Letters (revisited)

 Existence... is part brilliance and part bullshit... one could conjecture that i take too many psychedelics and spend too much time thinking about things and that statement would be both true and false, could be i think about different things than the average bear or maybe i am the average bear or maybe i try to divest myself from post capitalism, post modernism, Post Malone way of living, who fucking knows... as it is i tend to wander through days in a haphazard way, taking it all in and without any real plan to what? get things accomplished? succeed? i'm not even sure what that is, i don't really know... i have a lot of ideas but lack the time to bring them to fruition... but that's not exactly accurate, it may be more that i'm fucking lazy and undisciplined or decide my time could be better spent staring at the ceiling while hanging with Phat Paco or Archie or another of my cats... 

Recently i renegotiated my contract so to speak... as the BW is often sitting around complaining about things not getting done, pondering hiring people for this or that, a neat little thought popped into my head... see the BW was moaning about my gig, the one where i play serf to the bourgeois, shopping for them and delivering the groceries, her main argument was that it wasn't worth the gas or wear and tear on the Shitmobile, the loving name i've given to the car i use to work in, a third car (oh yes first world problems) that the boyos also use... one driving aimlessly and one learning how to drive... one may remember i was nudged (see pushed) into the gig economy world during the pandemic when the BW's business was quasi-shuttered, needless to say her and her partners did well when it came to the guvment loans and walked away much the better... her businesses do rather well and fact is i don't really need to do this gig economy shit but it allows me to bank a little dosh as well as some autonomy, the last thing i need is to be asking the BW for money as it would be both belittling and frustrating as it's been well documented how it's her money to which all expenditures must pass muster under the bosses watchful eye... 

But the new contract... what i proposed was cutting back on my gig, basically working a day or two (see two) to provide me with some money (as well as allowing me to squirrel some away) while freeing up more of the day for me to get things done around the house... of course i threw in the caveat, as my back allows, but with my local pool reopened i know i can get in the water to keep it loose and in shape... the BW, to my surprise, jumped at the idea and said that would be great... and being an objective sort i understood her issue, it wasn't worth it for what i put in the joint account once the expenditures on gas and such were taken out but the fact is i need/like having my own cash, it provides a modicum of freedom that i otherwise wouldn't have as the BW would keep a vicelike grip on the money when it came to my weed, shrooms, books, records, concert tickets... basically the only thing i actually spend money on... yes one could ask what the fuck i'm on about and hell at this point, three paragraphs in i'm not sure i fucking know... 

The other day as i was cleaning up a room, reorganizing things, sorting through stuff, some to be donated and some that's destined for the landfill (sadly), i found the box of my father's things again... and of course i opened it and read through them a bit, mainly because i miss my father and in reading his letters i can hear his voice... his handwriting was excellent, dare i say beautiful, his thoughts meticulously laid out... i realized now a couple were drafts of letters that i will never know if he actually sent to his ex-wife and ex-mother in law... and it once again provided me with an interesting perspective on my parents and their relationship, or possibly it just reminded me, reminded me of all the things that children may never know about their parents relationship, made me think of what my sons will think when their parents are gone or if/when that relationship dissolves... 

Reading my father's letters i was struck once again at how one sided my parents marriage was... my father, til the end of that marriage and for a few years after, was deeply in love with my mother... i can't say the same for her and in reading those letters again it reminded me of how vindictive, cruel and manipulative my mother was... i, for most of my life, had escaped this wrath due to the fact i was the golden boy, the son her father always wanted and to which she was delighted to give him... as previously laid out i was my mother's choice where my sister was always viewed as my father's choice, mainly because my mother got pregnant as an unmarried 18yr old, something rectified one July day when they were married but a fact my father didn't find out until a few weeks later... he didn't know she was pregnant when they got married, he married her because he loved her... i know why my mother married him and these letters drove that point home... 

There is a line in one of the letters where my mother apparently told my dad that maybe she was the world's greatest actress... this line stuck... she was basically saying she had been playing the part her whole life due to the fact that he provided a pretty nice life for her (and their children), that she never really loved him but that while he was providing for her she could deal being married to him and that once he had lost his job (and she had started working as a school bus driver, the place where she met her first boyfriend) she wasn't about to let him spend her money... a statement that is eerily echoed above... granted my father made all the money but my mother had received an inheritance from her uncle who was fond of stuffing cash in his mattress, she and her sisters where given the money by their mother, my mom getting roughly 33k which she deposited in the bank presumably only under her name.. this is the money my father wasn't going "to spend"... so basically after a lifetime of providing for her, of putting himself through college while working a full time job in order to give his family a better life, that when he needed his wife and partner the most, she walked out on him... 

My old man was a bit of a stoic... rational and organized in his thoughts he was not one to get what one might call emotional... to his young son he was a rock, i've written before about how i barely knew my dad until i was 7 or so, he'd come home from work, eat some dinner and then head off to night school earning a degree in accounting... he went to work each day in his suit and tie and yet somehow it was never enough for his wife who wanted him to be a CPA, something he easily could have done but he was cool with what he was doing... and then of course came the Great Middle Management Purge, ten years after Reagan and suddenly the corporations began to want to "maximize shareholder value", and so many of these employees, predominantly men, men who came of age when what you did for a living was closely tied to who you were, were then handed a severance check, a pat on the back and shown the door... it was also when suicide rates began to skyrocket... and of course it was at this point my lovely mother decided it was no longer expedient for her to support the man who supported her... reading my father's letters there is a vulnerability that i'd never seen until the split and even then he did his best to keep it under wraps if his children were around... these letters laid bare his heart and soul and it physically hurt to read them, a sadness crept in and i wish i would have known more, i wish i could have done more... 

Unfortunately the relationship that my mother an i have is for all intents over... we'll exchange the odd text just to for a modicum of civility and i will briefly keep her informed on what her grandsons are up to but in the history of the lounge i've watched this relationship go from being on shaky ground to being dare i say good and then disintegrating, flaring up and flaming out in a matter of minutes... yes some might say we shouldn't let politics come between us but these day politics in this country isn't the norm... if one is part of a fascist movement then the only thing i can say is get fucked... if you cloak these beliefs in your religion, get fucked twice, if one votes for bigotry and hatred while quoting the Jesus while failing to recognize the hypocrisy one is either willfully ignorant or just plain fucking evil and the truth is there ain't much separating the two... if one claims to be a "good christian", whatever the fuck that is but then puts all their needs, wants, biases and bigotries ahead of voting for the future of the planet, the less fortunate, their grandchildren they claim to love so much then for the third time, get fucked... 

Not long ago my mother asked if she could come down and see Disaster around his 16th birthday... my mother and the fucking nonce who lives in the house my father paid for drove down under the guise of giving Disaster a jar of coins, they had this thing were every time they found coins or money on the ground they matched whatever the found in a jar for all their grandchildren and on their 16th birthday they got the jar... of course Disaster has always been the grandchild least doted on, he wasn't all that found of going to their house and would never go without his big brother, the I-mac on the other hand was their "boy", to the point where it was insulting when they talked to us about him, they gave the impression that they would do a better job raising him than his parents and often talked about how sad he was when he'd have to go home after his visits when he was a wee lad making it seem as if he didn't want to go... of course the BW took less than kindly to these insinuations (what mother wouldn't?) which left me to talk her down and explain that my mother and man who lived in the house my dad paid for were the self righteous, self important type of muppet and that it was best to dismiss their bullshit... (i'm sure i've put this up here before but there is a famous picture of Jesus on the cross, side split open, drawn by a 3yr old? I-mac that is framed on hung on the wall in a very prominent place, a picture they claim he drew all by himself with no help or instruction at all... oh if they could see their little boy now, he's his father's son when it comes to religion or lack thereof and he often wants to tell them exactly what he thinks of their religion...)

It was no secret that there was tension between my mother and i but when they arrived i was polite and kind and wasn't going to bring up any topics that would turn this thing pear shaped as it was ostensibly about my boy Disaster getting his loot... granted in their self-important view they fail to realize teenage boyos aren't exactly all about hanging with their grandparents... or their parents for that matter but the boyos were cool and hung for a an hour or so, a very strange hour and at one point JF aka jesus freak aka my mother's husband, made some stupid comment vaguely hinting at politics to which the I-mac then calmly fucking destroyed using this shit called facts... i just sat there grinning as i watched a certain grandmother and her hubby eat a warm and steaming shit sandwich... as for my mother i knew she didn't know how to handle me but she affected an air of iciness that i actually found surprising... of course what she didn't realize was that her son was an excellent study of his mother's ways, had been schooled by his father in her tricks and so knows how to play this game better...  i remained kind and polite and i could see it unnerved my mother... why? because i didn't bat an eye, i just went about my business of being a decent human being, gave her a hug, talked freely and pleasantly, it's hard to play the game when one side refuses to play... 

Ultimately i know how this plays out and the main reason i know this is my father's letters... he wrote way back in that letter to my grandmother about how a mother treated her children, how she didn't understand why they were upset and pissed at her and how after she had sacrificed so much they were nothing more than ungrateful shits... and as my father laid it out in brutal honesty, she loves to play the victim, is a master at twisting the facts to make it look like she was nothing but sweetness and light instead of vindictive and cruel and now those ungrateful spawn of hers had turned their back on her... in what i can only laugh at as the greatest of ironies, mother and daughter are all that is left of that old nuclear family, the two who battled the most, mainly because in the end they were more alike than either would want to admit, have each other... i have always been my father's son but i also possess the self awareness that i was raised by two people and most of my worst traits i have gotten from my mother... funny how those traits mostly come out when i'm dealing with her though maybe that's because over the years i've watched her shitting on different people, some of whom i loved fucking dearly, i'm a good student, i understand i get a certain satisfaction out giving her that same treatment, wondering is she recognizes what her bastard son is doing? Though i know that when she speaks of me to her cronies it's probably how horrible it is for her to have raised a son who is a heathen and i'm sure places the blame for it on her ex-husband... though the heathen displays a lot more empathy, kindness, tolerance to the world at large than his "christian" mother... 

Still those letters get me thinking about my dad... about how i miss talking to the guy, about what a good dude he was, how most of what i know about being an empathetic and decent human being i learned from him, what unconditional love actually looks like, how i wish i could have done more for him... that even though the woman he loved more than anything broke his heart he put himself back together and lived out his days with dignity and decency... and he even managed to have a little fun with a few girlfriends along the way, something i like to think he picked up from his wild-eyed son... he always used to tell me if he could do it again he would do it just like me (he also told me getting married was a great way to fuck up a perfectly good relationship, probably should have listened).. i could tell him anything now it would be thanks for being a great guide, teacher, friend and that i was lucky to have a father like him, that i try my best to emulate him when it comes to the boyos with varying degrees of success and failure... of course Pops would give his familiar laugh and tell me, that's life kid, just keep trying... or as it said up top, half brilliance half bullshit...