Welcome to the Commune podcast. This is Jeff Krasno.

Many of you may receive my weekly Sunday commusing article where I address a breadth of issues from the spiritual to the sociopolitical.

And on occasion, I will also record an audio version of these articles and release it here as a bonus

episode. So today's recitation is an ode to Father's Day. But first, a brief note of awkward

self-promotion. I have recently released a compendium of all my 2020 commusing articles. The book is

titled Communion, 2020, and the Middle Path, Back to Reason, Morality,

and each other. You can purchase one if you are so inclined at onecommon.com slash communion.

And if you weren't totally sick of me, you can follow my regular rants on Instagram at Jeff Krasno.

So without further impediment, here's this week's commusing titled

Being There.

Being there.

They barely notice me, wretching and dripping with sweat, tangled in the sheets of my waiting pool of a bed.

They traips through my room to draw a bath or steal my phone charger.

I am desperate for some quiet, yet they nonchalantly stroll by the laundry room, never once considering disarming the incessant end-of-cycle dryer buzzer. I'd saw off my pinky toe to sleep this horror off,

but they stomp like elephants through the house and scream with abandon about TikTok videos.

To my horrible, adorable children, good old dad is just there, like a treasured family heirloom, a seldom used silver platter balanced precariously

on the shelf. I have just perspired, shivered, and moaned through an epic five-day stomach influenza,

incessant surging nausea coupled with a racking body ache that one might suffer at the hands of a

world-class pugilist. All output and no input. Neither food nor drink found even short-term shelter in me. But more,

my condition was so pitiful that I couldn't read, look at my phone, or even listen to a British

man read the Dow at half speed. Somewhere around hour 60, my cognitive function began to melt into a soup of delirium.

I'd recently delved into numerous fields of inquiry, including an inquest into epigenetics,

...