my father is willy loman
black friday. buy nothing day is a dismal failure as i am now the proud owner of a new pair of toothbrushes. i’m sitting in the back of the family minivan in dayton, oh because my dad wanted to come down here to inquire about an archival position at wright state. it’s not like he had an interview or anything, he just figured that he was in ohio so he’d check it out. i guess that the whole teaching thing and the crazy administrative hoops he has to jump through are turning him back towards his previous profession. i swore i heard him say once that he’d never go back to academia.
so we drive up to the campus which is empty because the kids, presumably like tim and i, are on thanksgiving break. so my dad leaves the car to go scope things out or whatever it is that he does when he’s in mission mode. tim and i stay in the car talking to my mom and reading 100% #4, bicycles for afghanistan #7, and scrag #24. spending more time with mikael and chad, who write the latter two publications refernced above has made me appreciate zines beyond just liking the idea of them and has made me really love the content.
about 1/2 hour later, my dad comes back to the car and he’s pretty excited. i guess he got to talk to the archivist there, who is like the head of the search committee for the position he’s interested in and he gave her his resume. and then he just starts talking as if he already has the position. he talks about how he dropped hints about his skills and background, he talks about how this place is totally different than dickinson, he talks about the exciting opportunity of working with the wright brothers collection, he talks about medical benefits, he talks about salaries. it’s like he’s trying to sell moving to ohio and taking this job to my mom, when he hasn’t even applied for it.
maybe he’s just excited, and maybe he does have a good chance of getting this job. maybe his unorthodox methods of searching out people, and circumventing normal procedure really do work better. maybe he seems like someone who is refreshingly enthusiastic and not some slightly odd pest. i’d like to believe all of those things, but for some reason i can’t. i don’t know when it happened, but at some point i stopped believing my father. now it just seems that he’s a man who creates these ideas of hope, of opportunity, of fulfillment to augment an existance that unfortunately seems to be wanting of any of those three things. i guess whenever i hear my dad get excited about something i can never be excited for him because i’m always wondering where reality ends and where self-deception begins.
a phone call from a friend
wednesday night and my parents have just shown up. we’re about to go to bed when the phone rings. my brother brings me the phone and says that it’s adam. “ward?” i ask. tim says he doesn’t think so. so it had to be the only other adam i really know, a former partner in crime, a former skate buddy, a former bandmate, and a kid i haven’t talked to in years. i guess i’d heard stories about him from friends. that he was going to school at temple and kicking ass at it, but i certainly didn’t expect a call. i still look back nostalgically on my friendships from high school and the thhings we did, but i doubted whether i still remeained relevent to those people. well it turns out that most of the old crew from high school was at a party at someone’s house, and my ex-ex-girlfriend lisa was there and my name came up. adam was a little drunk and wanted to give me a call. lisa had the number and so i found myself on the other end of the line with a kid whose voice i hadn’t heard in ages and who i, at one point in my life, easily considered my best friend. the phone conversation wasn’t too long because i was really tired, and more than a little overwhelmed. i caught up on what he was doing, which was pretty much what the stories i had heard had said. i couldn’t help but gush about the video project and my new band. it was cool. we agreed that we would have to get together when i cam back to pa for xmas. he put sandy on the phone, an old skate kid who i hadn’t really heard from since the summer after my freshman year of college. we had a similar conversation and i was real excited to hear that he still skated. again, plans for an xmas break rendevous were made. xmas break is going to be so much cooler than i thought it would be.