sippin' on gin and juice (with my laptop)

I'm not sure I should be allowed to write when I'm drunk. At the time it seems like a perfectly logical idea. I believe that the very best writers kill themselves and that the great ones all have a healthy drinking problem. Usually a few drinks into the evening, I've convinced myself that I could very easily saddle up at the bar and flawlessly integrate with this second echelon of literary masters.

But what always seems to result from my drunken moments is something that should have been written by some sappy, teary-eyed teenager, most likely because I'm horribly self-aware much like a sappy, teary-eyed teenager.

Nonetheless here is my latest drunken rambling I wrote while unpacking one of my few remaining boxes:

As I rifle through boxes, whose contents I had long forgotten (some of which haven’t been touched in over a year since leaving New York), I’m faced with a divestiture that I’ve struggled with since I was eight years old. Wrapped in yellowing newspapers and pushed into the far corners of my mind, I am faced with photographs that haunt me.

In one hand I hold my father… someone I have looked up to as a superhero of sorts, a David in a sea of Goliaths. He was always on the outskirts of my life, living an existence that did not include me, but endlessly intrigued me. Can the irony be any greater than that I have now found myself in the same occupation that stole him from me? Growing up he was a mythological character who slipped in and out of my life as he traveled the world from one intrinsically important meeting to another, and I was just a dust speck on his radar, hopelessly wide-eyed and waiting for the slightest sign of acknowledgment that he just might recognize me not only as his daughter, but as his. It was from him that I inherited my unmanageable hair and ability to win a crowd over on wit alone.

In the other hand I hold a photograph of my step-father, a term that feels so plastic at times that I wish I could invent a new word just for him. Immediately when I think of him I don’t remember his struggles with alcoholism or the fact that he died from a drug overdose. What I remember is every Sunday morning since I was eight years old. Promptly at 6am he woke me (and just me) to get suited up to go skiing. I’m truly convinced that it was on the ski lifts, in its eerie silence, that someone spoke directly to me as a person, and not just as a kid. The lift ride was long enough to delve into the latest heartbreaks, teenage gossip, and life tragedies, but short enough to be punctuated with adrenaline and a sense of accomplishment, all of which I shared with him (and just him). Sundays were our secret bond that I still crave to this day. It was through him that I learned I was greater than a high school diploma and that I just might be someone worth listening to.

It is between these two men in which I am torn, only one of whom is still alive. So the choice should be obvious, and yet my heart still can’t let go even fours years after his death.

If I could reinvent the dictionary you would be “dad.”