"When one has not had a good father, one must create one."
-Nietzsche
When Lil Wayne's father left him at an early age, instead of hating the father that abandoned him, he created a new one. He adopted Birdman (right of Lil Wayne) as his father and mentor.
I can think several fathers I've created/adopted throughout the years, one that comes to mind is Mr. Gajero, who taught me that the most important thing in sports or in this case 6 period P.E. class, is hustle. Or at least hustle is the most important thing when you are a scrawny yet paradoxically overweight Chinese kid who pleads with their P.E. teacher to allow him to race in the 1 mile qualifying round that would enable him to join the track team, even though he has no real chance of completing the race in the top three spots, and that he will be second to last, only beating a girl.
Another father that I adopted was, Friedrich Nietzsche. He never remembered my birthday, didn't pat me on the back to build my confidence when I completed minor achievements like most fathers, but the one thing he did for me was that he always kept it real. He never sugar coated things when I searched for life's meaning when I was searching for a religion with the best afterlife with the most amount of loopholes for getting in said after life. He told me bluntly, "God is dead," and when I was confused about my place in the world, he said, "The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." So, that's what I was doing my freshman year, when I squatted on top of the toilet, so no one could see my feet, not to go to the bathroom, but to wait for lunch to end in the bathroom stall. I was being an individual. He cleared the muddy waters for me.
My most recent father Barack Obama, gave me the most important advice of my life. He told me, "You are probably not that good a rapper. Maybe you are the next Lil Wayne, but probably not, in which case you need to stay in school," when he addressed African American youth in Powder Springs, Georgia.
I don't know what I would have done without my created fathers. Would I have become a stripper or porn star, like so many fatherless men and women, desperately seeking to fill their void with a man? But, what if I have a good father you say? I say what is a father and how many platinum records does your father have? If a father is a person you take advice from and have a CD of his advice in the form of gangsta rap, and have a poster of him on your wall, then one of my fathers is Fifty Cent. So, let us drop the daddy issues, and drop the fathers who don't have their own Wikipedia pages or Youtube videos in favor for ones that do. This fathers day, give that Walmart tie to John Stewart, Lebron James or Brad Pitt.
