Advice From A Dead Father

"Tell me A story, dad" said Tyson. I thought for a moment. "Do you wanna hear a story about grandpa talking to me in my dream?" I said. "A Dream isn't real" Tyson said. "I know buddy, but it's just pretend." 

"Start story" Tyson said.

It was a lot like that early riddle of steel scene in the 1982 Conan The Barabarian movie. Conan's burly dad talking to a little Conan,  except it was Grandpa and me. Your grandpa had a way of dispelling wisdom with such a coolness and casualness, something so opposed from my neuroses and wiry energy. The compulsion to overtalk. Your Grandpa knew when to leave things unsaid..

Me and Grandpa sit atop a snowy mountain  cliff that is also somehow the roof of a tenement building in East Ethertown. He is sipping at a light beer from its can. His face is covered in a clean but full dark brown beard,  his hair thinning but slicked back. His eyes pierce with wisdom, but the rest of his face betrays a life of hard breaks. He looks over to me with that steely seriousness that would shoot heated blasts of anxiety into my chest as a child. "You're doing good, don't.  Fuck. It. Up." Then he turns back to look out at the Desolation in the sky in front of us. The words sink into my heart. He's right.  He usually was. In my mind I was ready to reply with something I had read out of the book of existentialism, or some pop psychology, that I felt through a deep soul searching and skimming from the top of various eastern beliefs that I was self-sabotaging myself, whereas he had self sacrificed. But it was a physical reaction to a moment for him,  it wasn't  deeply thought. It was just what you did when you had kids.

"I guess that's how I feel about you sometimes buddy," I said to Tyson.  "Sometimes I don't know how to connect with you, so I just go along with whatever you want to do. But you won't grow that way. You need to be lead by me as well. But like Motorcycle boy says, if you lead people, you gotta have somewhere to take them. That's true of parents and kids as well, I guess."

I knew early on I was gonna make art as Long as I could. It was never a choice,  it was a compulsion,  A need to be satisfied. Me and Grandpa kind of got into it over that in my teens, because he was a talented artist as a kid, you should of seen him draw,  he even won an art award in school.But he gave that up early on when he heard artists starve. I relegated myself early on to be working all my life and never even considered making art as a living, but I sought out ways to maximize the time and attention I could give it. But with you Buds, you can do anything. I know how much you love science and the arrangement of time. You can make a whole life from that. The world is what you make of it. In his own way, grandpa was trying to tell me that."

"Dad?", Tyson says to me, his head resting on my arm as the television hums cartoons slowly in the background, snug under our blankets.  "Continue Story"..

-Lou Toad Jan, 2024.