I’m in the library back home, angry, nearing 10AM. I’m angry because once again M and the boys’ travel plans have been fucked. I had three conditions for leaving my family back in NY. First, they had to travel back on the same day we were originally scheduled to drive back. Second, they couldn’t drive back on their own. Third, they had to fly into Milwaukee. I bent on the Milwaukee issue after M said they could fly into O’Hare. Well, now M says she accidentally booked them into Midway. FUCK THAT. She’s working on switching the flight right now. I feel like I bend, bend, bend for M’s family, constantly, and every decision is arranged around their convenience. Frankly, I think her mom should get off her fucking ass and drive with everyone back to Milwaukee. I’ve put forty fucking hours in the car this summer driving back and forth from western NY, she can drive one fucking way and catch a flight back.

Ok, beating up my laptop keys, getting that down, was cathartic, but I’m still pissed.

Allow me to supply some background.

We were scheduled to spend two weeks in NY, visiting M’s family. I agreed to make this trip with a couple of caveats. First off, the house is in a horrible area for children. There is no yard, the house’s rooms and small and stuffy, and the main playing area is the small street in front of the block. In turn, the kids, esp. N, need more or less constant monitoring. I made clear that I wasn’t driving ten fucking hours to play babysitter in the street. Second, I could drive to Boston for five days to check out the Hopper exhibit.

None of this worked out as planned.

First off, I agreed to watch the kids in shitland all day and evening while M and her sisters in laws went out. I could live with that. No big deal. However, this seemed to be a harbinger of darker times. I get along with M’s brothers, and the rest of the family pretty well, but her mom and I don’t always click. In this case, with the entire family present, I feel as if my kids get the behavioral shaft at the expense of the other cousins. M’s mom seems afraid of offending her daughter in laws but has no such fears of offending her daughter. Now, men in her family, historically and in the present, serve little function besides earning money, drinking cocktails, and doing what they’re told. I’m sure you can see from where problems develop. I was especially frustrated because M’s mom, in one afternoon, criticized my kids for opening the fucking refrigerator without permission, not peeing straight (I’m not kidding), and failing to articulate words correctly. Let me clarify on the last part. My youngest son (N) has a history of ear infections, and if he’s excited and/or lots of other people are talking, he can be hard to understand, esp. if you don’t know him very well. At Chatuaquaua he’s with all his cousins and excited, so this can become an issue. M’s mom corrected him three times in a row, right in front of his cousins, and I asked her to back off because he was starting to tune her out. I also think it’s horribly embarrassing, esp. at a young age, to have your speech issues constantly pointed out in front of your cousins. Well, M approached her on this later, and apparently her mom went fucking nuts. She sure as hell went fucking nuts on me later, claiming that 1) I had a huge chip on my shoulders (I can see from where she’s coming on this one, but it’s not a chip on my shoulders as much as it is an unwillingness to do whatever the fuck she tells me) 2) my kids need to learn manners, and 3) she can’t understand ANYTHING N says EVER. Fuck her. I kept my cool, told her I appreciated her honesty, and left for a minor league baseball game M’s brother and I planned to attend with the kids. Oh, I should also add that I said she probably wasn’t used to fathers like me, because I tend to be more involved in the decision making, etc., and told her I disagreed with quite a bit of what she said but appreciated her perspective. I wasn’t going to get pushed around, but I wasn’t going to freak back on her, either.

(Maybe later I’ll write about minor league baseball. The experience was interesting. Go Jamestown Jammers!)

The next day I really just wanted to get the hell out of the house for a while, so I gassed up the van and drove over to Westfield. I had an absolutely awful rectangular omelet in a tiny diner. I drove around Westfield, considering the cool-looking library as a potential morning oasis, but the air was already hot and humid, and the building did not look air conditioned. I got on the highway and drove south, thinking I could hit a movie in Erie or something if nothing panned out, but the sun was still low and rising, the hour still early, too early for the theaters. I stopped just over the state line at a very clean tourist center. Pittsburgh was only a couple hours away, and I’ve heard their art museum is interesting, but as soon as I got back on the road I saw a sign for Cleveland, and I was struck by the truth that I had never visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I drove into the city, found an eight dollar parking space near the water, and walked towards the Hall.

Allow me to digress from the family issues for a moment to discuss the hall. First off, in order to buy a 20 dollar entrance ticket, I had to get past one of those annoying “can we take your picture, and later you can pick it up if you want?” stands right by the line. I’m by my fucking self, asshole, why would I want a picture in front of a RRHOF mural? Dumbass. I was way more rock and roll than the guy taking pictures, if I do say so myself. Unless the fact he was stuck in a shitty job asking tourists for pictures causes him to form a band, I win that battle. The building was really crowded, but honestly, I enjoyed the experience. I agree with most of the arguments against the RRHOF (e.g. too commercial, who cares about the Allman Brothers’ drumkit, they honor more shitty baby boomer artists than anything, etc.), but I put those aside and cooled down, emotionally and physically, in the display halls. I first checked out an early Beach Boys exhibit, including lyric sheets from “God Only Knows” and some hilarious notes Brian Wilson wrote to his parents and left on the kitchen table about photo shoots changing his schedule for dinner or whatever. I also saw a surprising Joy Division/New Order exhibit (“Love With Tear Us Apart” lyrics) and a decent Clash special exhibit. The rest all started to blend in together after a while. I discovered most rock stars are about four feet tall (I could stomp on David Bowie in my sneakers). I heard a pair of teenage girls trying to figure out who the Talking Heads were (“I think my dad has their album”) and a dad lovingly explaining that Jimmy Page was in the Yardbirds before Zep to a bored and embarrassed teenage boy. There was a pack of about 100 black kids on a field trip from camp in attendance too, and their loudness seemed to scare most of the older folks. Rock and roll! Maybe I’ll take the boys to the Hall when they get older (I can lovingly describe the importance of the Joy Division artifacts to them), but I think I’ll wait a decade or so to visit again.

I left Cleveland sometime after noon, picked up a couple veggie burgers at Burger King, and hit the road. I had time to kill, so I pulled into Peach Street in Erie and tried to find the movie theater. I found the building by sheer luck, as you can’t see the marquee from the street (strange, now that I consider it) and was somewhat lost. “The Simpsons” movie had just started, and I hate missing the previews/start (esp. for a movie like that), so I checked out “The Transformers”. I liked the movie, honestly, but I went in with no expectations beyond sitting in a dark, air conditioned room for a couple of hours. I’m not hard to please. I reached home after a local photographer had taken M’s family pictures. Score one for my punk rock immaturity on that one. I read for a while (M. John Harrison’s “Light”) before M and I talked through the scenario. I also told T I might be leaving early, and he said, “Dad, this place isn’t any fun without you.” I went upstairs and I cried, cried, cried, and I don’t cry very often. I was in a position where I could either leave my kids, with whom I love spending just about every second, or put up with watching hegemonic forces wreak havoc on my family. M and I talked through it, and we agreed to leave on Tuesday morning, somewhat early, so M’s mom and I didn’t kill each other.

M changed her mind in the morning. She wanted to stay longer because one of her friends, her maid of honor, actually, was arriving nearby on Monday. I said she could, fine, I’d drive the kids back Tuesday, and she could catch a flight or something. She said she wanted the kids to stay so she could hang out with them. Well I wanted the kids with me too, you know? I talked with T again, very careful not to pressure him or put him in the middle, and he said he’d be ok staying in Chautauqua and playing with friends if I wanted to leave. He’s such a good kid, and I fear we’ll pay the price someday for putting him the position where he’s had to be so mature so early. At that I loaded my car, put Shadow in the back, and hit the fucking road. I reached Milwaukee by 5.

This week has been ok. I haven’t done a ton, but I suppose that’s the point of a vacation. I’ve read (new William Gibson), watched TV (almost the entire “Arrested Development” series), cleaned (bathrooms, kitchen cabinets, etc.) played hoops, etc. I haven’t gone out much. I was set to pick up M and the kids from O’Hare on Saturday, as agreed, when she told me this morning she “accidentally” booked a Midway flight. I don’t know how the hell you book a flight without knowing at what goddamn airport the plane is landing, but she says she’s fixing it now. I’ve done fucking back flips to keep her family happy. The unwritten rules say everything has to go their way, and their idea of a compromise is to get almost everything they want because they’re set up this in this image of the perfect world, and any modifications to that plan, however small, are framed as a great inconvenience and a challenge to all that is right and good in the world. As I said before, fuck that. I’m re-writing the fucking rules so I can see my kids and they can learn that there’s more to this country’s core than the hegemony of rich white people. I’m not going to idly sit and be their comfortable victim.

More later. Cathartic.