Letter to my (step-)father 3/11/2024

Hey.

It’s been 26 years today. At this point I honestly can’t even remember much about you. I have that answering machine tape with your voice and it wasn’t what I was expecting for your voice, I’ve got photos of you but with this much time passed it just feels like another random stranger I’m looking at. I still get incredibly sad when I think about your passing, especially in light of information that was confirmed to me last year. You see… I’m not a Mercer. I’m not your biological son…

As it would turn out my father is a man called Ed Snyder of Fort Wayne, born Eduard Schlegel of Bavaria. They have these services where you spit in a tube and send it off, they sequence the DNA and then match you with others that have done the same. I did that via two services and… yeah. I matched Ed as a father/son match on one of the two platforms and when he realized what it was saying he blocked all contact with me.

On my birthday last year I was laid off while out to lunch with my wife. Shortly after I sent a letter to Ed just wanting to know some stuff about his parents so I could start doing the genealogy for my “new” family and understand more about where I came from. He reached out to mom telling her that he “wanted no contact with me” because I would “ruin things with his wife and kids”. So I’m not your biological son, and you are 26 years in the grave, and I am his biological son but he can’t even be bothered to tell me about his other children so I might know my other half-siblings. I’ve managed to identify one I believe, and watch their career from a distance because it is the best that I can do. I could message and explain the situation but I’ll respect his wishes until I see an obituary for him.

What really gets me is he’s a Master Mason like us, it looks like he was raised much later though - in 2008 and he went York Rite like I did too. I don’t want to disrupt his life, I don’t want money or missed love or anything, I just want to know more about where I came from and for my other siblings to know I exist. I believe he arrived here by boat with his mother on January 8th, 1953 as that’s what the immigration record I found records. It’s funny we always called my one eyebrow the “Jack Mercer eyebrow” in hindsight, especially since I look quite a bit like Ed:

While you may not be my biological father, you were there for just shy of 13 years of my life. I mourned you for 25, assuming you were my father; I’ve mourned you for another year, wondering if you still accept me as yours. Hopefully, when we meet again, on the other side of the veil, in that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens you’ve processed everything and still accept me as some part of you. I still keep a photo of you in my office and dining room.

Until next year Mark,

-Your… stepson :/

25AD (After Dad), letter to my father 2023

Hey dad.

We’re now into our 3rd year of COVID, things are as back to normal as they are going to get in the world on that front. Vladimir Putin is still trying to wage a war in Ukraine and has made threats to use nuclear weapons. Some level of mass-hysteria has started with weather balloons flying over the United States and Canada with U.S. fighter jets shooting them down and blaming China. Interesting times…

That artificial intelligence company my friend Sam Altman co-founded released something really cool called ChatGPT. It is “AI” that does really cool things and is taking the world by storm this year, here’s ChatGPT telling you about itself:

“I am ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI. I can understand and generate natural language text, and I am designed to assist users in answering their questions or providing information on a wide range of topics. My training data includes a vast amount of text from the internet, including books, articles, and websites. Using this training data, I have learned to understand language patterns and generate text that is similar to what a human might write.”

— Quote Source

It’s really interesting. I’ll end this letter by having it write a ballad to you based on your obituary. I use it for a lot of stuff, including work, I can tell it in plain English what I want a spreadsheet to do on the computer, and 95% of the time, it will correctly spit out a formula that does exactly what I wanted it to do in literal seconds.

I rode 1,000,000 meters on my indoor bicycle, just hit the milestone a couple of weeks ago, and now my target is 5,000,000 meters.

I’m still forcing myself through school. This makes year… 20 of pursuing a 4-year college degree, few more years to go if I keep at it at my current pace.

Baptismal work was done for your mother in the temple last year by some kind stranger.

Not much else to report. It’s been a fairly tame year with no robot overlords, no aliens, no bad pandemic, just some saber rattling by other countries. Now, I promised you a ballad…

Your obituary:

“MARK A. MERCER, 45, Indianapolis, died March 11. He was a detective with the Indiana State Police for 19 years. He was a member of the State Police Alliance, Northern Valley Scottish Rite and New Haven Masonic Lodge, Fort Wayne. Memorial contributions may be made to Indiana Concerns of Police Survivors, in care of Indianapolis Police Department Credit Union, 1502 E. Washington St., Indianapolis, Ind.

46201. Services: 10 a.m. March 14 in Speedway United Methodist Church, of which he was a member. Calling: 1 to 8 p.m. March 13 in Flanner & Buchanan Speedway Mortuary. Burial: Floral Park West Cemetery. Survivors: wife Pamela M.

Hager Mercer; son Ryan Mercer; stepson William Lawrence; father and stepmother Carl “Jack” and Marilyn Mercer: brothers Doug, Curt Mercer.”

— Quote Source

The ChatGPT generated ballad:

“Mark A. Mercer, a detective bold,
Served with Indiana’s finest fold,
For nineteen years, he kept the peace,
In his hands, justice would release.

A member of the Masonic Lodge,
And the Scottish Rite with all its awe,
His heart was pure, his spirit bright,
And to those he loved, he held on tight.

His memory lives on in his kin,
His beloved wife and son within,
Stepson and family by his side,
Mark’s legacy will never subside.

We honor his bravery and his name,
A hero, true, who played life’s game,
Rest in peace, dear Mark A. Mercer,
Your service we will always treasure.”

— Quote Source

24AD (After Dad), letter to my father 2021

Hey dad.

We are now past 2 years of the global COVID pandemic spreading through the world. Worldwide over 445 million cases have been confirmed with over 6 million lives lost to it. I have now been working from home for 2 years later this month.

While on the subject of working from home, I recently quit my job of nearly 16 years. People were quitting left and right as the pandemic has made it an employee’s market so I decided to jump ship too. I had not had a cost of living increase in 14 years so it was time to move on, I have started at a trucking startup that actually cares about its employees and I just finished my second week there. I really like it, the people are all super nice and supportive of each other. It has been a major culture shock going to TrueNorth from FedEx.

The morel clone I made last year, you know the clone of the one you gave your father as a joke, is doing well outside under a tree. I stand in the kitchen and look out at it, it does make me miss you and grandpa Jack but I do not regret putting it in the yard. I have now been in my house for about 16 months now and it’s going pretty great. We had the basement flood last year when we got somewhere between 8 and 12 inches of rain in just a couple of hours but we only lost a single particleboard shelf and people from church rushed to help us get the water out and clean up. My wife and I were running buckets up and down the stairs for at least a half-hour but the water was still rising, finally, we managed to get a call out for help and within an hour I think we had 8 people here helping us about the time the sump pump finally started to catch up. Just having help show up made the clean-up go much quicker and raised our spirits considerably.

Mom’s health isn’t the greatest but she seems pretty happy and stays pretty active. Her roommate and her don’t seem to get along very well but she’s on a waiting list to get into a retirement community the Quakers operate in downtown Plainfield.

As the latest wave of the pandemic started to die down, things looked great. Then on February 24th Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. The world quickly responded with sanctions and as of today, over 1.5 million people have fled Ukraine. Many are staying to fight though, despite facing superior forces. Men and women, young and old, are taking up any arms they can get their hands on and fighting in the streets while a Russian military column stretching over 40 miles moves deeper and deeper into their country. People are dying in the streets, in their homes, in their apartments, as superior Russian forces launch mortars and missiles into the cities. It is surreal. Around the time COVID started, there were massive worldwide wildfires, then we dealt with COVID and domestic civil unrest, we moved into a more virulent strain of COVID and now find ourselves at the doorstep of nuclear war. Russia has explicitly threatened to use their nuclear weapons if anyone tries to mess with them taking Ukraine.

One begins to wonder if I’ll be around next year to write this letter, or if I’ll stand on the other side of the veil and get to tell you what happened to between this letter and the next in person. On that subject, proxy baptism was performed for your mother last year. I haven’t gotten around to yours, or grandpa Jack’s, but things are weird in the world.

I heard your voice last year for the first time in a very long time, an answering machine recording. You sounded decidedly more country than I remember. Funny how we forget things with time.

Hopefully I am still around to write one of these next year, if not I guess I will be catching you up in person!

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave bereft
I am not there. I have not left.

Past letters.

A morel is born

Many years ago, when my father was still alive, my grandfather had been having trouble finding morels. He paid his way through college delivering ice blocks and morels and had decades of experience finding them. Somewhere, presumably while on patrol, my father found a morel statue and stopped by to see my grandfather. He placed the statue on the left in my grandfather's yard and asked him how mushroom hunting was going. Reporting to my father that he'd had no luck my father asked him how he missed the one in his own yard, taking him outside to see the statue. A decade after my father died my grandfather died and at his funeral my great uncle retold this somewhat known story. My grandfather's second wife auctioned off the house and its contents, but before this could happen though my great uncle stole the statue out of the yard to give to me. Fast forward another 12 years and I buy my first house, find a nearly identical statue on eBay and purchased it back in November of last year. Today I was finally able to get around to painting it. This family relic will remain safe in my office while the new one will represent it in my yard, under an evergreen, just like the original did in my grandfather's yard for all those years.

My father died 23 years ago, his voice is now an NFT

Twelve days before my 13th birthday my father lost his battle with cancer, that was twenty-three years ago. This was hands down the most difficult event that I’ve ever experienced in my life. Losing my father at such a young age is something I didn’t handle well, and it had negative impacts on my life starting with me largely dismissing school and not applying myself to anything for roughly the next decade.

My father welcomes me into the world

Sadly, my father died before there was the ease of recording moments in high definition video via these nifty little things we call smartphones. A couple of dozen photos of my father exist and, until very recently, it was all I thought I had to remember him by. While I did find the audio of his funeral recently and digitize it to publish to YouTube, I didn’t have any audio or video of him.

Then I found a microcassette tape with my name written in my father’s handwriting on the label. I went to eBay and bought the cheapest microcassette record I could find. My father worked for the Indiana State Police and, at the time of his passing, was a detective so he frequently used microcassette tapes for notes and interviews, would this be a personal message to me that I’d somehow not discovered until now? Sadly, no. It was one of the tapes from our answering machine in 1998.

Did my father leave me a message?

Jackpot.

My father’s voice. MY FATHER’S VOICE! Dad, through almost 23 years of time you’ve reached out and spoken to me. I cried. At first, I listened in shock, rewind, play, rewind, play, rewind, play. Then I cried. I’d heard my father’s voice for the first time in decades. But it’s so brief, ever so brief, just him saying our phone number at the time and to leave a message. I listened to both sides of the tape and sadly, this was the only capture of his voice. The rest of the tape was filled with me rambling to the machine that so and so would be bringing me home after basketball practice, people calling to leave messages to mom that they were so sorry to hear of his passing, but alas only these few words of my father’s voice. Even now I have tears freely flowing as I write this.

Wow, dad, you sounded a lot more country than I remember. What have I forgotten about you?

My father has been dead for almost two thirds of my life now, aside from a few memories that grow fuzzier each year, I don’t have much to remember him by. I write a yearly letter to tell him of what has happened in my life, you can find the most recent one here, I find it a therapeutic process and it lets me feel for a brief few moments that I still have my father here and that he’s part of my life still. This letter gives me some way of keeping him alive, digitally, by treating him like he’s still there.

Enter NFTs. NFT stands for non-fungible token, they are these blockchain creations that allow you to carry out transactions involving the ownership of a specific digital thing. Recently NFTs have made headlines as people have begun selling digital art. Then I joked to someone about the only known recording of my father’s voice as an NFT to someone.

Well… why not? If I make my father an NFT, I could give him some extension to his digital mortality by getting another person involved in the stewardship of this digital artifact that captures a brief moment of his time on earth. Maybe he’ll go on to be sampled in a song or used by some electronic music artist to be the next “the system is down, the system is down, doo doo doo”, used in a film, catch a news cycle, or maybe someone will become his champion like me and work to keep some fragment of his existence preserved for as long as practically possible.

Mark Mercer, born on January 24th, 1953. Died March 11th, 1998. Rebirthed (sorta) as an NFT on March 17th, 2021.

Dad, you are now a unique digital asset. Your voice now exists as a non-fungible digital property. You could barely operate an electric typewriter and now you 'live' on the internet in the latest in blockchain developments.

The NFT listing can be found here on Rarible.

https://rarible.com/token/0x60f80121c31a0d46b5279700f9df786054aa5ee5:492427?tab=overview

23AD (After Dad), letter to my father 2021

In 8 days you'll have been dead 23 yeas.

It’s been an interesting year. A pandemic has become an ever-present part of our lives since last year… that virus really took hold. I noticed in my records yesterday that on that day last year 5 citizens of the United States had died to the virus, today the confirmed death toll for the United States stands at 531,456 people with the official worldwide reported total at 2,570,265, but likely higher. 29 million confirmed cases in the United States, almost 116 million confirmed cases worldwide. It’s… been an interesting year.

I got married. April 10th, in a church parking lot because of this COVID-19 virus causing everything to be closed with quarantines and people beginning to shelter in place. Married in a parking lot with mom, my wife Amanda’s 2 parents, Trent Cameron performing the ceremony, and a random fox that trotted by while we stood in visual range of rush hour traffic on 267. We had a more sacred religious ceremony in November as pandemic restrictions relaxed just the tiniest amount. My wife is a teacher, one of 12 children, and comes from Missouri. Her father is a retired builder and effectively a lifelong farmer, her mother is a retired teacher, one of her brothers is a medical doctor and another an eye doctor, the rest are all equally intelligent and driven. She’s got dozens of nieces and nephews too and I’ve met some of them.

It seems I was cursed to live in interesting times. 3 years after you died we saw terrorists slam planes into 2 skyscrapers and the Pentagon, we then entered a large-scale military conflict, then another large-scale military conflict, 20 years later and we’ve spent the past year with everyone wearing masks in public, restaurants largely closed to dine-in eating, limits on toilet paper and paper towels at the grocery, for a while last year it was even hard to get a lot of food at the grocery - especially staple foods like beans, rice, flour.

My wife and I drove out to Brazil last summer, I was going stir crazy being stuck in a small apartment during the lockdown really ramping up, I just got on 40 and headed west. When we started to get close to Brazil I looked up where your dad was buried and went and saw the grave. It was a nice and quiet little cemetery there in Brazil. Dick isn’t buried there, but Rhonda has a plot right next to your dad.

In November we moved into a house we bought in Stilesville, it’s about 20 minutes west of Plainfield off of 40, about 30 minutes east of Brazil. It’s a red brick ranch, with a basement, it’s probably about the size of the house you grew up in and roughly the same age. We do not get residential mail delivery, have to go pick stuff up at the post office, that kinda stinks. We’re also on a well which… yeah it’s pretty stinky water, but we are on town sewer. The house has a little over a half-acre of land with maybe a dozen mature trees and a little clear space in the backyard. I actually spent the past 2 days of my vacation tilling and planting, got 100 onions in and 34 potatoes in. I also got about 80 or 90 seeds started and need to start another 40ish tomorrow plus direct-sow some greens. I’m so sore. Hopefully, there is a decent yield but I’m not sure… our soil is pretty dense silty clay loam. I think it would do corn well, and I do plan to plant a little grinding corn as a test, but next year the plan is to build raised garden beds and fill them with soil much better for the types of things we want to grow, I would have this year but we had to put about 5,000 dollars into the well and water purification right after moving in.

I’m still inactive in the Lodge but I am an active dues payer. There’s a Lodge here in town a couple of blocks over, once the virus calms down and we start to see some sort of return to pre-pandemic life I’m going to go visit it. I’m hesitant to now as I’ve found these small towns out here have a lot of covid-deniers that won’t wear masks despite it being the law in some areas and are generally just flippant about even the simplest measures to protect others from them if they happen to be infected. They did a few EAs last week or the week before but it was a hard pass for me given the virus situation.

Oh, remember the mushroom you gave your dad? I still have it, it sits in my office. But one of the first things I bought when we bought the house was a new one that is virtually identical. I was actually going to start painting it today but wore myself out working on the garden. Sometime this spring I’m going to paint it to be somewhat close to the original and then place it outside in our yard, probably under some of the evergreens not unlike how the original was at your dad’s house. The original will remain in my office until I die. I still have your horse and dog statue from your office too, they’re in the basement and I see them every day when I go down to empty the dehumidifier. An old photo of you and your flag sit in my office too.

I’m 1 year, 7 months, 11 days sober on my current stretch as I write this. Hopefully, I can continue that indefinitely.

Mom is doing ok. She’s still got a lot of health issues but she’s recovering well from her most recent surgery a few weeks ago. She moved in with a friend earlier this year in Avon to be closer to her doctors, and stuff in general. It’s a 20ish minute drive just for us to get to a grocery store.

Bun is well too. These days he spends his time in a cabinet, just sitting there greeting me with a smile when I open the door to get my razor or any number of other things. I love that little dude, he’s always there for me.

I heard your voice for the first time in 2 decades last year, just the quickest of words on the answering machine tape. I wish there was more. You sounded far more country than I remembered. I also listened to your funeral for the first time since it happened this year, I even put the audio of it up on the internet with a slideshow of images of you https://youtu.be/0o-OeM8qRVc

You know, I’ve lived almost 64% of my life without you. That kinda sucks. I wonder what you’d be doing if you were still here. I wonder what you’re doing now. I wonder what you’d think of me as a wildly bearded, balding, GED toting, overweight, stuck in a dead-end job in an entry-level position 15 years after hiring in.

Anyway, I’d better wrap this up. I’ll talk to you next year.

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave bereft
I am not there. I have not left.

Past letters.

22AD (After Dad), letter to my father 2020

In 9 days you'll have been dead 22 years.

No developments in my professional life, no lotteries won, no exciting vacations or trips. I'm getting married race weekend (maybe, I'll get to that) so there's that. Can't say I ever imagined a world where that would happen but wow it is!

Aaron's mom died of cancer, rather quickly, last year. I didn't even know she was sick. Little Billy's mother died of cancer just after Thanksgiving, he got to spend her last moments with her like I did you and I hate that he had to go through that. A friend from high school, Marcus, apparently overdosed and died last year leaving behind a woman and several children both step and biological A few weeks later someone else I went to high school with, Jeff, also overdosed and died on heroin and I later found out the same guy sold to both of them and may have been present when at least one of them overdosed and did nothing to help.

Mom's health is up and down, mostly down. She's supposed to have more surgery on the 10th and be released on the 11th... I don't like that timing. At all. Not one bit. She’s been waiting to have that surgery for quite a while now though so I guess that’s just how it has to be.

A previously unseen virus has been making its way around the world. As I write this letter there have been 89,832 confirmed cases worldwide with the true number believed to be much higher. 3,061 confirmed deaths are attributed to the virus with the first 2 in the United States happening this past weekend. 10-11 days ago South Korea had 33 cases, as of right now they have 4,335 cases... that gives an idea as to how this thing is spreading. As a result of the virus the stock market has fallen sharply and likely entered a correction, cargo ships have been leaving China nearly empty for weeks now, shortages for things like toilet paper and hand sanitizer have in multiple countries and the runs on groceries and supplies started in the United States this weekend.

People have been advised, or in some cases forced, to self-quarantine for a minimum of two weeks. I can feed mom and I for a few months if need be but if she gets this virus it will most likely kill her. Given my past respiratory issues with bronchitis and pneumonia I'm not so certain that it wouldn't kill me either. We share desks at work so I've been liberally using hand sanitizer and using sanitary wipes every morning on my desk. As I write this though I hear someone coughing, is it the normal flu or is it Covid-19?

Oh! Roger Penskey bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway!!! If this year's race happens it should be very interesting. He's been doing a lot of work at the track as a fan trying to improve the experience for fans and teams both. Abby has a podcast... um a podcast is like a radio show but it is released on the internet and can be listened to on-demand, where her and her co-host talk about racing. They've become friends with Doug Boles, the President of IMS, and get a lot of cool access. It's neat that she has that opportunity and that Roger bought the track. I really hope the virus doesn't mess with this year's race but events are being cancelled all over the world, this weekend the Louvre museum in Paris closed due to the virus. The Pope may also have the virus, he's been sick and cancelling appearances for several days now after meeting with those that did have the virus. Who knows if the race will happen, nearly 3 months is a long time.

We've scheduled to get married the Saturday before the race, the virus could change that though. We may have to adapt on the fly and are trying to have a contingency plan for a worst case scenario. She's fun, she's a high school teacher currently living in Missouri and has a big family. As soon as her teaching year is up she'll be coming here, that's why the wedding is race weekend, it's the first weekend she'll be done with her teaching year.

This year will be interesting I imagine. Hopefully the virus burns out quickly and doesn't have much of an impact on the world but it definitely has the potential of doing damage similar to the Spanish Flu. The economic impacts alone are already pretty noteworthy.

Bun is well, he's definitely entering his dotage but I'll figure out a way to prolong his life.

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave bereft
I am not there. I have not left.

Past letters.

21AD (After Dad), letter to my father 2019

Hey dad, 1 week from today you’ve been dead 21 years. TWENTY ONE YEARS. I miss you.

You know, you’d think it would get easier to write these each year but it actually gets worse, not harder, just worse. I don’t remember what you sounded like at this point, what you smelled like, some days I couldn’t even describe what you looked like without looking at a photo. It’s not just you either… Joe, Nikki, Jack, Dick, 2 of my barbers, Mr. Pedigo, Herman and Mary, the list of the dead and slowly forgotten continues to pile up and I’m not even 34. You know, Mr. Pedigo sent me home with that camcorder when you were sick… told me to record you, told me to ask you questions, because he’d been there and was trying to help me save some portion of you… what did I do? Recorded my television with it… original episodes of Battlestar Galactica, ugh.

Oh yeah, mom lost Mary and then Herman some months later last year. In both cases her sisters didn’t tell her and she found out after the fact.

We moved to Plainfield like I said we were going to, it’s not Speedway but it’s not too bad.

I told you they remade Death Wish in last year’s email oddly enough I watched it again yesterday… that’s an interesting coincidence.

That man called Elon Musk is still a character, a couple of television shows in the past year or so have even had fictional characters that were blatantly supposed to be him. He’s a weird guy, he hasn’t done anything crazy like launch another car into space but he’s still pushing hard to make a spaceship that’ll take men to Mars. I think you were 16 when Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Armstrong hopped around the Moon, I’d love to see mankind set foot on Mars in my lifetime, our future is in the stars… ad astra and all that.

Last year someone was very nice to me and did something for me. A week or so before the race they lost someone too and I tried to share as much wisdom with them as I could to help equip them to deal with the loss and told them how I write these letters. I hope they’ve found some way to keep the memory of their loved one alive like I have with these letters. They are a really interesting person doing some neat things, and while they’re also an enigma, I just hope i was able to return even a fraction of what they’ve done for me with the advice I gave them. At some point they saw something in me and that’s so foreign and unusual or out of the norm, the past year their interest in my life was definitely a noteworthy thing.

I went the farthest from home ever last year too. At the end of June I was invited out to San Francisco, I had a layover for an hour or two in Texas on the way there. Within an hour of landing in San Francisco I saw a completely naked man walking down the sidewalk just out for a stroll. He walked by multiple uniformed police officer over the course of several blocks and they all just laughed. Pretty much everyone has cellular telephones now and they have cameras built in, the police just laughed at him and some took pictures as he walked by. There were road closures due to a parade and I couldn’t get to my hotel so had to walk several blocks and couldn’t find a way around the barricades so I tried to ask a group of police, while holding my suitcase, “move along, KEEP MOVING” shutting me down not wanting to listen to me… this happened a few times before I came upon 2 motorcycle cops “excuse me officers, I’m trying to get to my hotel, where does this barricade end” and they both gave me a good look up and down, including my suitcase, before one curtly replied “you want to go under the street” to which I replied with a quisitive ‘ok’ “No listen, you want to go under the street” and pointed down the road a bit to a sign. Turns out there are subway/train stops that release underground and empty to either side of the street.

Overall San Francisco was weird. They have some level of problem with IV drug users and discarded syringes are here and there on the sidewalks, I also saw human feces here and there on the sidewalk and some areas had a definite stale urine smell. It was a depressing experience, I’d never really seen homelessness before. You know what Indy was like as far as homeless, I don’t really think it’s changed much and the way it was out there was alarming and just sad. I knew it was a problem in major cities but reading it and seeing it first-hand are very different things. I had to literally step over people that were asleep on the sidewalk in broad daylight and from the windows at my 4-star hotel I watched a man sleep on the sidewalk until the morning traffic woke him. It was strange.

I was only there for about 2 days but I had fun. I didn’t get to see much but I did see the Golden Gate bridge, kinda, as I flew out. I upgraded my seat on the way back, I didn’t pay for the trip, so I could have a window seat and a little more leg room and seeing all of the desert on the way back was interesting and shocking. Wind power has also become quite a thing as of late and it was amazing seeing how many massive wind turbines there are dotting the country. In the nearly 21 years you’ve been dead we’ve done a lot to harm our planet but some are trying to retard the damage we’re doing and save us, some solar panels and those wind farms on the way home were somewhat refreshing after all the desert and homeless persons.

I didn’t pass the broker’s exam, I didn’t think I would though. I’m not suddenly successful or rich, I still have very few people in my life, I didn’t make it into the woods last year but I have the morel statue you gave Jack that one year in my bedroom, I see it every day and night as I get in and out of bed.. I’m looking at it right now actually.

I also went on a Nazi U-boat that we captured during WWII, U-505 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It was that one they had when I went up there in scouts and we camped at Indiana Dunes State Park and you didn’t go with us. They had it outside in a courtyard back then but some years back they moved it underground and built a big cavern of a room for it. It was neat walking through it, I barely fit through the engine room… I can only imagine what that was like with those engines hot and firing, diesel and oil fumes gathering. Walking along side it/underneath it was overwhelming, it was so big on the outside but very compact on the inside. You could even see bullet holes from when we captured it. It was amazing!

I doubt too much will happen exciting in the next year. I can’t get anyone to give me a better job, they all want degrees and I don’t have one. I can’t get anyone to take a chance on me because there are people that look infinitely better on paper. I can’t afford to do exciting things so I probably won’t have anything on that front but hey who knows, when I wrote last year’s letter I didn’t think I’d see a naked guy walking down the street or that I’d have visited California so hey who knows. Maybe I’ll surprise us both!

Talk to you in a year dad, Bun says hi!

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave bereft
I am not there. I have not left.

20 AD (After Dad), letter to my father 2018

(past year's letters can be found at https://www.ryanmercer.com/?category=dad )

Well, dad... in just 5 days you'll have been dead 20 years. TWENTY YEARS. You've nearly been gone 2/3 of my life. Let's see, where do I start this year...

I'm inactive as a Freemason. I didn't even bother demitting, the Lodge I transferred to was a mess and never even sent me a request for dues until I was several months past due sending me a handwritten, in red ink, note on the back of a scrap of paper claiming I was late on my dues and needed to pay them.

I don't know what's going on with Doug but Curt lives in Arizona I believe with his daughter now. I've still not produced an heir and, since the girl that ultimately shot and killed herself, that hasn't really been anyone. 

Adam West died last year. I remember the day I found out, my friend Jeremy broke the news to me. There's this thing called twitter on the internet. Adam had 'followed' me on this platform for years and years, he still does in death, he didn't follow too many people and we were friendly with one another over the years. I cried and cried and cried when I found out. I shut myself up in the bathroom and just lost it. I think I took it rough not because television's Batman had died but because when I'd come home from preschool and kindergarten you and I would watch him fighting crime on tv when we weren't watching Hogan's Heroes, The Beverly Hillbillies or Andy Griffith. I told Adam about you once, that you and I would sit there and watch him on the television. I miss you both. 

Mom and I are moving to Plainfield in a month. Into an apartment. I still have the mushroom, your droopy horseman, and that droopy dog. They'll be proudly displayed in my room when we move. 

In April I'm taking a test for the Customs Broker license. Depending on what source you look at, it usually has something like a 3-11% pass rate. It's an open book test, however, the material is 6,000-7.000 pages. It's multiple choice but yeah... I bought some training material for it but I really don't know how I'll do, once we move I'll have a little over 2 weeks until the test and I'm going to take a few of the past years' tests as the publish the questions and answers to see where I stand. I hope I pass it as it will be beneficial at my current employer and open up options at other companies as well (or I could even hang out my shingle and have a go at it solo but I wouldn't likely do that). 

The remade Death Wish, with Bruce Willis this time, and I saw it last week. It was alright but the two detectives in it were terribly unrealistic.

There's also a man called Elon Musk. He builds his own rockets and is designing one to take man to Mars but earlier this year he took his electric car, oh yeah he makes electric sports cars that are pretty amazing, he took his electric car and put it on his newest rocket and launched it into space. He put his sports car, in space. What a world you've missed.

 Oh! On the internet last week I saw a police patch that I bought. It was the same shape as the State Police patch, a similar font and a blue background but said Indiana State Police Free Mason' and had a square & compass on it. I had to add it to the collection, you know?

Well, dad. I miss you. Until next year.