Letter to my unborn offspring....

  Well, here's the thing.  You're never going to be born because I'm a cynic who will never get married.  I know what you're thinking.  What the fuck are you writing this letter for if you're not planning on or aren't inclined to have any offspring?  Well, I'm probably writing this because it's a frigid winter night and I'm heading home on the subway from a job that I hate.  Or perhaps it's the onset of clinical depression.  Or maybe I'm just in one of those black Hemmingwayesque moods where I'm feeling writerly because I feel like I really don't give a shit.  Sadly, your dad is a tormented soul who wrestles with something known as angst.  What I'm hoping for is that you enjoy the world as I never could.  My hope is that you don't reach a point in your life where the garden of possibility turns into a vast acre of tumble weeds.

  I'm writing this letter in the hope that the cycle of life will always keep us connected.  Not at the end when I'm on the way out and your journey has just begun , but all throughout the first act and right up until the very end of the picture.  Don't worry I'm not going to preach to you about better living through chemistry.  Blow up the lab, get it out of your system.  Do all the self indulgent and or stupid things in one shot.  Trust me, you'll be better for it later.


  My hope is that you have, at some point, a great love story like your dad had once upon a time.  Hopefully it's a love story that lasts through the last act and has a happy ending.  Nothing contrived, just heartfelt.  Hopefully this woman, whoever she is, will make you better and hopefully she'll make you feel like anything is possible.  Take a lesson from your old man, nothing is trivial.  Not to her anyway.  Be a good listener and be a pip and get her coffee in the morning; even if you have to go out in the freezing cold.  Be proactive, be open, be sweet, don't ever take this woman, whoever she may be, for granted. 
 

   See the world, be impulsive, never over think things.  Just.... be the man I aspired to be once upon a time.  Lastly, if you root for the Cubs.... keep your sense of humor and an extra supply of faith.  Even if all seems hopeless, even if you feel your loyalty wavering; have faith.  Have faith and then have a big old cry,  it's OK, when you're sitting there at Wrigley on a frigid October night and the Cubs break finally break through and do the unimaginable.  Soak it all in.  And when it's time to settle back into reality, be sure to tell that woman in your life that you love her.  Say it often, don't be a "guy."  Why?  Because you never know.  Life is funny that way.

                                                    Yours,
                                                    Dad

Amfar's cinematic victory lap....

  Every once in awhile, I'll be sitting there watching something on HBO and I'll get so flustered by the the obvious political pandering of the content that I'll have to control my urge to launch my shiny HD TV into oblivion.  HBO'S latest entry into the political self congratulation archives was a short mini documentary on AMFAR or The American Foundation For Aids Research.  If you watched this special, you'd think that AMFAR had rendered the AIDS disease to nothing more than a tragic footnote in the annuals of medical history.  While the upper crust ate champagne and dined on their self delusions, actress Sharon Stone was see in one segment touting AMFAR'S horn as if they had plowed the road towards a cure.  Last time I checked, a cure for AIDS was nowhere in sight and people were still dying of this dreaded disease.  To hear the subjects in the documentary tell it, AMFAR has somehow unlocked scientific doors to the very nature of AIDS and how to attack it.  Last I heard scientists had been struggling with another strain of AIDS.  A strain that had become resistant to the very HIV/AIDS drugs that AMFAR says they had a hand in developing.  Is this where we're at in terms of the outlook on AIDS; people promising better tomorrows while they hand out so called wonder pills and don't worry be happy buttons?  This isn't the time for self congratulations.  The war against HIV/AIDS isn't over and if organizations like AMFAR think there's nothing left to fight for on this front, then they're simply delusional or too in love with their own press clippings to know better. 

  Still, that's not even what put the proverbial bee in my bonnet.   It's the fact that the film makers, predictably, drudge up the name of Ryan White to prop up AMFAR as some sort of do gooding organization for AIDS research.  As we all know, we can never let facts get in the way of a mutual admiration society.  Those facts being that Ryan White only became a poster boy for the AIDS movement because he was the victim of blatant bean counting by the blood industry.  The blood industry, god bless them, felt that cost was more prevalent than prevention and or public safety when AIDS was in its embryo stages and victims like Ryan White were being infected by the very blood that was supposed to save their lives.  Yet, there is AMFAR and their minions taking credit for the HIV blood testing system that is currently in place.  The very system that was begrudgingly put into action after organizations like the Red Cross knew they had to deal with the shit storm that would soon follow.  But again, let's not let the facts of a brutal epidemic with no end in sight get in the way of an AIDS organization and its need for a victory lap.  Make it a quick one AMFAR, there's till work to be done.  There are still lives being lost.  There are still stigmas that need to be tackled and there are still lives to be saved.

And Perez hilton shall lead us.....

    I shouldn't get all indignant when I hear about someone snapping photos of a celebrity in the throes of a rather unseemly demise.  For all of the advances in technology, it has only served to placate the bottom feeding opportunist looking to make a few quick bucks with some taboo footage.  I wonder how anyone can stand there with their cell phone and snap a picture of someone's life slipping away beneath a ton of crushed, smoldering steel.  It seems incomprehensible.  I don't know if that's as horrible as the report that the amateur shutter bug kept filming even as a friend of Paul Walker's raced to the scene to try and perform some type of miracle rescue.  I don't know what makes me sicker, this act of blatantly insensitive voyeurism or the sanctimonious odor of quasi journalism coming from the site of Perez Hilton.  I guess it's true what they say, everyone thinks that they're a journalist these days.  I fear that the line between bottom feeding media vultures and actual journalists is becoming increasingly murkier by the minute.  I think I would respect a guy like Perez Hilton more if he dropped the act.  If he truly had a soul or any semblance of integrity, he'd realize that his plastic sense of empathy for Paul Walker's demise is obviously tempered by his need to feed the hunger of the bottom feeders who keep him in business; bottom feeders like the amateur shutter bug who couldn't bring himself to put his cell phone down for one second.  Can you imagine if a guy like Perez Hilton was around when say, JFK was gunned down.  I imagine Hilton spewing some pre written spiel about the nation's great loss before directing the visitors to his site to a multitude of photos of JFK'S skull being blown into a thousand pieces.  But true to Hilton's slimy nature, he'd cloak his carnival barking need for blood and guts in the guise of patriotism.   Just like he's wrapping himself up in the guise of journalism when he proudly features multi angle shots of the crash that killed Paul Walker. 

  A person gets thrown in front of train and our fellow citizens snap photos of said locomotive bearing down on the victim.  An actor in the prime of his career lies dead in a mangled heap of foreign steel and some guy zooms in for a pay day shot.  We're de evolving as a society and it's extremely unsettling to me.  Maybe it's the reality television culture that has led to this perceived sense of moral decay.   Today, the opportunity for someone to get their fifteen minutes of fame isn't as daunting as it used to be.  You don't need talent, you need only a puppet master.  You don't need purpose, you simply need a camera and a tragedy and a knack for being an opportunist.  To the amateur shutter bug, I say this.  Those photos you took are going to be seen by a fifteen year old who doesn't have a father anymore.  Thanks to your voyeurism, that fifteen year old gets a first hand lesson in both selfishness and callousness.  Good night and good luck.