Dad Yelling Crosswalk Dec 2006

I was yelling at this lady for backing into me in the crosswalk (well, the car really just tapped me, but I yelled anyway.

Before that I was yelling at someone at work for being too loud.

I'm becoming my father. He yelled.

I wish Dad were still alive. I'd ask him: Did you ever feel bad ten minutes later, after you'd yelled at someone?

It was not her fault she was being incautious. Even if she killed you it wouldn't be her fault, as far as the squirrels and the trees were concerned. Supposing I died, would my wife be angry with her, then find a way to forgive her? Is there a reason to wonder these things? Did the people who died in the concentration camps look back from their afterlife and find a way to feel forgiveness for the Nazis, as Vonnegut envisioned in Happy Birthday, Wanda June?

What about the lady in the car, who almost backed over me? Did she imagine herself in my shoes, and she in mine, and wonder to herself, whether she would have yelled at me the way I yelled at her? I hope so!

My blustery behavior notwithstanding, I believe I think the best of most people, and I want them to think the best of people as well. How can this be so? In practice I'm a boor like all the other boors.

The Dad's Death Idea

Outside the hospice I laugh; what's that guy doing selling cheap Van Gogh prints in the parking lot. Who pays for that? Especially here? Once again, I have a tin ear for my own culture: a couple hours later, there's my sister, with "Starry Night" in her back seat.

I have this book idea, called Madhouse Diary. It's all over my blog, or it will be soon if it's not. The book would be my own re-do of Dad's self-published manuscript from 1989 or so. The title of it then was Love, Lust and Schizophrenia, Volume 1: Snakes and Other Lowlife. I still blame myself, somewhat, for not telling him to save his money and not self-publish.

It was a sad story how badly done the thing was, from start to finish. Dad never sold to anyone outside his own circle of friends and relatives, and to this very day his multiple hundred copies of the first edition are taking up space in some storage locker.

Not long after, or before, the Van Gogh scene outside the hospice, Dad asked if my sister or myself would like to take the manuscript and do more with it. He said we were "welcome to it".

After I had time to think about it, I realized a semi-autobiographical manuscript is not the worst legacy, even if the story is a bit disjointed and written in the style of a person who rarely reads books of that genre, or any genre.

Whenever I have something tagged with Madhouse Diary, it means it is a possible scene in my own remaking of Dad's story.

(November 2006)