Skip to primary content

Post-it | Aug 20 2004

The ghost of my father keeps leaving me post-its. He sticks them on my bathroom mirror. I know they’re his because of the handwriting. I wouldn’t have known I knew my father’s handwriting, but I recognized it immediately.

Each post-it includes a quote from Werner Erhard, the founder of est. I don’t know if my father knows I know where he’s getting these quotes. Are ghosts capable of knowing such things? Can they read our minds?

I found the first post-it last week. My father had placed it in the middle of the mirror, where I couldn’t miss seeing it. It read: You don’t have to go looking for love when it’s where you come from. Let me tell you, it was weird seeing these words in my father’s handwriting—this plus the shock of finding the post-it. I checked to see if the door to my apartment was locked, which it was. I’m not sure why I did this because, like I say, I knew it was my father’s handwriting—he has a characteristic way of writing his y’s. I mean the lowercase ones. I think he writes them backwards, beginning with the long descending stroke, then crossing this from the left with the shorter stroke which he continues to the next letter, if there is one.

The quote sounded familiar so I looked it up online. Werner Erhard. Then I checked to see if the post-it matched the post-its I keep in my desk drawer. It did, although that didn’t really mean anything since I use standard, yellow, two-by-two-inch post-its. There must be billions of these in circulation. Also, what difference did it make if my father used my post-it or one of his own? It adds up to the same thing.

The next day he left me a second post-it. This one wasn’t on the mirror itself but along the left-edge of the cabinet. It read: Create your future from your future not your past.

I recognized this as Werner Erhard without having to look it up. My father used to say it to me all the time. I always took it to mean I should forget all the shit he pulled when I was a kid.

Anyway, I got to thinking about that shit again, which I don’t like to do, and this made me so upset that I went to my desk and wrote a post-it of my own: Create your lies from your lies not from mine. I wasn’t really sure what this meant, but I liked it anyway so I stuck it on the cabinet in the spot where I’d found his.

The next day he left me another post-it, this time on the faucet. It read: Happiness is a function of accepting what is.

My post-it was still on the cabinet. Had he read it? Knowing him, he probably saw it there and ignored it. On the other hand, I’m not even sure ghosts can read. I tried to look this up online. Naturally I realize that people write all kinds of crap online, but I was curious if anyone had written an account that mentioned ghosts reading. No one had, that I could find. Not that this means anything one way or another.

I guess the real question is whether ghosts can change. I know they change in The Sixth Sense. That’s the whole idea of the film—all the ghosts, including Bruce Willis, are in the process of accepting their deaths. They don’t know this, so it’s scary.

Is my father in the process of accepting his death? It doesn’t seem so. Instead it seems like he’s lecturing me, just like old times. Every day there’s a new post-it. This morning’s read: In life, understanding is the booby prize. That’s Werner Erhard as well. They’re all Werner Erhard.

I stopped writing post-its after the one about lies, since for one thing, I don’t even know if my father can read them, and then for another, I doubt he would even if he could. And finally of course, what’s the point? That’s the clincher. There’s no point.

A few days ago, though, he left a post-it that really pissed me off, coming from him. It said: Your life works to the degree you keep your agreements. The second I read this, I rushed to my desk and scribbled two words on a fresh post-it, in big block letters.

DROP DEAD, it said.

Then I remembered. He is.