Today’s My Dad’s Birthday
The cover image is from this new app I’ve been using called dream.ai. It’s super cool. You type in a prompt, select a style, then voila. An AI painting emerges mere seconds later. My husband likes to call me “bunny goose”, so this is the result of typing that in.
I haven’t seen my dad since 2019. When I tried to send a concerning email in 2020 about his health, his lovely wife responded with, “Alan* wants nothing to do with you.”
Truthfully that bitch has been jealous of how close my dad and I were since I was 15. She may have “won” but all she got is some sick enabling from my dad for bad behavior.
I’ll always think positively about him no matter how bad things became between us. He wrote a biography about his life and didn’t actually mention in it he has a daughter.
He mentioned the failed marriage to my mom though, and dedicated a whole ass chapter to his current shrew. Whatever. We all must lie in the bed we make for ourselves.
My dad is probably a narcissist. He’s also got an avoidance issue. And he never once said “I love you” to me growing up. But that’s alright. I think he showed his appreciation in subtle ways.
Today’s his birthday. I know he’ll throw a big bash for himself like he always does. I used to look forward to his birthday party growing up. It meant talking to adults, watching them slowly get drunk, listening to live jazz all night, and stealing drinks from the open bar. A good year would bring over a hundred guests, whereas a bad year might only have seventy guests.
Sometimes I really wonder who the fuck attended those parties, though. I’ve only just started putting the pieces together.
I know jazz seems kind of ole timey, so because of that, I never assumed the adults were anything less than responsible, stable people.
When I was 12, I snooped around his office cabinets and found fuckin crack rocks. I didn’t know what they were back then, but once I got older, I understood.
I also knew that he, along with other guests, would openly smoke weed in our backyard. This was before any kind of legalization or decriminalization. Who knows…
