history, it was difficult to write and record. Maybe that’s why it’s only been played live twice in the entire history of the band (as of this writing).
My early teenage years were spent in the l ate 80s and early 90s. Music was a touchy subject in my house, because my father believed that only he knew what good music really was (basically anything he liked) and he also believed he was just as talented as any of the 50s and 60s stars he idolized. His musical journey is something that I’ll go in later in a longer post, but suffice it to say, I wasn’t allowed to listen to any music that didn’t meet my father’s approval. There was little that did, and while as an adult I became to appreciate some of the bands he liked, I loathed them when I was growing up.
Guns n’ Roses were a symbol of rebellion, and their songs really hit me to the core. Not all of them, but the ones that did - it was like they knew exactly what I was going through and that their words were written towards my father and the struggle I endured. There are so many lines in Estranged that encapsulated perfectly how I felt but couldn’t put into words.
It’s weird to think that GnR is classified as oldies or classic rock now. It’s amazing these guys are still touring, playing the songs of my youth three decades after they were written. I bought their albums in secret, and only listened to them at very low volume in my room or on my Walkman.
Certain smells or weather bring back strong memories for me, as I’m sure they do for most. In November 1991, I was stuck in the cold outside painting the fence that went around our entire 8 acre property. It wasn’t the first chore or the last chore that Sunday morning. As I painted, Breakdown came on my Walkman. The rage, frustration, disappointment, angst, and wanderlust I felt was all encapsulated perfectly in this song. As I sat there in the cold November rain - literally - painting a fence for the tenth time, I thought about all I would do and see when I could escape the chains that held me.
Guns n’ Roses represented that escape. Whether it was a 10 minute escape through one of their songs or the escape that I longed for, they heard my cries and offered a way out.
I’m sure everyone thinks the songs of their youth were the best. I like new music, but whenever I’m feeling a certain way I always gravitate to a band that got me through so much, even though they didn’t know it.
I was able to fulfill a lifelong dream and see GnR during their Not in this Lifetime tour. They weren’t the same band as I remembered, as we all age, but it was amazing to see them on stage and fulfill a dream I had when I was alone painting that damn fence.
One thing I am most grateful for in my life is the opportunity I’ve had to become a father myself. Every day, my son amazes me and I think one of the most awesome things in the world is to be a part of your children’s lives. Whenever anyone asks…
For the entire time I knew him, my father would always claim he was on the brink of something terrible. Mostly related to his health, he was a hypochondriac but yet I never recall him going to the doctor or actually taking his health seriously. He never exercised and never did anything to mitigate his unhealthy life choices. He was always looking for shortcuts - like liposuction - instead of making meaningful changes.
I don’t know think he was actually ever concerned for his health. If he was, he would have seen doctors, tried to make lifestyle changes, or done something. I don’t think a month went by when he didn’t tell me at least a few times that he would be dead soon. But this wasn’t what he really believed. It was all for sympathy. He would tell you some elaborate story, look for your empathy (which was ironic because he was not an empathetic person himself), and then ask you for something.
Looking over old emails and letters from him from the past 20 years, it wasn’t surprising for me to see that the things he was telling me 6 months ago were the same things he was telling me 20 years ago. I won’t make it to next year! I’ll be dead in a few months! Someday it would be true, but he was the classic person who cried wolf a million times with the only reason being for personal gain.
Over the last few years, things got worse. At one point in 2020, he claimed to have all of the following happen in a three week period:
It was impossible to know if any of the above were true. Maybe one was true. Maybe all had a little bit of truth to them and maybe he made them all up. The thing with my father, was that he was saying these things his entire life so it was impossible to believe anything he said.
He was always on the brink of his existence.