goodlnck

I have been at my desk for the past few hours writing lyrics when I should be getting my life in order, ready for uni over the weeks ahead. To my academic detrament the muse has me and I am loath to put her aside. It is rare that I am free to accept her visits with an open heart.

The song is about my relationships with women in my life, which is odd because they are normally about the ones that have left my life. So I'm quietly thumbing at my guitar so as not to wake the neighbours above me and i think, "So what about my relationships with men?", and I remember back to last weekend when my parents were visiting from the country. I spent Saturday afternoon entertaining my dad. We went to see 'Walk the Line' and afterwards I took him to see my bar and we sat down for a beer and some chips. We were discussing the movie, as you do, and my dad says something like, "His dad was a real piece of work, wasn't he?"

A few days later I'm back at work and one of the waiters goes to me, "Your dad's an alright bloke." And I say something like, "Yeah he seems to think so (insert dry laughter). Yeah I suppose he's alright.". The waiter is a bit of a misfit amongst the misfits that we work with. He's neat and clean but not a metrosexual and lacking any austentation. 30ish, straight, well built. I was surprised when we first got to know eachother he is a dancer. He looks a professional or maybe religious/community type. He responds by asking, "Oh, so do you get along?" and I worry that I've given him the wrong impression and reinforce that, yeah, he is a good bloke.

So the waiter starts telling me how he hasn't spoken to his father since he was 14. How he believes that some people really shouldn't have children. How if/when he has children he will be a much better father than his was. I get a bit lost at this point, lacking any real way to give the waiter what he needs from this conversation. I start to feel a bit of a dick for not appreciating that I had it good as far as fathers went. I make a lame attempt at keeping the tone positive, but I'm entirely at a loss for how to be helpful to him, which is rare. I am usually pretty good at helping people when they need to speak about problems, but all I could do was make a lame attempt by talking about how it's good that he has learnt from his experience and grown. He goes on to tell me a little bit about how much he's grown. How he went off the rails as a young man, leading gangs and fighting on the streets, something for which I have completely no frame of reference. I sort of just had to bail out of the conversation and get back to work, because I couldn't see how I would be able to forge a good outcome from this line of discussion.

So I'm remebering tonight for the first time, after an extremely hectic week, how I left my friend just hanging there without even trying to support him. And I'm wondering whether the problems that I had with my father while growing up were entirely, and selfishly, fabricated. Quite often I think about how much I have grown to resemble my father, and how even though I believe myself more enlightened than he, I still act out many of his bad behaviours along with the good. How what I once philosophically condemned I have functionally embraced. And I remember how the waiter seemed not to understand how I could have a dim view of my father yet have a good relationship with him. And I wonder why I might engineer conflict with him in the form of personality clashes when I was younger, when there is very little difference between the two of us. And so this little insight is the reason I have subjected you to all this guff:-

I came to the conclusion that ultimately we all strive to be better men than our fathers. The good fathers want that for us. The bad ones don't.

I'll see how I might be able to make good with the waiter on Wednesday.

Ciao!