Failure

Yeah, so I can't just postdate this entry to make up for missing a post yesterday. I mean, I could, and that's my instinct, because it's not like I'm doing this for a grade or anything, but I won't. I'm trying to toughen up my integrity. I don't exactly know where or how I learned to so easily coat my inadequacies and failures with the thick sauce of argument and excuse. It's not exactly lying. It's more like salad dressing. You disguise the broccoli and radishes, so that your tastebuds get tricked into eating them.

That's what I tend to do with the truth when it is not so delicious. I hate admitting that. But that's part of learning to tell the truth. Doing so when it makes me taste like a yucky vegetable.

(Yes, I am indeed eating a salad right now.)

I am not even going to blame it on my parents. I know that growing up acting had something to do with it. Acting has often been lambasted with aspersions of wickedness for its kinship with fiction, which is made up, like a lie. That's why some religious groups outlaw the theater. That's why the theater world always seems a bit slippery in character. Because people are slipping in and out of characters. And that makes it hard sometimes to have one that's solid, grounded, and true.

My father often philosophized about the distinction between fact and truth. He was an amateur historian. One of my favorite memories of him: he's pontificating in his jaunty, jovial way before a group of other cpers in metal chairs in a semicircle around him. I'm walking by, stopping to listen. It's outside, on the grounds of the church where the summer sessions were held. It's summer in California, but my dad is still wearing a long-sleeved shirt over his t-shirt. He dresses like an Arab, in layers.

He's telling a story from history, I think European. I don't know which story. He was a good story teller. I passed the European AP test with a 4 without a class or studying because of his stories. And he's saying how there are facts and truths but the two aren't the same.

Maybe he understood that so well because of his immersion in acting, because inhabiting characters could portray truths if not strict factual details. Many of the historical roles he played summer after summer: Churchill, Patton, an RAF chaplain from WWII, and Maurice Chevalier, and a French swordsman, and Harpo Marx. He collected the necessary props and accessories: bowties, cigars, fake guns, stage swords, a curly wig, a silver pocket watch. Also a leather pouch holding thirty fake pieces of silver for his singlet performance of Judas - an especially intense one-man play that frightened me when I saw it as a young child, because my father, under the bright stage lights, sweat pouring from his temples, cried and screamed like a man about to commit suicide for betraying his Christ.

I have all of these things now, in boxes. The effects of a dead person -- but stranger, the effects of myriad dead characters, who died and died everytime the curtain closed. With my father died a host -- I mean, a host of souls, or the host of a host of souls. It's an odd assortment of relics that piece together an incomplete man. My memory is also incomplete. I write this with weakening confidence. My recollection feels watered down, a shallow puddle at my feet. How much will I have to make up to make up for the lacking thereof?

And can I trust myself to be my father's historian? Can I tell his story with even a small measure of the authenticity with which he told the stories of people he didn't even know or touch the way I knew him?

I think this is why I wrote poems, why I became a (failed) poet. Because it's easier to take the remnants and leave them small and inconclusive than to try and tease out a sustained narrative. It feels more truthful to leave pieces as pieces.

My father's ashes are still in a box, too. By now I should have found an urn or a proper scenic river in which to throw them. I've had some ideas. But nothing seems right. He didn't belong anywhere physically, not really, except in his body and voice. Which are gone.

This is ridiculous, of course, to keep writing when I've failed already. But honestly, I have to keep going. I am too used to quitting if I can't be perfect. Quitting or covering up. But I won't do either, this time. I'll keep going forward, a failure though I am, but an honest one.