This confusion with my dad has catapulted into something I didn’t want to happen and it wasn’t what I was intending. What started as just a letter to tell my uncle how I feel about him being the only male figure in my life….is starting to turn out into this quest for my mom to have my real dad speak with me again.

I don’t think how it really came up is important but here you go. Last Thursday I was thinking of how I was going to write this letter in my own words and read it to my Uncle Gray but I couldn’t finish it that day. I had to go to my moms and watch the Ottawa Sens kick some ass (go sens go, if they win next game we go to the finals!). At one point I got curious about my dad, what he was up too and if she still spoke with him…shit I should have known better lol.

Whenever I have asked that question in the past, it starts this process over. I love her for it but emotionally, Im not sure if I am ready to speak with my dad.

Since then we have had 2-3 conversations about this and during this time I have told her what I am going to do when Gray’s birthday comes around. She didn’t have a problem with that. She even saw it my way. She understands that he was really the only male figure in my life but that is why I think she feels that she has to do try and get my dad to talk to me again. Hell, I just got off the phone with her and I could tell at one point she was crying.

I do sound preachy when I say only male figure...blah blah blah, but people who grew up with both parents AND both of them loving their kids, wont ever truly understand how important it is in EVERY child’s life to have those people there. Both boys and girls look up to their parents, subconsciously, to guide them and teach them how they will do things in life and etc.

Anyone who reads this might think, no, my dad is an asshole. Well if he is an asshole then explain to me why is he still married to your mom? Why is he still trying to take care of you even when you rebel against him? Tell me why he isn’t causing you trauma like so many other…well…parents have causes their kids?

If your mother of father didn’t love you and didn’t have the best interests for you, then they would be beating you up for the fun of it, maybe molesting you and then would kick you out on the street.

So I guess you have all figure that I feel that my dad doesn’t love me. Shit, I know he doesn’t care about me. He might feel bad about not being in my life…but that is a different feel all together. That one is called guilt.

He might feel guilty but that doesn’t mean he cared enough to pick up the damn phone and call his son just to fuckin know what I was up too. A controlling relationship is one thing, which I hear he was in, but that is no excuse.

If he cared at all about me, he would have got the fuck out of that relationship the very second that his girlfriend told him to not call me.

“Gilles, you are not to call or see your son anymore!”

“Fuck that…later bitch”

That is all that had to happen. They ended up breaking up anyways but it sure wasn’t for me. Too late man, you missed my child hood and I don’t know you.

I have stated from time to time that Tupac Shakur was one of my favourites but not in just rapping but as a person, he is someone I tend to look up too.I have said he made a difference and he did make an impact in many people. He was inspirational to many peoples today...and not just artists in the music industry. You might be surprised about who he has inspired if you just look a little into it. I had heard he was a poet but I had never really read any of his work.

I still feel Tupac was a great man and it has been over 10 years since his death. Hell, Tupac was named #6 of the '100 immortal artists of all time' behind the people like Elvis and Lennon. That tells you something.

So, last night I had watched a documentary that i had been waiting to see for some time and it got me interested in looking up and remind myself of what kind of things he accomplished. (this video was "welcome 2 deathrow"

This is when I found this quote that I find really speaks to me in so many ways...I dont think I can or will go into how it speaks to me. I will let you, the readers, decide what you think:

"If you walked by a street and you was walking on the concrete and you saw a rose growing from the concrete, even if it had messed up petals and it was a little to the side you would marvel at just seeing a rose grow through concrete. So why is it that when you see some ghetto kid grow out of the dirtiest circumstance and he can talk and he can sit across the room and make you cry, make you laugh, all you can talk about is my dirty rose, my dirty stems and how I am leaning crooked to the side, you can't even see that I've come up from out of that"

All I really want to say about this is, amongst other things that I thought about, it opened my eyes to how the world can be truely hypocritical. The rose is an obvious metaphor that he speaks about. He was the rose from concrete. The concrete was his tough life and his perseverence. If there was 1 thing I have learned from this simple quote, and that is you need to stand tall for what you believe in and you need to fight for it. These are the first steps in life to make a difference and not just as a race or country but as a people of this world

If you dont fight for what you want and what you need in life...who will?

I ended up breaking my camping chair today. It wasn’t on purpose. It was already breaking to begin with. It was fairly comfortable but now I have to get a new computer chair…back to this kneeling chair which I don’t find too comfortable.

So, tonight, I needed a change. I stopped playing World of Warcraft and just surfing the web and downloading more music when I get this message from my friend Myles on MSN.

As it turns out, he is having another slow night at work and decided to check out this blog. He commented how I really poured into it which is nice to hear and then he asked something that I had briefly forgotten about.

He asked about the girl from the convenience store. It took me a second but I told him she didn’t call me back.

It sucks she didn’t call back but Myles really motivated me to give it another shot. It has been about 3 weeks since that morning now I will try something he said.

To me it sounds a bit forward but hey, I haven’t had much experience…so what do I know? I can only hope for the best. He said I should bring her flowers with my number on the tag.

That is doable, but I do think it will be a bit interesting to go overnight to the café again and have some flowers with me all night.

Maybe, buying her a card would work too. It is something to think about and I have until Tuesday morning to come up with an idea I really like. That is assume she is on a somewhat fixed schedule and working on Tuesdays.

It is settled, that I will try again but I want to add that Myles was really funny with his analogies.

He said, ‘You gotta follow that shit up, life is a game, it’s about manipulating your environment. Apply your WoW thinking to real life. Even RTS”

It is funny and sounds a bit crazy but I can see what he means but just to be clear I’ll try to explain of what I understood. First, WoW is an abbreviation that stands for World of Warcraft. It is a very popular game and it currently has 7-8 million active members. RTS stands for Real Time Strategy. So yes, both computer game’s but they both make sense in a way.

RTS is about keeping your units alive and using strategies to win. In real life, you need to use many strategies to get what you want…this situation is no different.

Well as for the WoW analogy…I’m really tired and I did kinda put this post on hold a bit as I checked a few things on my facebook.

I believe I found one of my good friend's sisters on Facebook...geeze I hope so. I moved out of my grandmothers to my first apartment, then by the time i get settled in and go to check what Mark is up too...I find out his parents sold the house and moved away...so bam, I lost contact with him.

why didnt he call me to tell me you say? because at the time he didnt have my number and let's face it, he is a busy person plus and a bit absentminded (also not many people these days, I find, call their friends parents/grandparents if they know the friend doesnt live their anymore). I was calling him to tell him my new number. It was also one ofhte first none busy times i had at the start. I thought calling then was a good time...clearly I should have called earlier.

Anyways, I left her an email in her facebook account...time will tell if I get lucky.

I was going to write more…but I can do so when I wake up.

TTYL.

If there was a word for emotional and physical pain, this is would be the word I would used to describe myself.

I don’t know where to start really so forgive me for that lack of proper paragraph.

Everyday of my life as the last few years now…wow…I wake up with mind blowing pain in my neck. The pain migrated to the left side of my jaw, my nose, and my face.

I don’t know how much more I can take of this pain. It is just so much too bear all the time. It is relentless and courses threw me not giving a fuck if it makes me feel like my head will fall off my neck.

Right now it feels like someone drove a nail in my neck and just left it there. This pain has taken its toll on me over the years and I feel it is just as strong as my emotional pain. There are many times when I wonder how my neck will hinder what jobs I can get.

People don’t understand how brittle my neck really is. I can’t do heavy lifting as a career so there goes a lot of jobs. I can’t and I don’t want to be a chef because 1 my neck cant handle standing in 1 position, looking down to a cutting board/pot/pan…etc for 12 hours a day but that is all I will say about that. That was getting a bit off track.

My emotional pain comes from a lot of sources. These sources are, my birth father, the first 5 years of my life with my mom and how it fucked with me for years to come after that, having my grandmother raise me, and to top it off…the emotional stresses that my neck brings me, although I don’t want to make it sound that my neck is the biggest source.

Most people don’t realize how lucky they are to have a father that loves them in there life even if they don’t see each everyday. Most people have dysfunctional families but what most people don’t see and they take for granted are those small but happy moments in life with various family members.

Think, if you have a mother of father figure that loves you, do you honestly believe you would have turned out the way you are now if either parent just wasn’t in your life?

My mom loved and loves me, however, she had her own problems then, so she could not raise me. My father was an asshole and proved it when he chose not to be in my life at all. The last time I saw him, I was at his home with his new family, wife and kids, and now that I look back to it, I don’t feel like I was 100% welcome there.

The last time I saw him was when the music band “The Verve” at a hit single at the top of the charts; this song being “Bitter Sweet Symphony”. So that was a long time ago. I was about 10-11 years old at the time and I am now 22 years of age.

I didn’t really care at first but time passed on and I eventually grew angry at him for abandoning me without any real explanation. Now, I am sad I didn’t have a father that loved me.

You see, my real father is just a man some where in the world who I am still angry at, a man I don’t really care about, and he is also a man that if I was told he died yesterday or last week or last month…I would just go about me day and not give a fuck about him. I wouldn’t think twice about being sad for him.

However, I do admit, I would be sad that I would then know that any last drops of residing hope to rekindle some kind of father/son friendship, would be truly gone forever.

I never want to be my father. WHEN I get married and have children I will be there for them.

I would not know how to be a father since I would only know how other people I know did it, but I would try and help out where I can. I would be a good husband and a father. In those aspects I would be a better man.

I could never abandon my child like he did to me. I would like to say that I would always love my wife or girlfriend for all time even after separation but I can’t say that. All I can say is, I would still be an active father figure in my child’s life. I would fight to continue to be my child’s parent no matter what would happen.

I do know I would be terrified to be a father. I would hope and pray to god every day that I wouldn’t turn out like him or fuck it up some how. I’ve had father figures but not 1 man that has really been there in my life 24/7 to show me what it is like to be a man, like a father can.

In fact, everyone who plans on having children who is reading this post should realize, even if it is at a subconscious level, you tend to look up to your parent to see how to raise your own children.

With that said, I was raised by my grandmother and I think I turned out ok. She is truly an amazing and loving person. She is the matriarch and the head of the family and that is where she belongs. She raised me and I am just like one of her own kids.

She is the one who was there for me in the most important years and moments of my life. I don’t mean to say that like I am some how bashing my mom. That isn’t the case, I just mean granny is an amazing person and I love her. I hope she is the one I look up to for how to be a parent some day.

But how do I be a father or how do I become the things that men become without having that male influence in my life? Well I feel I had/have two men in my life, 1 being my grandpa. I feel he was a good man and I know he meant well for me. I don’t have a lot of memories of him since for some reason I have a hard time remembering a lot of the ages before at 10 or so but I digress. The 2nd man in my life who I tend to also look up to is a man who actually married my Aunt Kim.
I call him Uncle Gray, Gray being his real name. I never once put him on the spot and tried to make him my father but mostly unknown to me at the time, I did look up to him a lot. Time passed and I found myself thinking, “How would Gray do this?” or “how would he approach this problem?”

He is a fairly busy person but he is a good man and as I said, I have never put him on the spot and some how forced him to be my father nor does he know I actually look up to him like this but I am grateful to him in my life.

His 40th birthday is coming up in July and I plan on telling him all of this as part of a gift. I will try to make him understand it all so he doesn’t feel like he has some kind of new obligation to me. All he has to do to be the constant male influence in my life is for him to just be himself when we have family get events.

lol…there is the chance he would just happen to fall upon my Blog. I mean he is a computer genius, although I think he has better things to do then to search for a Blog site that he might not be sure exists.

So in the unlikely event which that happens, I say thank you Gray for simply being in my life and being a big influence on me.