VexVox

Here’s what how I imagined it would happen.

I’m in Austin, minding my own business. I go to work in the morning, I come home in the evening. I’m working on one of my myriad projects — recording tracks for Eponymous 4, doing homework for C# class, writing a review for Musicwhore.org. Maybe I’m watching an episode of Good Eats for the umpteenth time.

Then I get a call. "Son, you need to come home." I get on a plane. I go to the funeral. I get back on a plane, and life resumes.

Intent and outcome are rarely coincident, Morpheus once said in The Sandman. The same, of course, applies to reality and fantasy.

One aspect of that last scenario came true — I did get a call, a few actually. And the message was simple: Dad doesn’t have much longer, and it would be good if you could see him before he went.

I had already bought a ticket home. I timed it for my mom’s birthday — and also the last day of C# class — and I wanted it to be a surprise. (Another example of intent and outcome being rarely coincident.)

But the conversations had turned urgent. At first, I spilled the beans about the surprise visit. That bought some time but not enough for my dad to hold out till December.

So I rescheduled the flight from Dec. 9 to Nov. 22, and I sent an e-mail to my office saying, You know That Call I said I might be getting at any time? Any time has become now.

Eleven hours and two-layovers later, I was back in Hawaiʻi.

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I don’t think this is a good idea.

Participating in Holidailies — no, not a good time. But here I am.

I make it a point not to talk about family. I run under the assumption that somehow, somewhere, someone I know can read this site, and given my tendency toward … mature language, I prefer those readers not to be related to me.

But events from the past two weeks which have dominated my life deal directly with family, and despite my reservations, I feel some misguided responsibility to log these events for that nebulous notion of posterity.

My dad passed away a week ago and a day.

You probably have some knee-jerk reaction to say something comforting at this point because perhaps you have filtered that last sentence through your own experience, or you’re trying to picture your own life without someone so significant.

Hold off on that sentiment for now.

We can most likely agree this situation is all kinds of suck, but what compounds the suck for me is ambivalence. I can’t say I liked my dad, and manners prevent me from being more forthright.

The gap he leaves in my mom’s life is heart-breaking, and the fact that he’s gone — not just away, but flat out gone — is something that probably won’t make itself apparent till a week from now, when he is buried.

Damn. Happy holidays.

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I’ve been meaning to bring this site back into the self-hosted fold for a long time.

VexVox was originally a Vox site, but Vox didn’t have an export function. I experimented with some Movable Type plug-ins to exploit the RSS feeds on the site to no avail.

Then Vox announced its closure and provided a means to move user sites to other services. I moved VexVox to Typepad, then exported from Typepad into Movable Type.

So now VexVox has come home.

I could blame the lack of updates on this site to that inability to export, but in reality, my mom quoted back to me something I wrote on Musicwhore.org, which pretty much ended more than a decade of anonymity on the Net.

Yes, yes, I know that’s a fallacy, a delusion. But my parents are of a generation where the concept of double-click can be daunting. (I may recount the tale of the minimizing/maximizing window one day.) But I’ve always gambled on said parents’ technical know-how to allow me some wiggle room for such public expression.

Now I guess I have to bite my tongue.