It has been a long lapse between posts, so let me explain. As I wrote years ago (before our second trip to Australia), my writing is now constrained by the need to consider other people's feelings. The best word for it is 'suffocating.' I mean, if Stephen King had to think about the feelings of St. Bernard owners, Cujo never would have been written. But it turns out that good fathers (and even pretty marginal fathers) must consider the feelings of their daughters. It also turns out that 13 year olds have much stronger preferences than 6 year olds when it comes to information sharing. They have demanded veto power over every blog post.
Here is an example of a redacted blog post that was recently approved.
Today Tessa and Lily Lily great kids ] But then Amy and I and I admitted I was a horrible father
Both Lily and Tessa have that intuitive sense of dictatorial suppression that you only see in dystopian sci fi villains or the Kremlin. I imagine the KGB agents reading my blog (I've heard I'm really big over in the Kremlin) would nod with grudging approval and admiration and yet, at some point, even veteran agents would eventually say with some level of exasperation "but if you block everything out then it isn't funny."
To which Amy would say, "it's much better this way."
So here's what I'm thinking. The blog will be an in-vivo experiment of free speech. Freeish speech. Now I’m not saying that it will devolve into a “nightmarish hell scape” though that is ironically how my daughters describe our conversations over family dinner. It will essentially be historical fiction - a blog about a fictitious family of four fumbling their way through Japan. Even so, I recognize that my daughter Tessa may read it someday and suspect that the character ‘Tessa’ is loosely based on her. I totally get why she would think that. My response is that I’ve tried to capture my perspective throughout my life. Given the way my mind works, everything I write is infused with hyperbole and therefore only very loosely based in reality. I'm sure colleagues reading this will mutter something about late onset schizophrenia or early onset dementia or an as yet unnamed personality disorder.
This picture is proof.
