I first produced my pistol...

1020PM on a Monday.

If I could ever get to sleep by a "normal" hour, I think the people around me would get concerned.

I remember having a bedtime of 830, and thinking 930 was so late and when I was older I'd stay up to the exalted 10PM.

Now I sit and hope that my life and my brain will slow down enough during the week so that I can get to bed before 1230 each night.

I drove home from my friend's place a little before 9PM, finding myself putting "Whiskey in the Jar" by Thin Lizzy on repeat. That guitar reminds me so much of my childhood, of listening to that type of rock with my parents, doing yard work and hanging out with my father in the garage of our first house in San Gabriel Valley.

I drove by LAX.

It never gets old, seeing those planes lined up, waiting to touch down, sometimes an entire highway of backed up aircraft. I look out my window and watch, wondering who is on them, where they're coming from, if they're coming home or coming out here for vacation or business. How many are asleep, how many are reading, how many are traveling due to life upheavals? The ones who sit, who dread the descent, dread coming back home to their unhappy marriages or empty apartments. The ones who stare out their window at the grid that makes up LA.

I miss this neighborhood. I miss being so near the beach, so near the airport. Driving up PCH just because I can, just because it's there, checking the bonfires at Dockweiler on the weekends, being ever so careful because the pedestrians are drunk, stupid, and more than willing to run across the small highway in front of your car.

Before this summer is over, sometime around midnight, I want to take a blanket out to that beach, long after the cops have kicked everyone out, and lay on my back and watch the planes.

I can hardly imagine anything better.

Freedom and possibility flying over your head.

Reminds me of being up in Oregon, sitting on the hood of the car, watching a meteor shower, dodging the millions of moths that haunted our headlights.

Time is passing so quickly. I find myself looking at my body, wondering what it is going to be like to watch the gradual decline of my flesh. I wonder if I'll go to skin and bones, or to plumpness, when I'm in my 70s. I think I'd prefer the plump. Skinny old people look too breakable, and aren't comfortable to hug. I wonder what my tattoos will look like, if the black will fade and blur like so many sailors' tattoos I've seen in the nursing homes.

If I reproduce, will my children, and my possible children's children, look intently at photographs of me at their own age, like I have done so much over the years, and look for bits of themselves, or look for bits of me that the recognize? Will they think I'm pretty? Will they tell each other that they've got my eyes? Will someone regale them with the my blacksheep stories?

On Father's Day, my family and I sat on the patio in the backyard, eating dinner.

My sister brought up alcohol, and how she really does not like tequila. My father tells her, "There's something in it. I don't know what. When I drank it I always wanted to fight or fuck."

My mother tells me I have so much of my father in me, in my personality.

My father, who tries so hard to suppress that nature in himself, who wishes so badly that I was not like him.

My father, the partier, the man about town, the manwhore, the druggie, the prankster.

My father, getting smashed with Jerry Garcia, hanging with Timothy Leary.

The man who tore his own nose off because he was so spun out on something he decided to ride his motorcycle down a hill by standing on it.

Reading Sperm Wars, they talk about mate selection, about passing down desirable social traits, on particular chapter spoke of two half-siblings with different fathers, and how one was also social, shining, and active, and the other was always a few steps behind, shy, and passive, mirrors of their fathers.

Something in me broke, years ago. And now I'm living the life he left for my mother when he was 23. Except I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't do drugs.

Anymore.

Will I ever have children that I will sit by me on the couch, flipping through scrapbooks with, showing pictures of the grandfather and grandmother to?

Do I even want kids?

Can I imagine trusting and submitting to a man so deeply that I would wish to carry his seed? That I would make my body into a vessel for his offspring?

I don't know. I don't want children, but I know that someone, somewhere, may eventually change my mind. I'm submissive in nature, and to carry a man's child seems like the ultimate act of submission to me. My body is yours, my body accepts you, accepts your seed, and will spend the next eight to nine months changing in order to successfully give birth to our offspring.

...hm.

I think I am going to continue to pass on this.