today’s ride 🚋

i've been thinking about my dad lately, mainly because i was home over the weekend to visit them with mar and saw more gray hairs on his head than last time.

it made me think about age and what he’d been through and how we were sitting here in this beautiful home i grew up in and how i am 32 and when he was my age he already two kids and how when i was 18 i was bummed about not getting into my dream school and how when he was 18 he moved to chicago from the other side of the damn world.

and in my head as i zoned out i literally thought to myself bro what the fuck that is crazy. so naturally, i had to write about it. (mind you, i’ve heard this story a million times but now it’s your turn).

my dad grew up in barisal, bangladesh, in a house with a tin roof and six siblings under it. i’m talking an actual roof made of actual tin and the entire home was smaller than my current living room. my paternal grandfather and grandmother were not very well off financially, but my grandfather so deeply valued education and knowledge. and he saw in his eldest son, the same hunger. some months my grandpa didn't have enough for rice AND paper. so he bought the paper. so my dad could keep studying. and the younger kids chewed on the blank pages just to have something in their mouths.

i am not playing about this detail. i’ve been poor in my life too (shoutout grad school) but the worst it’s ever been is just cans of black beans on loop. go find a piece of paper right now and put it in your mouth. i’m serious.

i’m waiting.

tastes like shit, right? or at the least, like nothing.

i think about this detail a lot. a patriach, choosing between food and a future, and picking the future, on purpose, more than once, and putting all the chips on his son.

my dad won that bet, for the record. graduated near the top of his class in dhaka, got into the illinois institute of technology (IIT, southside, sox fans, let's GO!), which means somewhere in the middle of studying off pages his siblings were eating, a teenager in barisal was destined to end up in a tiny apartment on the southside.

he left at 18. alone. in the '80s. to a city he'd only ever seen on tv because it meant not dying forgotten and nameless in the village.

some people chase the american dream. my dad grabbed it and built a raft out of it, one person at a time, and putting his whole family on board.

after graduating and starting work in IT and computer engineering, he sent as much money home as he possibly could. he married my mom in bangladesh, brought her here in '93, put her through school. then he brought my grandma over in '95, right after my brother was born. then he brought all three of his brothers. THEN he brought his youngest sister — my aunt millie — and put her through high school AND college, like it was just another line item on a to-do list that never seemed to end.

oh you thought he was done? nah. started his own data company, then became a multi-business owner, somewhere along the way he said sure, i will also become a CEO of an architecture firm, and now he owns a restaurant just outside of DeKalb. That ending feels poetically ironic for a guy whose entire childhood ran on the question of who eats and who doesn't.

speaking of poetry, we haven't always gotten along. mainly because when i turned 18, i was starting a band and pursuing creative writing in college. then i decided if we’re gonna commit to this starving artist bit, let’s throw an MFA in there. my dad’s entire life ran on the premise that survival is the job, full stop. i grew up on the other side of that sacrifice, with the wild, borrowed luxury of asking whether i could make a living with my writing and how meaningful i could make my art. for a long time that felt less like a career choice and more like a rejection letter i was writing to him personally. like i took the raft he gambled everything building and steered it somewhere he would never in a million years go.

but he was 18 once too. choosing between a life that seemed like a dead-end and a life that scared the hell out of everyone who loved him. i don't think i actually understood that until i was old enough to make my own version of that choice — smaller stakes, sure, but it had the same shape.

i just used the raft differently than he expected. now that i've got a job, a fiancée, and enough years behind me to know what it actually costs to choose a life on purpose, we can sit across from each other and mean it when we say we get it. well, not fully. probably never fully. (i mean he still calls my band a hobby…) but it’s enough to where we see where the other is on the water.

we're not the same kind of builder. we're both still building, though. maybe it got lost sometimes along the way but i really don’t think the point of everything he went through was so that i would owe him anything out of my own life. i don’t think he wants that either.

what i do owe him though, and certainly never say enough, is thank you. thank you, dad. i will never know the weight of staring into an unknown so vast and murky as yours and daring to sprint into it, but i do know what it means to run towards a future that looks better than the past you leave behind.

with humility and gratitude. thank you.

from our last haiku, one of you said “i don’t want this to come off wrong, but there are people who i love and care about who have differing beliefs that don’t agree with everything [that’s being done], but they have valid concerns.”

first, i just wanted to say that it was very brave of you to offer this perspective because i have a clear stance on where i stand in all of this, and sending this in could mean i see you differently. i don’t! i get it!

but valid concerns or not, there are systemic issues that are undeniable with what is happening (and has been happening) in both this country and this world. yes, there is no ethical consumption or superior moral means to live in a capitalist/exploitative society, but what we can do is make more active choices when we can.

here’s one i get a lot:

my [insert relationship type here] is a cop. but they’re a good person and they really just want to stop crime! all of these protests and peoples’ opinions on the left make me feel bad and they are hated unjustly.

hey, welcome to microdosing discrimination! it’s way worse for us dark-skinned folk! the system of policing in this country statistically punishes people of color at a way harsher rate than it does white people. whether you’re a good cop doesn’t matter to the larger numbers at play.

so what? have them quit their job?

highkey, if they can switch into another career, my take is fuck yeah. because in essence what you have here is an “i-work-at-the-subjugate-black-people-especially-factory-but-i-don’t-have-anything-against-black-people” situation.

does that kind of spell it out?

(send in your questions to [email protected] and maybe your question will be the star of the next newsletter!)

this week’s song is "no maps” by, two cities with an amazing feature from mat kerekes, the lead singer of the band citizen.

did your parents ever hand you a different set of options than the ones they had — and did it take you embarrassingly long to actually see the CHOICE they made? it took me forever to realize that my dad chose the path he did, knowing what he was giving up. he gave me the choice of choices. that sounds so silly, but if it weren’t for that, who knows if i’d even be here, writing this.

if you don’t want to send in a question for deep dish with nish but still have thoughts, comments, concerns for my mental well-being after seeing this existential spiral caught on keyboard, talk to me! i love mail, even when it’s ‘e’.

liked what you read? tell someone about it! that beats me vageuposting into the void trying to fight an algorithm! 🤖

as always though, thanks for being here. 🙏

is this little bit not enough?

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