“I Had A Dad”

“I tried hard to have a father
Instead I had a dad . . .”
—Cobain

In America, you probably grew up with this shlubby dude who wanted to be your buddy, your pal, your amigo, your confidante, your friend.

"So Dad . . ."

He didn’t want to be your father—he wanted to be your dad.

So he didn’t teach you as a father should. And you knew it, even if you couldn’t articulate it.

You wandered through elementary school, high-school, college, without a fucking clue as to what to do, how to behave, what to pay attention to and what to ignore. You didn’t even realize why you were wandering through these halls, supposedly getting this great education. So you either blew it off—to your later deep regret—or you took it at face value—again, to your later deep regret. Your dad kept sighing, giving you a shit-eating grin, and saying, “Son, you need to get good grades,” or “Son, you need to get an education,” without telling you that good grades and a good education are two vastly different things. No one ever told you what all that schooling was really for, or how to get a real education in spite of (rather than because of) the dangerous joke that is the educational system.

Women? They might as well been martians for all the help you got from dear old “Dad”. From the first boy-girl dances you went to in junior-high, to the hook-up culture of college, to twenty-something girls on their Slut-Trek through the big city, to the Biological Alarm Clockers who accost you like beggars in Calcutta now that they’re in their early-thirties, trying to trap you into marriage: The “Dads” (“Dicks”?) gave you nothing smarter than “Follow your heart”, or “Be true to your feelings”, or most despicably of all: “Tell her how you feel—but always respect her wishes.”

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