This has been something I’ve hoped and wished and prayed she wanted to do for so many years. She finally “came upon” the decision on her own. She has been overseas studying and decided that if she wanted mobility more than subways and tubes and buses, she had better understand how to become mobile in a form of transportation she could control and access without someone else setting the timeline.

When she first mentioned it, I wanted to leap right in and say, “I’ll teach you” but I knew that was never going to be acceptable. After all, I’m her baba and babas are not cool. She has no patience for me and we’d never get very far in the endeavor. So, I said instead, “if you want to learn, I’ll pay for it.” I meant this wholeheartedly. She’s decided to take me up on the offer and I asked her again today as we were in my recently deceased father’s car driving back from his place if she was still interested in learning to drive? She said yes and would look into the schools. I did say, “there are two things you should however, know how to do: change a tire, and change the oil”. She looked at me and said, “well I can do the first one, I’ve watched plenty of tiktok videos” (ahem). Oh govinda save us from tiktok experts. I’m hoping she’ll let me teach her how to change a tire and the oil in whatever car she eventually gets. We’ll see. Baby steps. She’s agreed. Now, she has to find a school that will teach her. Part of the ride consisted of my asking her road-worthy questions. The kind they ask on the written portion of the test (well, it has been over 40 years so perhaps horse and buggy test) and she knew some of them and declared “oh, come on, everyone knows this stuff, it’s common sense”. I wanted to point out, common sense isn’t always common.

Baby steps.

So, life did get in the way. Life, the universe, and everything (thank you, Douglas, will forever be grateful for those wonderful words). I’ve become a full-fledged, card-carrying nerd of the highest order. I speak in tech, I dream in binary, and most days, I work with the most talented and awe-inspiring people I’ve ever had the fortune to meet. Most days.

Other days, I have the frustration of the millions. Those days are not so great, leave me gasping for my own sense of sanity, and wondering why the fuck did I ever get out of bed today? Those days seem to be far-and-few-in-between more and more. Thankfully.

I love still living in NYC. I love that my daughter is off at college now. She keeps in touch as frequently as she can (gods bless her for her 20-minute calls that leave me breathless in their scope, width, and breadth). I always wait until after she hangs up to say, “I love you” because she once said to me, “you know, saying, I love you is manipulative”. So, I compromise. I love her dearly and can say it after she’s gone back to her adult life. I’m not so brave in not admitting I love her. She’s the highlight of my world every day. Maybe someday she’ll read these pages and know how incredibly proud of her I am. She went such a long way to come all the way back to herself. She stumbles and topples over only to pick herself up, brush herself off, and just get on with the business of living. She’s my hero some days. Other days, she’s just the best person I know. Every day, she’s still my daughter.

Life is progressing. It ebbs and flows along. Just screams into the wind hoping there isn’t a bee heading straight for its mouth as it gapes and gaws at the world. I am more buffeted by how life moves than how I move it. I’m quite happy with the way life is in the past few years. Ups, downs, sideways, back-and-forth, all the ways we move in the world, I’ve moved through them all. None as easily as up. I strive every day to do better than the day before. I don’t always succeed, but at least the passion for it isn’t gone. It, of course, is life. Life is lovely when you hold it in your hands and stroke it gently.

My favorite expression every day is “I love living indoors.” So many can’t say that and to me, everything after this fact is simply gravy. Not the smooth and perfect gravy from a packet, but the homemade kind that is lumpy and obscene and incredibly good. The best kind of gravy is definitely the kind that has lumps. How would we know we’re alive if we didn’t have lumps in our lives?

It’s interesting to see my daughter, now 11, grow into the woman she’s becoming. She’s her own person every day a little more. There’s nothing I feel I can offer her and yet, she still looks to me and tells me things about her life which truly is a mystery to me. She’s growing faster than I can comprehend sometimes. Just yesterday, she used to insist on piggyback rides and letting me do her hair. Where did that little person go? It’s not a lament for things past, it’s nostalgia for who she was to what she’s becoming every day. She’s more amazing every time I look at her. She may not need me as much, but in all honesty, I love her to stand and take the world on her own terms. I just hope I’ve had some small part in getting her ready for it.

The nature of evil is subjective. In this, I mean that what one man may consider evil,           another considers just, true, and right to his cause. When one man commits genocide or murder, the nature of his soul may never be in question if his belief tells him that he is doing what his soul tells him it must do. There is no wrong if the action is guided by purity of spirit. If a man does evil deeds is there an objective judge for his actions or a subjective well-respected and understood and accepted moral compass that everyone “knows” is absolutely correct? How often have religious texts been interpreted as meaning that the actions of those that follow them give them free reign to act thusly? How often have those same texts been interpreted in exactly the opposite and equally diametrically opposing viewpoint by those whose belief system is also diametrically opposite and use the same text to support their beliefs? Who is the final arbiter of such force of wills? Who is to say that one is not the correct and the other also not correct? If history is written by the victors are the losers incorrect? When evil triumphs does it make it good by its very nature of victory over its opposing viewpoint? What of those that rewrite history to their liking long after the witnesses have all vanished into dust? Does this new retelling mean that the history of today is the evil of yesterday?

More things may be interpreted as one thing or another, yet can they be interpreted as both? The act of understanding is the act if being able to hold two opposing and conflicting viewpoints and being able to see both as valid and correct. When one becomes evil and the other good, nothing more than human interpretation of the original unknowable action is taking place.

What is the purpose if religion but to teach morality? However, whose morality is it? Is the objective or subjective reality? Does truth have objective natures or is it all biased and blessed by those who understand its will of force to be thus or this? In every religious ideal there is the ability to be misinterpreted. Is this a problem of the original text or the limitation of the interpreter?

The scariest words I’ve uttered in the past few years over and over again, have been that I’m dating. Or at least, trying to date. As a man, there’s quite a few things easier than trying to date in NYC, jackhammering your own testicles while eating fried cheese; hurling yourself directly at spinning helicopter blades; walking into a biker bar and asking in a very loud voice, if anyone has a suggestion for a pink striped bike… many things easier.

I have gone on many dates. None of them have been successful. Some have, with varying degrees resulted in second dates, some, even in third, yet, by the time the crazy comes to the forefront, it’s in full open fire, Rambo full-on automatic with all the ammunition blazoned. What is it that makes this such a crazy place to meet women? Is it that by “our age” they’ve gone through the checklist:

• Overpriced, (sometimes, but often preferred) ivy league education (check)
• Career that would crush most people under the weight of how overblown it is (check)
• Apartment that is uniquely and overgrossly you, apportioned just so to show off everything that you’ve accomplished all on your own (check)
• So many activities and friends that breathing is only possible between the hours of hell no and what are you, high? (check)

Reaching (that age), as guys in NYC, we KNOW that means. The women are on a hunt. They’re on a complete search and deranged mission to get that last check box filled in. A MAN!!!. They are on a hunt as though they’d just heard there were free Italian shoes being given away at a designer’s loft in Soho. They smell it, their hormones are raging, their incredible sense of NEED is hankering for a MAN. They MUST have it to fulfill their primal ritualistic needs. The last check box MUST be obeyed. We all know what that check box is, CHILDREN.

However, it’s just one more project for them. Just all the other check boxes, they are methodical, like a puma tracking a gazelle, it’s something they set about doing with complete deliberation. They stalk their prey, they hunt for it, peppering the scenes of their conquests with scents to be remembered and also feared. They want us to be wide-eyed and recumbent in our inability to sense what is happening. We are after all not much more than donors. We’re the penis with the purpose. Other than that, we could be something that can be discarded once they have what they want. Oftentimes we are. After all, once we sire what they want, we don’t actually WANT to stick around do we? It’s been predetermined through the coffe-klatch of cohorts that men are only needed to fulfill the need for procreation, we’re to be discarded like the effluent from a bad memory. This is, of course, because it’s too expensive to go the IVF route as the prohibitive cost. After all, where else can you have dinner paid on numerous occasions and still get out with everything you want and discard the slimy sheath afterward?

Does all this sound calculating? Misogynistic? Hurtful? It’s not. How many stories have I heard of this occurring. How many of them have I met? This isn’t sour grapes at all. Truth be told, men want the same thing, they just want to know they are in on the plan. Give us a sign that this is for keeps. Let us know you want more than the little bit of affection you’d expect from the 5 minutes you’d show a Dove bar. We’re actually quite willing to participate happily, gleefully, joyfully. Everything about us also screams what is it that we want equally as well. Yet, we aren’t often given that opportunity to decide on our own fates. We’re sometimes surreptitiously banked away from the knowledge that would make us happy.

What to do in all this hoopla?

How about just talking more? How about playing fool’s poker and showing your hand to us as we are showing ours to you? How about MAD in the romantic sense so that neither one is left in the lurch? We want the same. How about we figure it out together?

Living in NYC is an amazing experience. Where else can you get on a subway sit next to a guy making 20x than the guy next to him and STILL hear the two of them deride the Mets. Then again, what else are the Mets good for but derision?

I’m going to make an honest attempt at documenting life. It may not always be exciting, because exciting is what you do when you’re not paying the bills after all. I do guarantee that it will be what it is.

We’ll see.