My older brother Brian was down in Barstow last week, dealing with my ailing father, someone who gave his children, collectively, nothing. After my parents broke up, when I was about ten, Brian went to live with him. This was good and bad, good because he and my mother were not getting along, bad because, as Brian said last week, “That first summer I thought that Dad really loved me. By the end of the summer I realized that he didn’t love anybody.”

That’s a tough nut to crack when you are 14. I was about 30 before I came to the same realization and am stilll grappling with the ramifications. It does explain a lot, though, including why no one wants to deal with Dad right now. My older sister is down there now, probably counting the days until she can go. And wondering why I’m not there to help her.

Which is, of course, a longer story. I told Brian that if he represents one extreme in the spectrum of how to deal with my father — answering cruelty with compassion — and younger brother Ethan is the other (die already), I’m like Switzerland. Which as we know makes a mean cuckoo clock.

But in the broken email threads we siblings have had re Pop I have explained that my son is job number one right now. He seems to have lost a lot of coping strategies and I am trying to get him up to speed. Fortunately for him, an absent & sometimes hostile father has compelled me to act differently with my own son.

He was having trouble with his iPod, said it wouldn’t charge. I plugged it into the Bose speaker my wife gave me for Christmas, which is sitting right next to the bed. It seemed to be charging when I went to sleep the other night — and once it was fully charged, at about one am, it began to play VERY LOUDLY. Before I turned it off I looked at the screen; it was “Nihilsim” by Rancid.

Or the other way around.