A few days back I heard Russell Dobular rip a quote that went something like: “Rock and roll is one long scream of Daaaaady!”

I don’t think so, but maybe I’m starting to see it.

The whole time I had a ‘real’ job I watched almost no football, partly because in the context of having to give all that time every week away, it didn’t seem like a good way to spent solitude hours on a Sunday–and partly because during much of that time my team, the Niners, sucked.

But the last year or so, they’re pretty good and I grab onto distractions a lot, and there’s only so much history and politics and philosophy one human can swallow. I probably don’t have to explain that to anyone who reads me, heh.

So, I saw this:

What Former 49ers HC Jim Harbaugh Wrote About Lowell Cohn & Grant Cohn

Grant Cohn is my favorite 49ers analyst. Lowell is his old dad, who joins him on his YT show once a week or so. The video is a seven-minute clip of them talking about fathers and sons. They’re really good role models for that relationship.

At some point in the clip, and I think it was when they were talking about a father having a deep trust for his son, I screamed out loud at my dead old man. “You hear that, you bastard!” And I laughed, but not with a lot of joy.

Now I’m thinking. I hate my father for what he was, a narcissistic pig of a baby-man. I have a lot of spleen to vent toward the second guy my mother married too, for what he was. (Yes, in spite of the fact that he did my Mom and my sibs some good; quite a lot of good in certain ways.)

Husband #2 offered to adopt me when I was 19. He didn’t ask me. He gave that job to my mother, and the second-hand offer struck me as ludicrous from the jump. Th’fuck did I, a nominally grown-ass dude, need a second daddy for?

My relationship with the man was downhill from there. He never treated me with any respect at all (honestly I was in no way respectable), and in return I gave him the bare minimum of same, with plenty of attitude besides.

He was, as some of you will know, the proximate source of the proverbial advice to “lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way”, and from the first time I heard that shit I knew what my own smart-ass bellicose answer to the advice would be. Helloutta sounds like the only choice, to this prole boy bitch, daddy-o. That instinctive reaction has never changed.

It’s only deepened. Ripened, artfully. It’s grown into a thin strong branching tree of a worldview that bows in the slightest wind but breaks for no blow, ever.

The worldview isn’t really about the would-be father that I rejected, though.

It’s about the actual father that I could not reject. I could walk away from him, and I did. I could hate him more with each passing year, and I did.

A son can’t really and properly disown a father, with a whole lineage of fathers stretching back to the hominid savannas, even if he has the best of cause to wanna.

I did the next best thing instead.

I rejected the worst parts of him, and what he stood for, the paranoia and the laziness and the childishness.

I did the same for the other father who wasn’t my father. I rejected and continue to reject the militaristic approach to life, the one-upsmanship, the America-first mindset, the worldly success with all its brutal hidden and unspoken costs, costs that fall the hardest on the ones who didn’t get into a nice college, or somehow fail to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps–‘guess they just weren’t smart like us’, us, the blessed of a vengeful god.

I know some of you hate hearing about it. I know some of you came to believe as he did, in all that crap that purports to be For The Noble Cause, when the only real cause aspired to is the moneybutter and the social approval landing on Our side of the bread; We got ours, Jack, so sorry you billions of also-rans didn’t make the cut. Manifest Destiny I guess, God loved us more than the sand niggers, whatcha gonna do, oh well oh well oh … that is life. Accept. Accept it.

I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.

I’m the other kind.

I’m a broken soul so sinfully proud of its own scars and cracks, and I haven’t calmed down.

Decrepit but still mad.

In every sense of the word.

Rock and roll, mutha fuckahs.