I began writing this—whatever this is—circa. 2012 and have continuously updated, edited and added to it up until present day 2025. If there’s a subject, it’s the month of April; but if there’s a meaning or context, it’s about “A world without fathers and how lonely a world that is.” It’s a series of observations about external events juxtaposed temporally in the actual events of my life and the theme, albeit centered around and so-named month of April, I think, it’s about fathers.
Or lack thereof.
And so:
I . The Cobain
I was 30 days out of the bottle when the news broke that the front man for Grungefuck trio NIRVANA was found dead of an apparent self- inflicted shotgun blast at his home in Seattle. But memory is a fragile, suggestible thing and the recall narrative shifts with time. There isn’t, for example, such thing as the infallible imprinting of a “traumatic memory.” Turns out the electric Jello we call memory is a malleable—almost fluid—thing; ergo, this is what I remember about remembering: I had 30 days sober and was at my place of gainful employment gassing up the company short bus without a valid State of California Driver’s License when the news broke on the A.M. radio. It was 1994, so that was the only kind of radio the van. Listening to an array of talking heads give the redundant traffic weather news bulletins every 8 minutes or something like that. I’d play it on loop. Which may as well have been HAM or short-wave CB radio.
On the day the music died, the local DJs began to pay tribute and evince tributes auditory obituary playlists and somber segues about yet another young rock and roller who’d crashed and burned 25 years into the game. Names like Jim, Janis and Jimi were rehashed. This was the first time an age cohort celebrity death evoked the raw shock and sadness that a sudden, irrevocable loss does. And he was a peer, albeit a successful one, but someone born same year as me. That made us bound in the thread of time and life. Breathing the same air as me.
8 April 1994. When news like this broke, it was blunt force real time audio. I think I heard it on KNX or someshit. I was putting gas in the short bus/van owned by the Lutheran special needs school where I was gainfully employed.
“Kurt Cobain front man for grunge rock trio NIRVANA was found dead today of an apparent self-inflicted shotgun blast.”
When news broke, it was always a dramatic affair (long before the dystopic saturation our caveman brains are assaulted with today.) But that was the extent of instant information—print, TV, radio, word of mouth and phone calls. We had secrets back then; you were oblivious to anything going on beyond the sphere of your presence and someone would burst into the room you were in or the TV or radio program got interrupted or someone (or not, since the research jury on traumatic memory refutes that the “I know exactly what I was doing/where I was upon discovering of a noteworthy world event.”)
Now, everyone’s reporting on it, has an opinion on it is downloading it, tweaking it, editing it, deepfaking it. Every image is eternal and lives eternal in the black cloud mirror to which we are all now bound. Same brain as the Early Man homo sapiens of yore. And with all of this lightning-fast neuron decimating onslaught of musings, pictures, videos, headlines, opinion, information, vicious rumor, war, violence, genocide and, of course, ads, ads ads ad nauseum.
So here we are. His death evoked a primal sadness. It was the death of someone with access to the deep underpinnings and emotional hinges in you because that’s the stuff that came up when you listened to their music. Artists are the historical vessels to our pain, darkness, and desires. We see truly talented people and worship them the same, but at the same time they make us realize how insignificant we really are. The same way amputees bask in the glory of the Olympic Games; the way pathetic neckbeards mire themselves in porn; or motherless children stare at Facebook baby feeds. But what if you were given a choice? What if instead of barren uterus your child was Adam Lanza, Lawrence Bittaker or Jim Jones.
But how could you know the future?
And if you did, would you do it all differently?
Like the man says, “But…we want what we want.”
Cobain struggled with the pain of being human. Who the fuck didn’t? We do shit like this to ourselves because we don’t want to feel any pain. The needle and the damage done are part of the largest pandemic in human history. There wasn’t a collective realization about it at first, for it was being marginalized by comparison to the other rock stars that bought the farm early in their careers. I went home that night with the discomfort of sobriety eking its way into my brain, shining lights into dark crevasses and leaving wide open places I didn’t want to see. That’s how it would be for a long time; the novelty would wear off and only the cold cruel reasons why there was drinking in the first place would remain. Then light would shine in the dark places. Things buried would slough off the carefully shoveled earth. The days and chips and accolades would meld into years. The triumphs of getting kudos for doing things I should have been doing in the first place (purchasing appliances; paying my electric bill) would shift somehow into getting every problem I ever prayed for. And then the yearning for relationships with the opposite sex would gel into the lamenting about the ones that were never mended with people who died prematurely or left without saying goodbye—or explaining why.
Kurt said fuck all that and checked out early. Master of his own destiny. Agony. Dope. Sickness. Family. Chaos. He saw the wreckage and realized it was going to be his responsibility to clean it up—and doing that didn’t interest him.
You can’t fire me, because I quit.
Radio was an important medium then. I remember Jim Ladd surmising in that signature stoner groove baritone of his: “Cobain was quite the tunesmith.”
Then he played Serve the Servants or Heart Shaped Box, I’m not sure. The pop culture pundits were quick to weigh in, some opining that a recent show where he was wheeled onstage wearing a hospital nightgown, his face a masked catatonic stupor, bore eerily prescient overtones to his impending demise, his legacy at once cemented in this tragic overtone. This grungy snarling towhead with his obnoxious who gives a fuck rat’s nest hair, his ill- fitting, trashy torn and scribbled on DIY fashion choices ensconced in legend. (Not mine, though. Mine was stuck in the video arcade and bowling alleys playing Asteroids and Mr. Do, still reaching for the can of spray paint and 40 oz. bottle asking “WELL…DO THEY?” Latchkey laggers. We, of Sparklet’s water bottle bongs, drugs harvested from cow dung, scraped from petri dishes and dusted from mold spores. Dipped into a satanic glue of formaldehyde, gasoline, ether and RAID bugspray: SuPeR kOOLiEs; dippers; Sherm. I think ours was defined by MTV day glow goons and hairspray hags but me and mine were strangers even to that scene. I was a kid of the black hole, in torn jeans, Converse and a large crusty self-inflicted burn—a key, a basic geometric oval 1980’s KEY mind you–. I put a lot of effort into appearing as The Antithesis to the world.) Generation Nirvana produced the kids who hit college right around the time 9/11—the catalyst that set the country on a trajectory towards ChristoFascism.
How long ago, that April? There were seasons then, it seemed, and I was all bright eyed and bushy tailed bumbling through life newly sober, obnoxious and riding the coattails of whatever privilege i was blessed to have come up on. In any case, the news wasn’t instant then; it was word of mouth, breaking news on TV’s and radios stuff like that. News would break and then people would start calling each other or one person would announce it in a crowded room, the library, restaurant, hair salon or bar; word of mouth, that’s how the story was told and would unfold. That’s how history was made, yeah? It would trickle in and then people would gather around a TV somewhere. No instant alerts. No self- referential comment threads. No rumor made flesh by repetition. You heard and if you were anything like me, you would commit it to memory. Trauma makes it haystack crochet on the brain, prods it into stereotypical and self-soothing rituals. One of mine was remembering. And I can still remember so many Aprils ago.
An eternity and a day from where we’re at now.
”I tried hard to have a father but instead I had a dad.”
2014- Twenty years later. Part of this was written while I’m sitting in the ICU with my old man; he is intubated and supine on a state-of-the-art pre-coffin, an 8-decade postnatal rocking chair: a mechanized hospital bed that has as many gears and cost as much as a new car. The old man’s respirations are forced, and his thoughts muted. His incessant, stubborn requests for the impossible are all but quelled. The last thing he quietly demands is to be kept alive. He refuses to give up. I refused to love him for the past 20 years. It’s not that I didn’t try; I loved him by proxy via every borderline personality disorder tsunami that came my way and dropped to her knees in front of me. I loved him by not hating him and showing up when the shit really got ugly–or in his case when it was smeared all over the apartment in which he should not have been living alone. I guess what I didn’t sign up for when I got Here was the clarity of that stuff. It’s daunting, really. Makes for a lonely road and world. Makes for discomfort across a lot of emotional miles. Forces a view from whence you came, and where that might lead.
It never led to a wife and children that I would’ve been reluctant to introduce him to. It did amount to a career he never understood, a life he wasn’t privy to and to choices that I made in a conscious, concerted effort to never wind up like him. It led to this, this clarity and second sight I never wanted but got stuck with. It led to the horror of the world that changed despite his protestations and insistence on hanging onto the past. It changed and was not kind to him. None of his schemes and designs ever worked out, there was no get rich quick answer to the poor choices he made became his demise and self-imposed prison. And I’ve spent the better part of 20 years going back and forth with that, being reluctant to tell him the truth about it all. I did a few times, and I don’t really know if he heard or understood me. I wrote them down in letters and on at least one occasion in a birthday card. I remember my brother Mark telling me during one of those Dad Hiatuses that he said, “I don’t know what’s got into him.”
It led to this. To April.
I never paid that much mind, though. The thing about Self Awareness is that it sinks in and rides a wave out of you. And when the quake has subsided and the sunset of death and goodbye are on the horizon in the form of tubes, oxygen tanks and intubated nastiness it returns in the form of epiphanies: It was me trying to get him out of me. You got into me, Pops. That’s what I feared the most, hence the silences and forced exiles. Why I stayed away and avoidant; I refused and avoided and ignored having a face to face with you after I wrote it all down. I don’t even know what year that was—1997? It’s that I’ll have you in me and I’ll fuck it all up if I ever find someone the way you found Sweet Caroline, sabotaged it and then pined for her the rest of your life…
Difficult To Cure 