Guiding my hypothetical spawn, one story at a time.
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Hi Avery,
If I can teach you one lesson, pertaining to the culture and dynamics of human-nature, it would be this:
Power Corrupts.
This rule is to human-nature, as gravity is to the universe, and as your father, protector and provider, it is my responsibility to wield the powers of adulthood for the betterment of your well-being. This role and duty is inherently a corruption of my will. The irony is that I myself, to this very day, still battle the will of my parents, and I anticipate, that I always will. Power just isn’t something you ask for, or something life just hands you, it’s something you fight for. So I expect, anticipate, and plan for, all the love and happiness we shared over your childhood, to be put aside, and I encourage you to challenge the authority of your captures.
I forgive you Avery, for I know that if I do my job right, you will not go silently into that good night. I said and did horrible things to both of my parents, and we survived. Even so, when I spend time with them, I often want to apologize for my rebellion, and what I think is guilt, may actually just be appreciation, admiration, and eventual inspiration.
Hopefully, I’m ready Avery, or as ready as I can be; either way, I will try to rememeber, that my goal is to survive this war, because there is no victor, just another recruit
From one warrior to another, bring it on brat.
Inspired by this guy:
Hi Avery,
I’m at a pivotal time of my life right now, and in fact, I may be having a crisis of faith. I call myself an artist, and for me, art is like a church. It is my personal respite from all the ambiguity that haunts my future. The crisis of faith that I need to speak of, is how much the arrogance of hate and judgement, threatens my ambitions.
It bothers me, and I’m sick and tired of being ashamed of this fact. How could it not bother me, when I care about something so deeply, and all I want to do is share it with the world. That is the arrogant part, when we assume that one persons contributions are more valuable than others.
I know this so well, because I too have been a contributor of hate and judgement. Its the disease of the consumer, if you paid for it, you have the right to hate it, but now I pay for these acts with my own pride, and it haunts my every action and this payment makes it easier to just give up on being an artist. With every act of procrastination, I carve out my eventual escape plan from my own ambitions. I need to eradicate this fear, because it stands for everything that poisons a genuine act of creation.
Easier said, than done.
The reason this is important to you Avery, is that creating, caring, and protecting you, is art. I’m the co-director of your future, and the decisions I make with the canvas and craft of parenting, will be scrutinized, dismissed and judged as much, if not more than anything else I will love in my lifetime.
For instance, my favorite film of 2011 was created by a man who avoids the public at all cost. His film is nominated for picture of the year, best directing, and best cinematography, yet he will not even show up to the award ceremony, nor will you find a single interview with him about the nominations or any of his work. His film “The Tree of Life”, is a very personal, bold, and original attempt to create art from life, and no matter what you think about this film, you simply, can’t take that away from the creator. At this very moment, somebody, somewhere, is calling this movie “The biggest piece of garbage ever made”. I don’t really care why someone does or does not like something, I wonder what did this artist do wrong besides honor his own vision? If that is why he is being hated, than nobody should be surprised that he hides from pop-culture. If you feel the need to publicly hate this movie, ask yourself, “What does Terrence Malick owe you?”. The answer to that question is nothing, you paid to see an artist be creative, honest and ambitious, whether or not it works for you, shouldn’t be a reason to detest such a genuine effort of love.
As a creator, you have the responsibility to be honest with yourself, work hard, and find your own path. I’m still not there Avery, I’m still afraid to do this, and I still feel trapped in a cycle of insecurity and self-pity.
It is time I face this fear head on, and find my own way. I owe that to you, because nobody in the world should have the power to make me question your beauty.
So far, this has been all talk, so I want to prove that I’m not afraid to fail. Tonight, I’m going to shoot a short film, and I will release it for the world to see. I will try to not care about what people think about it, because it is not for them, it is for us.
Hey Avery,
When you’re a kid, you will be taxed with numerous challenges. Everything from your first heart-beat to motor-functions, breath of air, bowel movements, crying and on, and eventually you will learn to play, laugh, and dance; and yes, it can be all fun and games, but someone always gets hurt. I don’t mean some little scrape on the knee, or for that matter, I’m not even talking about physical harm, this lesson is about learning to handle emotional pain.
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| Call the Whambulance |
My journey through this challenge, was very difficult, and I must remain connected to this time of my life, so that I can be aware of your own struggle, and be your guiding light. This is the story of my own childish journey through the dark murky waters of emotional ambiguity.
Gradually over time, I began to feel my body and mind change, and I recall this metamorphosis being hard to notice in the moment, but still strangely confusing. My family was very loving and providing, but I remember feeling like they were distracted and not aware of my introspective struggle.
I should clarify, I didn’t roll up into a ball and cry in my room, I did actually try to heal these wounds, but I was a kid, and my first attempts to discover emotional clarity, were quite crude, and rather dangerous. My first solution came to me while facing social-anxiety, I recall wanting to talk to my baby-sitter, and was afraid to do so. Instead, I sat in my room, and would stare into my cheap plastic osculating fan. I took off the plastic barrier and started jamming action figures and other random objects into the spinning blades. The destruction, and dismay gave me an internal sense of fulfillment, that I had never before felt. Once bored with that game, I began to wonder what would happen if I jammed my finger into the fan blades. I imagined the blood, drama and panic it would cause. I did approach the fan blades with my pinky-finger, hoping for the worst, but I didn’t have the courage to find out that a plastic fan, can’t actually sever a finger. A week later, I told my Mother, that I was thinking about committing suicide. It was a lie, I wanted attention, and I got the attention of a psychiatrist instead. I was prescribed anti-depressants and everyone acted as if all was well. I never swallowed a single pill.
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| I never swallow |
So I failed the fan test, but the idea planted the seed of a dangerous concept, that pain and fear could provide a momentary sense of emotional clarity. One night I stole a pair of tweezers from the bathroom; I can’t even remember how I got this idea, but I laid in my bed and began plucking single hairs from the inside of my nose, one by one. I did this until my nostrils were hairless, then I would wait, until I could seek relief another night. My patience grew short, and I would wait less and less. I was already a drug addict, and I didn’t even know what drugs were yet. One night, I was seeking relief real bad, and my nostrils were bone dry and would even spot with blood, so I decided to start plucking other hairs, eye-lashes, eye brows, and I had even started at the top of my head. So I got out of control, and one day while I was at school, a classmate pointed at the top my head and shouted, “baldy!”. I had not known, but I plucked a bald spot, the size of a quarter, into the top of my head. My Mom and the therapist she said was mine, decided I was allergic to the antideppresants, I was pretending to take. I will never forget my Father, when he looked directly into my eyes, and announced, “He is doing it to himself”, nobody believed him, and I didn’t have the strength to out myself, but for some strange reason, it was all I really wanted, is to be noticed.
Coming soon, a picture from my Jr. High year book with the nickname “Baldy” underneath.
Things made a turn for the better at this point, far from perfect, but better. One of the most important influences of my positive growth was discovered through music. I borrowed my Dads album “Animals” by Pink Floyd, just because the cover art interested me. The very opening track is “Pigs on the Wing Part 1”, and I remember feeling like I had already wrote the lyrics to a song that I have never before.
If you didn’t care what happened to me,
and I didn’t care for you,
we would zig zag our way through the boredom and pain,
occasionally glancing up through the rain
wondering which of the buggers to blame
and watching for pigs on the wing.
I continued to discover that many of these confusing emotions were all packaged in this fascinating poetic rhythm. Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, The Doors and Pink Floyd, spoke to the dark corners of my imagination, and provided a contextual beauty to the emotional pain I struggled to process. It may not have been the last time I flirted with self-destructive behavior, but it was the last time I felt like I didn’t have any other option.
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| The soundtrack of my puberty. |
Avery, my situation was my own, and not yours. I intend to do everything in my capability to protect you, but I know even the greatest efforts will falter under the ambiguous nature of the human psyche.
Hi Avery,
It has been a tough couple of months, yet on the surface, I have nothing to complain about, I started a new job, I’m in good health, and I have a great partner to share my life with. So I feel the need to talk to you about my recent nights of paranoia driven sleeplessness.So what is it, why can’t I relax, I have everything going for me, so why not just close my eyes and sleep in peace?
Avery, I fear the Apocalypse.
For me, this word is not some excuse for a wild conspiracy theory, or some cult following of a fiction horror genre, you know, where the dead come to life and eat the living; for me the apocalypse is simply anything that kills my entire family. So anywhere between an atomic bomb, and a head on collision with a drunk driver, I lay there, wondering if something is around the corner, waiting to rape and murder everything I love.
I’m trying to keep this feeling of dread and panic in perspective, its not like I live my life thinking about this all the time. But with the notion of your future existence, the stakes are only getting higher. So I need to find a path towards peace with this fear, in a practical way, where I can protect my family, as well as my sanity.Here are my two biggest fears:
Solution: We, as a family, will go camping, backpacking, and we will also practice and prepare for outdoor survival. The outdoors is considered by many, a place for vacation or adventure, but its easy to forget that it’s the home of many living things, and it just may end up being the home for our family. We wont have Ipad’s or the Netflix Instant Queue, but we will always have each other, and if the family dog goes “missing”, don’t ask me whats in the stew.
Problem #2, People like to Rape each otherThe very same community that we rely on for our survival, has unfortunately created the advent of the sociopath. People, for a multitude of reasons, derived from a mixture of their environmental and mental influences, will steal, rape and murder each other. How can I protect you from these threats, while being the pacifist, bleeding heart, and anti-gun liberal that I’am?The Solution: 
Well first off, a gun is not an option, although it would be extremely helpful in the case of an apocalypse, and I feel vastly more sympathetic to those who choose to own a gun, than ever before; yet I still have one ethical issue with this choice. I fear that the simplicity of its function would cause a different kind of paranoia. I believe that if a life is to be taken, under any circumstance, I prefer it to require more effort than just pulling a trigger. I have found an alternative to this limitation? I will use a duel weapon system, where I combine pepper spray in my off-hand, and a samurai sword in my right hand. You can’t shoot what you can’t see, and there is just something frightening and classic about a samurai sword. Plus, I think there is something instinctively cautious about anything that looks like a gigantic knife, and I also feel like there is less chance for an accidental or domestic related incident. If something dies by a sword, it was probably meant to be.
During these two sleepless nights, these ideas profoundly scared me, and I laid awake staring at my ceiling contemplating the frailty of life, how quickly it can all end, and everything there is to lose. Ultimately, all I can really do, is place these dark thoughts into something constructive; and embrace my role as your protector, by teaching you how to protect yourself. So sharpen your steal, pack your bags and stock up on pepper spray, the Boyle family will not be fucked with.
Hi Avery, It has been a while since I wrote you, but I have been busy trying to learn about the universe that we live in. It is kind of a strange place, but in time, the oddness of most things living can be understood with the right amount of patience and a pursuit of truth.
My studies have lead me to fantasize about your childhood and I like to picture what your process of discovery might be like; the first time you see a Hawk soaring above a distant tree line, you will be amazed by its sheer grace of flight, and the next time you may wonder, what does it eat and where does it sleep, and finally, the third time you might ask, what kind of Hawk is that? I imagine your curiosity functioning exactly like the very same evolutionary process that created our kind. Sometimes I think of these evolutionary ideas when people say, “It’s a small world”, or “What a coincidence”, and I think, maybe we just want to believe in the idea that something, anything, and everything can be that special, but I must admit Avery, I don’t think it is that special, and the thought of being a father makes me wonder if challenging that notion will be a part of my own evolutionary adaptation.
For now, allow me to explain my current day logic, you see the modern human being is at most 200,000 years young, and living in a universe that is at the most 14 BILLION years old, calculates the significance of our species to being about ten-millionth of a percentile (0.0000145%). Also, I have been a sexually active post-pubescent adult for about 16 years, so that equals a total 5,680 days orgasmic existence. Lets assume I managed one-and-a-half orgasms a day, which equals 8,760 orgasms. If we multiply that by 70 million sperm, per ejaculation, that’s where you come in, my perfect, beautiful and amazing one-point-twenty-five thousandth of a percentile 0.00125%.
I suspect this can come off as being dark and cynical, but this math proves an empowering fact, that you have no control over the biological and geological tethers of your existence, and you can always treat these factors as just that, scientific data. Av ery, be warned, for that our culture will trivialize these factors as being significant in of themselves; but the secret they don’t want you to know, is that you don’t actually have to love your biological parents, unless they earn it. Who, how and where you are created is not in your ha nds, and I urge you to give cred it to those who do the work, instead of the ones that figuratively do nothing more than flip a switch.
I’m ready to earn it Avery, and most importantly, I’m excited! Its time for you to transcend being the figment of my imagination, and become the next clump of self-aware molecules, and you should be excited too, because the universe is amazing and mysterious, and its also your home.
Lessons For Avery 