Distaff

I am the little boy who had a little blue blanket.  Really.  Like Linus.  A security blanket -- I remember it well.  It was important to me.  I remember throwing up in bed, and I covered the spot with my blanket, not hiding it, just being able to sleep, curled around the spot, without having to call, well, mom to help with the matter.  I pulled the corners so it lay flat and neat, centered over the wet place. 

It was gone one day when I came home from school.  I would have been maybe six, maybe even seven.  Yes, too old for a blue baby blanket left over from when I was an actual baby.  But how do such attachments form?  Obviously, the parents imbue it with some significance -- Oh here Jackie, don't cry -- you just be quiet and hold onto your little blue blanket and there there.  Children draw comfort from symbols.  After all, there was once a womb, a close warm wall of encompassing security.  Transition is continuity.  

I don't remember looking for it.  I don't know if I always went for it, home from school.  Sometimes it was in the washing, and I did like the clean and sometimes warm way it felt afterwards.  But I remember the surprise of not finding it and then worry and other emotions, searching.  I remember asking my mom where it was, perhaps by then with some anxiety.  Not hysterical.

"Oh, I threw it away.  I thought you were too old for it."  And I remember the, well, hysteria.  Why did you do that why did you do that...  I have the words for it, now.  I do remember she said it was trash day.  So too late to recover it.  Let's go look.  But too late, too late.  I think I recall saying we should find the truck, go after it.  I have a related memory of imagining the journey of trash trucks to the dump. But maybe it was just a lie, about trash day -- an easy lie to shut him up.  How after all would a very little child know when trash day was?  Could I even count to seven?  I was not a good student.  Did I know the names of the days of the week?  I don't think I did.  I was neglected.  

The words are betrayal and betrayal.  That was not the way to handle it, this too-enduring babyish attachment.  There should have been some preparation.  There should have been some thought about the meaning it had for me, and how to aid in a next step toward emotional maturity and healthy attachment.  You do not simply take away without providing an alternative.  Like nature, emotions abhor a vacuum.  And something about security, which is one of the many opposites of betrayal.

Once in a while, rarely, the family would sit around the fireplace and have popcorn and throw some special product into the flames so that they would burn in different colors.  Little bits of metal, elementals I'm thinking, in a long narrow cardboard tube.  So there we were, dad absent, and I was thirsty so I went to get water and when I came back I ate some more popcorn from my bowl and the two siblings and my mom started to laugh.  Well, that first handful was a bit different.  It had some wetness in it, in my mouth.  And they said the dog had been eating from my bowl, and they'd put some of their popcorn into it so I wouldn't know.  So, dog slobber.  This is the sort of thing I should have expected from the brothers.  But my mom was laughing too.  

I still didn't have the word, betrayal.  And even without the word, I didn't expect it, the thing itself, under the circumstances, of present parent supervision.  Caught off guard. 

And one day, when I was still upstairs, the then-worst brother told me that this was his room, not mine, and I had to do whatever he said or he'd kick me out.  But it was a shared bedroom.  Right?  Turns out, no, not anymore.  That one had gone to his mother and told her to give him the room.  Give me that room, I want it for myself.  And she had said, literally, with the actual words -- but I don't know the actual words.  Yes, or Okay.  Or, Anything you want, honey.

They well deserve to have, that know the surest way to get.

Because they were all liars, I went to her, no doubt distraught, and told on that lying brother -- the lie, one of his lies, that I did not have a room anymore.  But maybe it wasn't telling on him.  Maybe I was looking for truth and comfort and stability and rationality.  Security.  Well Jackie, he asked me for it, he wanted it. So I gave it to him.  And I was hysterical.  But now I don't have a room.  Now I'm in his room.  Now I don't have anyplace.  And so on.  Why did you do that why did you do that...  And mom was bothered by this, this puling fretful helpless need from this now frantic little boy.  She must have realized, upon reflection, that I had been placed in an uncomfortable position.  Parents often are attuned to this sort of thing.  It's an instinct, maternal and paternal.

These are early but not earliest details of a single ongoing story.  My first memory, pre-toilet training, is of standing in a crib holding the vertical rails screaming to be picked up -- I can still feel the wood.  I remember pretending to be asleep in the car, wanting to be carried up the stairs -- but I was big enough to walk.  Long long ago.  When I was still honest about wanting to be held.

I am reluctant to think I have a codependency with my mother.  I have just wanted her to be happy.  And I have given her a considerable amount of money over the past more-than-a-decade -- she's on a fixed income with debt and no credit and no savings.  She had drained all of her assets to the voracious demand of that middle brother. Repeatedly refinancing her house to make down payments for yet another house for the leech, having lost as he did his former home.  Three or four times.  

So in reality it was I who was supporting this worthless sibling -- making, somehow, their car payments, buying cigars, supporting hobbies and fantasies and failed financial adventures into being an importer of Chinese merchandise or a buyer of gold or an expert in currency exchange.  

But I wanted her to be happy.  I'm still reluctant to call it codependency.  It has seemed like duty -- protect and support your elderly parents.  No matter how sick they might be, or destructive to self or third sons.

I have been wrong, though.  The prudent thing would have been to save literally all the money I had given her, and require a strict and confirmed budget, so that when real need came up -- other than feeding the parasite, the late middle-aged nipple-baby mama's boy -- other than enabling her sick relationship with that one -- rather than flush that money save it, so she could have actual comfort in her old age, instead of futility and anxiety and dependency on me.  It's that iron in the soul, saying no to the sucking vampire need, hers from me, the parasite from her.  So I was wrong.

In my 20s I asked her, in all seriousness, if she had dropped him on his head as a baby, that she felt so responsible, that he was the way he was.  I asked her, literally, if she had tried to abort him, to act so guilty.  She said, indignant, that she would never do anything like that.  I was trying to understand this incomprehensible enmeshment.  But I never did, until my recent insight that paired codependency with a freshly discovered, salient and adult-sized betrayal.

I will not tell the end of this long, lifelong story.  There are innumerable other truly bizarre details and incidents, threads in the warp of this tapestry.  They fall very much -- perfectly -- into the pattern I've traced out.  And of course, of course, it's not actually over.  There is a monster, more than one at the heart of the maze, and the unwinding of a single clue leads there, if not away again.  

I have been deceived and betrayed in as grotesque a way as could fit expectation, if I had ever actually learned to expect betrayal from its persistent yet unsuspected source.  You would laugh outloud at the perfection of it, like a very clever whodunit that is also a farce and a tragedy, every detail dovetailing into an elegant denouement.  Pluck out the heart of the mystery, unravelled yet tightly wound.  

Penelope. Theseus. Linus. Baldir. Oedipus. Hamlet. Norns.

There aren't really any villains.  Just types, archetypes, like Greed and Need, swallowed Guilt, shamed Nemesis.  Like comedia dell'arte ... I'm the buffoon, dunce cap, Pierrot I'd suppose, heart broken, sad clown.  

J

*Tacos or Starbucks

YT

Some of my pals go together and get tacos, no, let's say Starbucks together all the time. I've never been to Starbucks or a taco place, maybe a truck. I wonder what it's like. I wish I could go. It must be great. I don't eat meat.  What do people do at Starbucks? I bet it's full of cool people and they laugh like on tv, but I don't watch tv anymore. And someone will make a remark, and I'll come up with a snappy comeback, and they'll all be laughing at how funny I am, and they'll be laughing and I'll be all popular and smiling. But then I'll go "Ach. I think I just swallowed a bug. Starbucks has bugs? That's not very hygienic. That's why I don't drink coffee. I usually just have water." But then they'll say, "No, Jack H, it wasn't a bug. We spiked your cuppa brew with a Micky Finn ... no, with an herbal capsule for Male Enhancement!" And I'll be like, "Dudes, that's totally whack! I knew something like this would happen." But then they'll say, "Oh no Jack H, we would never really do a thing like that. We were just joking about that capsule in your joe. It was just a harmless prank on you." And I'll say, "Well what was it then, that lump in my piping hot java?" And they'll say, "Dude, it was just a coffee bean or something. Coffee beans are very nutritious. They include them for roughage." And I'll believe them and then I'll laugh and it will be okay. And then there will be a lull in the conversation, and someone will say, "Let's make up haikus!" And I'll say, "Okay, I'll start! My muse is speaking!" And then just then on the spot I'll make up this really good haiku! 

I like my java. 

It makes me feel so happy. 

Hot. Foamy. Starbucks. 

 

And they'll think that's so good, but I wonder if coffee is really foamy, but then someone will say, "Oh Jack H, can you make up a limerick too? We bet you can!" And I'll say, "Sure, fellas! Just you listen!" And then right then I'll make this up: 

At Starbucks some guys of jiu jitsu 

Were pining to know whether it's true: 

"Perhaps we should quit 

The Art of the Jit -- 

Cuz whenever Jack wants, he just gits you."

 

And they'll all be amazed at how good my haikus and limericks are, but they know by my ironic tone I'm just kidding about gitting them -- maybe like a question, "he just gits you?"  But they're all amazed and that will be the psychological moment for me to leave, so then I'll stand up and look each of my friends in the eye as I shake their hands goodbye. And at the door I'll turn and raise my hand like Caesar saluting his legions, and I'll say, "Gentlemen, farewell." Then I'll turn one last time and pass through the door into the brisk breezes of the bright winter night. And as I drive home I'll be filled with peace, and later, in my home, when it's time to set aside the cares of the day, I'll lay myself down in the swaddling embrace of my sheets, and I will sleep the restful sleep of a man whose fondest dreams come true. 

 J

jackie

So much of this is about just trying to get clean.  Covered in whatever the filth is, or internal, filled with well I want to say stink and corruption, but that's not it.  Whatever it is where clean is the answer.  Not my own filth -- I can own that.  It's mine, I made it, like a toddler's pride in toilet training.  Mine.  Honest anger is fine.  Likewise rage and hatred.  The theology may be challenging, but God hates sin, and rage is just the current word for biblical wrath. Emotions become sick when they are stagnant.  They should flow.  So I was wrong.  It is my own filth that's the problem.  I own it, and won't let go.  

I've played quite a few games with my name, in these pages, these anonymous pages.  So I looked just now, and I am actually surprised to see that in these hundreds of thousands and millions of words there are a couple of my horrible stories that I have not told.

I should have thought I had.  I mean, I told, finally, even, finally, the story of my boys -- the Joey story and the Jason story.  Took a few years to get there.  That's two of my handful of ongoing untreated PTSD cases right there.  Maybe three.

Until I was seven or eight they called me Jackie.  I've said that.  But at some point I decided to be called Jack.  I knew why.  I'd heard the name Jackie spoken with hatred so much, it was just too much.  But one of the siblings wouldn't go along.  It was, after all, my function to be hated.  So I trained him the way my father trained the dog.  Every time he said it I provided a negative reinforcement.  I'd kick him as hard as I could on the shin.  He learned pretty quickly, actually.  Lots of violence, but he did learn.  After that for a few years it was only when substitute teachers were taking roll, Jackie, and from kids who hadn't seen me for a while.

I just think it's telling, an apt metaphor, that I had to fight, with actual violence, for my name.  That's a metaphor, right?  

These past few weeks, in these pages, have not been cathartic.  I had that one insight, about gang rape, and this has got me to actually write down stories that I used to tell in quite a humorous way.  People laughed.  No doubt I made witty comments as I went along.  I could make witty comments now, about raping a pony or a young teenage boy.  I'm quite witty.  But my purpose in these later years isn't what it used to be.  

One of my father's tropes was to call us his offspring.  Not sons, but offspring.  The clever thing is that he told us why.  He was ashamed of us.  (I will always use the plural, in this context.  No individuality was recognized.  The two assholes would need a negative reenforcement, and all three of us would get lined up for the whipping.)  So he spelled it out.  Less than sons.  Less than men, young men, boys.  Offspring.  

Seems unnecessarily harsh.  

And after the other two had been kicked out, each at age 16, and I was the only one left, at age 16 my father decided it would be authentic and manly to tell me that he was sorry he had named me Jack.  Because Jack was his name, one of them, and it was a man's name, and if his hypothetical friends saw me and heard my name was Jack, well dad would be embarrassed about that.  You know, because I was, I'll pick a word, a disappointment? -- but that's not it.  No matter.  But it was harsher than disappointment.

It's kind of hard to think clearly.  No emotion, but like I'm skimming the surface ... oh, it's hard to concentrate.  Not hard, but like my mind is pushed away, like uncooperative magnetic poles.  Repulsed.  Interesting.  

Eight years later I became a father in Australia, and six months after that my father had yet another offspring, this time a son, 25 years younger than me.  I was no longer the little one.  Hurrah.  So here's the point.  Get ready.  Ahem.  Guess, dear reader, what name my father gave to his new baby boy.  Guess.  

Um, was it George?  No.  Uh, Vincent? Darryl?  No -- well I'll just tell you.  Jack.  

So he really did mean it, when he said that thing about naming me.  How can we fault honesty?  Being forthright is a virtue.  

Some few years later, when it was still possible, there was a sort of family Christmas get-together at my father's house.  Not my, our, mother.  The brothers, and I have to suppose their various families.  I suppose after I came back from Australia I tried to have some kind of adult relationship with him.  But here's the thing, another thing.  Get ready.  My father had started to call me by another name.  My first name, which I have never used.  You see why of course.  Two sons named Jack, that might get confusing.  

So at that get-together he was trying to use some other name, for me, and I said, quite clearly, with some emphasis -- "My name is Jack."  He would not have been used to being corrected, contradicted, confronted.  The memory is dull, but I expect I had brooded about this for, well, since I learned of it in Australia.  So I will have mocked the stupidity.  I certainly said, "Hi, I'm Larry, and this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl."  I expect I said that he did not have to right to change my name, take my name, give it to anyone else.  When it was his to give, he gave it to me.  I even had to fight for it.  Mine.

I'd expect that even my brothers, now adults, might have been on my side.  

The happy ending to that story is that at some point after this they started to call my new little brother -- however old he was by then, maybe seven or eight -- by his first name, which was also the name my father was currently using as his name.  

That's a happy ending, right?  I could finally stop fighting for my name?

In looking just now, after so many years, at the story of my boys, I find I did indeed tell the sorry-I-named-you-Jack story.  Don't bother with that link.  It's not straightforward, a very convoluted story.  Over-complicated.  Bad drama.  I'm here to amuse.

J

* My Booty Call

YT

Maybe she’s not American.  Maybe she travels, often abroad, and calls on short notice, after three weeks, a month, as soon as she can but delayed enough for that internal pressure to propel me to her arms like command and compulsion.  Maybe she’s an island girl, tawny skin and thick black hair, wild, dark, almond eyes, full lips I trace in tender passion with my tongue.  Perhaps I’ve known her for years, nothing anonymous for me, nothing casual, not committed but suiting our respective remote natures, wounded monogamy, indulgent physical friendship that consumes 5 or 6 or 7 hours of some one or few Saturdays of each month or season, embrace, caress, and so on, and because it is me, and her, again, again, etc, but we need not dwell on that.

You might be glad for me, to find I’m not as isolated as my partial explications may suggest.  You may feel I’ve not been utterly frank, now, or in the past.  To this I smile, slightly, sly, silent, then in a seemingly irrelevant aside mention my love of science, physics, quantum mechanics.  Particles and waves, and Schrodinger’s cat, and the byplay between virtual and virtuosity and virtue.  

I would not be proud, not pleased, with such a compromise.  It would be, almost, a desperate thing, a bargain against despair, my one seduction, the time I fell and stayed down, for years then, perhaps because this man’s body of mine was not upheld by the promises, empty as it seems, of God to sustain me in my darkest hours.  It is, perhaps, my rebellion, disobedient, deliberate, addictive, unrepentant, wrong, and I don’t care.  If I found no comfort in awaiting God’s notice, if I shattered with loss, broken, grieving, and when I could see again saw her, well, sometime she might say she’s falling in love with me, and I might say, ‘shhhh’, or ‘yes of course you are’, or make no reply but fingertips to her cheek, and this is more than God has done for me.  Lately.  

It could be though that I am always alone.  That is the impression I create.  But who is always alone?  It must be a metaphor.  As this must be as well.

J

My Secret

I never thought I'd say it.  I never would have thought I'd ever say it.  Never could I ever have supposed that this would be something that I should or even might ever even have thought about ever saying.  

One of those data points, bits of evidence my father confabulated to support his case against me.  You know, about how I'm a gay.  So.

Confession is good for the soul.

When my son was nine I was trying to have some sort of family contact, as with my father.  He had a son as well, six months older than my son -- or maybe six months younger -- haven't seen him for nearly 30 years, so I don't recall.  And my father had gotten himself involved with local little-league baseball.  He coached his son's team, made him the pitcher, and I signed my son up. So I was a sort of assistant coach, despite having zero interest in the general situation.

There were two brothers on the team, a year or so apart.  The older was, well, thick-boned, stocky -- not fat, that of course would inevitably come later -- and he was a loud-mouth.  The younger boy was slender, with glasses ... whatever the cues are, the costume, to dress the character type.  Maybe a reader -- we'll say so ... and the stage is set.  

So I watched the dynamics between these brothers, and I felt compassion for the younger boy, and being as I was, still a teacher, and more open than in subsequent years -- and at the time, being still a hugger -- and I just now recall that it was the last game of the season -- I did, I admit it, hug this younger boy. 

That was the day -- in my father's car, driving back to his house -- he initiated that heart-felt discussion about my being gay.  

That's what really did it.  He will have seen me hug this boy, and formed his conclusion.  

Isn't shame an odd emotion?  Even an accusation gets us.  Like my little pirate treasure chest, with its tell-tale jewelry.  Shame is the external face of its internal counterpart, guilt.  Shame is social, guilt is soulish.  It's an Eastern/Western thing -- Judeo-Christian with its personal and accountable and eternal individual soul -- the East with its ultimate subsuming into the non-existence of the finally foamless Brahmanic ocean of cyclic oblivion.  The East talks about losing face, the West about the corruption of the heart.  

At the time of course I was just, call it, surprised. Bushwhacked?  Ambuscadoed?  But the slow still shock with its inarticulate denial slipped, as it will, over the following days and weeks, into outrage.   And I laboriously pieced together the subtle clues of the mysterious case of the meaning of my childhood and my role in that household.

So the precise term my father would have been groping for is not, actually, gay.  It should have been pedophile.   

What boy would I rape.

As I have said, I didn't see him after that for perhaps 15 years.  

I said it was something I have always known -- a father takes the blows.  This is imprecise, obviously.  I should have been more theoretical.  That's how it should be.  A father gives the blows?  Well that's just cheap.  Usually it's a combination, and necessary, given the need for correction, about things that cannot be ignored.  

I could go on, about justice, Justice, with her blindfold and her sword.  Point is, justice has nothing to do with mercy or grace.  These must be different goddesses.  But, dad -- when you urge so heartily for manliness, remember the frailty of a child's soul.  Sometimes there should be compassion, even if it's just a sort of psychological projection.  Sometimes silence would be a wiser option.

Not every true thing needs to be spoken.  Likewise, not every fear.

J

Unspent

I used to be strong. Certain and focused and unrelenting. Willing to suffer for a sufficient purpose. 

Now I cower in my soul and just want to be left alone. I have grown unspeakably selfish. 

Once upon a time there was some turmoil in my household. A friend, a pastor, reminded me of a truth I have always known. A father takes the blows. Yes. 

Once long ago when I was a white or a blue belt, I went to roll. Didn't get enough. Nothing like enough. Seemed like it finished early. Nobody to roll with me. So I was angry and frustrated.  It's one of the times I was reminded that it's possible to be depressed even while you roll. Unbelievable.  It's not like I had all the energy in the world, but I had to go running after. Run hard. But running was not enough. None of it is. 

Have I said it before? -- that I'd be dead now if I hadn't started running? I'd have found a way. Something noble of course ... that's just how I am, so very noble. Nobility -- it is my curse. Who is there more noble than I? Not possible to exceed my nobleness, that's what I say. Saving a little flop-eared puppy from a burning building maybe. Something like that. I'd have a good excuse. God would never know. Oh Jack! -- He'd say. You tried to save that little floppy eared puppy from that burning building! Well done, good and faithful servant! And in my secret heart I would finally breathe easy. My really secret heart, that even God doesn't know about. Just you. 

Once long ago, before I was a blue belt, or even a white belt, I had thousands and thousands of dollars worth of uncashed, stale checks sitting in my desk, from years before that. What the hell was my problem. 

 J

Imaginary Conversations, update

Precisely 12 years ago, I posted this:

----- 

Man I hate the holidays. All these slimy lowlifes crawl out of their holes and want to have family get-togethers. Leave me the fuck alone. A hideous tragedy of bad luck put me into that madhouse when I had no choice. Involuntary commitment. Please, sir, may I have a choice now?

• Y'see, when words come out of your mouth, that's how people know what you think.

• No, dumbass, I'm not the one who tells you what you have to do to make it right. You need to figure it out. Fucking clueless retard.

• Is there anything that would make it better? Yes, I could travel back in time and beat you to death with a brick in your crib.

• Do not ever ever ever try to contact me again in any way. If you do, the first thing out of your mouth had better be an abject and perfect apology. Or I will burn your house to the ground.

• So let me get this straight. Explain it to me. Is it a dick up my ass that I like, or in my mouth? Or my dick in some guy's ass and/or mouth? Or both? Since you understand my love affair with shit so well, please explain myself to me.

Hate speech? I call it therapy.

Women women women. That is to say, sex. I don't believe I've ever confided my tastes to these pages. Is it a secret? I think it may be. It just seems like a vulnerability, letting anyone know what I like. I mentioned once that Queen Latifah was a handsome woman, and that provoked gales of laughter. No, Big Girls are not to my taste. (They tend to like me though.) There is a phenotype or two that I prefer, but always tending toward athletic. That's as much as I think I'll let you know. Something to do with honesty. Some emotions I'm open about. Rage. Some, desire, are private, in their details. Twisted, I know. All the more reason to judge and reject me.

The idea of friendship, trust, love, all bound up in each other -- very hard for me to come to terms with. I think people wonder about me. I think I'm someone for whom there is no mate.

So, I like athletic women of a certain type, and guys' dicks in my mouth, and assholes.

-----

Thus, 12 years ago.  I will have been thinking about certain details alluded to in the post just previous to this one, two weeks past.  I've been trolling through this blog, rediscovering who I have been and how I have remained exactly the same.  Maybe it's loyalty?  I won't, for this once, dwell on having been and remaining stuck.  I'm stretching and doing qi gong, and feeling a bit better.  The above was written a couple of years prior to my life-altering pain issue.  But the psychic life is about the same.  As I will have said, so many times -- what a waste.  

My father is dead now, and exactly as I predicted.  Those fragments of conversations above would have been my rage fantasies about him.  Very sick indeed. What can I say. 

Well, I suppose I answered that sort-of question, 'what can I say', in a post from 13 years ago:

---

Ta det med ro.  A great old Norwegian idiom. Apparently my grandfather used it a lot. He was a depot master in Montana -- ran the train station. Ranchers and farmers would try to bribe him with thousands of dollars, so that they could get 4 boxcars instead of only 3 to move their grain come harvest time. He would not yield. Earned $1.85 an hour, and picked rocks on the weekends. Lived in relative poverty, with five kids, four daughters and my father in the middle. A bad marriage. Worked as a child from age nine to support his abandoned mother and three siblings. That would have been 1907. The pressure must have been overwhelming. He would not bend. He was proud of being Norwegian, for some reason. Surrounded by Germans and Poles. Made the kids say their prayers in the old language. Although he was born here.

Ta det med ro -- take it with ease. What a beautiful phrase. How wise. Was my grandfather wise? He lived into his nineties and died because he just stopped eating. I remember him as an old man, bald, not large but hard. He was probably reminding himself, the way we need to do, about how to stay alive. Take it with ease. Not take it easy, mind you. My grandfather did not take it easy. I picked rocks as a kid. Because they made me. My grandfather did it because he needed the money -- four daughters, a son and a nagging wife. This was in the 1930s, so there's that. There is a difference, more felt than spoken, between the two, with ease and easy.

I drove my father to some medical thing this morning, to one of his genius doctors. My father is a very strange man. He talked about a cousin of mine, again, dead now, a genius, law school at an early age, prosecutor in Dade County Florida. "He probably had an IQ 50 points higher than average." My IQ is higher than that. He must know that. I know it because it was in my school records. It was surprising. In those days they still measured IQs in schools. They must have talked to my father after they tested me. My brother said once, "Like, you're some kind of genius, right?" It was one of the few human things he ever said to me. It must have been a family rumor. Now boys, Jackie has a genius IQ, but nobody is ever to talk about it, and don't be jealous. "Well, I tested pretty well, they seem to think." So all this constant harping about genius, from my father, yet he is incapable of listening to me. Makes me doubt the sincerity of his admiration for genius.

He got to badmouthing that same brother, his choice of a bride. "All these women do is hunt for men online all day long -- they're basically prostitutes. Then they catch one and get pregnant and get alimony." He actually said something like this to my brother. "I tried to warn him after he got married." I just had to say it: "That is really, really bad advice. Good advice isn't just true -- you have to say it right. You married a slut and you're just a sucker -- not such a good thing to say. What man would stand by and have his wife slandered?" But my father wasn't listening. "People just don't like to take advice," he said. No indeed, they do not.

We're all driven. Even the ones who take it easy. It takes resolve to sit and watch TV all day long. The determination to waste time shouldn't be downgraded, just because it's passive. Self destruction takes a lot of energy -- or the energy is used to suppress who-knows-what horrors. That's why there's so little left to actually get things done.

I do love the weather in this time of year. It's just now feeling autumnal. Pretty good workout last night. Feel fine today. Isn't it odd, how excellence is so important? With me it's always been intellectual and to a lesser degree physical excellence. Jealous for my character and my integrity, profoundly untrusting but unwavering in my loyalty once I give it. I sound like a pretty great guy, don't I. There are, sadly, plenty of rocks left in the field that need to be picked. There's a part of my soul where I'm just watching TV.

I asked my father if it was an old-time saying, ta det med ro, from a hundred and thirty years ago, that got remembered in the US but had fallen into obscurity in the hustle and bustle of Oslo. Nope, he said, they still use it.

My father said about how he visited his father's grave, 15 years ago. He admitted to tearing up. I did not say that the only good that tears can do is to wash us from the inside. One of the best things I did as a father was to just keep my mouth shut, sometimes. Kids should be allowed to make mistakes without being corrected. Correct yourself. Take it with ease.

--

What can I say, then?  Sometimes the best thing you can do is just keep your mouth shut.  With people you love but who can't hear.  I reposted that first one because of the rage.  I don't remember writing it.  But it would have been a near-transcript of actual outloud solitary ranting I will have done.  Crazy?  That is the reason for this blog.  No one has to hear, but I need to speak.  As it were, and ignoring the contradictions.  

But here's another post, again from 15 years ago, earlier.  Seems like a more artful way to leave this.  

---

 What the Sirens Sing

You will have seen my anger, implicit and, less often, expressed. You’ve seen hatred, very rarely. But no, never rage, I think. Well, I’m a pretty self-contained guy. But we’re the dangerous ones, eh? He seemed like such a pleasant fellow. Can’t imagine how he could have killed all those people, and so viciously. So I ran until I found jiu jitsu, then I did that. In 15 months I took two days off. That’s just stupid. It wasn’t even good for my training. But it wasn’t about the training.

Ah well. You’ll have noticed that I use different voices in these little efforts here. It’s not planned. I just start. Just singing in harmony with myself.

Here’s what it is to be human: something bad happens, and we get angry about it. Since we can’t have justice, we become angry with God. He’s big enough to take it, but that doesn’t do us any good. So when we get the chance, we grab hold of him and kill him. What, it didn’t happen? Why do you think people kill babies? I bet that some of them, Jews and Romans, knew who they had, and killed him anyway, Jesus. You think that you wouldn’t. But you would. Almost everyone dies damned. If I could get my hands on God, and get away with it, it wouldn’t be pretty. Unfortunately, that would be Jesus, and he doesn’t deserve it. Awkward.

I’m just talking. When faced with it, there is no getting away with it. There are people that I can’t think about -- or rather, that I simply do not think about, because there’s only one thing for me to think, and it would just make me crazy. Please, keep your advice to yourself. Such is the nature of addiction. And you don’t know these people anyway.

Once I talked to my son when he was far far away in a land of war and madness, and he was saying how he’d like to be able to be vegetarian, but it just was not possible. He said he’d get so hungry but didn’t want to eat all that fried grease. So he got hungry, then ate the fried grease. I told him he could sprout like we used to have to do back in the seventies. So he ordered a kit for that online. My point is that I said, “Yep, food and sex, the two appetites.” And he gave the instant agreement that comes at hearing a true thing you never noticed before.

Odysseus lashed himself to the ship mast so that he could hear the sirens’ song. It drove him mad for a time, with some appetite, but he could not jump overboard to swim to them. Save for his bonds he would have died. There is no swimming to sirens, and surviving.

A film project videoed the Golden Gate Bridge for a year. Caught thirty people jumping. Saved six. Twenty percent survival rate. Sounds about right. One fellow changed his mind just after he launched. Adjusted his angle and survived. In the icy water he tried to cry out for help. He could only gasp. He felt something brushing his legs. Great, I survived just to be eaten alive by sharks. But it was a seal, and only its circling kept him afloat.

The director got the idea for the film when he saw the planes crash into the Towers. People jumped rather than burn. Well? Some people leap to the sirens. Some stay and face the inferno.

There are true things that we don’t dare admit. Things about hatred. Things about love. What a horrible world, where appetites are poisonous and innocence is mocked. Sometimes we pass through fire. Sometimes we are consumed by it. Sometimes we are saved from the water. Sometimes we are saved in the water. Sometimes it swallows us whole, or in pieces. What choice, and what power do we have? We are what our natures make us.

Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Freedom is being able to dance like no one is watching. I don’t dance at all. But this is me, singing.

---

And that's where I'll end it, this stroll through the overgrowth.  I started with the rage that I had not previously shown.  It deserves instant agreement.  Frankly, I don't know anymore that I'll be fine.  I was having a conversation that touched on depression, some weeks ago.  I said that mine was four percent away from severe, which is institutionalizable, which is a real word.  He asked if I thought about suicide.  In the silence that followed, he said, "I don't mean that you have a plan ..." and went on from there.  

To respond to the question, no, I don't have a plan.  I have a son.

J

On Being a Faggot

Close to four years since my father died.  On his bedroom floor, alone, in pain, full of fear and regret.  Those words cling together.  It could have been no other way.  When I was young, a strange teenager, I identified as a poet (pronouns I and me) -- especially after I recognized that poems don't have to rhyme.  That's a dangerous discovery, for obvious reasons. Not everything that doesn't rhyme is poetry.  I expect it's completely lost now, but I do recall the last line of something I wrote, of him.  Don't even remember the title.  I was sixteen -- a most difficult age -- and it was, "So die alone, you who did not want, and did not need, our love."  When I used first person plural, it always stood for the singular.  When we were young.  

One of the most destructive things my father did was what my older siblings called the lectures.  I, being six or eight, would not have had that word, lectures.  Every few months or seasons he would arrange us on the living room couch and stand or sit and go on and on for what, truly, must have been hours.  How unhappy he was.  What a failure he was.  How horrific his childhood was.  Details and stories.  Always the same ones, across the years.  And always what I later understood to be the curse.  His parents had done it to him, he was doing it to us, and we would do it to our children.  Do what?  Some sort of ruination.  He wasn't specific.  As I recall.  

One of the stories was about Queenie, his pony.  He grew up in small-town Montana, in the '30s and '40s.  So no electricity, no paved roads, no indoor plumbing.  Probably a hand pump in the kitchen, and certainly an outhouse out back.  He always mentioned Queenie, how much he loved that horse.  And the story always ended with how the town boys had killed her, stoned her to death.  Tears.  "They were jealous."  

Years and years later the middle brother, who had been a sadistic monster as a child -- but evolved into a sloppy parasitical self-pitying sentimentalist -- added a detail I had never heard.  Before the town boys killed Queenie, they raped her.  I am pleased that my father had the decency to hold back that detail from his lectures. I was after all very young.  And sex was never a topic for discussion, from adult to child in that family.  But maybe he did include it, bestiality, and I was just too young to process and therefore to remember it.  The middle brother called the town of the town boys, 'the town from hell.'  Butte, a wide-open hard-drinking mining town.  That explains a lot.  It was Irish boys, attacking the Norwegian.

After the lectures we were excused and I would go down the stairs to my room.  I was two stories below the rest of them, in what had been the servants' quarters.  It was a Hollywood Hills Spanish castle, built in the late '20s by a silent movie star -- Bebe Daniels, a doe-eyed flapper.  A few years later Clark Gable lived there.  Seventy-two steps from street to front door.  Not practical, especially later, for an old man in his pain-filled and solitary 80s.  

I had been upstairs too, sharing -- no, "sharing" a room with the middle sibling.  Bunk beds, and he would spit down on me.  I look back now and realize I should have dropped a large potted plant two stories down onto his head.  That's the victim child speaking, not the adult.  But that child has a right to be heard.  Heart.

Dismissed, I walked down the dark narrow stairs, silent, barely breathing, to sit at my desk doing nothing.  I felt nothing at all.  Nothing nothing nothing.  I must have been 8 or 9 by then -- I don't remember when the move downstairs happened.  I am convinced that's the reason I'm alive, or at least as sane as I am.  

I did have the self-awareness to know how completely crazy I was feeling, or not feeling.  Internal screaming.  I absolutely knew that I should have been crying, inconsolably, or at best unconsoled.  I clearly remember thinking that I should cry, to let it out, and if I didn't, it would harm me, later.  But I was fierce with the cold self-hatred that does not care about future damage. I wanted future pain.  I was not going to feel it in the moment.  Of course I was wrong, but that's what neurosis is -- an adaptive behavior that outlives the situation -- a compromising solution that outlasts the specific problem.  

After my father died, the eldest, thieving sibling revealed that aspect of his character, and at the same time I became aware of the mental illness and flatly betraying character of my nice kind generous mother.  My theory now is that my father had appropriated the firstborn, into whom his hopes and demands were poured.  You know, love.  The middle one was claimed by my mother, and it became a truly sick codependency.  She is the reason that one was such a monster.  Spoiled, completely completely out of control.  

Then I came along, unwanted of course, three and four years later.  And poor little Jackie, who did not belong to anyone.  It was a middle-class household, so I was provided for, and the forms were nominally observed.  But I somehow learned to never ask for anything.  "It's okay, I don't want anything."  Want or need. "Oh that Jackie, such a little philosopher, so wise.  He has the IQ of a genius, you know."  That, plus happiness...

Blindness, then, is a survival mechanism, like a cave salamander, where the resources needed to preserve sight might make the difference between surviving and starving.  It's understandable that I didn't figure it out until this late age, that I was the least-favorite, the unfavorite child.  It was frankly unthinkable, given that I was the cute one, the smart one, the good one.  The little one.  It's just crazy.  But there it is.  

So I could never figure out why my father seemed to actively dislike me.  To repeat myself from not many posts ago, he actually said it, outloud, a number of times across the years.  When I was a teenager, and in my 20s, and 30s.  "I have to love you, because you're my son.  But I don't have to like you."  I was baffled.  

One Christmas we all three got little wooden boxes, for cufflinks and change, etc. 

And that summer I went looking for junk jewelry, strings of beads and bangles and so on.  I had the image in my mind of a Long John Silver treasure, jewels spilling out like Pirates of the Caribbean. 

 

A very kid thing.  One day my father came into my room in a rage.  Absolutely furious.  It seemed like hatred.  Why do you have these beads.  I don't even have words to describe it, but through my tears I attempted to explain about a treasure chest.  I suppose at the time I saw how silly it was, this childish pretending.  I intuit that I was ashamed.  I fill in the blanks of memory by supposing my father pulled back slightly, maybe even, well, not chastened, but mollified, his wrath appeased somehow by the tininess of the little boy in front of him. I don't know.  That's the most I can remember. 

Every summer we'd take the train -- pre Amtrak -- to the maternal grandparents' farm in North Dakota.  Dad stayed home.  There was what we called the Bunkhouse -- a cleaned out chicken coop with some furniture.  There were trunks of old clothes, and being kids we went through them.  I put on a dress and held a flower to my cheek and my mom took a picture.  It was hilarious.  Everyone laughed.  Some months later my father saw the picture and was absolutely enraged.  Very violently angry.  Very verbally abusive.  Dude was totally VVA.  I explained, between my sobs, that it was a joke.  I was completely confused.  

Well it should be obvious.  My father thought I was gay.  You know, because I listened to classical music, and read books, and didn't care about sportsball.  And whatever else he used as evidence, that I haven't thought of.  I was little and cute and had white hair.  I wore jewelry and dressed like a girl.  

Years later, as I have previously written, he argued with me, that I was gay.  I took the I'm not gay side of the debate.  After that discussion, I didn't see him for quite a few years.  It made me put together some of the details I've just related.  Recolored my whole childhood, even darker.  I really don't think there was anything feminine about me.  Now I have a hard ascetic face, like an angry Jesus with sad eyes, but I was a cute kid.  Was that my crime?  Being a cute little white-haired boy who tried to be funny?

My father talked about the niggers, and the jews, and faggots.  My siblings used constantly hateful language.  Kill you, faggot.  Hate you, faggot.  Bash your head in, faggot.  Albino.  Queerbait.  Daily and hourly and by the minute.  I attempted to defend myself as best I could, physically and verbally.  I may have a gift for invective, but I don't like it.  I had no idea at all what a faggot was.  I don't think I really understood what hatred was, covered though I was by its bukkake spray.  I understand, now.

(I just looked it up, to make sure about what bukkake is, and how to spell it.  What a world.  And -- just to be thorough, because you know but don't quite know –– queerbait: "Any male who attracts a considerable amount of gay lust wittingly or unwittingly.  The new boy on the cell block.  An unsuspecting alterboy."  This, to and about a little brother.  Sick hateful pervert scum.  This has made me angry.)

I don't know how unusual these stories are.  Everyone has stories.  A distinguisher with mine may be that it never stopped, and there was no protection and no safe place, other than solitude.  But when those teenagers where busy raping and killing Queenie, well, is that really what they did, or all that they did? Why stop at fucking a horse?  I think they raped my father.  A good-looking 14 year old boy, held down, turned over, flat or bent over something, maybe the body of a dead or dying pony. Fucked by four or five or more older boys, and maybe some classmates. 

Well, that would explain it, this hatred of sodomites.  This madness.  This cursing.  A secret he never could have told.  Silent, hardly breathing.  Able to express rage, though.  Feeling. 

So I knew the Queenie story, and I'd thought that he might have been raped as well.  But it was only yesterday that I put that together with his, well, it was a sort of hatred toward me.  

One of those older boys, I now choose to believe -- the ringleader, maybe -- had white hair.  

Not all Irish, then.

I don't expect he asked it, about me, but it was unspoken only because he hadn't put it together: If I was a faggot, what boy would I rape? 

All my rage, as I have said, toward my father died with him.  For not feeling or showing love toward him, I have guilt and regret.  In his solitary old age he felt the same way, I am certain.

J

What We Owe

A woman's eggs are in her forming-ovaries when she is a fetus. Her eggs start out inside her mother's womb.  Grandma's nutrition is what built the grandchild's egg.  A dad's sperm is practically instant.  But the Talmud recognizes a father's lasting contribution: When you teach your son, you teach your son's son.

There's a supposed Chinese proverb -- I wouldn't know, being illiterate in Chinese: Giving your son a skill is better than giving him a thousand pieces of gold.  I do know, having read Plutarch, that Solon "made a law that no son should be obliged to relieve a father who had not bred him up to any calling."

 

My son was in town last week to take care of biz and to visit, etc. We took a day to empty out a storage unit full to the brim with very heavy stuff. Transferred it into my garage -- pretty full but a nice fit. Much much much easier to unload than to load. I took the job of stooping in the truck and sliding things to the edge for the offload. Not easy on the lower back -- like hoeing cabbages. 

My son suggested we switch places, and I said, "No. Your back is more important than mine." You know, just a throw-away dad line.    

A few minutes ago he texted me this: 

"Saw this and made me think of your comment."  I hadn't meant for it to be remembered.  

I texted back, "That's very true.  Except the heart is the first thing we give.   :-)"

It's not a quote from Shakespeare -- I've read all of Shakespeare quite a few times, and I would have noticed this; it's a Yiddish proverb: When a father gives to his son, both laugh.  When a son gives to his father, both cry. 

 J

April First

My peanuts. 

J

Dear Will Smith --

When Jada Pinkett Smith washes her face, how does she know where to stop? 

Can Jada Pinkett Smith see Aunty Em whenever she wants? Poppies ... poppies. 

How many Jada Pinkett Smiths does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

What's the difference between Jada Pinkett Smith and a rotisserie oven?

Sir, you took a bland joke about a fashion choice, and intensified it to make your wife an eternal punchline. Like the Dixie Chicks. Like Latoya Jackson. Like Monica Lewinsky. Well, no -- Jada Pinkett Smith will be a slapline. Giddit?  

It is appropriate and manly for a husband to defend his wife. Clearly, your wife's feelings were hurt -- her fashion choice involved a health element. She did not expect to be singled out as an object of humor -- only of glamor. But you could have defended her with a shout from your seat -- "Not cool, Chris", or somesuch; this would have been the first level of aggression -- verbal. You could have rushed the stage as you did, and whispered an admonition into his ear; a dramatic and perhaps riveting gesture (the second level, of physical intimidation). You could have taken the mike, if there was one, and made a speech about gentlemanly deportment.  You could have taken him by the lapel (third level, physical contact). You chose assault. "Bitchslap" in this case refers to the slapper.

Reportedly you have an "open" marriage. A public stance of chivalry, then, hangs limp. You have further soiled our already depraved culture. Assault against free speech has been further legitimized, to the already triggered-happy, cry-bully stormfront of the re-educational elite. The cowards and moral idiots attending the gala did not have the decency to boo you out of the auditorium. 

If it weren't Chris Rock, but The Rock, Dwayne Johnson who made the joke, you would have made no assault.  So it's a tradeoff: on the one hand, the left, you are a bully -- the worst thing it's possible to be; on the other hand, also the left, you are a coward -- the best and mandatory thing to be, of those who identify as binary.

Your penance is to donate the entirety of your earnings from your film to one or more charities of Chris Rock's choosing. I doubt that you have the emotional maturity to make a truly sincere, non-press-agent authored, apology. I hope I'm wrong about that. 

But the most important thing.  Chris Rock was the perfect professional.  He is exemplary.

J

Notes to my grandchild(ren), as yet unconceived

Every generation starts out not even knowing our right hand from our left.  We don't know how to speak.  We don't have teeth.  We have to learn how to eat.  Old people have the advantage of perspective, which if appreciated, like a grand vista overlooking a vast expanse, can be edifying.  We might identify the trends and find a pattern -- the repeated errors and learn their remedies or how to avoid them.  We might grow wise.  But none of us starts out that way.  We're born knowing nothing at all.  

I was quite an arrogant youth.  I wouldn't have agreed about that, but it's true.  I deduced it, correctly: it comes from "arrogate" -- to claim, without justification.  Arrogance has nothing to do with confidence, aside from a superficial likeness.  Confidence is content to accept disagreement.  Arrogance has to be seen to be right -- it is insecure, and fragile.  Confidence accepts, arrogance argues.  One is gracious, the other is tribal.  

That's a distinction I would have profited from knowing.  Someone should have told me.  

My father meant well, but he was crippled.  He thought somehow that forbidding emotions would transform them into happiness and competence.  Suppression however is not actually any kind of disciple at all.  By lecturing about what a man should be, he thought he was teaching some kind of success.  He did not mean the harm he did to us.  His intentions were undermined by narcissism -- immaturity and unhealed wounds.  His theories about fatherhood were never corrected by their invalidation.  Thus, not theories at all, open to refinement -- rather, ideology and dogma.  I hadn't really thought about it, but I grew up in a cult.  

I raised your father with that in mind.  In contrast, I liked my little boy.  I enjoyed him, and respected him.  I let him know this, first because it was true, and also because such things need to be shown.  Hugs, and kisses, and tickles -- physical stuff, because touch is our first human experience -- fetal skin against uterine walls.  Love is not a drug, not a medicine -- these are always poisons, hopefully healing.  Love is a nutrient.  

I've allowed your father, in recent years as I write this, to see much more of how damaged I am as a man.  He didn't know.  But he's in his thirties now, late thirties, and successful, and secure, and even though it will be a burden on him, there is such a large opportunity for him to grow, emotionally and in his insight into a deeper wisdom.  I have been willing to -- well, personally it feels like I've devalued, almost degraded myself -- but, reveal myself, as crippled and neurotic, fearful, unsuccessful -- futile and ashamed.  A harsh legacy, but there was never deceit -- just appropriate truth, the revelation of which evolves. 

Part of my reevaluation of my own fathering, of your father, is where I could have been better.  I've never been shy about proclaiming how awesome I was as a dad.  It was a combination of learning from my father's mistakes, and doing the opposite -- as, for example, actually liking my son -- and also of simply being intuitive and observant -- of not being theoretical at the expense of, oh, reality.  But I didn't have exceptional insight about puberty.  That went well because of the solid childhood he had.  But, while I gave him his teenage space, appropriately, there was something missing.  I know this, because of his own teenage arrogance.  Maybe it's an inevitable stage.  But I could have made the transition out of it easier, somehow.  I know there must be a way to do this.  I just didn't know.  

Fortunately, some of the hard lessons the Army taught him dealt with this. The outcome was fortunate.  The lessons were hard.  Why did it have to come to that? So hard?  That's on me.  But I did my best. As my own father did -- his best.  We only know what we learn, and we find our lessons where we may.  In savage and depriving childhoods, or in the silence of unrecognized ignorance.  Our response, in every case, is of love, or bitterness.  

So you, a grandchild who may never be born, well, that's how it always is -- each generation is produced and turned loose with hardly any guidance at all -- in this case, because there was a message but no one there to hear.  Or maybe I won't live to know you -- I may be just a name, an important if distant influence upon your life.  If I do know you, I do love you with all the capacity of my heart.  If I do not know you, I would have loved you that much.  

Papa

The Unified State of America

You know the line, "Ain't nobody here but us chickens"?  A hipster used it, and I asked if he knew the joke.  He did not.  My dad told it in the 60s, but it's from minstrel-show days, as far back as the 1830s.  Someone was stealing a Southern farmer's chickens, and one night he hears a big commotion in the coop.  Gets his shotgun, goes out and says, "Come on out or I'll blast you."  Silence.  Says it again, and again.  Maybe he shoots into the air.  And from inside the coop, in Amos and Andy dialect, "Ain't nobody here but us chickens, boss!"  A racial joke -- the thief being very stupid.  

Bill Cosby said of the TV show, Amos and Andy, "It was very funny.  And we knew we had to get it off the air."  It wasn't racist, in my opinion, at all.  But as with all dialect and ethnic humor, it exploited stereotypes.  That of course is what very much humor does, but this was and remains a sensitive topic, so the broad social interests were not to be ignored.  Along my ongoing journey toward maturity, I am coming to understand that not everything that can be said, even if true, needs to be said.  

Remember the line, "What you mean 'we', white man."  I looked it up, via the convenience of the Internet.  A Bill Cosby joke.  The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by redskins.  "Well Tonto, looks like we're done for."  "What you mean 'we', white man?"  Again, a racial joke, the humor of which hangs on the presumption and rejection of subservient identification.  

You understand and approve the conditions governing your presence in this State.  You must submit to all inspections of physical, emotional and verbal hygiene.  You must at all times carry on your person proof of responsible social and medical conformity -- your Cards, or in your device. You must follow all posted and non-posted regulations. You will contemn all proscribed epithets and attitudes.  Failure to comply will result in loss of employment, reputation, courtesy, and permission to participate in any public gathering of more than three subjects.  You will conform.  You will obey.  

Remember that old line?  Went something like, "Live free or die."  Remember that joke? -- don't quite recall it, but the punchline was, "give me liberty, or give me death."  Well, that's the kind of thoughtless humor we just don't accept anymore.  Its time has passed.  Inappropriate for our frankly superior sensibilities.  Not cool.  Anyway, it's 'live free and die'.  It's 'give me liberty and death'.

J

*MoveOn dot MeToo

YT

They're too young to remember it, mostly.  Or in fading early middle age, old people puberty, decline combined with self-righteousness.  They've always been self-righteous, entitled, empowered, esteemed.  Proud heirs to the participation trophy, the triumph of will, ascendant upon the mountain of the universe -- vast in the equality of poppies, their vaginas are powerful, their penises a handy leash.  The decline was from birth, born into twilight, and hell is murky.  

The Left wanted us to move along, forget about it, that clinton thing.  Get over it.  Move on.  So what if the male president groped a boob or grabbed a mons pubis.  Trump, clinton -- well it mattered with Trump, but that was different.  Vulgarian.  Cigars, blue dresses, semen stains, flowers, troopers. Who can remember.  Class. 

Like a glimpse of stocking.  Something shocking, from a long-ago generation.  Passé. We have evolved.  This is what maturity looks like.  Virtue signals and cancel culture.  Signal cancels -- a failure to communicate.  What you are allowed to do, say, think, feel.  

Best watch yourself.  

It's never been okay.  And if women finally get the courtesy they were, several generations ago, nominally due -- holding a door open, standing when she enters -- well such formalities didn't prevent scum from abusing the power of position.  

And abortionism had its price.  Women stopped being female.  They are men with breasts, as men are women with back hair.  What they are pleased to call 'gender' is all about, and nothing but, bulges.  Everything is entirely superficial and phenomenological.  Shave down an adams apple, remove breast tissue -- presto change-o.  Déclassé.  

It's an idea I may go into, sometime.  But transgenderism is an anti-abortion argument.  There is a spirit, they suppose, male or female, in the wrong body.  So, there is a spirit in a body.  A human spirit, in a human body. Thus, abortion is homicide.  

Don't blame me.  My position is consistent.  I've changed in hardly anything.  There is no longer an America -- that was hard to accept.  My brazen serpent, Nehushtan, a useful thing that became an idol.  Nun sheath -- ashen hunt.  Now it's not even useful, america.  Nothing but the richest slave.  A fun fact known from ancient Rome (and everywhere else): slaves make the cruelest masters.  It's all they know.

What is the first human emotion?  You'd think hunger, but that's just biology.  Hot or cold or itchy, or boredom, the same.  The first human emotion is the need for connection.  Intimacy.  It's why babies stare.  They look at everything.  They stare at mommy.  As I have said, it is the nature of a personality to want to be known -- to reveal itself.  Human life is about contact.  Sartre is mistranslated: hell is [needing] other people.

This explains it all.  

Move On.  Me Too.  They're almost anagrams.  Move onto me.  Like OJ, there's just too much love.  

J

Brother Uncle Son

                                                        Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, 

                                                        Because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass. 

                                                        Cease from anger, and forsake wrath; 

                                                        Do not fret -- it only causes harm.

                                                                                                                                -- Ps 37:7-8 

 

After my father died, I found that I was completely done with the rage I had felt over his failures as a father.  Whatever the real reason, the reason I accept is that there's nothing I can do to change the past.  That pathetic, ultimately old man, rejected and abandoned in his monstrosity of a house, who finally died, alone on the floor of his bedroom, his last moments consumed with regret and futility and despair. 

No one in his family could tolerate him.  I couldn't stand to visit him, alone.  I always took my son, when he came to visit.  Triangulation, so I wouldn't be trapped alone with him and his judgments and blindness, his desperation and stuckness.  The only virtue in any of this is that my father was proud of my son -- so, a vindication.

 I've never made a secret about what a nightmare my birth-family was.  One of the ways I'm a fool is that I think I have to say what I think.  I stupidly think that's integrity.  It's adolescent -- the immaturity of improperly understood rule-keeping.  Honesty matters, but other people matter at least as much.  I doubt I will ever master that idea.  

Thinking about all this for the past few years -- trying to find my way out of the pit I was thrown into as an infant -- I have come to understand something that very much surprised me.  I was the least-favorite child.  This seems astounding.  I was the cute one. I wanted to be good.  I was little, and should have been protected.  None of that mattered.  Brenn, the narcissist crybaby, was my father's favorite.  It must be because he was the firstborn.  Kip was my mother's favorite -- as worthless, violent, and hateful as he was, he got every favor from her.  In that cultish family, I was the child sacrifice.  

I have always been betrayed.  Not self-pity -- but it's the reason I cannot trust.  My mother sacrificed me.  My father had no time for me.  He told me a number of times across the years, starting when I was a teenager, that he didn't like me.  He told me with those very words. "I have to love you, because you're my son.  But I don't have to like you."  That's the kind of stupid honesty I've been guilty of.  Because it was true, he thought it should be said.  Damaging to the spirit and to the relationship.  Unwise.  

Apparently from very early, my father had decided I was homosexual.  I had to figure that out.  Well, no -- eventually, in my thirties, he actually argued with me about it.  He took the "you are gay" side.  You know, because I listened to classical music and read books.  And other things he did not say but I put together ... one of them, truly vicious.

Nothing was left for me -- just middle-class duty on the positive side, and otherwise neglect and abuse.  I was an afterthought.  This is not a reason I pity myself.  By the time I was able to notice this, I was so completely alienated and isolated that it was too late.  It's only 50 years later, give or take, that I even realized it.  I pity myself because of the wasted time and potential.  Locusts have eaten the years -- a family of locusts.  That's true, but it's on me, the way addiction is on the addict.  

I've had two important ideas.  The first, I had not long after it was clear about Brenn's lies and cowardice and theft.   It's that he, and incidentally my other brother, would have to be forgiven.  It's the only way I can make up to my father for the not-good son I was.  Nothing I can do, to show him love now.  Only to love the worthless, selfish, abusing brothers of my childhood.  Well, maybe love is too much to ask -- love your rapists, love the people who used you like toilet paper.  But forgive, if there's a meaningful difference.  

The other idea is that both of them, but mostly the most-betraying brother, Brenn, Brenn Ko -- to me they were like the brothers of Joseph, in the Bible.  His brothers dropped him into a pit, to kill him, but ended up selling him into slavery.  They meant it for evil, because of jealousy and spite.  And Joseph suffered, but ultimately he prospered.  It's a nice story.  The lesson is that the evil, the envy and hatred of his brothers worked finally to a good purpose.  

Trapped in that crazy, frankly wicked family, I didn't understand.  I thought abuse was the order of things.  I didn't stop to wonder why my brothers were such scum.  To say they were jealous seems inadequate -- it's too cheap an answer.  I was just a white-haired little kid, in no way a favorite in that family.  I suppose it was that I was at the bottom of the pecking order -- the easy victim.  So, the convenience of corrupt human nature. 

Almost three years ago now, while Brenn was playing his waiting game, plotting his theft and flight, I made assurances to various family members that I thought he had integrity.  I remember saying he was not a thief. Obviously I was wrong. Years before I had pointed out to him a lack of integrity in his behavior, and he was very offended.   Time has proven that observation to be right.  

I had a conversation with him shortly after my father died, and he went on about how Kip's family, "the H's", were all greedy.  I corrected him, that they were ungrateful.  "No, greedy."  Regardless, Brenn is greedy.  I had not put that together.  

Hypocrisy, then, and a deep ignorance of self.

That's how Brenn justified cheating Kip.  He justified cheating his nephews and niece because he was greedy.  He justified cheating me because he manufactured an excuse that I was dishonest -- I was plotting, stupidly, to steal mom's house -- so Brenn imagined he could and should steal dad's house. I had to put that together.  So he is sleazy and shameful -- but there it is.  It's not stupidity and it's not craftiness.  It's willful evil.  

At that same conversation, Brenn was saying that the idea of giving my father's grandkids an inheritance was "ridiculous."  His reasoning was not sound -- dad was senile, and our grandfather had not left anything to the grandkids -- but I did not argue.  First, because I no longer like to argue, and second because I recognized a malevolent situation.  

The thing I am ashamed of, and philosophical about, is that I did the calculation.  Three sons, instead of  three sons and four grandkids -- my "share" would be about equal either way, so my own son was taken care of -- and what I would allot to my mother.  In other words, I wasn't looking out for my other brother's kids.  My instant calculation was that Kip had drained his mother's resources for so long, for so much, that it more than equaled out.  (I had planned on my mother's assets -- her house -- going to the grandkids -- but that's another story, possibly uglier.)  No harm done, except in the end to my self respect. 

All of us ended up cheated. None of us deserved to be robbed, but none of us deserved an inheritance -- least of all the betrayer. I'm philosophical about it, because none of us deserve anything, for all that our father wanted, ultimately, to be a blessing to us.  

That's Brenn's biggest betrayal.  He is of course a coward.  He ran away, and would never dare meet any of his family again.  Given the magnitude of his crime, fear is appropriate.  He is a thief, taking and keeping what is not his.  He is a betrayer, of his mother, his brothers, his nephews and niece -- most, of his father, who trusted him.  

His infantile sentimentality, his blackmail and threats, his need to control -- in his fifties he married a teenager -- in part that's a response to the harm my father did to him.  That he chose to harm others rather than examine himself -- well, my response to the abuse was to lose my ability to trust.  Of these two psychopathies, I'd take mine.  I've been hated, but only a few times with just cause.  

There is nothing to say against his wife.  She was just a little teenager who took the chance she was given -- get to live with money in America. Maybe she was complicit in the theft, but her debt would be to common decency, not to in-laws she met only a few times. Maybe she deserves what she got, and will never understand the cost. 

When you're that much given over to depravity -- what does it take to be redeemed from it?  Probably as much of a miracle as it would take for me to learn how to trust.  Like Kip -- how to repay what he owes?  So many cripples.  

And if Brenn Ko were not a thief?  And we got and divided the million dollars that he stole? Honestly, I have to suppose it would not be a blessing.  The work that I have yet to do, I would neglect.  The growth that this continuing betrayal has demanded would not have been spurred.  The self-examination would have remained superficial, and my self-righteousness would degenerate into delusion.  We've been talking about how that happens.

It must be obvious that I could say many crushing truths about my brother Brenn -- liar, pervert -- so true and so ugly that his response could be only hatred, more hatred.  I have nothing to fear from him.  He has done all the evil to most of his family that he can.  He is a bad son, and has only the power to further harm his mother, but if he does, he will die of pancreatic cancer within not many months.  Other than that, I don't know what deserved anguish is coming his way.   No, actually I do -- there will be a sexual element to it.

I have said it only to two people, but it is the explanation, other than his personal corruption: Brenn has a demon.  I saw it, years ago.  It's not possession -- affiliation.  He delved into that cheap sort of thing -- the fantasy of controlling others.  This is why hating him would be futile, as well as ungodly.  It would add to the evil his demon wants to flourish.  His demon loves to do harm, and if it cannot harm us, it will turn, even more, upon him. 

He will not believe he is evil because he thinks being sentimental is the same as being good.

It has to count for something, this idea of 'brother'.  It's always only meant bitterness to me. We can let hatred, resentment, obsession, unforgiveness, rule us.  The time has not arrived, but I have to trust that it will, when I can say in my heart, with honesty, that my abusive brothers have been forgiven. 

So there he is, my shameful and bizarre eldest brother, spending stolen money on travel and boats and toys and other such trash. Every time he buys something, he is a thief.  Every time he remembers the past, he is a coward. Every time he touches his wife, he is a betrayer. 

The appropriate response to this must be that of Joseph.  We can rule only ourselves, if we do.  The blessing that was stolen from my father, can be returned, by me.  The price of being good is giving up our craving for justice.    

J

Weeqs

Moonday

I Wislblohd U today.  They needed a name, and thheirs just came to mind.  Someone said I petted a cat and Wislblohd me for Inviyyurmenl Inuhsenxhulizm.  I said I was examining the cat’s collar for Qahrbn Misapluhqayxhun, so I could report it.

Then why hadn't I submitted an Eqspohzay?  I said it wasn't a collar after all, but a bit of noose -- some hyumins tried to hang the cat but the string broke.  It's a popular hyumins' game down by the Needl uv Fayrnus -- so I was believed.  And it really was a noose.  

But I did pet the cat.  Only hunger made it trust me.  I gave it a bit of Mahyqohtahmash.  The Wislr wasn't close enough to see.  I'd have said I was testing a hypothesis, using vermin to dispose of refuse -- for the Uhternul Hohpr.

I'd inconvenienced Thuh Stayt, though -- so I gave them U's name.  They will arrest thhem, if not already.  These things happen.  The Intrvyu won't be severe.  Like me, U will give up the first name that comes to thheir mind.  There’s no malice.  It'll only be bruises, not blood.  U is smart.

If they knew I petted the cat, it would be the end of me.  I'm too old to survive a Quhreqnus Qamp.  I know someone who was Beeyuhfendudbiyd for 7 years at Perfiqt Eluhqwns Tahwr.  Thhey'd been Thinqn Liyq Haydrz -- Biynayreeyizm.  Thhey never talks about it, but thhey fell asleep once in the waterline and mumbled about digging for worms to eat.

Once I gave U's name, I had to accuse thhem of something, and this was true at least -- thhey was humming an Intahlerunt song.  Sometimes I feel like a m*th*rless ch*ld.  I used to sing that to my baby hyumin, before it mattered.  

I’m not worried -- the cat mistake is the first I’ve made in many years.  Nobody's as careful as me.

Hequhday

I met a hyumun last week.  Thhey was sitting on the steps outside Yunuhvrsul Uhgreemnt Sentr.  Thhey was wearing a small gray locket, heartshaped like hearts used to be shaped.  Thhey had a Liysns for it clipped to thheir coat, but it was still a Selfush Ahbjeq -- not something safe like Bahdeemahd.  Thhey was much younger than me.  But everyone is.

I didn't mean to, but we made eye contact, and something in thheir look kept me from breaking away.  After the Weeqs Vrqhyu Uhsesmun, thhey was still there.  Thhey had a permit clipped to thheir hat, so the BayzhShrts wouldn't Beeyuhfendudbiy thhem.  I wondered what thhey was waiting for.  Thhey stood up just as I passed and we bumped.

Then we walked down the steps, side by side, and I don't know who was leading or following, but we walked in silence to the Ahbuhlisq uv Ahluhliyqnus.  I could hear thheir breathing.  It sounded like snowflakes.  We bumped shoulders.  I tilted my hand out and took thheirs.  It has been many years since I touched a hyumun.

It's late spring and Soon's up longer, so less cold.  I couldn't think of anything to say.  Thhey never let go of my hand.  Thheir hand was small through the gloves.  There were BeeEsuz on patrol, but we kept to the gravel paths and they don't like to scuff their boots.  

About Ayteen Ohqlahq thhey tugged me, but without any movement, toward the mainwalk and Grayt Speeqh Ahmnuhbus Serqul.  We stood until it came, and thhey got on, slipping through the Laytwerq crowd until I saw thhem at a window.  Thhey held my eyes again, expressionless.  Thheir face was tight but thheir lips were full and dark.  Like someone I once knew.

As I stood watching, I suddenly became aware, I was holding something.  In my hand, in my glove, I was holding thheir locket.  I felt dizzy.  I looked up and stared.  When the omnibus pulled away, my eyes burned.

I have not seen thhem again.  I return to the steps of the YUS after work everyday.

 

Veenuhsday   

Sometimes I wonder about the meaning of life.  The lesson for the Stoodunts today was how perfectly Q loves all hyumins.  They must love thhem perfectly too.  I drilled them on it.  Do you ever doubt how much thhey loves you?  No, they replied in chorus.  Never?  Never.  Do you doubt Soon when it shows?  No.  Do you doubt that gravity holds you to Thuh Planut Urth?  No.  Do you doubt the perfection of Q's love for all little hyumins?  No.  Very good, hyumins.  Always remember this lesson.  Always give these examples, Soon and Thuh Planut Urth and Q in the middle, when they ask about the love of Q, or the Iqwahluhty uvthuh Yuniytud Stayt, or the Prfeqxhun uv Qhaynj.

For the older Stoodunts I asked, Do you love Q perfectly?  Yes.  So you are as perfect as thhey is?  They didn't know how to answer that.  I fed it to them.  How can thheir perfect love not receive love just as perfect?  It is not our love, it is thheirs, reflected back to thhemself.  We are Moon to thheir Soon.  Yes, we love Q perfectly.  There is no imperfect love for Q.  Duhplohruhblz don't love thhem at all.  Everyone else loves thhem perfectly.  I drilled them until they learned it.  It may save their lives.

That’s the meaning of life.  Teaching hyumins to stay alive.  Never deny, I teach them.  Doubt means you think Thuh Qhaynj is Uhngud.  Agree, reframe, deflect, add a detail that Qhaynjuz the meaning.  If they Wislbloh a Playpahrtnr -- these things happen.   Always look at the bridge of the nose, and never smile.

I haven't read yet about U.  If thhey makes it, thhey'll be around by Soonday.

ThuhUrthday

U died today, or maybe yesterday.  I can't be sure.  I read it in the Fayrnus Rejustr.  I scan it for familiar names.  We all do.  Heart failure.  All deaths, of course, are heart failure.  Old joke.  Thhey must not have given up a name.  Or thhey made Uhn Uhnhyumrus Ruhmarq, or thhey held eye-contact with a Quhmyunuhty Ohrguhniyzr.  Or thheir heart failed.

I've saved enough Qreduts to trade for a bicycle almost.  There's always the risk of Insiytn Uhndrprivluhjizm.  Don't invite trouble.  But I have my eye on an old one, very rusted.  No rubber, but big wheels.  IU is a gray area under Q's Fayvrd Tahlerayxhun directive, but one weighted complaint and the Iqwahluhty Gahrd confiscates Thuh Trigr. 

I'm noticeable -- nobody's tall anymore.  But hyumuns are usually gray.  I'll vary the route.  Nobody uses Thuh Qahluhnayd uv Iqahlujy.  Just don't get noticed day after day -- that's the cause.  They brood -- leads to Sohxhul Juhstus.  Labeled a Haydr, you're through. 

It is risky.  

But it will save time.  And I have old knees.

Soonday

They announced they cancelled Hequhday.  Clashes with Veenuhsday and Moonday.  Back to a 9 day week. Next I think will be Qahntuhnuntsday.  The younger hyumins get confused.  Last year they added Qbr.  And they changed Raynbr to Raynbohwbr.  Don't like the name?  Wait a minute.  Old joke.

Satrnday 

I saw U's partner I today.  Thhey was standing by Thuh Mahnuhlith uv Inqloosuhvnus, coming from work.  Thheir breath did not steam.  Thheir nose looked wet.  It should warm up after Sohlstuhsbr for a few weeks -- but Qliymut Qhaynj is so unpredictable.  Q saved Thuh Planut though.  Thhey just stood, feet on the patchy salt, staring into the gray middle distance, still as ice.  I passed without stopping.

Hequhday  Veenuhsday

It's too dangerous.  I'm careful, but -- that cat thing.  Don't undo it all.  Isn't Sohxhul Werqr a funny title? Liynwerqr.  Agruhwerqr.  Sohxhulwerqr.  Once they notice you, it's just over.  No, nothing funny about it.  No.  No bike.  What was I thinking.

Moonday

Another hyumun was sitting on the steps today, with a permit in thheir hat.  I asked why thhey was sitting there.  Thhey didn't respond.  I ask if thhey knows the hyumun who was there the week before.  Thheir eyes flicker, and thhey glances up.  "What is it?" I ask.  "I'm waiting for a Mohrnun Liysns.  This is the line."  "Who died?"  "Everybody."

I left thhem there.  I will not return.

Stahrzday

I Qahrbn Traydud for another pair of gloves today.  The one that held thheir hand, I keep in a box.  When I hold it to my lips I smell newly washed hair.  In the locket when I pressed it open was a tiny picture from the old days.  Thhey must have switched it for another when thhey got thheir Induhljuns Liysns.  There was a name.

Qday

Q was Reeyuhleqdud again, because it's Qday.  Old joke.  Universal mandate -- it's been that way longer than most can remember.  People don't live as long as they used to though, mostly -- not Werqrz.  A generation flies by.  The usual Seluhbrayxhunz uv Duhmahqrusy.  Every few years, no pattern, thhey calls for thheir Reeyuhleqxhn.  Thhey always gives thheir Grayt Speeqh, with Legthuhril Spiyr and Thuh Pilr uv Tohtl Satuhsfaqshn framed in the background.  The same musty intonations from thhem, the same ritual frenzy from Thuh Pahpyulus.  I thought of a joke, but I can't say it.  Great is * of the *

The wristchips Voht automatically.  Some people started Vohtn the day they were born.  Saves Qahrbn, not going anywhere or doing anything.  As the Yuniytud Stayt motto says, "Prahgres iz ahlwayz gitn bedr!"

Q's motorcade sped by the school a few weeks ago.  I didn't go to the window.  I was alone, so no one could notice.  Afterwards I thought, what if a great pit opened and swallowed thheir limousine? Then I thought, how could somebody make that happen? 

Back when there used to be teevee with commercials, there was a show about a little hyumin who could make happen whatever thhey wanted.  I thought of that, and Thuh Urthqwayq, what it would be like to have that power.  Then I realized Q had it.  I'm one of the few left who remember thhem promising to Lohwr thuh Seez.  Indeed thhey did.  Froze them over to do it.  Too bad the moon's in the wrong place.  Moon.

ThuhUrthday 

Yesterday I went mad.  I read thheir name in the Rejustr and my heart has not beaten since.  My heartshaped heart.  Failure.  Words.  

Names.    Tears

ice     salt

I said once long ago that all bets are off.  When I lost my, I lost, my

I didn't mean it.

Sometimes I feel

I think I've come to a decision.

Qday

I have lived in fear and silence and cowardice and complicity and betrayal through all the recent generations.  I was never the hyumun I thought I was.  Such a hyumun is no longer possible.  No gene splicing of atavistic traits will reclaim that hyumunity.

There used to be a Resistance.  "Who does not doubt, does not know freedom."  We had a plan, the tenth plague. The firstborn virus.  But we didn't mean it.

All that remains is a memory of teevee shows and the skulking that sneaks an extra splat of mash in the commissaryline.  Their violence has met for too long with only bleeding and weeping.  We are broken and they have grown careless. 

Sunday

We.  As if there were a we.  The wrong people have been suffering.  I will remind them of fear.  I will show them their own blood.  I will work such obscenity on their corpses that all who see will face the cowardice of their own souls.  I will be as evil as Q.  I will burn down Thuh Planut and all its childless fathers.

A man cannot live, fearing the loss of his tyreless bicycle.  He cannot live, denouncing acquaintances who are beaten to death.  He cannot live staring at a tiny heartshaped picture of a little girl, clutching a glove because he thinks it smells of his baby daughter's hair.  I have forgotten God.  But no atheism promises an end more meaningless than life as it now is.

End

Shin

I've been regretting that I neglected to learn Hebrew in my youth.  For probably 2500 years (since Ezra, I'd suppose), very smart rabbis have been playing around with the words and letters of the Torah, finding real and merely clever subtleties of which the goyim must remain ignorant.  I of course am not among the goyim, the nations -- Christians are children of Abraham, through faith.  Thus, I'd suppose, brothers by adoption of Isaac (who was to be sacrificed) -- and uncles to Jacob.  That's pretty interesting -- Israel, my little nephew.   

Almost randomly, I found a talk by Rabbi Michael Skobac which is worthwhile.  We learn that Hebrew letters have a number of meanings in themselves, beyond mere phonics.  It's an extremely deep study -- vertiginous.  Thus, each of the 22 letters resonate to rabbis as the initial letter of a set of important words. Reb Skobac's ministry seems in part about Jews remaining talmudic Jews, rather than, oh, say messianic Jews.  And on that point, he has a story to tell (at 13:15), transcribed by me: 

There was once an apostate Jew who came to the great Elijah of Vilna, one of the greatest sages of rabbinic Judaism, lived about 300 years ago.  And he said to this great rabbi, "I'm going to prove to you the truth of Christianity from the very first word of the bible."  And he says to the rabbi, "Look at the first word in the Hebrew bible.  The word beresheet [be-r-a-sh-ee-t, בְּרֵאשִׁית‎].  The first three letters, bet resh alef [בְּרֵא], "Ben, Ruach, Ab" -- "Son, Spirit, Father".  The first three letters.  So the rabbi immediately said to him, "You know, you didn't read the rest of the word.  The rest of the word says, shin yud tov [שִׁית] -- spells out "torah Yeshu sheker" -- "the teachings of Jesus are falsehood".  

Well.  That seems disappointing.  Score one for the opposing team?  But being me, I had to check it out.  It would be that pesky shin, "falsehood."  Indeed, the "letter shin also represents the word שֶׁקֶר (sheker) lie, falsehood."  So it's true.  But, that "also" -- what else?  And there it is: "We all know that the first letter of the word שָׁלוֹם (shalom) peace is shin. The ש is also the first letter of the word שַׁדַי (shadai) which is one of the names of G-d."

So Rabbi Skobac didn't tell the rest of the story -- maybe he didn't know it.  In the rest of the story, the apostate Jew … but let's not call him that -- seems dismissive.  "And the faithful Jew immediately said to the rabbi, 'You read it backwards in the same way you have the meaning backwards.  The rest of the word says, shin yud tov [שִׁית] -- spells out "shalom Yeshu torah" -- "redemption is Jesus' law"'."

(For, "shalam is translated as 'make it good', 'shall surely pay', 'make full restitution' or to 'restore'. The ancient Hebrew meaning of shalam was 'to make something whole'.")

So.  Beresheet, the first word in the Hebrew bible, holds a talmudic rabbinical Jewish teaching of, Son, Spirit, Father: redemption is Jesus' law.

Thank you, Rabbi Elijah of Vilna.  And, Rabbi Skobac -- may I have another? 

J