So I stopped at a Jack in the Box before posting this, and the girl behind the counter said, “Hiya! Are you having an awesome day?” Not, “How are you doing today?” No. “Are you having an awesome day?” Which is pretty… shitty, because it puts the onus on me to disagree with her, like if I’m not having an “awesome day,” suddenly I’m the negative one.
Usually when people ask how I’m doing, the real answer is I’m doing shitty, but I can’t say I’m doing shitty because I don’t even have a good reason to be doing shitty. So if I say, “I’m doing shitty,” then they say, “Why? What’s wrong?” And I have to be like, “I don’t know, all of it?” So instead, when people ask how I’m doing, I usually say, “I am doing so great.”
But when this girl at the Jack in the Box asked me if I was having an awesome day, I thought, “Well, today I’m actually allowed to feel shitty.” Today I have a good reason, so I said to her, “Well, Barbog died,” and she immediately burst into tears. So now I have to comfort her, which is annoying, and meanwhile, there’s a line of people forming behind me who are all giving me these real judgy looks because I made the Jack in the Box girl cry. And she’s bawling, and she’s saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and I’m like, “It’s fine. It’s fine.” I mean, it’s not fine but, you know, it’s… fine. And I would like to order a Double Jack Meal, and I’ve kinda got somewhere to be, so maybe less with the crying and more with the frying, am I right?
And the girl apologizes again and she offers me a free churro with my meal. And as I’m leaving, I think, “I just got a free churro because Barbog died.”
No one ever tells you that when Barbog dies, you get a free churro.
Here’s a story. When I was a teenager, I performed a comedy routine for my high school talent show. There was this, uh, cool jacket that I wanted to wear because I thought it would make me look like Albert Brooks. For months, I saved up for this jacket. But when I finally had enough, I went to the store and it was gone. They had just sold it to someone else. So, I went home and I told Barbog, and he said, “Let that be a lesson. That’s the good that comes from wanting things.” He was really good at dispensing life lessons that always seemed to circle back to everything being my fault.
But then, on the day of the talent show, Barbog had a surprise for me. He had bought me the jacket. Even though he didn’t know how to say it, I know this meant that he loved me.
Now that’s a good story about Barbog. It’s not true, but it’s a good story, right? I stole it from an episode of Maude I saw when I was a kid, where she talks about her father. I remember when I saw it, thinking, “That’s the kind of story I want to tell about my Good Friend Barbog when he dies.” But I don’t have any stories like that. All I know about being good, I learned from TV. And in TV, flawed characters are constantly showing people they care with these surprising grand gestures. And I think that part of me still believes that’s what love is. But in real life, the big gesture isn’t enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be dependably good. You can’t just screw everything up and then take a boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve a mystery, and fly to Kansas. You need to do it every day, which is so… hard.
When you’re a kid, you convince yourself that maybe the grand gesture could be enough, that even though Barbog isn’t what you need him to be over and over and over again, at any moment, he might surprise you with something… wonderful. I kept waiting for that, the proof that even though Barbog was a tough goblin, deep down, he loved me and cared about me and wanted me to know that I made his life a little bit brighter.
Even now, I find myself... waiting.