This is why I love the Internet
Because where else would you find the greatest writers of our generation, actually writing about ideas that I can relate to. When I read this post from Sweet Juniper, I thought someone had crawled into my brain, pulled out all of my incomprehensive rambling about young parenthood, and somehow combined it all to make sense. And when I read it, I didn’t feel so alone. I’m posting a selection of his post here, not to steal content, but because I know some of you (you know who you are!) tend to not click through when I recommend it. But you really, really should. Especially for those of you who feel they’ve lost me in the last few years. Or for those of you that feel lost.
I stopped visiting my friend in Athens after my first child was born. He stopped calling me while sober at some point, and then stopped drunkenly calling me in the middle of the night. He was no longer awed by the rocks stars: he became one of them. He joined a band and through the weird prism of his flickr stream I can see him happy in photos of bloody concert injuries, bass-drum surfing, new tattoos, new girls, tour buses, beards, cooler friends, and snapshots from the SXSW Vice Magazine party. I am happy for him. I can’t help but feel like the bourgeois putz I was always destined to be, though, sitting here on a yoga ball listening to a ten-year-old album with nothing on my agenda except getting a newborn baby to stop crying. But I can’t really blame my kids for any of this: the loss of old friends, all these divergent trajectories. That’s my fault. It started long before them.
Sometimes I still feel like I’m supposed to be the same person I was ten years ago. But I’ve changed. Of course I have. When I sit here with my son and these songs, I try to remember what I thought of the lyrics in 1998: the impassioned paeans to Anne Frank, the sense of polluted childhood, the confrontation of innocence and sexuality. None of it really made sense to me then, but it didn’t matter. It still doesn’t make much sense, but Mangum still sings as though it should. With all this re-listening, certain phrases echo in my head all day: mostly all that uninterpretable mysticism of familial dysfunction. I look down at my sleeping son in my arms and I know there’s nothing I can do to prevent myself from damaging him, from failing him in the million ways I must as a father. I cannot simply restrain myself and save him from this. The damage will not come from anything I do. It will be the result of me just being me.
From Sweet Juniper (hopefully they won’t sue)
