do you wanna find hell with me?

when i was in the ninth grade, my dad, like a plague of locusts, cleansed me of my sins.

i.e. he threw away a thousand dollars worth of cassette tapes.
danzig
the dead kennedys
the yeastie girls
faith no more
the misfits (i had a thing for short meatheads)
shit... i think he even threw away edie brickell.

he was feeling fatherly (unlike the other three weeks a month he spent with his secret family on another continent) and believed it was his duty to expunge the evil from my music collection. never mind that i had owned most of these tapes for years, and that he had seen them all before.

the parenting was on, much like the time my smith's meat is murder t-shirt mysteriously disappeared during a family vacation that had me trapped in a travel trailer with my parents for 3 weeks. it was one of those shirts that was soft from years of washing and definitive in its proclamation of fuck you, you meat-eating, carnivore suburbanites. i loved that damn thing and wore it 3 days a week.

it's been 16 years, and i still miss that t-shirt.
i kind of miss that danzig tape, too.

but, i guess that is the nature of nurture.
you get rid of what might hurt your children.
protecting them is paramount.
sometimes to the point of delusion.

like the time that some friends and i decided to see what's inside of a fire extinguisher. granted, it went off in the backseat of my car, and i was driving at the time of detonation. so i, technically, may have needed some protection.

by the way, white powder is what's inside.
lots of white powder that crawls into cracks and crevices.
crevices you never knew you had in the interior of a car.
q-tips can't clean it up either.

and to my father, all white powder is cocaine.
(seriously. stop and consider this conclusion drawn)
(no really, try to wrap your mind around it)
(i still can't)

obviously, an argument ensued, and i wondered aloud why i was driving a $1500 car if i had access to enough cocaine to spill it all over the interior. i may have chortled the possibility that if i had that much coke, i'd sell snorts from behind the sun visor and buy my own damn place to live where i could listen to all of the punk rock i wanted.
delusional grounded me.
for the 7 millionth time in my life.

apparently, delusional is just part of the deal.
and laughing at your father when he is concerned that you are using drugs isn't the key to family bliss at age 16.

neither is saying that the rest of your life wasn't what you had in mind at age 31 when he warns you that you won't find your next husband in a bar on saturday night. and i hear him, cause i seriously want to get married again. like right now. it's the only thing i think about when i watch the hills on mtv.

if you believe that, you might need to go live in the land of milk and jimmy.
a place where fatherhood is defined by delusion.

tonight, i'm going to see jello biafra at the belcourt.
wanna come jimmy?