hello darkness


letter to dad:

Hello Darkness My Old Friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.
 
Well… I’m another year older… you’re nearly another year deader…
visiting dad
 
I’m sorry I don’t come around here a lot. I inherited your preference for solitude and don’t get out a lot… probably not as much as I should.
 
Mom’s up here regularly obsessing over your monument and visiting Me-honk… I know you don’t really care – but this plot of memorial  sarcophagus storage is well tended to.
 
I discover bits of you in my code regularly these days. Dormant, repressed or ignored ticks and peculiarities – I greet them with a smile every time,.. and think of you.
 
I’ve had a rough year. Chock full of mistakes and confusion demanding course corrections requiring an amount of courage I simply didn’t think I possessed.
 
You saw this coming and alluded to it all in that god damned cryptic overpoetic way you had… I’d brush it all off and you’d end your fortuntelling with a thousand yard stare and say “you’ll figure it all out”.
 
I’m trying pop…
 
Through this I’ve heard the existential silence that haunted you so… fucking deafening silence… which at times in recent history has turned this 40 year old man into scared little boy alone in the dark and crying for his father.
 
Your favorite song makes so much sense now… I only wish I could put that worn 45 on that you played the grooves off of when I was young…  and just hug you.
 
I’ll see you next year when I come to talk again….
 
until then I carry you with me every day – quite literally in every fiber of my being.
 
[wpaudio url=”https://jimcorbett.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/The-Sound-of-Silence.mp3″ dl=”0″]

_________

The last couple of years a new tradition for the season has formed…

The week of my birthday I purchase a pumpkin and sit it out… It gets carved on my birthday.

Three days later on Halloween – I’ll ghoul myself up and bring the jack-o-lantern and a thermos of mulled wine to the cemetery at sunset. I’ll spend an hour chatting with dad, having a drink and watching the sun go down.

The jack-o-lantern gets lit and left on the grave.

I say goodbye and happy birthday…

till next year.