Precisely 12 years ago, I posted this:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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