Lord, there goes a Buick forty-nine - Black sheep of the angels riding, riding down the line.

Sunday afternoon blog -

It's been awhile since I've devoted an entire post to the ridiculous saga that is the teenager and his antics, mostly because we've been a step removed from his actions for some time thanks to him relocating for the better part of the summer to my mother's house - which had the intended effect of helping our house feel much more relaxed, even when we were still hearing about the latest barrage he was firing at his own feet.

All that came to a different end than I had planned (he was still making reference to moving back home at the end of summer as if it was a given, which was better than the 'I never want to have a relationship with these people' tactic he was using when last we saw him) last week when he was caught using not only at but IN my mother's house and rather than apologize for doing something clearly wrong and against the rules of the place he decided to get so indignant that someone would dare enforce the rules that he left - that was a couple days before we got the call out of the blue from the boy, in a sudden burst of hygiene and needing to know where his ticket to the Rancid concert was, saying he wanted to come to the house to at least shower and change clothes (he didnt' - he went at least 4 days without either. That'll speed up how fast your friends get tired of you staying at their house for sure) and we got to tell him that he was actually welcome to think of our house as home, which probably hadn't occurred to him at all.

So yesterday I picked up the boy, who has been out crashing on couches and using with all the restraint and moderation of a teenager living 'on his own' - he came home, showered, was pleasantly surprised by his new room (now in the basement, where he wanted in initially anyway) and we had a nice sit down talk.

the boy may not have used any of the time apart to reflect on why things were so tense and hostile when he left but his dad is certainly a different mindset than when he left. While I raged about my mother giving into his every request and making decisions that enabled him to go further and further wrong when he first moved over there, I have changed radically in my outlook on rules, discipline and generally what is worth worrying about. It might actually be a jarring 180 degree turn in some areas for the boy - where before I would get very strict about him listening to and obeying his parents as something important enough to fight over, now I have let go of the need to control things as a way to defend some idea of patriarchal respect or power.

And it feels good. It didn't really hit me that I had changed that much until we sat down and talked about it with the boy's counselor and I put it into words and realized my wife was sitting next to me hearing an entirely different person and I didn't have all this weight and stress bearing down on me and I felt so much better. She asked where this new enlightened stance was coming from and I didn't know.

It took a little while to put my finger on it and I think it may have something very directly to do with seeing the film Surf Wise. No shit. A film may have had a major impact on me. I find it a little unnerving.

The movie follows the Paskowitz family, and without going into too much detail that is better watched than read about, they spend their lives in a tiny trailer surfing and being a nomadic family (with a father that may have been a selfish man and a bastard at times but actually did have some profound ideas on "wellness) and eventually had several huge arguements over money, business deals and such that led to the family splitting apart for years until they all got back together as the father was growing very close to the end of his life (to my knowledge he's still alive, or was at the time the movie was finished) and there was the growing dread that some of the kids wouldn't come back to see their father (who may deserve some of the hate they pointed at him, sure) ever again. In the end they did and it seemed so obvious - of course you would put family over something as trivial as a business deal gone bad when you looked at what was important in life. of course! Of course they should get past it and just realize that giving your father a hug and telling him that you love him is more important , you'd have to be dead inside not to see that!

The whole scene was actually called to mind some of the worst human beings I can think of - my wife's uncles - who hounded their brother (my father-in-law) literally until the day he died over money. They actually called us and wanted us to bring him papers to sign on his deathbed at the hospice to make sure they got the money they wanted (money of all fucking stupid things!!) and all I can remember is the incredible disgust I felt and just being unable to comprhend how someone could look at their family and say that, in the end, anything was more important. And yet, so many people do.

I realized at some point, maybe not sitting in the Lagoon Theater, but sometime after that - that I had been putting all these small things that the boy and I would lock horns over above the fact that, in the end, we're family. And I had been choosing to fight on the side of all the little things at the expense of being a family. It was so clear - and so stupid.

Seeing how absurd those choices had been in the big sense of what is going to matter over the course of our whole lives - and how repugnant I found people that would deliberately choose otherwise - it was easy. All the rest of it sort of fell away and it doesn't trouble me.

So the boy is back at home - living under much less strict rules that control his behavior - and he may choose to make good use of it or not. He might just take advantage of it and use it to crap all over us again but I can't say I really expected the teenager to take time away, meditiate on the bigger picture and come back enlightened. He's still just a teenager and he'll keep doing the shitty things teenagers do until he figures it out.

Maybe I should take him surfing.