There’s this man I know who is a few years older than myself, though our difference in age continues to shrink the older he gets, according to him.

We’re shared an acquaintance for the better part of 30 years, and nothing about him has changed – other than the fact that he has, in fact, aged.

He’s always flawlessly coiffed, handsome, charming, narcissistic, and bordering on what many clinicians under duress would describe as functional psychopath.

I assume he has the capacity to feel empathy, and I assume, remorse, but it’s controlled like everything else about him.

He has fathered many children by almost as many wives, who maintain friendships with him if only because they don’t know exactly what else to make of someone who appears to skim the surface of life without getting his shoes scuffed.

This is what cold-blooded and calculating looks like in men who use veneer as a weapon of mass destruction.

This is also the man my father wanted me to be because he was exactly like him.

~~~

Many of us grew up in the shadows of our WW2 fathers, men who held the horrors of the world in check.

They traded in their uniforms for suits of armor that kept them in lock-step with a rigid mentality necessary to maintain sanity in the midst of wholesale bloodshed.

Who were they…really?

Many of us have no idea. We just see the symbols, hear the stories, imagine the people they were as children.

Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I just accepted everything I was told.

Some of us are just doomed to failure, I guess.