What the Hell Am I Even Doing Here?

 

My dad died in December of 2019. 

Way to start on a down note, amiright?

December of 2019 and January of 2020 were a crazy time in the world. We were just starting to hear about this thing called COVID-19, and trying to figure out how it was going to impact our world and our lives. We set up a wake for Dad for the first week of March of 2020. We arranged food, a location, and invited a bunch of people. And on the morning of the wake, we got a call from a dear friend asking us to cancel, because the first cases had been detected in our county (and the wake would have been a pretty broad cross-section of the elderly folks in the community, include a whole bunch of teachers and school employees). We canceled. 

Because our extended family was already on the way, we opted to give them the option of coming to our house for a very small gathering where we could talk about and remember Dad. As part of that, my brother and I prepared brief remarks. Mine was, I am quite sure, poignant and heart-spoken and and great. But, my brother's was simple, and charming. To paraphrase, he reminded us that Dad's true superpower was the ability to be unabashadly, openly and wildly ENTHUSIASTIC about things, either things that were important to him, or to his family, or his students, or his friends. This is a man who picked up Magic: The Gathering and comic books in his forties because his kids and students thought they were fun. A man who learned to play video games in his fifties just so he could beat his kids at Ambrosia Studio's Barrack. A man who dragged his 8 and 10 year old kids to see the Grateful Dead for the first time, who taught me to love music and food and wine, and who wholeheartedly embraced the new music I brought home in college and developed a love of whiskey and bourbon when I was in my 30s. Who would have long conversations with me about the intersection of environmental regulation and intellectual property law, or my brother about the implications of Chinese transportation policy on nationalism and a sense of identity, who learned to make bead jewelry because my mom enjoyed it, and who embraced slumped glass art in his sixties because why not?

One thing I've tried to do over the last few years, in his honor, is to lean into the things that I love and to try to share them with my friends and family. So this is part of that effort.

What will I review? Whatever I'm feeling great about in any given moment. I'd guess a lot of that will be audio gear, albums I love, whiskeys or wines that I'm excited about, causes that strike me as important, etc. I'll probably try to steer clear of politics, but who knows if I'll keep to it. 

Questions? Concerns? Comments? Angry diatribes about my distate for Bluetooth as a protocol (and face it, it's a pretty shitty protocol)? Shoot. 

#why