Ok – I’m in the middle of a big deadline at the moment, so all my thoughts are necessarily truncated. But still – the biggest thing in my head at the moment is my father. He and my mother got divorced when I was two or three and I haven’t seen him or heard anything from him since I was about four or five. My mother had a couple of conversations with him when I was about six or seven, but that’s it. No more.
I’ve never really been even the slightest bit interested in finding out about him – all my friends seemed to think that I should seek him out – but why? What possible connection could I have with this man? At least that was always my position. But now I think it’s changing. The easiest way to tell what’s on your mind is to see how often you find yourself confronted by it everywhere you look – in the books you read, the TV shows you watch. It’s like with theories – if you get attached to a theory about the way the world works, then you see evidence for it everywhere. It’s not so much that you’re making up the evidence, but that your mind is hoovering up associated material left, right and centre…
Anyway – at the moment everything I touch seems to be about absent fathers and having a sense of your own history and about memories. Things as random as Paul Auster novels, films like Memento and TV shows like Sex and the City have all (over the last few days) made me think about my past and my parents. And my father particularly. He’d be in his sixties now – he might be dead. I think maybe I just need to know whether or not he’s dead. Head’s too full of crap today. Will think about this in more depth later – maybe next week.