Father's Day

This is me. My portrait, made by my daughter at school, for one Father’s Day many years ago. It is, more or less, true to life – no hair at the top, very dark eyes. My Father’s Day today was rather uneventful. I actually had to go to work in the morning. Like so many other so-called ‘special days’, we really had nothing to celebrate. Which is just as well.

Today I just feel like saying that I have the best daughter in the world. She is indeed the best, the nicest, the cleverest and the most beautiful daughter in this whole world, and her name is Clea Soledad. She is 6 and 9 months old.

But she is gone. Like so many other children on 29 September 2009, she was taken away from us by the ocean, while all of us were walking on a paradisiacal beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She was, she is, she will always be, the best daughter in the world.

I miss you, Babita.

Valid art

“The Moms revealed that if you're not crazy then speaking to someone who isn't there is termed apostrophe and is valid art. Mario’d fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she'd taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and … woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way. […] It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 592.


Or that the real and the sad and the woeful have been becoming utterly unbearable for most people, to the extent that we appear to prefer fiction to fact, virtual worlds to tangible realities, and the safe remoteness of distance to any kind of uncomfortable closeness.