Did you ever have that feeling of hope mixed with an almost certain knowledge that this was going to finally be the moment when things started to turn around? Life was finally going to start moving on a course that looked something closer to what dreams, Hollywood and storybooks provide as a best practice sort of life.

This school year in high school was going to be the year I finally asked T out to a movie, dance, etc. This semester in college was going to be the semester where I finally met that special someone in that perfect moment on the quad or in the library, gym, etc., and suddenly, things would just click. This job that I am starting will be the one that finally turns into an actual career that leads to an upper management role and a six figure salary. Or, this hobby or book I just picked up will go on to become the thing I was meant to do for the rest of my time here on earth.

But, the feeling contains more information than this. It would be the moment where I myself would start clicking with the words I use when communicating with others, and clicking with workouts and other routines that require discipline to improve. It’s the moment that such clicking with words with others leads to meeting that person who has clout or a network of such. That “promise” you somehow thought was given to you that you would, after a few years of struggle, finally get to join people like Ben Affleck and Ben Gibbard at being famous and married to attractive women and having your words (written, spoken or sung) consumed and adored by millions.

Of course, the goal was always nebulous—a famous...what? Whatever the magical moment sent me down a path to become.

I am not going to lie. I spent more time looking for signs that I was now on the right track and living in my world of fantastic expectations of reality, than I looked for clues in reality as to what the truth was—and I certainly failed to ask for help or listen to others trying to guide me where I wanted to go in favor of believing I intrinsically was perfectly charmed and knew precisely what was best for me and my precious path to becoming a somebody.

I believed because my high school teacher had more or less let me do all the math homework in class and gave me mostly A’s that I didn’t need to spend time down at the math lab in college to re-learn pre-calc. And so, I left the class with a D+ and a declaration that Math wasn’t for me.

I believed because I could run through impressive sounding scales for hours on my guitar that I was somehow ready to join/start a band and we would figure out the songwriting/rehearsal/performance aspect of the process as we went along. After all, most bands started out sounding pretty terrible—my bandmates of destiny would simply click with me when the time came.

I assumed because I spent so much time following a disciplined approach to prayer, meditation and study of the Bible and key Buddhist/Daoist texts, and because I had designed in my head how my wife and I would start clicking again and be one of those couples who exchange new vows with a new ceremony—that God and reality were ready to provide accordingly and all would be well. Never mind that each and every attempt to click again or even solicit a “Love you” in reply was met with cold silence.

I don’t completely dismiss the idea that you can effect change in the outside world through endless internal efforts—manifesting this or that. I have seen changes in the past happen in my life when I get disciplined about whatever I am doing, be it prayer/meditation or exercise and learning. However, any time that I’ve let excessive wishful thinking begin to crowd in on all the data points that reality is sending me, I’ve been hit extremely hard in the face with doses of reality that set me straight.

Somehow, when I was younger, I felt as if those auspicious moments that would come on often at the start of spring or fall could also amount to a time when my older brothers came back home to the family and all of the internal conflicts that seemed to be always flaring up between me and my parents, me and my little brother or my parents with each other—all of these would resolve themselves through the course of the new world that had sprung forth after we’d turned the corner, passed through the darkest days of all the sorrow and seemingly endless family conflict.

Such was the spring of the garage sale madness that saw me spending more time bonding with my father than I had in a long time. As a college student ending his second year of college and transitioning out of a dorm into an apartment, I was on the hunt for practical things like crock pots, dishes and furniture, but I also had started to imagine myself a bit of hipster type and was picking up a lot of old books, records, musical intruments, typewriters (I believed for some reason I would find an antique one or that I could somehow write more interesting poetry on a typewriter). My father’s own inner pack rat was awakened by all of this, it seemed. It was also the start of the online site eBay, and the idea of getting an affordable cello shipped to you that you had just won in an auction seemed like the perfect application of the new Internet everyone was getting into.

The people in the small town whose garages we visited on the day of the citywide garage sale seemed to be all kind and friendly, unlike my memories of surly, angry people everywhere scowling at me for being a deficient boy, incapable of playing many sports and generally looking like a loser. It was only a matter of time before I bumped into T again, returned home from college, and this time there would be none of that awkward high school environment and the incessant need to be have a football jersey for her to wear (or some other small town high school status symbol I never had) before I could ask her out to anything.

I never saw T in person again, of course. The garage sale obsession died for me. I found the furniture I needed, soon saw that the records at these garage sales resembled the book collections—popular stuff that you have heard on the radio many times or did back at the time the record was made.

My dad never lost his appetite for finding random things online and picking up large quantities of a single item for whatever he thought was a bargain.

But, the year before that auspicious garage sale spring was actually the year my mom got cancer and my oldest brother (whom my dad had run off with a gun some eleven years prior) died of AIDS. So, for that spring, there was already a certain knowledge things would never again be quite perfect for the family. However, the cancer was little discussed and seemed to not be nearly as terrible as it later turned out to be when my mom had to go to Omaha for an experimental treatment that had a low survival rate. My oldest brother had been out of the family picture for some time (and so had my other older brother, really, as my two adopted brothers weren’t interested much in coming back home or talking to the family after they left).

Nonetheless, I could sense a kind of repair or healing happening with my family and me. My mom was less strict about what we could watch on TV, so I would routinely come home from college and see my little brother enjoying some show that would have been turned off in a heartbeat when I was a kid. Sex, violence, cursing, witches, gay people—any movies or shows where any of this was remotely talked about, the show got turned off. A spinoff of the Cosby show where sex gets mentioned (plus pretty much every other 80s/90s sitcom with a teenager in the house)? Turn it off. An action movie with a little gunfire (even all the gory parts edited for TV)? Shut it off. Witchcraft in a kid’s movie? Nope. I went to the movies once before I was 17 and saw Winnie the Pooh at age four. I saw any movies rated PG or higher at friends’ houses.

But, this felt like a new era where that exceedingly tight grip of pentecostal religiosity my mom had on the family had loosened. Why I felt like some kind of harmony/balance had to be in order in my home in order for it to appear in me and then be realized in my relations with others at college—I honestly don’t know. Perhaps I hid behind all of the restrictions and weird hangups of my parents so I didn’t need to face my own private ones that were preventing me from making any more friends at college beyond the one or two I’d picked up in the dorm from drinking together and liking some of the same music. Whatever private personal issues I had to work through should have been completely framed in my head as mine and mine alone to solve, no matter how disappointed my mom would be if it meant I ended up having premarital sex or singing curse words in a rock band.

Some of the stuff from that garage sale summer, like the furniture from this too-cool-for-school kid L’s parent’s boathouse, managed to make its way down to Texas and ended up among the massive quantities of stuff I had to remove from my dad’s house (and finally pay someone else an inordinate sum to finish removing). It was almost like we had a parasocial relationship with these more well-liked, integrated, adjusted and wealthy people from our small town by virtue of now owning some of the furniture from their boathouse. If you were to ever track down L or anyone from his family, they would probably not even remember who we were (except perhaps to recall me as being someone too weird for words)

My parents used to have social relationships with people. I read dozens of Christmas cards sent to them from times when they lived in SF and Denver and had friends who actually visited them (and perhaps even invted them to their houses for dinner and recreation). By the time we were in Missouri, it felt like aside from the people my mom knew from her church, my parents had turned into these recluses already (especially my dad), but were adamant nonetheless that I attempt to make more friends and even have a girlfriend throughout high school and college (which was incredibly hard to do without having any skills whatsoever to begin the process of building a connection with someone beyond banal conversation in school and at work).

So, what happened?

Honestly, I think my dad was just getting old and was too tired at the end of a workday to bother with building a new network of connections in the small town, and he often said he didn’t plan on living in Missouri that long. But, if you don’t ever visit anyone, no one visits you, and all of the other education of social norms that kids were getting watching TV and movies isn’t available to you—how do you even know where to get started?

Now, I am the father of a boy who has spent the last few years becoming less and less willing to even say “hi” to another child, interact with other kids in his scout pack, and generally even make the effort to try to get to know other kids. Now out of the house, I have only the times on the phone and via video recordings and the once-a-week visit to help him with any advice I can provide—which is of minimal value, of course, but I have at least been able to baseline maintain some kind of cordial working relationship with most people I work with, and did manage to convince one person to marry me once upon a time.

But, so much of this feels like it is genetic and beyond my control. My grandfather was 44 when my dad was born, and was (by my dad’s account) distant and not involved much in my dad’s character development. My own dad had me at 36, and I had my boys when I was 38 and 42. Older dads deliver weaker, epigenetically screwed up DNA by virtue of just being older—and that doesn’t cover all the ways those dads abused themselves throughout their lives through rough work and play.

I am not scientist. I have no idea if each generation is getting at least some of the inferior copy of the previous one. That my poor boys have inherited a triple-dose of old dad DNA that has accumulated over time to yield for them bodies that struggle with taking the ident mapping of their souls in a way that can be productive for them to confidently and properly use their voices and fine motor skills.

Or, I could blame my son’s current crippling shyness on some of the trauma I have myself no doubt put upon him by yelling more than listening at times. However, as dads go now and historically, I hardly feel like I was ever the most trauma-inducing dad there ever was.

My father freely beat my older brothers with belts and paddles. Hard. I could hear my oldest brother’s spirit being crushed by my dad. My mom wrote “prayers against sadism” in her journal during that period of time. One night I tried to get my dad to give me a spanking for something just to stand in solidarity with my brothers. I didn’t feel like it was right for them to get beat so much and me to only get spanked by mom (though she had techniques with combs and ping pong paddles that could yield fierce pain and welts). My dad barely smacked me on the bum and never did after that.

At my dad’s burial, my brother told me that my dad did continue to hit him after we moved to Missouri, which I wasn’t aware of. I honestly thought my dad had stopped hitting my older brothers after he declared “I don’t believe in corporal punishment anymore” shortly after the one time he hit me.

I never once hit my kids. Nor did the thought ever cross my mind. However, the idea that someone must be disciplined when they misbehave so they don’t do the bad thing again hadn’t completely left me. Changing someone’s behavior still seemed most efficiently approached from that perspective of: make the kid feel as much like they just put their hand on a hot stove so they don’t burn themselves again. So, yes, I yelled at my boys, especially L when he acted up. I let them see how angry I was over whatever they were doing. But M, my younger boy, is so autistic that none of it had much of an effect on him. Yelling at someone (or offering heavy sarcasm/criticism/reminders that babies wear diapers and big boys do not) who refuses to attempt to use the potty when they are almost five years old might seem like the easiest way to hijack whatever it is that is preventing them from getting up and going when they need to go, but then again if it isn’t working at all with someone—why keep doing it?

I couldn’t stop my dad from becoming the hoarder living with rats that he became. My dad couldn’t stop my older brothers from becoming the kinds individuals they ended up becoming (one chasing high after high until a dirty needle took him down and the other basically disowning the family and pursuing a living in military/law enforcement instead of college). Yet, my remaining older brother now lives better than I do, and has gotten past all of the kluge and issues that arose from his own problematic past marriages.

I couldn’t stop my wife from deciding that a bungled figure of speech and an attempt to get her to listen to one of our children more carefully was actually some kind of more intentional abuse/gaslighting heaped upon her than what truly was. I couldn’t stop my wife from deciding there was absolutely no path back reestablishing our marriage and household to be even stronger than it ever had been. (Though there was if she had paused to open her eyes and ears for a few minutes beyond her own private narrative she’d established and apparently will hold onto for the rest of her life).

But then again, you can’t always expect people to hold onto what seem like fixed notions forever. My father was an independent libertarian sort, but always consistently voted Republican. He came around to vote for Obama after seeing the insanity of of Bush’s war built on lies about Iraq procuring enriched Uranium from Nigeria. Diehard Mac fans like my cousin, scoffing at my Samsung Note 2 some 10+ years ago (what’s the big deal about having a stylus on board, you can just go buy a stylus for any given smartphone), and then last month while helping me clean up my dad’s place she pulls out the latest Samsung Note and extolls the virtues of the onboard stylus. People often change their minds and even significant aspects of their personalities yet refuse to admit they ever believed anything than what they believe today. You can call them on it, or just let them conveniently forget how they once were.

Nonetheless, you can’t do the work that Time needs to do to change someone’s mind—trying to cram that into a much shorter period via logic, data, emotional pleas, etc. Nor can you undo the work that Time has wrought on someone to cover up who/how they once were that might have actually been superior in some way to how they are today.

Take my surviving older brother. As a child, he loved jazz and played saxophone exceptionally and had learned piano and guitar well. He would go to great lengths to explain to me the virtues of Wayne Shorter or Lee Morgan, while at that time (I was probably about 8 and he was 15) jazz seemed kind of boring to me, like a compromise between rock n’ roll and classical that mom would let you listen to though you really wanted to listen to the Billboard Top 40 hits. Last time I saw him before my dad’s death (like 2001), he was pretty much gone down the “groaner metal” path. In 2025, not much had changed...his favorite bands were much the same—Avenge Sevenfold, etc. Is there anything inherently wrong with this? Not necessarily, except the potential for a musical appreciation that was capable of seeing the sophistication in jazz—this was long gone. Perhaps my father (whom my brother mostly hated) in his desire to push R toward something more academic had encouraged the saxophone too much and R associated anything of that nature with my dad.

I don’t know. All I know is that you can watch a person’s very identity/personality seem to change over a lifetime and this goes beyond mere examples of taste and personal preference. How much of any of that has been influenced by your inputs and the time you spent with them is anybody’s guess. But, the idea of being able to change someone’s behavior (in a meaningful, long-lasting way) through punishment, exhortation, preaching, pleading, graphs drawn from data, etc. is absurd. You might see change effected in them that they have wrought to get you off of their back. You might see them change, but you have broken their spirit or scared them off so you will never benefit from the change—or, perhaps they now have come over to your point of view but you are hardly convinced of their sincerity.

Anyone I have ever managed to change for the better (and stayed that way)– if such a thing has indeed ever happened, albeit even to a slight degree – either had it in their own heads to make the change anyway already, or were won over by my actions, NOT my words. And to be frank, the mere act alone of changing someone’s mind or behavior is hollow and the boost to the ego is fleeting. The result, even if perfectly sincere and fully realized, is NEVER going to feel quite like you imagined it would be, so you are guaranteed disappointment if you think you can only be happier after the other person takes your advice/does what you tell them to.