Dads. We all have one or are one. You've at least seen one. They're everywhere. But what is their true purpose? Do you know? Do they? This story follows one Eduardo Aquifer, a Dad finding out his place in the Universe, and who might explain his parenting style the way Kurt Vonnegut did when he explained to his own children that he had only basically shown up 15 minutes before them. Read it and learn what he learned too, and the next time you see a Dad in the wild you will know so much more.
Dads. We all have one or are one. You've at least seen one. They're everywhere. But what is their true purpose? Do you know? Do they? This story follows one Eduardo Aquifer, a Dad finding out his place in the Universe, and who might explain his parenting style the way Kurt Vonnegut did when he explained to his own children that he had only basically shown up 15 minutes before them. Read it and learn what he learned too, and the next time you see a Dad in the wild you will know so much more.
Eduardo Aquifer XXVII, the last in an ancient and miserable family line of unpublished novelists, paused teaching his creative writing course to gather a well-worn blanket like a cape around his shoulders. In the backyard, his students – a dejected group of fallen pecans – stared back at him listlessly. What they all wanted to know this morning was if their writing was any good. Were they going to be published, loved, revered? Full of questions, these pecans, muttering nervously that it was rumored books were made from the very trees of their motherships.
But even with their nutty guilt they wanted their money's worth. Their instructor had fielded their questions and worries every morning this semester when they had dropped into his class early from lack of rain. The pecans, restless and riddled with self-doubt, yearned for formulas, for guaranteed success. Today in particular they were more irritated and impatient than ever that the literary forest was leaving them in limbo and agony. Their perpetually defeated professor struggled on against their doubting his credentials while he tried to answer difficult questions like, What's the plot? What's the hook? Can I write about a squirrel who's secretly a time traveler and also a gourmet chef, but then discovers he's part of an ancient prophecy?
He had encouraged them over the semester in the backyard to write from the heart, to tell the truth. But his tiny students didn’t care about truth, they wanted success and a cheat sheet, and were now begging more questions. What genre? First or third person? What should they write about? Was there a market for Squirrel Vampire Lit?
Eduardo looked out at his small class of small students and spoke to their big dreams. “All good art starts very small, like you. All good things in the world really. A great band’s first show probably only had a few friends in the audience. Any great writer you can think of that survived history sold shockingly few copies of their first printing. Mozart just played for his Mom at first, and well, at the Last Supper there were only twelve people there, and on and on. All seeds, all, er, nuts, become trees!”
He paused for dramatic effect, then leaned in conspiratorially. "The key is to capture the essence of being a nut – the constant fear of being stepped on, the existential dread of becoming squirrel food, the chronic inability to find a decent limb, or the unsettling feeling that you're being watched...”
So having now unnerved them he digressed into his own problems: Eduardo went on further to talk about his own version of squirrels, his own antagonist and arch enemy, as if trying to program a small army to do his bidding. Suffering under the Dad-weight of his bills, his modern frustrations, and even his collective era at large, and mixed with his ancient bloodlines’ continual non-stop rejection letter like a scroll across their family crest, he then put into words, or one word really, what the class wanted, when he finally told them exactly what to write about. Breaking his own rule he even told them what everyone should write about, telling them the name of this one thing, the only thing worth writing about, both this morning and at this very time in history, and that it should also be written about non-stop until the battle against it was completely won for the first time in history. The pecans licked their pencils and waited. Who wouldn’t with that lead-up? Again, it was one word. Ready?
The word was Grunch.
The smallest of the pecans trembled.
“That’s right, I have uttered the name of the enemy of our story, of our very life and times,” Eduardo said, striding the porch’s planks in his robe. “But what can we do against them? In our story, the Grunch of Giants are coming for the trees, the air and the water. They are coming for our minds, stomachs and wallets. They are coming for our children, they are coming for everything we have, and there is nothing left but art to defeat them.”
It was almost time for work, and Eduardo looked to the house where Bun and the kids were waking up, and soon the windows would have the giant visitors from Grunch peering in right on time, with its tax and news men pressurizing the house like a weather system, its entertainers and addictors and propagandists driving gray matter like storm clouds towards their purposes, while their digital device moles in the home would be revved up inviting the enemy inside, all coming for his family. The Grunch of Giants would start his car and drive him to where he toiled at Doomed Computers. They would drop his kids off at Murder Prep and Our Lady of Incarceration on the way. They would disturb Bun with their madness, and make all the townsfolk turn against each other, and labor for them while they did it.
“Unless…” Eduardo thought, starting to peck at the keys of his typewriter, the wind beginning to pick up and carrying his students off in a skittering cavalry, he imagined, shouting out soldier’s wills to one another in the old way as they rode off into battle, that if something happened to one, the other could have his watch, his wife, his strange mother’s secret recipe for pecan(less) pie.
“Unless…” Eduardo repeated to himself as their war pledges grew faint and his battle plans became louder and in ink. The sun was fully up now, in the old way, in the Aztec way. He put a title on the first chapter. It read, “Let’s do battle.”
Good dads are heroes. They balance the fast-changing, capricious world outside home and home. They provide homes insulated from external pressure. Dads discipline us and love us. They give the family direction, plan for the future, and provide financial support. Dads are philosophical and tough, yet compassionate. While Mom is simply wonderful to spend the day with, by nightfall, Dad’s absence is deeply felt—the family circle just isn’t complete without him! Even Mom feels relieved and reassured when he’s back!!
There are a lot more nice things to say about good dads. Dadness by Jeff Hunt follows a future-age dad named Eduardo, who embodies all of the above. He’s trying to find his feet in a world run by GOG—an acronym for "Grunch of Giants," the name of a conglomerate of supranational corporate bodies worldwide, first introduced in R. Buckminster Fuller's seminal work of the same name. Fuller envisioned an age when GOG would replace sovereign governments and rule the world.
Like “Big Brother is Watching You” in Orwell’s 1984, in this book, the almighty GOG shadows you everywhere, so you suffer from a “GOG is watching you” syndrome all the time. The world has turned interplanetary, and Earth is just another planet in a network of interconnected celestial bodies of the Milky Way. Commercial space travel has commenced, and humans and aliens cohabit in several locations in the universe. GOG knows everything about you, and they want everything you have: your “… minds, stomachs, and wallets.”
If being a good dad in a world as pernicious as ours is tough, imagine being successful in a GOG-governed, interplanetary universe—a herculean achievement, I’d say!
The book is an enjoyable read because it’s drenched in wit and humor. The cover looks nice. It’s thought-provoking and suggestive of a hi-tech, future-age dad, but in my opinion, it could do better with suitable enhancements. It isn’t free of language errors, but the sporadic ones you encounter are minor. As they don’t detract from the pleasure of reading, we can ignore them. Another shortcoming is it doesn’t have a Table of Contents. However, given the nature of the book, we may excuse that. Finally, weighing the positive and negative points together, I award it a rating of 3 stars.
You may find this book cryptic without the right background. To fully appreciate it, you’ll need to be acquainted with the concept of GOG as introduced by R. Buckminster Fuller in Grunch of Giants. GOG is real. They exist in our times, though not openly. It’s they—not governments—who actually run the world.
And the recommended audience? Families, planners, futurists, whistle-blowers, vigilantes, politicians, and others with some background in politics, corporatocracy, high-tech, and computer science.