Dad O' The Week: Genuine

Must be the season: I'm sick (head cold), and the end of the year is nigh, a scant ten weeks until 2007. In daddy terms, this means that moving forward every single weekend is booked - parties, visits from relatives and friends, trips to visit parents, nonstop action. Hence the lack of material. New dads out there, be warned: things don't let up for a while. I'm told that life's frenetic pace downshifts to 4th somewhere around the kid's 18th birthday. That'll be nice.

Not that I'm complaining (well, as I just realized that I'll be 55 when the kid turns 18, I may have a small complaint, but I'll save that for a future post. Unless someone can offer me assurance that at that age I'll be driving a flying car and getting a foot massage from my robot maid while watching my son play quarterback for USC on my giant hologram projection device). Most of us generally lead sitcom-flavored lives; every once in a while, we get a Very Special Episode, but for the most part things go...well, if not swimmingly, at least dog-paddlingly. A few of you may know Jim, from The Blogfathers and The Best of Blogs Awards and his own site, Genuine. He's one of the more gracious and gregarious bloggers out there, and I was shocked and deeply saddened to read his account of the turn his life has taken.

One of the unexpected pleasures of being a dadblogger is the camaraderie I've found among my peers. While I may not agree with all of them, and have gotten into some heated debates with some, I get the sense that there's a bond between dads that transcends our differences. So when one of our own takes a tumble, I'd like to think that the rest of us are out there to offer a hand, even if it's a virtuablogospherical one. Please drop by Jim's site and wish him well.