L0 completion +5

This is a rant. I didn't re-read after writing because it was hard enough for me to write. Yeah, i whine. Yeah, it's not really a great piece of writing. Some praxis are about giving to the community, some are about SF0 giving something to you. This would be the latter. Documenting this fleeting feeling of care is worth throwing disorganized feelings into cyberspace.



1) Fine, I care! Please spit out your cigarettes. I want each and every one of you to know that I care about you too much to let you do this to yourself. You know the statistics; you went though health class in high school. You know that 1 in 5 deaths in the United States are related to your little vice. You know that it will come back to bite your ass eventually. You know you smell like shit and you know it costs a lot.

But how can you resist it, the sweetly intoxicating feeling of calm, which comes over you with each toxic breath… the way the pistons of your mind whir smoothly and sweetly, the quenching, satisfying feeling which comes from feeding and indulgent addiction. I know it well. We all have our dragons to slay.

But I honestly implore you to stop. What you will experience isn’t fun. Your skin the color of the remnants in your ashtray, the black filth you cough up from your lungs, the tears of those whom you are close too.

I don’t just care about you though…

I care about your children (whether or not you have them yet, statistically, you’ll probably want them later.) I don’t want them to have to watch you die in a slow, disgusting and expensive way. Each of those hospital bills you will have to pay robs them of an education, or any other support you could have given them.

While your so busy dealing with your shit, you won’t be able to help them with theirs. You rob them of a childhood, because they have to fix daddy.

Oh and on that note, I care about you dad.

I pretend for the most part that I’m ok with all of this. I’m not.

I should have wanted something more then for you to stop smoking when I was 12. I shouldn’t have had to visit you in the hospital. I shouldn’t have had to walk slow to keep up with you in a walker when you were only 48 years old. You should have been there at my middle school and high school graduations. I’m so angry still for so many reasons. The fact that no one seems to tell me the truth, and that you and mom so avidly wove lies about everything that I’ll never de-tangle the truth.

But the anger is pretty easy to talk about.

What is harder to admit is that despite all that, I wish you were still alive. You may have gotten married without telling us, gotten pneumonia for a month without telling us, failed to pay child support, left us alone outside of a bar in Mexico in the summer so you could go drinking, done hard drugs, threaten to kill mom, and leave us on the side of the road (or make just not stop, and make people puke out the window.)

But despite it all, I miss you. It’s hard to know how much I miss you, and how much I miss the idea of having a father. Maybe is that I just love being held by men of some kind, I crave it and need it and pine for it and will do near any thing to get it. Funny, that sounds like how you felt about cigarettes.

The good thing about your death is that I’ve learned so much. I can cope with lots, I’ve learned the value of honesty, and I will never touch the black poison you used to off yourself. But more importantly, I love every moment, I treasure it because I know that life is delicate. I don’t wish death or ill upon others, because I know how beautiful life is.

That’s not the hard part to say though. It’s easy to play the stoic.

The hard bit is admitting that I would rather have you in my life still then have learned all of the beautiful lessons. I’d rather you hold me then to be enlightened. I care enough that despite all of the lameness and abuse and crap you’ve put on all of us,

I’d take it all just to get to spend more time with you.

Because I love you.