I Have Fewer and Fewer F**ks To Give
A new truck. A new tattoo. A new trip to Europe. Time to get busy...
My mom died just over three months ago. I’ve written a bit about that a few times in this…What do we call it on Substack? This “space”? This “page”? This “Substack”?
Anyway…
I’ve been back to my mom’s house in Tacoma, Washington, three or four times since she died on January 30, and things are still pretty raw. Each time, the place diminishes a little more. This is mostly because of my mom not being there. I still expect her to get up in the morning, toddle out to the living room and ask me if the heater has broken because it is “so cold”. My mom, like a lot of moms, was always cold, and could always find a reason to crank the heat up, even if it was 75 degrees outside.
The other main reason the place is getting smaller is because it literally is shrinking. At least in terms of what’s inside the house.
Like many children do after their parents die, my brother and I have been going through our mom’s stuff and figuring out what to keep, what to donate and what to throw out. The walls are bare as we have taken down all the photos mom had collected over the years. The piano that always seemed to be out of tune, and which neither my brother nor I ever learned to play, has been donated to a local charity. We took out the guest room bed weeks ago, and it has been leaning up against the garage as we try to find the time to haul it to the city dump.
Needless to say, watching mom’s house shrink has churned up a lot of emotions, and I think that’s because there is a finality to all of this that is inevitable and unavoidable. It’s scary, but it’s also liberating, in a way.
Because I have found that as more time that passes since mom’s death, I have almost zero fucks to give.
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That’s quite the expression: I have zero fucks to give. It sounds crass, and the speaker can come across as some kind of narcississtic jerk. When you say something like that, others can think you just don’t care about anyone else’s feelings or sentiments about anything. But, that is wrong.
To me, “Zero fucks to give” means that you have little interest in how your decisions directly impact yourself. It means you are going to take some chances, and do some of those things that you have put off for any number of reasons. You are aware that there might not be a tomorrow, so it’s time to do something today.
Now, I need to say this: I do not have “zero” or “no” fucks left to give. I have a wife and two teenage daughters. I have responsibilities. I can’t be a total jerk and, say, start spending all my nights at the local Irish bar, living on Jameson’s and then getting behind the wheel of my new truck to pick up my kids from softball and soccer practice. No one needs Daddy showing up smelling like a distillery in a public setting and proclaming that he could drive home blindfolded just fine.
But…I can buy that new Toyota Tundra truck. My prior truck, a 2007 Dodge Ram 1500, served us well for nearly two decades. We drove that thing up and down and all over the West Coast and put almost 210,000 miles on its engine. Yet, all good things must come to an end. Especially when that Good Thing’s catalytic converter is on the brink of conking out for good and it sounds like an axle is going to break off when you drive over even the slightest bump in the road. It was time for something new.
And, I have to admit, from a purely materialistic standpoint, it is pretty cool to drive a vehicle that feels like piloting the Millennium Falcon.
Another example of my “Fewer Fucks to Give” mentailty can be found in the upcoming trip my family and I are about to take to Europe. For years, we have talked about going across the pond, and for years, the price has been prohibitive. Also, my wife and I had always feared what kind of international drama our daughters could get into in a foreign land. Our girls are now 16 and 14, and like many teenagers, they pretty much disdain everything we say or do. It’s bad enough wasting money on an order of Wingstop wings that they barely touch; the thought of burning several hundred bucks because our girls made us miss a tour of Vatican City was too awful to contemplate.
But, again…My mom’s death got me thinking that if we are ever going to take in some Old World (if not touristy) culture from the lands where we won two World Wars, now is the time. Germany, Italy, Switzerland and France are on the intinerary for three weeks this summer. Will it be expensive? Yes. Will it be hot? At times, I am sure. Will we lose our patiene with each other? Undoubtedly. I don’t care. You can say something like, “Europe will always be there”, and that is true. In fact, my wife and I have been saying that for 18 years, or since we spent a week in Paris before we had kids. If we wait another 18 years, I might be in a wheelchair, or, at the very least, needing a hip replacement and such a trip might be impossible. Best to go now while we are still somewhat upright and can embarrass our kids in multi-national public arenas.
The third piece of recent evidence of my attitude is now on my right arm.
About eight years ago, we researched the roots of my family name and found that it likely comes from Olde England. I always felt an affinity for our former colonial overlords, and every Ancestry DNA test and update has shown me to be something like 87% British. We got a copy of the family crest, put it up on the wall and barely a day has gone by without me saying that I was going to get that thing tattooed on my arm.
And I kept putting it off every day. For eight years. Until a recent trip to my mom’s house in Tacoma, Washington, where I did a thorough researching of area tattoo parlors (I looked up Yelp reviews), and found a place that looked as clean, bright and sanitary as operating room theater. It even had a juice bar in the lobby.
Three hours after going in, my upper right outer arm was emblazoned with swirls, ribbons, a cross, a minitature griffon and a badass-looking head of knight in full medieval armor. Should a grownup man of my age be getting a new tattoo when there are certainly more responsible ways to spend $580 (plus tip)? Well, I think it’s better than wasting it at a blackjack table, or blowing it at Katy Perry’s insane residency in Las Vegas.
As the late Neil Peart said, “We’re only immortal for a limited time”. Will I ever have zero fucks to give? Probably not. But, I think the fewer I have, the happier I am going to be with whatever time I have left to do the things I’m not going to put off anymore.