I went for a walk yesterday and ended up at Universal City Walk.  It’s kind of cool to be up their midweek, in the morning, it’s crawling with tourists…  Makes for great people watching.  I think it was on my mind because I received this thing in the mail the other day about how they’re trying to get a huge expansion built… It actually sounded pretty cool.  I love the whole urban living concept… That’s sort of how I lived when I was at STAR, I lived behind the building and everything I needed was walking distance, I could go days without having to drive my car.

I’m stepping into the modern age… DSL is getting installed in my apartment on Friday!  I know you pod-people will miss random people walking in on me while I’m recording, but I’ll still have distractions, don’t worry.

The other day I was low on polka-dot diapers (or diapies, as Bing calls them), so I went to my local Target.  I hadn’t really thought about it before, but that Target was Gemco when I was a kid… The Gemco my Dad worked at as an appliance salesman.  I flashed back to being a kid and going to see him there with my Mom, there he would be near the stoves and refrigerators wearing a short sleeve shirt with a tie, his glasses, clean shaven (I remember him explaining, after I asked why he shaved his mustache off, that people had a preconceived notion of men with mustaches and it would be harder to make sales – it was the 70′s).  The same store that there was a huge line in front of the day the Star Wars toys went on sale…  My Dad was able to get me some figures before the store opened, they sold out really quickly.

Thinking back, it was one of the few times I thought my Dad was cool.  For the most part, he was a tall, thick man, who grew back his mustache when he got out of sales and the eighties rolled around.  He never had cool jobs or was particularly popular… He had friends, was well liked and could be very funny, but he was no means the life of the party.

My parents divorced when my sister and I were roughly the same age as my kids…  But for obviously vastly different reasons.  For a while all was good, they shared custody evenly, stayed within the same city, we stayed in our school.  This went on for 2 or 3 years.

Things really started to change when my Dad lost his job at AT&T.  He was unemployed for a long time and ultimately was only able to find work at Thrifty’s  (Were it was obvious, even to me a kid at the time, he was quite unhappy).  It was around this time that he met a woman that he would later marry.  He has never said this, but it appeared this was more a marriage of convenience… Although to his credit, they are still together.

I bring cliff’s notes version of my Dads life up because walking through that Target, thinking about Gemco, I realized that my life has run the same course… And that scares me.  I don’t want to be my Dad.  I want to be a hero to my kids, for them to have lists of great memories with me.  I want them to think I’m cool… Although I know that the older they get, the bigger the dork I become to them.  I refuse to be with someone just so I’m not alone, or have a house, or because they support me… I’d rather spend the rest of my life alone.  I look at my Dad as a functioning broken man…  I’m trying to find my pieces and glue them back into place, so I can just be a man.

Let’s boil this guy alive.  What car color city are you from?  Oh deer, good tackle.   Want a “supercat?”  You know Miss Plastic Beverly Hills is not far off.  Breaking Skunk News!  Iart.  Drive-bike shooting.  Don’t mock the one armed softball player.  Don’t leave your kiddie porn packed phone as collateral.

Rock On, Jack