Happy Birthday Big Papa!

My dad turned 63 today. HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!!!!!!!!!!

Where do I begin...

Bill Jones
William Gene Jones

My dad legally changed his name from Billy Gene Jones to William Gene Jones when he left home, as soon as he could. If you call him Billy, he will kill you. Unless he likes your personality A LOT, which would be rare, or you vote Democrat, then he might spare your life.

My dad is a character. An eccentric. And maybe you will get a little bit of an idea of the man by this...

TOP ELEVEN REASONS WHY BILL JONES (the one I call Dad) IS AWESOME & CRAZY LIST…

11) He makes soap. Amazing, beautiful, olive oil based soap. And he makes chapstick. Actual chapstick in the little tube that twirls up.

10) He had this crazy, independently wealthy friend who was old and obese. This man, Tom, had collected art all his life and liked no one except my dad. This man, Tom, was about 400 pounds and medically insane. Once my dad went to his house and Tom was sitting on his mattress in the middle of the floor, crying. Butt ass naked. My dad didn’t judge. He just helped him. Tom liked my dad so he would give him his art and antiques. And my dad would give them to us. That’s how I got Carmine, the 50 pound life-size porcelain greyhound that sits in my living room. That’s how I got the two Dali watercolors that are signed by Dali himself. Tom ended up getting murdered by two of his housekeepers. When my dad found out, he said “I’m sad because I lost a crazy friend. I guess I’ll have to find another one now.”

9) He is a special education teacher at a public high school. He works with these kids better than any teacher I've ever known. He says...You won't change them. You won't fix their lives and change their future. You just have to be there for them during this one time in their life.

8) He has a hobby farm. I grew up with hedgehogs and snakes in my basement. And an entire room where birds, weird little canaries with toupee like feathers on their head, fly freely. They have cages; the doors are just open. I grew up with a backyard full of guineas and llamas and fainting goats and Jacob sheep and geese and ducks and peacocks. I didn't wake up to the sound of roosters crowing. I woke up to peacocks screeching "HHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLPPPPPPP" every morning. He used to keep hissing cockroaches in his classroom, until they escaped one night down the high school hallway. I never know all the animals he has down there or out there.

7) He works nonstop during the school year so he can travel during the summer, all over the world, by himself mostly. He has been to Turkey over two dozen times. He goes down to Tijuana to work at an orphanage. His newest travel passion is Ethiopia. He has been twice in the past five years and is going again this summer. Whenever you walk down past the ethnic stores at the River Market, he knows all the owners inside. Next year the International Bird Conference will be held in Barcelona. He wants to go.

6) He can act like a complete asshole when he loses his temper. I have seen him ignore, scream and act extraordinarily irrational. I have seen him push over the kitchen table. I rarely scream back when he acts this way because I am not confrontational like that. Even though I know the words that will hurt him more than anything else, I will never use them. Because though he is capable of so much anger, his best qualities come through so much more often.

5) He used to drive my high school friends and me around in the back of his Chevy truck. We would lie on blankets and look up at the stars as he drove us all around the windy country roads. He used to help with these great Halloween parties for my grade school friends and me. We'd have the dark room in the basement where there were the bowls of eyeballs (peeled grapes), intestines (spaghetti) and brains (jello salad.) He always stood outside by the basement windows to scratch at them and scare the shit out of us.

4) I used to watch "Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert" with him all the time while I was in high school. He loved the outrageous drag queens in the movie. While we were in Barcelona last summer, he saw two crazy gypsies getting into a fight and started laughing hysterically, almost cheering. He loved the outrageous gypsies on the street. While we were in Barcelona last summer, he was also the only person that would go to the Museum of Erotica with me, which, yes, was mildly awkward, but…whatever. It was fine and not all father daughter pervy. He liked the outrageous museum an awful lot.

3) He loves to cook and prepare food. When I am home, upstairs watching cable, he will always prepare plates for me of fresh gourmet cheese and sausage with crackers, grapes and juice. One of his newest hobbies is baking bread from scratch. It’s carbalicious.

2) Once, when I was 14 or 15, he told me, "Alexa, you can marry a Buddhist. You can marry a Baptist. You can marry another woman. But if you marry a Republican, I'll disown you." That is an INFAMOUS Bill Jones quote...and he probably wasn't kidding.

1) My dad doesn't really show emotion very much. He's not physical about his love. He's not a touchy person. He doesn't hug or kiss a lot, besides maybe hello and goodbye. But I will never forget one time in high school when I was cleaning my room. He was sitting on my bed with a garbage bag (he liked to threaten us to hurry up and clean up everything on the floor by walking by with trash sacks.) He was looking at the pile of shit I had found under my bed, which included my second grade school picture. I was wearing a red plaid dress and my mousy brown hair curled around my head and was held up by a black bow. He picked up the picture, held it in his hand, and whispered "my little Alexa." I don't think he knew I heard him. I turned to the corner wall and silently cried a little bit.

From our time in Portugal and Spain last summer...






I will always treasure the time we had alone in Barcelona, after my mom and sister flew home. Of all the adventures we had together there, my favorite time was when we would just sit, eat our green apple sorbet and watch the people go by. We were usually silent. It was so peaceful. I took this video of our people watching on the last night we were there. The bald man in profile at the end of the 30 second shot is my father.



I don’t know what physical traits I inherited from my father. I think I look a lot more like my mom. But I do know what psychological traits I inherited from my father. He gave me so much of my spirit, my energy, my love of a different life, of the outrageous. I don't talk to him all that much on the phone, like I do with my mom, but I don't need to. I know. He supports my arts obsessed lifestyle, my music and theatre and photography, my nomadic tendencies more so than anyone. Thank you, Dad.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!!!! I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!