My grandfather used to keep cowboy movies running on his television set all throughout the day and night. He lived out his ontological last stand in a small apartment in Charlottesville, Virginia, surrounded by the hoardings of his dead wife. When he was younger, before diabetes took his mobility, he was a paratrooper (and a black one at that). He never told us stories about it, at least not ones that were true.
He showed me Shane when I was maybe ten years old. He liked the scenes with odd dialogue– where the cowboys talked like schizo-phasic old men. Where they talked about farming, horses, guns, whatever it is that cowboys talk about in all their dirt-flower language. I didn’t understand a lot of what he was saying then, I just knew that he liked me and lamented the distance between us imposed by the evils of time and space. But whatever, we’ll live. (Not including him, though: he died a few years ago after collapsing in his bathroom and being driven to the hospital by my uncle.)
Wherever it is that my Grandfather spent all those years before death, I think my father did too. Working, making white friends, traveling, being a man as far away from our little family-of-four as he could be. No more fathers, no more grandfathers, no more men from Charlottesville, Virginia, that want to have anything to do with me. So I sought out my own men, from other places, to fill their size-fourteen shoes.
Ivan Karamazov, for some reason; Quadir, whose last name I don’t know, who manned the grill while I made burgers at Wendy’s; Guts, from Berserk, for his massive sword; Punyama from Oyasumi Punpun, because he’s autistic like me; and Shinji Ikari because I liked the convoluted clusterfuck that Evangelion turned in to.
I don’t know where any of this is going, or where it ever was going to begin with. Anyway, this semester of school is wrapping up, so I’m gonna be posting again for a bit over this break. Also, expect some posts of papers I wrote for school. Thanks for reading.