no other gods before me
just thinking about the state of the world, “sick dad energy,” Elon Musk and Danny & Nia Booko and demiurge-type shit. Maybe I wouldn’t ordinarily explain exactly what I’m getting at, but hey we live in a strange time
My dad wrote once—to an old girlfriend, a woman who was not his wife and not my mother—that being a new dad was the nicest thing that had ever happened. “She smiles all the time,” he wrote to her. “She smiles at me.”
The old girlfriend remembered that pair of sentences, the way he’d chosen to describe the miracle of my infancy, so she wrote them down in her own letter, four or five years after his death, writing in blue calligraphic hand on pale blue stationery, then folded into thirds, because she had since become an educator in Europe.
And what John was trying to tell Joanie was for the first time he was at the center, how dazzling it felt to be the sun an infant was orbiting, the one true creator of the universe.
And I’m thinking about it darkly now—but yours was the only sky I ever saw—about the way men see women on the street, the way men shout for you to smile, how they want you, they want you, stunted and fragile.
Does every man on the street wish to be a girldad—and not a dependable, laughing girldad, but one who flies into a rage and shouts “I never break my promises,” who uses the belt, raids your toybox for whatever’s good enough to pawn, whose love extends only up to the moment you stop smiling, whose love is a circle of vanishing and neglect and self-loathing and coming up for air again, and so lonely.
I wonder if every dad is so sick of being his own mother’s son, if that’s why he cherishes his small and helpless wife, and if one morning she rolls over and pities him, bless his heart, if she pities him, he experiences the rage of a thousand sons, reminding her, you are not my mother you are the child, removing his belt.