Ode Part 3: Crazy Transitions ? Roots to Now - Fatherhood Poetic's ...

I seem to find again and again that no real good is ever served in passing judgment on other people. I say that as an opener because it seems important to frame the following statement since I mean it in no way to impugn or invalidate anyone who happens for whatever reason or reasons not to have children. OK, so that said, becoming a parent on July 14, 2003 removed any shred of doubt I may have had that children, babies, kids, and being a parent are the fundamental meaning of existence.

Put another way, the luxury of being conscious is afforded by the protein shakes that embody the tightly wound systems dances of life on earth, and since we humans have memory and the ability to enact change in our world unlike any other creature yet known, when any of us engage or find ourselves engaged in the reproductive continuum, doing everything within our powers to maximize the thriving potential for the spawn we've engendered is a moral imperative. If ya don't have a personal stake in the reproductive continuum, you're hardly off the hook, as simply doing and being good is still your responsibility.

But this all sounds so frikking stern and joyless! Ach! It ain't like that. SO who am I? OK: when I became a dad, I'd celebrated my 32nd birthday a few months before that, and interestingly, the day before my daughter's birth marked the 33rd anniversary of my conception. Wacky! I'd been born in Washington, DC to a woman from Minnesota who'd thrown her smarts into organizing public school teachers into unions and helping them be better teachers. She'd decided to have me on her own, and went for it, raising me alone through job-promotion-related moves through Indiana, Seattle, Montana, Denver, and finally Phoenix/Scottsdale. She fostered an amazingly comfortable intellectual bubble for me. She had met a mid-40s artist (sculptor, potter, art professor) in the summer of '67 around the university she'd just graduated from and at which he taught art. Being from Liverpool at that time, and hyper smart were not hurt by Italian good looks he'd inherited from his mother, and sparks flew as they say. Their part-time, later long-distant involvement found them together but one night in 1970. Although my mom was upfront about not demanding much from him, I gotta say, the guy still handled the news of new-found fatherhood pretty good. I met him for the first time on Christmas of 1973 when he came to visit us from his home in Boulder to Indiana. There were a few more visits up to 1977. At that point he seems to have decided to focus elsewhere in his life, landing in San Diego in ca. 1979 -- the same year my mom and I landed in Phoenix, where she remains.

After 10 years in suburbia I ran screaming for an alternative intellectual incubator in the woods of western Massachusetts: Hampshire College. I studied writing, American history, political science, media, critical theory, ancient literature, a little cognitive and neuro science and the mind in general. I bonded with heroic people, trees, hiking and experiencing music. I took a year off and found house music and techno music and lived in London and backpacked around Europe and saw Socrates' jail cell, the ruins of Hitler's bunker and read Ulysses. I wrote short histories to get my degree and ran to San Francisco, eager to embrace the wave that showed every sign of breaking there at that moment.

And brake it did. After a year working in the techno music grassroots industry and planting roots in it, I landed a writing job at what came to be known as a dot com. It was Nov 1995. I was on a first name basis with Craig, Dave, Joan, Marc and Halsey, of craigslist, RSS, MoveOn, Macromedia and CNET fame. I wrote for lots of dot coms, magazines, and was part of an emmy-winning team producing TV. I got to go to Germany, Italy, London, Seattle, New York, DC, Baltimore and New Orleans for amazing work gigs. It was unique. It is the past.

I met a woman April 7, 2002 through a mutual friend who not only laughed at my jokes, but thrust into reparte right off the bat. I found her beautiful and she's whip smart. We married in Las Vegas 104 days later, throwing a big bash two months later so everyone could see it was real. Just over a month later pregnancy changed our life together forever. We both lost our jobs before the baby arrived.

To this day, the moment our daughter emerged from my wife's stomach is uncategorizable. Suffice it to say the shit chokes me up when I recall or tell it, even now.

I worked some crap-ass jobs for a while before finally gaining entre back into the dot com industry in 2005, where I still work, now in Oakland. I also write about music for the Village Voice, and am working on a few different writing projects. Oh yes, and two kids. I do tend to go on.....lol

Source: http://roots2now.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/ode-part-3-crazy-transitions/

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