My father used to say that the most important thing in your life was to formulate what question you wanted to answer, but he was a bad father.
How about “Who am I?”. “Terrible.” “Why?” “Hopelessly vague. How are you going to know when you answered it?”
“What is the meaning of my life?” “Pretentious.”
“What’s it all about?” “Childish!”
“How can I be happy?” “Who says you can?”
“Fuck you!?” “Now you’re just being sassy.”
“What do you want from me?” “What do you want from you?”
“What do I want from me? “ “Now you’re just copying.”
“What about now?” “Now you’re showing off.”
“What is my question? What is a question? What do I need to know?” “Save your self-referential paradoxes for the bullshitters at the tea party, college boy.”
He died and obviously never answered any of the questions about questions, and for a while, don’t you know, I was so relieved not to have his weight on my life. And then I missed him and then I forgot him. I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of asking who was he really, I mean obviously I’d like to know, but it’s not my question. I thought that when he died.
But now I think I think I know the answer. Who he was was the one to flip the oppression his own father had laid on his life by demanding answers by not doing the same injustice, laying the same burden upon me his son. As if making another person and giving him a life of his own could be done so easily and simply as changing a single mark?
Eric Linus Kaplan 
Thanks for sharing this, Eric. It reveals a lot and exposes a vulnerability that I haven’t seen before in your blogging. As per these kinds of dialogues, my father was similar in many ways to yours (or so it seems).
thanks! I’m glad you liked it! In the interests of accuracy and fairness my real Dad was not very much like this in real life — he was very gentle.
Oh….that’s good to know.