Home is Where the Carlin Is, Comedy
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/21
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That makes me think of Terry. If I can be indulged, it was one paragraph (and a sentence):
A few days later Terry showed up at our house. I’m not sure why he came – to apologize, to charm me again, to tell me I was a whore? My dad saw him outside the gate at the end of our long driveway. He went into his office and grabbed his baseball bat. As my dad marched down the driveway toward Terry, he said, “You come near my daughter again, I’ll bash your fucking skull in.”
It was the proudest day of my life – my father had finally fathered me.
Kelly Marie Carlin-McCall: Yup, says it all. [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Was that your first experience of feeling truly fathered, or were there other minor events that you did actually feel fathered?
Carlin-McCall: Obviously, my dad would get things for me, or protect me, or stand up for me with my mother at times. He was always teaching me things about the world – politics and the cultural stuff, the ethical/moral compass things. But as far as being a dad who is like “Who are you going out with? Where are you going? Are you going to be safe?”
He would check in with me about stuff like that, but there was never any sense of fear that they would take anything away, like driving privileges, or search my room for drugs. There wasn’t that type of fathering going on, which is what I mean in that comment. The protective father who wants to create boundaries, teach me boundaries, and show me what is safe and what is not safe. That hadn’t shown up in my life up to the point. It had become a type of crisis point.
Jacobsen: There was not only drug abuse and misuse, depending on the term of preference, within the household. In a way, there was an involving you in it. From a young age, you were able to roll and clean cannabis/marijuana.
Carlin-McCall: I couldn’t really roll joints very well, but I definitely cleaned the weed. By watching people, I learned how to roll a joint. When it came to adolescence and knowing how to roll a joint, I was way, way, way ahead of my peers! [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing]
Carlin-McCall: Because I had been studying it for quite a long time.
Jacobsen: [Laughing]
Carlin-McCall: [Laughing]
Jacobsen: You started smoking marijuana/cannabis at age 14.
Carlin-McCall: That’s when I started self-medicating. I started smoking cigarettes, then started stealing roaches from my dad’s stash. That’s when I started altering my consciousness in order to feel something I didn’t want to feel anymore.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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