Juice with Junior

I just called my dad for Father's Day. Listen, I went out to go to my best friend's birthday party at 9 PM on Saturday and did not get back to my apartment until 6 AM on Father's Day morning. Good times.

Anyway, I then went to sleep and woke up, my bestie picked me up, she was still a little drunk but OK to drive, and we went to the bookstore where the guy she's been stalking for 3 weeks works, but she swears she's over him... People, I know this all sounds like I'm a 19-year-old girl with Daddy issues, but I promise this was just a one-time thing. Anyway, I finally got around to calling my dad. He liked the book I got for him the previous week that he asked for, the one my mom didn't want me to buy because she thought it would be too "complicated" for him because it's not about New York or basketball... My mother is a wonderful person... And he asked me how my night was. I told him about it and he said "Um, okay..." I do talk to him a lot but often those conversations are usually about the major events going on in my life like jobs, births, deaths, things like that. Basically, to my father, I am an unemployed writer of some type who spent all night out with friends instead of looking for a job possibly swinging from chandeliers while muscular men dressed in leather doused me in oil and beat my naked bottom with reeds.

Or some variation thereof. I would like to say that he is more evolved not to think these things, but I know and appreciate that he isn't, which is why he never asks me about my personal life. He never asks partly because he knows that I know that there is nothing that I can say to effectively convey how boring my life really is given how different we are as men and he doesn't want to make me uncomfortable. He also doesn't ask because what if his son's dangling a$$ out on a swing while strange men pour canola oil all over him actually is true; he'd rather not know. This is the interesting relationship a gay son has with an aggressively masculine father, but it's not a bad one. He appreciates me for the talents I have and has never once forced me to take part in the things that he loves and never made me feel bad that I didn't. And he also took a vague interest in the things I liked, enough of an interest where he could tell his friends that he son was a "writer, always chained to the computer. He can do anything on the computer. Not so much of a basketball guy as he loves the computer and writing." Now when my father would say things like this to his friends, all black men who play basketball as well as as badly as I play basketball, the only thing that would offend me was his insistence on highlighting my "computer" expertise as if that made my writing more legitimate. This was mostly due to his fear that I wouldn't get a job if he just focused on the writing, and you know what, he was right.

I like Father's Day as a holiday because I think it is our most ambiguous holiday. I don't think anyone really knows the best way to celebrate it yet. It is similar to the fact that fatherhood in general is still evolving; we as a society still haven't really decided what this whole "being a father" thing entails. Religious conservatives will tell you that having a father is essential although they rarely will tell you what that fatherly participation actually gives to a child, particularly because when a child has two dads they say that that arrangement is also bad. I guess it's like too much of a good thing.

Overall, there are a lot of people who grow up and have successful lives without any input from a father and often we don't sigh as loudly as we do when someone announces that they grew up without a mother. Mothering seems to me anyway to be well-defined. Fathering, not so much. I mean I remember a time when there weren't babies changing tables in men's bathrooms at department stores as if the idea that a man would be taking care of a baby was so novel that there was no need to pretend it could ever happen. Plus, there are a lot of people whose fathers were not wonderful, don't support them, or are just deadbeat, which is why this holiday is always so interestingly bittersweet. p.s. I will take any opportunity to post the above picture of Christopher Meloni because I imagine myself laying next to him when the picture was taken... Sorry for the aside...

So what am I babbling on about? I actually have no idea. I am so tired. People, I threw my back out last week and have been on medication ever since, and then I went to this party on 2 hours of sleep... Argh... I guess what I'm trying to say is that I hope you have a great Father's Day if you are a dad, have a dad, know a dad, or know that you came from a dad but don't really want to go there.

Happy Father's Day!