Being a Father2

 after my last entry, (hmmmm sound farmiliar) and due to
the anticipated highly intellectual responce from your little cyber
brains I thought it apt to share with you a recent event in my life as
a father.

I dont expect many of you will be able to relate to this story but not
to worry your opinion is totaly erelivent to me.

If you're like me, then we're identical twins separated at birth
who grew to adulthood without knowing each other.

If you're a little bit less like me than that, but still in the same
ball park as far as the kind of fella you tend to be, you probably find
yourself wondering "Should a guy who once watched two Dwarves arm
wrestle under a pool table in a Lesbian bar even be allowed to tell his
kids about God?"

Although I don't usually go to lezbian bars here in sunny Belfast and
while several other people in my party that night saw a single Dwarf at
the bar later that evening, I'm the only one claiming two have scene
two of them arm wrestling.

To be fair, I might have imagined it. I'd had a bit to drink. I was
miffed it had taken a full half hour for anyone to realize I wasn't
just a really butch dyke. My wife says it's because I use words like
'miffed'. What the hell does she know? Was she there? Is she a
Dwarf? Hmmm well anyway...

The point is, twenty years later I'm telling my kids what to do in
there school Noah's Ark play at a the local summer scheme Church and
worrying I've maybe lost some of my edge.
That is not an excuse for my behavior. It is an explanation. A
justification, a way of saying what happened was not my fault, which I
suppose technically is an excuse, but you know what? Why don't you
bite me? Why don't you take a frigging number and get at the very end
of the extremely long line of people who need to bite me.

I mean, it just seems to me that one minute it's two A.M., I'm in a
windowless confirmed bachelorette bar swapping Shcnapps shots with a
Little Person who is a quarter of an hour away from breaking my thumb
when it finally gets through her undersized head that I am a MAN, I am
here with female FRIENDS, and the next minute? I have a mortgage, two
kids, a wife, I'm standing in the aisle of Ulsters oldest houses of
Worship, mere feet from the pew Nathaniel frigging Hawthorne sung hymns
from, shrieking at a sobbing four year old in a dove costume. JESUS!

"No Gabby, NO! You can NOT be a lion in the animal parade for the
simple reason that you are the DOVE! THAT is the reason behind the dove
costume you are wearing, that is WHY you run flapping down the aisle
and back again with a branch in your beak, something I imagine you have
never seen any of the lions on the Discovery Kid's channel do,
because lions CAN'T fly and if they did they'd come back with a
dead gazelle dangling by it's broken neck from their beak, which
would really suck as a symbol of peace when compared with an olive
branch, and in case your little pre-school brain has never taken this
in, LIONS DO NOT HAVE BEAKS, ASSHOLE!

If you were HELL BENT on being a fucking LION you damn well should have
SAID so a month ago when I first dipped my toes in this FUCKING
QUAGMIRE of a PLAY!"

I want to say that this outburst was something I built up to over a
period of several weeks. It wouldn't be true, but it certainly would
paint me in a better light. I mean at some point I'm sure I could
have said "no" to all of this, but when was that point? And was I
thinking about Anne Margaret in "Viva Las Vegas"? Because there should
be a goddamned law against asking a guy to direct a Sunday school Play
while he's thinking about Anne Margaret in "Viva Las Vegas". If you
haven't seen it you need to rent it now, because the moment the King
let her go is the moment he set foot on a path that led to a solitary,
naked death on a toilet.

See, the thing is, when you agree to do a play about Noah's ark? You
are agreeing to write a children's play that features God KILLING
VIRTUALLY EVERY LIVING THING ON THE PLANET.

Aye,Good old benevolent God on his granite throne with his long white
beard and his bathrobe, which is the way kids see Him no matter what
you tell them, orchestrating the most complete genocide, the most
thorough holocaust, EVER! Everyone thinks Noah's Ark is all cute
animals, "Twoseys-Twoseys" and "Gopher Barky-Barky", and I suppose it
is, but each of those animals are the LAST OF THEIR KIND! The Ark
tossed for forty days and nights on a ocean filled with BLOATING
CORPSES! I mean try making a fucking lamp shade from wet hypoelephant
skin.

Which is what I TRIED to explain to the hapless little pre-schoolers
who were my 'cast' during the first read through there lines.

I tried to tell them this was the story of a capricious, dangerous All
Father, that it was a way of understanding a world where tragedy and
horror lurked around every corner, and there was never any explanation
for the endless, agonizing struggle for existence, a world NO DIFFERENT
from their own. And some little child star, some angelic Pre-Raphaelite
cherub, quite possibly one of my daughters (which might explain why she
was not yet crying, having grown used to my methods of expression over
the years) pipes up:

"But what about the Rainbow?"

"The Rainbow." I replied, "The Rainbow, the Rainbow, ah, yes, what...
about... the rainbow? Sung by Kermit, or stamped on backpacks and
lunchboxes and notebooks and bicycle helmets, Listlessly inscribed on
any non-moving surface by anime-eyed hopefuls such as yourself, THE
RAINBOW! Our Lord's promise, his admission that perhaps in killing
off every human being on earth down to the last suckling babe who
wasn't immediate family of one, stinking boat builder, He MIGHT HAVE
OVERREACTED A TAD!
The Rainbow, the RAINBOW, the Holy sign that God will NEVER AGAIN
destroy all life!... With a flood."

"That Holy Cheater! That divine finger crosser! Don't you get it?
Does the rainbow mean he won't kill us all with a comet?! Is it any
proof against Him making the SUN BLOW UP, or go OUT or just swell
enough to roast us all like a world full of christmas Day TURKEYS?!
Does that rainbow say "I, GOD, will NEVER send a pandemic Plague that
will make your underarms swell up like grapefruits until the pressure
cracks your chest cavities like frigging WALNUTS?! PEOPLE, PEOPLE, HOW
ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO THIS PLAY IF YOU DON'T AT LEAST TRY TO
UNDERSTAND IT?!" I mean I have this problem in work when I try to
explain why every £10 note that may or may not appear infront of me is
mine!

Now, see, that got even my daughter, (if that's who she was), crying.
I have a gift, and I'm like a terrier, I don't give up 'till the
hole is dug. And I shit in the corner.

I guess I have to wonder (as several of the parents did, in writing) if
I'm really the right person to be an upstanding member of the
community? If I'm totally honest, I have to say I wasn't really any
more comfortable trying to improvise my way through a knife fight with
a Lesbian Dwarf, but if she won (and my friends say she did) I'm sure
it was due to my broken thumb.

Wouldn't you think, though, that on the twenty year pendulum swing
from drunken brawling in a Belfast Lesbian UDA bar to directing a
school play, somewhere in between might have felt... comfortable?
It's probably just the fistful of Excedrin Migraine Relief talking,
but is that really too much to ask? A little stretch of Rainbow I might
call my own?

Don't I deserve something in return for single handily clocking up
more debt in 6 years than Hitler did Jewish scull cap?

Next year I am scheduled to do "Daniel and the Lions Den", which should
go more smoothly. Nothing But Lions in that one, and not a dove to be
seen, though I may have couple of the youngest girls arm wrestle in the
background.

Stay tuned for my new marrage guidence booklet titled. "Man is the
master and a womans place is in the kitchen".