Kids...

Thursday, August 05, 2010
Kids...
Current mood: content

I never encouraged my daughters to be musicians. Granted, though my urgings toward the long-respected occupations of hausfrau and cleaning lady were mostly tongue in cheek, and always ignored, I figured it could never hurt to have a solid back-up plan. After all, I had always figured that I would be the next Paul McCartney, but then my hair fell out, I got a job in the restaurant business and the first thing you know, I’m fifty years old and spend most of my days killing time at a job I tolerate and waiting for the day when I can collect my thousand a month in well-deserved social security and eat home-picked avocados. That’s how it works in rock and roll – you make it by the age of twenty four, or you settle for the second best option that is offered. In my case, it was twenty miserable years of making certain that we passed the health inspections and keeping the food cost at a manageable level.

My daughters display quite a gift when it comes to music. Allison is the moody intellectual, busy writing and recording her mini-masterpieces on digital 8-track – Logan is the ultimate singer-songwriter, down to her sundress and blonde tresses. When I finally got to see them perform in front of a coffee house crowd, I must admit I got a little weepy. Some of the weepiness was caused by the fact that I knew that if they continued their pursuit of this dream they would never get into a world-class college, and some of the tears were pure and unadulterated pride and joy seeing my girls playing and singing their little asses off for an audience admittedly composed of mostly friends and family. Friends and family that could have kept their fucking yaps shut , if you want my opinion, but if Logan would have heeded my advise and bitch-slapped the shit out of an innocent in the front row, perhaps even the most unwieldly might have thought twice before tossing out their well-intended observations.

I think that perhaps I might have better served my daughters by leaving the guitars and keyboards locked into a room that was only accessible by ME, the musician of the family. And I should have NEVER shown them how to work the recording gear… Then, they might have cultivated their obsessions over marine biology or avoiding teenage pregnancy like every other teenage daughter worth their salt. Instead, I encouraged their dabbling, always giving them the warning that they shouldn’t count on music to make their living – after all, “look at me, Dumbass!” They instead kept playing and learned much quicker than I ever did and started writing their own songs and soon didn’t even need my useless opinion regarding their musical endeavors. “Death Cab For Cutie, who?” – as much as I tried to keep up, they had already moved into some new area of interest and soon I was listening to the music that blared from their bathrooms and wondering “what the fuck is this nonsense???”

However it turns out, I take great pride in the fact that I tried to steer them the right way – education, marriage, abortion… I also take tremendous pride that they are finding a means with which to express their artistic feelings. Their music is awesome and their voices and harmonies beautiful. If there is indeed a benevolent God in this pathetic universe, they will make enough money and earn enough freedom to express themselves in their music for the rest of their lives and help those that come up behind them. And buy their dad a farmhouse in West Virginia with a fully-stocked wetbar and a stripper pole.

That’s the most any father can hope for.

Check out my daughters and their music at these websites:

http://www.youtube.com/loganishollow

http://www.youtube.com/user/omigoth

Sign up to follow them – it’ll do you some good.