<\/p>\n
I’ve been having a hard time writing lately.\u00a0\u00a0 I’d like to
\nblame it on more-than-normal stress factors that have wrapped around me
\nsince November.\u00a0 There are plenty of little incidents that have
\ncome about between November 15th and January 15th that could be called
\nlife changing, or life shattering.\u00a0 I’ve been to a reunion
\nluncheon for my grandfather’s rapidly-dying Parkersburg High School
\nclass of 43, I’ve crossed swords with family members, I’ve been
\nreunited with lovers as well as my father, estranged for 18 difficult
\nand lonely years.\u00a0 I’ve met human traffickers from the Philippines
\nand done Jager Bombs with bisexual truck drivers. Those latter two I
\nfound in a small bar hidden behind a Days Inn in Atlanta and, now, I
\nwonder how I got out of there alive.<\/p>\n
This week, I started to write an article about the holidays, putting
\nall of that seasonal depression anxiety behind me and trying to cope
\nwith the fight my aunt and I had at Thanksgiving dinner about how bad a
\nperson I was, in her Zoloft eyes.\u00a0 Then trying to look
\nanalytically at the shell of Christmas designed to appease a spoiled 10
\nyear old who’s allowed to run free – to the point where she shits and
\npisses wherever she wants and beats her mother with a riding
\ncrop.\u00a0 My cousin’s always good for an article, it’s like writing
\nabout some feral wolf-child.<\/p>\n
Increasingly, though, the holidays have become more emotionally
\ndamaging.\u00a0 As my grandparents age, one of them poorly, and as my
\ncousin and aunt drive deeper into a world of self-abusive terror, what
\nwas once comedy has become, quite simply, pathetic, corrupt and
\nheartbreaking.<\/p>\n
I gave up on that article.<\/p>\n
I decided to move on to an intimate article about the girl I once loved
\nand, if you’re asking me over drinks, I’ll confess that I still love
\nher.\u00a0 Though, here, I’m drinking coffee and the white stuff falls
\nhard outside my windows as a DC Saturday grinds to a snarled snowday
\nnothingness.\u00a0 In this state, if you could actually make it up the
\nhill to my house and have a cup of this coffee, I’d tell you that I’m
\nnot sure about the love thing.\u00a0 I’d talk about chemical
\nconnections and emotional comfort.\u00a0 I wouldn’t splash scotch into
\nthis particular coffee – only the best beans cross my threshold – but
\nit would be tempting as we sat and looked through these picture windows
\nat a winter wonderland, a frozen suburban forest barely able to
\nbreathe, the tumble-down wooden fence marking the end of my property,
\nhalf an acre from these windows, tilting towards us and coated in white
\nwhile the neighbor’s toolshed bends beneath the weight of snow and an
\nold branch that’s hit the roof.<\/p>\n
I would talk about the essence of love, and how this woman once touched
\nme and has remained with me as a spirit.\u00a0 Just like the blacks
\nused to say in the 60’s – you got to be a spirit, not a ghost.
\nWhile my love for this woman was and is on some spiritual level, she,
\nherself, is a ghost.\u00a0 When I met her again, we came together as if
\nwe had never been apart.\u00a0 Every movement, every thought, every
\nfeeling was as natural and comfortable as if we had been a couple for
\nthe last six years instead of strangers.<\/p>\n
In my article, I wrote about how that comfort pulled me forward and, at
\nthe same time, seemed to push me back.\u00a0 That, of course, is the
\ndefinition of human confusion.\u00a0 It’s also something that holds us
\nall in place.\u00a0 I wrote about how there are no other women who have
\ntouched me in this way but, between you and me, that’s a lie.
\nThis girl in question simply stuck with me for 15 months as lover and
\nmuse, the others who struck me on the exact same chemical and emotional
\nlevel didn’t enter into the same orbit for reasons dictated purely by
\nchance and circumstance.<\/p>\n
Writing about the love of my life goes nowhere when I can name five
\nother loves of my life and rest easy with the knowledge that a sixth
\none will come.<\/p>\n
I tried hard, though.\u00a0 I started three different articles, and one
\neven got up to 20 pages.\u00a0 I might return to those, but they didn’t
\nreally strike me as worthwhile.<\/p>\n
I moved on to an article about my father.\u00a0 I went down to Atlanta
\nand saw him for the first time in 18 years.\u00a0 He had run away in
\n1986.\u00a0 His last promise to me was that he was going to
\nCharlottesville, VA for the weekend and he’d be back on Monday.
\nPerhaps sub-consciously, I had scheduled to see him on a Monday.
\nI didn’t think about that synchronicity until I started in on the
\narticle.<\/p>\n
I don’t really understand what my father was running from.\u00a0 The
\nwaters were troubled, sure, thanks to my mom’s dramatic insanity.
\nBut is that an excuse?\u00a0 She was a woman who, from childhood, was
\nviolent and enraged.\u00a0 As a nine year old, she held my aunt off the
\nBel Pre bridge in Parkersburg and threatened to throw her into the Ohio
\nRiver.\u00a0 She would end her life by driving into a tree at top
\nspeed, her body and her car consumed by fire.\u00a0 When my father ran,
\nfrom her and from his own demons, I was left entering adolescence with
\nthis woman who, though she sacrificed much to stand by me, filled my
\ndays and nights with terror.\u00a0 I moved through my teenage years on
\neggshells.\u00a0 The slightest hiccup would bring mom down on me in a
\nfury I have never seen from any other person, and I work in customer
\nservice.<\/p>\n
Seeing my father again was nothing like I expected.\u00a0 As I wrote
\nthe article, I realized that I didn’t know what to say about this
\nmeeting.\u00a0 Eighteen years is a long time, a lifetime, and, looking
\nback, it all feels like some absurd dream.<\/p>\n
I abandoned the article, and I started writing one about that
\ndream.\u00a0 How strange that my life up to this point seems like
\nsomeone else lived it.\u00a0 I look at pictures from three years ago,
\nand I recall the scene as if it were from a movie.\u00a0 Perhaps we all
\nlive in a movie, but my family has made it so that the movie has been
\nremoved from any sense of emotion.\u00a0 I have not enjoyed nor have I
\nbeen disappointed by the film.\u00a0 I’ve simply sat alone and watched
\nit in silence.<\/p>\n
I left that article behind because I feared that everyone feels that
\nway, so, who would want to hear about it?\u00a0 On the other hand, I
\nwondered if I was the only one who felt that way and, if so, reading
\nback on what I had written, I obviously wasn’t able to describe it
\nproperly.<\/p>\n
I started on an article about the men I met at Riley’s Irish Pub by the
\nDays Inn in Forest Park, Georgia.\u00a0 That’s somewhere to the east of
\nAtlanta, the city looming in the distance.\u00a0 One, Jun, was a
\nFilipino who brought immigrants over at the cost of $3000 a head.
\nThey worked at various jobs as illegals until they could pay him
\nback.\u00a0 The other, Glen, was a bisexual truck driver who was five
\nwives into his life and owed half a million to them and the
\ngovernment.\u00a0 He was planning a way to get to Costa Rica and vanish
\nforever.<\/p>\n
Glen’s son had died, and he blamed himself.\u00a0 He’d been into drugs,
\nhe said, shipping them across the country on the blue highways, weaving
\naround and away from the interstates.\u00a0 When they finally caught up
\nwith him, he put in 10 years and came out of jail in the service of the
\nFeds, working as a Narc.\u00a0 That’s how he made his money, but enough
\nwas enough.<\/p>\n
Glen drifted in and out of anger, his hands becoming steady only after
\neight beers and four Jager Bombs – shots of Jager dropped into a full
\nglass of Jack Daniels.\u00a0 Jun, however, always had a steady hand,
\nand the eyes of a predator.<\/p>\n
That article had promise, but it was too late.\u00a0 I was gummed up
\nwith the thoughts of a woman, her image and her smell, her flesh, every
\nlittle flaw all burned into my mind.\u00a0 I was frozen in place by my
\nfather and the world around him that should have been part of my world
\nbut, now, will never be.\u00a0 Not really.\u00a0 My childhood is
\nover.\u00a0 Shattered elbows and car crashes, lost bikes and college
\nand student loans, loves lost and diplomas and drunken nights and
\nmoving violations and two decades of those awful, depressing family
\ndinners have been missed.<\/p>\n
I thought about that as an article, though I didn’t work on it. How, at
\n30, I’m suddenly quite unexciting.\u00a0 I’ve built my world and
\nthere’s not that much to share, and the desire to share it in that way
\n– catching up with an erstwhile family member or taking a new lover –
\nhas faded.\u00a0 My family has been diseased since well before I was
\nborn.\u00a0 The only commonality is blood and, through that, a
\nstone-age clan feeling that says it’s okay to stand side by side and
\nthrow back enemies.\u00a0 Sitting with my father, I summed up the
\nmissing years in half an hour.<\/p>\n
While plotting out that article, I wanted to go on a bit about how I’ve
\nbeen forced to live the present.\u00a0 How the past is so painful and
\nso embarrassing that I’m only able to turn it into amusing
\npseudo-fiction online but, face to face, I wouldn’t be able to hold
\nmyself together long enough to get to the gritty details.<\/p>\n
A shrink may say, well, that’s a problem.\u00a0 But I think they’re
\nobsessed with the past. Hey, if you and I are drinking at a bar, do you
\nreally want to know these parts of my life?\u00a0\u00a0 The answer
\nshould be no, because there’s so much more we can talk about.<\/p>\n
This is the problem with meeting new friends and taking new
\nlovers.\u00a0 I have no past.\u00a0 I can sum it up in half an
\nhour.\u00a0 When you put all the parts together, it’s just so goddamned
\nterrible.<\/p>\n
That’s what really stopped me from writing this week.\u00a0 Too much
\nhas happened that deals with my past self, my stagnant self.\u00a0 If,
\nperhaps, I had reunited with old drinking buddies, or the insane
\nJapanese exchange students who filled me with Sake, or a couple of the
\nself-abusive one night stand girls, I’d have something to write
\nabout.\u00a0 The dangerous and the psychotic, the depressingly amusing,
\nthe off the wall antics that can turn barrooms upside down and horrify
\nhuman traffickers and violent truckers.<\/p>\n
Instead, I plodded through a few points in my life, piled all together
\nin a three day weekend coming after a months-long seasonal depression,
\nall of it marked by death and illness, anxiety and Zoloft, faded
\nmemory, failed love and lost childhood.<\/p>\n
I trashed all the articles and wrote this one because, after days of
\nwriting, and over a hundred pages of soul-baring whining, I realized
\nhow surprising it is that I survived all these years, and did so
\nwithout any assistance.\u00a0 Loans and credit cards got me through
\ncollege, not a single friend stuck with me until recent years, I was as
\ngood as orphaned by my parents and the financial and emotional
\nwell-being of my remaining family has been shattered.\u00a0 While my
\nlife has been scarred forever by this past that I can’t seem to
\nremember living, I have, somehow, in that fugue state, managed to hit
\nall the marks no matter the expense.\u00a0 The problem I was having
\nwith articles that looked backward (and inward) in a deeply serious
\nlight was quite simple – it didn’t matter.\u00a0 Nothing really matters
\nexcept the act of moving forward.\u00a0 How to deal with all these
\nthings that have built up in me since right before Thanksgiving Dinner
\nat our harshly lit family table – since I was 12, really – is so easy
\nI’ve just not been able to accept it.\u00a0 It’s the greatest life
\nlesson, the greatest solution to all of our problems, repeated in
\nmovies and music and to each other every day:\u00a0 Fuck it.\u00a0 Fuck
\nit all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[353,127],"class_list":["post-2472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2472"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2840,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2472\/revisions\/2840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}