For The Better

Mid-course correction - Previously I said that John Cheever doesn't beat you over the head from start to finish of a story.

That is unless he is describing the typical lives of the american middle class, which he skewers with precise derision. And rightfully so. The pointlessness of it, the hollowness, the predictability, the soul-smothering level of boredom. Phoniness, playacting. Pointless materialism. Infidelity. Cruelty.

I started reading his book Bullet Park today. It is twisting me into knots because he is describing large chunks of my life. Bullet Park is a suburban neighborhood filled with everything I described above. Not perfectly dead-on because I live in the boonies, not suburbia - but a lot of it still applies. Painful.

But that is not why I am here today.

One character in the book is having a difficult relationship with his son. Every time I read something like this I question myself.

Here's where I come down on this at this moment in time. I was The Greatest Father in The History of the The World when Keith and Craig were young. I am still a good father but the example I set since they became men is questionable. It is this period of their lives that I worry about. And I am talking about a good many years.

I have always been self-absorbed; wrapped up in my own misery - real or imagined - since the day after I was born. Obsessed with it. I am selfish that way. I look at everything through a me-versus-the-world lens.

I distort reality with my neuroses and psychoses; I don't see things clearly because I don't see me clearly.

I perceive reality as if I were looking through a camera lens with vaseline smeared on it. 

That being the case, I believe there had to be times when I hurt or neglected Keith and Craig emotionally. Not purposefully, but inadvertently because I didn't listen to what they were saying, or didn't pick up on signals they were sending or just didn't have the drive to do for them what I should have done.

Self-absorption is exhausting.

There is nothing I can do about that now. I regret it - deeply - but I can't change it.

The most important thing I can do now is learn how to be myself. They deserve that. The father they have dealt with over the last 20 years or so has slipped in and out of reality - mostly out of it - so they were not dealing with the real me.

I have spent this entire year working on myself - The Ultimate Goal is to just be myself, effortlessly and without conscious effort.

I see the upcoming holiday season as a chance to do this. If I get it right my sons will notice a change. 

I think for the better.