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Still Crazy After All These Years before/after This is how crazy my father is. I was sitting at the dinner table, eating a burger and fries I purchased from a bar. He approaches me from behind, taking me by surprise, holding a blue plastic tube. "Argentum," he says, "Do you know..." (pause) "where there might be" (pause) "another one of these?", thrusting a blue plastic tube at me. (looking at what appears to be a plain blue plastic tube) "No, I...uh, don't." I say. "Because (pause) there used to be another one." he says. Okay dude, I already said I didn't know. There might be one at the store, why don't you check it out. The more you ask me the same question doesn't mean I will miracle three feet of hard blue plastic tube out of my ass. I'm not mad or anything, just...where this strategy so bound for failure came from, I am not sure. Don't like the answer you get? Why, just ask again. "It was about three feet long, and had a yellow paddle on it." he tries again. So I sit with a mouthful of burger, and it dawns on me. He is looking for an oar from an inflatable raft they gave me when I was about seven or eight years old. Maybe not even seven or eight. Twenty years ago. As if I kept track of that all these years, calling back to the homestead. 'Hey, dad, just calling to make sure my useless plastic oars are okay.' Periodically over the years he has asked me about that oar. At a freakish rate, considering the irrelevance of the object in question. And back when I smoked copious amounts of marijuana, this particular line of questioning made me very paranoid, and I almost thought of it as an accusation. Because the truth is, I DO know where that other oar is. Years ago, when they left on one of their week long vacations to the redneck riviera, I fashioned that one oar, sans paddle into a steamer, which is a device used to smoke pot, with a bowl on the top and a tube with both ends open. One end is inhaled from, and the other acts as a carburator, and it gets you really, really stoned. Or in this case, I got really, really stoned. All day, all night until my head hurt. I specifically remember sitting in bed, trying to smoke all the way up until I tried to go to sleep, feeling vaguely guilty and dirty smoking in my bed with a big long blue tube and a bowl caked with thc, wondering if I had a problem, thinking, as my head literally ached from either the pot or lack of oxygen, "Man, what am I doing?" and then giggling to myself as I tried to go to sleep, realizing that there is no such thing as a 'marijuana problem'. I wasn't holding up stores, nor stealing anything. If I ran out of pot, which was extrememly rare, I was bummed for a couple of days and had a lot of time on my hands that would otherwise be spent smoking pot and creating devices to smoke pot out of, such as the 'case of the missing blue oar' steamer, of which my father is currently inquiring. I hid it when they came home, and eventually threw it away. "Oh! You mean the oar from that raft that you guys gave me." I said. "Yeah." "I was, like, seven or eight when you gave that to me. It could be broken or thrown away." (one year I said something like, "Dude, that was so long ago, it could be anywhere", and he got seriously pissed. "It could NOT be anywhere!!" and my mom would chime in with her usual, "It didn't just grow legs, get up and walk away, arg!" I almost started laughing right then and there, but choked it down.) "This family never throws anything away." (meaning he never throws anything away...and godammit, I thought no one would ever notice ONE GODDAM USELESS BLUE PLASTIC OAR THAT WAS GIVEN TO ME IN THE FUCKIN' EIGHTIES AND THE GHOST OF WHICH HAS SOMEHOW COME BACK TO LIFE TO HAUNT ME PERIODICALLY IN THE 21st CENTURY.) "Okay, well, I'll keep an eye out for it." I say. "No, no you won't" he keeps on, laying the guilt smackdown. He makes it apparent he wants me to search for this thing amongst all the bullshit in the basement. A fruitless search, mind you, and this I know. Its like he kept the fuckers for years like hidden bastard children. 'One day...I'll have a use for you...' I mean, who the fuck thinks of these things? Who thinks like this? My dad, that's who. And long ago, I gave up any pretense of doing a dance around the issues to make them happy. I dropped the play that many kids do for their parents, the maintenance of illusions, the maintenance of denial for the parent's sake. I've long thought it all bullshit, only to find that parents typically and willfully deceive themselves where their children are concerned. But this one I will conceed. I will not explain what a 'steamer' is, nor the truth behind 'the case of the missing blue and yellow plastic oar from the eighties'. I might not even have been seven. What the fuck, dude. How weird can you get? I didn't like the shit when I got it in the first place. And I know they're just going to get weirder as time goes on, the only thing I have on my side is my emergent objectivity, and the perspective I have gained in my travels and travails, my professional and personal lives. So, tomorrow I will dotifully go down into the basement. I will move boxes around. I will stir up dust. And I will, once again, repeat what I have said. What a pathetic sham. How fucking weird is that?
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