It may come as a surprise that i actually put some time and effort into these little missives ripped off into the ether, granted i'm under no illusions of fame and fortune as was once the want of the blogosphere, i recall many a site where it was all about monetization and the hopes of some "career"... career? fuck that, i write for sheer and simple reasons, it's what i do to make sense of things, i'm not all that into fame and fortune and everything that goes with it (i thank you all, Freddie) but as Vonnegut once said, go into the arts, you don't even have to be good at it, you do it cuz at the end of it you will have created something, and most likely learned a thing or two about this cosmic joke we're all temporarily traipsing through, when i see the madness around me every day and by madness i mean what people pass off as existence or a "meaningful life" i'm utterly and totally confused... the acquisition of "stuff" or to paraphrase Bill Hicks, look at my huge house and big wallet and fancy car, when in the end it means nothing... granted i'm a product of my culture and can be rightly and justly accused of accumulating far too many books and records but in a way that goes back to the whole art thing, even the art of living thing, the point of dancing is the dance as Alan Watts said, there is something about getting lost in a piece of literature or music that provides more value, dare i say wealth, than any fucking designer label or high end automobile will ever provide, call it the substance and not the stuff...
As usual one could easily be sitting back and saying, what the fuck is he one about this time? as i watch the place i live skip blindly towards a new form of shit show, something akin to an oligarchy of the rich by the rich and for the rich disguised as a fascist theocracy it hit me the other day, or shortly after the orange shitgibbon was thought by the populace to be a viable option to run this place, that for the first time since my father had died i was glad to that he wasn't here to see this shit show, and to a lesser degree my uncle, his older brother as well... this might have done them both in really but as my father so often pointed out to his older brother, people don't give a rat's ass about anyone other than their own self and maybe their immediate family, as long as they go theirs, he said, they didn't give a shit... as usual the old man was spot on... which brings me around the gist of this post...
It was seven years ago this week that i had suffered the Night of the Living Back Spasm, a night spent in agonizing pain where the first 45 minutes were spent face down on a hardwood floor begging for an ambulance and as one might recall the Breadwinner deemed that wholly unnecessary and expensive... so like most things in this life i gritted my teeth and got through it... (granted i should have known this would happen, i've written about an incident years ago where i had the flu, i had asked the BW to go to the store and get me a few things, namely Gatorade and some meds, she hemmed and hawed and said she would just not yet as i believe she needed her afternoon nap, i couldn't really wait and so exasperated i fucking got dressed and walked to the store myself and got what i needed feeling like i'd been hit by a truck, in truth i should have known how this whole thing would go way back when... or in short i fucked up...) it was that night that i spent my first night on the downstairs couch, due to the fact i couldn't even get up steps, and it has been on the couch where i slept, alone save for various cats, that i have stayed...
The other day i was in my favorite boozer (see post) when i mentioned the situation and an old acquaintance looked at me in shock, he couldn't believe it, he asked why i don't move back to the bedroom, i didn't feel like explaining to him that the ship of which he spoke had sailed, even the BW doesn't mind anymore and that i quite liked sleeping alone, not to mention the fact i could eat mushrooms whenever i wanted and not have to worry about answering any questions... i didn't cite facts about the roughly 25% of couples who sleep in separate rooms for various reasons and the biggest reason he mentioned was the sexual aspect, i laughed and explained to him that frigid wasn't just a word in the dictionary... i explained that my life was just fine, how there is always a balance between the dark and the light and though i could use with more of certain things in my life i didn't wholly go without... as i explained, happiness is where you find it...
Though these days happiness... or whatever that feeling is supposed to be, seems fleeting at best, like trying to catch water in my hands, of course i realize there is some psychic baggage that comes with this time of year, i've always been prone to bouts melancholia, why else would my favorite band of all time be The Smiths? and of course i think about my dad, i think about him every day and the truth is i miss those conversations, miss his wisdom and insight, his meticulous way of thinking through things... i also realize that he was the last person in my nuclear family i could speak or relate to as the current political climate has most definitely created a chasm between myself and the rest of my childhood household...
It began in September when the norm between my lovely mother and i quickly disintegrated... there was a picture posted on a social media site of the BW and the guy from Minnesota, he was in town helping his running mate prepare for her debate, had gone out for a run and then decided to take his daughter to breakfast, no campaign stop just a guy and his kid having some pancakes... now my mother, the once Catholic now evangelical (due to the Catlicks not annulling her marriage on the grounds she didn't like the guy anymore), married to a guy who sports nothing but Jesus t-shirts and Shitgibbon bumper stickers, had seen the photo, we were having a conversation on the phone, i was telling her about her grandsons and avoiding all the topics i always have, politics and religion, i never bring it up because we are on opposite sides, i am most definitely my father's son, always have been, but now and then she'll try to slip something in about it, her biggest worry is for the soul of her grandson, notice i only mentioned one which also drives home a point about her and her husband's hypocrisy...
--- the background is that when the Imac was a toddler, roughly around 3 years old, he somehow unprovoked drew a picture of Jesus on the cross, complete with gaping wound in his side, a picture that is now framed and hung on their wall in a most prominent place... i had told my mother that it was not her job to teach my sons about religion, that when old enough they could decide for themselves but as we all know in order to indoctrinate one must get them young... add the fact that my mother has often given the vibe that she and her Jesus freak hubby knew how to raise the boyos better than their parents and one gets the drift... let's just say this didn't go down with the BW very well... and it definitely did not fucking fly with yours truly... the line the Imac has heard since he was a small child was that he had Jesus in his heart... the Imac has asked if he could set them straight and i've always told him to be cool but i've now told him feel free to tell them whatever he wants, he's 18, he's more than welcome to espouse his "beliefs"... (one may notice she doesn't say much about her other grandson, probably because he's produced no religious drawings...)
The conversation the ensued that fine September day suddenly went south when my mother caustically spat out , "i saw the picture of the BW and that horrible man..." and while i knew what was coming i played a bit dumb, who? i said, "Tampon Tim!" she shot back... now one may be surprised to discover this but i can be a bit of a handful, there are times when i can go from zero to hundred in a split second, more so in my younger days but the ability is still there and this was one of those times... i unloaded on the daft cow, yes i just called my mother a daft cow because when the shoe fits... honestly there was no reason to bring it up and if she did she could have done it much more tactfully, there was no need for the animosity, the vitriol, she could have stated that was neat or whatever or she could have kept her fucking mouth shut, it's not as if she doesn't know my stance, as i've told her before we can agree to disagree... that being said, she didn't shut up...
The Cliff Notes version is that El Kono went full El Kono and while i didn't exactly tell her to go fuck herself i basically told her to go fuck herself... i unloaded on her hypocrisy, how these bible thumping knuckeldraggers like her and her husband fawned all over a thrice divorced, porn star shagging, racist shitbag and asked her to square that with the one and only book she seems to ever pick up, she then said i should pick up that book and i explained that i wasn't into beating my slaves or my wife but that hey by that books standards my father and i should have been able to throw stones at her... she bleated about wanting things to be "how they used to be" to which i replied that she had made some dumb and horrible statements over the years but that one by far was fucking top of the list and it was the not so veiled racism inherent in it that set me off even more... once i get going the acid tongue does the rest... she was soon crying (crocodile tears- as i told her,, that ex-husband tipped me to all her tricks) and scrambling to get off the phone... that was three months ago... we hadn't spoken since other than an odd text and...
One fine early October day i was watching the afternoon futbol when there was a sudden banging on the door, startled i walked around the corner to find my mother and her husband standing there, all half-smiles, i was very polite and kind towards them and yet i could tell they were nervous, my mother not knowing what to expect from her son... needless to say they came in, Disaster did his best to run away which i found funny, suddenly getting the urge to go outside and shoot baskets, the car plastered with bumper stickers was parked out front, i watched as they walked around my house and surveyed the place, even more disconcerting was their attitude towards the BW, a distant and cold attitude that has not been witnessed before... my theory is my mother often thought the BW would bring Jesus into our sons' lives... really? while she may not be as outspoken as me about the uselessness of Western religions (christianity in particular) she is by no means a follower or fan of it... in what was a totally bizarre visit they were there and gone in maybe 20 minutes? baffling really even more so the fact they were downright rude to the BW... when said info was relayed to her eldest son he about blew a gasket, the Imac may drive his mother nuts and act like a real shit sometimes but no one, absolutely no one better mess with his mama...
Fast forward to this week... my big sis turned 60 this week and so i called her up to wish her happy birthday... my sister and i are not close, never have been, she's been pissed since the day i came home from the hospital, she has never been that fond of me and has contended her whole life that i was the "favorite", for someone who claims to be so intelligent she has never once sat down and examined her own actions and where those had led her for most of her life but instead chooses to blame everything and anything... though i should add she did buy me a ticket to see David Bowie (1990 Sound and Vision Tour) which to this day was a pivotal event in my development as a human being (a post in itself) she's six years older and has vastly different social and political views than i do, a fact that baffled my father to his last breath, she is a racist and a fascist, married to a guy who owns a full Third Reich uniform as well as a few other "artifacts"...
Big Sis seems to take much joy when my mom and i are on the outs and it was during the birthday call that i could hear the excitement in her voice when she stated i heard you're not talking to mom... i stated i have no problem talking to anyone but that i'm at an age where i don't feel the need to suffer fools... it was then that she said, "mom tells me you're into the communism and the socialism"... the way she said it made me chuckle, the socialism?... for most of my life all i've ever heard is how brilliant my sister is, i once told Pops i'd put my intelligence up against hers any day (not in some egomaniacal way) to which he replied that's a bold statement, i then elaborated on the fact intelligence is like a muscle and must be kept in shape and i often wonder how well she's doing with that especially with her slide towards the far right, though she's one of those clever enough to cloak her racist tendencies in veiled language, the kind i hear from white guys when no one of color is around... my sister has never lived more than three miles from the house we grew up in, i've lived all over, the backwoods of Wyoming and Pennsyltucky, the shit part of Ocean City, various hoods in the Burgh the type she would be aghast to to go, it's not as if we talk very often, in fact i really don't remember the last time we did, it's been a couple years at least but as i said we don't have much common ground other than our parents, one of whom is gone and was sad that his daughter had become what she had... i remember my father telling me he felt bad because he avoided talking to my sister because of her politics.. (it should be noted that my sister refused to go to my dad's apartment because of the "neighborhood"... i stayed in his place for a month, would walk to the restaurant down the street, was it the best hood? no... but it was better than some of the ones i had lived in so i didn't take much notice...)
As my sister and i began our "debate" about "the socialism and the communism", i wanted to laugh, i could hear the snark in her voice, i almost started to tell her a story, that her little brother was one of the biggest weed dealers in his city for a time (a capitalist wet dream if ever there was one) and that he had honed his people skills to a fine point, that it behooved me to understand when i was being bullshitted or lied to which led me to sniff out quite quickly that her whole line of questioning was nonsense... she wanted me to explain what communism and socialism were and i told her that she could study that on her own, that i called to say happy birthday and didn't feel the need to explain things that could be easily looked up, she pretended that she wanted to know and i reiterated my statement, of course my sister is of the belief that all the "welfare kings and queens" are non-white while making racist statements cloaked in her white privilege... at one point she mentioned that if you don't work you don't eat... odd coming from a stay at home parent living in America, even stranger still seeing that someone who is not religious was quoting the bible, Paul, and somewhat spouting a principle of "the communism" under certain regimes...
The most telling aspect of the whole conversation though arose when it came to Tim Walz's son... my nephew is on the spectrum, for a long time my sister was an ant-vaxxer (still is actually) due to a study that linked vaccines to autism... an old study that was found to be complete bullshit, a doctor/researcher who was paid to come up with that very result and somehow passed off a study that was done on a handful of patients into people actually believing it... when it finally came out that he was paid to lie about it, his own admission (subsequently losing his medical license), i asked my sis what she thought about vaccines now, her answer was as vague as when i asked my mother if dinosaurs lived 6000 years ago, nuff said...
My question to my sister was how does she support a party that openly mocked a kid, who while not exactly like her son, suffered from (for lack of a better word) a disability... (not to mention the orange shitgibbon and his mocking of a journalist, the good christian that he is)... her response told me all i really needed to know, not that i didn't know it anyway... she launched into a diatribe about how kids like that forced her kid to sit in the back of the bus (how she didn't say), how he wasn't non-verbal (proving that she didn't understand a thing about this kid's condition) and how someone should have told the kid to sit down... hmm, i wonder how my sister would have responded if someone had said that to her son, i remember her getting upset when people would stare at her son when he flapped (something kids on the spectrum do when stressed) but now it was perfectly okay to tell a kid who was excited for his father to sit down and shut up... funny how this shit works... and while i won't discount any of the work my sister has put in to help her son i'd also wager to say that most of his anxiety issues come from being under her thumb his whole life...
At this point i was just trying to get off the phone mind you as i really only wanted so say happy birthday, i didn't want to have some political or philosophical debate particularly with someone who, just like her mother, wasn't concerned so much about facts as she was about her opinions, which she perceived as her facts, the root cause of my big sis's issues were not much different than a lot of people currently, in the simplest terms possible... she's a selfish cunt... and the truth is she has been for most of her life, growing up most of her issues/problems whatever stemmed from the wrongs the she perceived were done to her, very rarely if ever did i hear take any responsibility for shit, it was always someone else's fault that she was in the situation she was in... from not going off to school (the university had restrictions because she was only 17 but still accepted her, she also could have started in the spring term but threw a fit about it), from not moving out of her parents house until she was 27, from not getting a "wedding" because of our parents impending divorce, things have always been about her and what she didn't get and she gave little regard to anyone else... it's why it's why she's had practically no friends for the last forty-five years...
(What my big sis doesn't know is that i'm under no illusions how she feels about me, yes there is no bond really, the closest there has ever been was when my father was sick but that was more working as a team to take care of him, but here's an interesting fact... for years my sis threw an Xmas party and for years i was never invited, in fact i didn't know about it until my dad told me one day, her reason was she didn't want my young children to upset her child, which of course was a steaming pile of bullshit seeing as there were other kids there... it's really i all i needed to know, and honestly it's cool, our gap in age made us both a bit like only children and as stated we were never close, she was pretty shit to me most of my childhood but it didn't have an effect on me other than to honestly feel sorry for her, even as a kid, she never seemed all that happy and still doesn't, there is a victim complex that gets old and at some point one either deals with shit and fixes things or wallows in their own self pity... she seems to enjoy the latter...)
And so once again i look around and see what i've always known... i'm on my own in this universe, of course the fact is we are all on our own but we can try our best to love and help those around us to navigate this mortal coil cuz the fact is it will go by quicker than any of us care to admit... i also know i'm a bit of a special case, my dad always used to marvel at his son's ability to get through things, i'm a hard bastard but i'm working on it, particularly when it comes to my sons and especially the I-mac, i tend to go about these days smiling at strangers and being polite and kind, even though at times i want to clock a motherfucker in the mouth i remember the wu-wei, and in practicing said mindset sometimes the best way to be kind is to not be there at all... if that makes sense... sometimes inaction is the best action... so it goes...
1 comment:
remember the wu-wei...
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