The top priority and biggest challenge of my life is to find a way to raise my sons that doesn't leave them wrestling with the same old father shit as I did. Don't get me wrong, they'll have plenty of father shit to wrestle with. Doesn't every child? I just want them to have different problems to consider than fearing a violent alcoholic. Than fearing that they're condemned to personal and economic failure. 

I'd much rather have them wrestle with a father who's slightly unavailable because he's working on the art that he loves, for instance. With a father who writes about them and asks them to be on camera––though I fear this is coming to an end, since they both recently declined my request to be interviewed about how they deal with their anger. 

Different shit in the Augean stables of their father/son relationship than I had. Interesting shit that doesn't sap their energy, but builds it up. Like the time they didn't spend with dad because he was writing paying off, every once in a while, in family trips to cool international destinations. (Remember London and Oxford?)  

We've had good times together, boys. If you ever forget, visit my letters to my dad about you. Know that for each of you, a little clock in my head went off before you even turned two on the day that I spent more hours of my life with you than my father ever spent with me. Know that this whole process of writing daddylabyrinth––the days and nights in my office when I needed quiet, the bad moods when I overturned rocks in my psyche and found demons there––has been in service of me dispelling the curse so none of us ever have to deal with it again. 

Know, also, that this is a book you can keep on writing. But if I've done my job right as a father, you won't have to. You'll go write books of your own, in which fathers can be other things than minotaurs. In which you can be other things than minotaurs.

1. BOUNCY OLD SOUL
2. ARIES SON OF AN ARIES SON OF AN ARIES SON