In the preface to his book “Love and Will,” Rollo May described a clinical anomaly that has always resonated with me. He described a study of “at risk” youth wherein he could not explain a spike of adaptable behavior in reams of otherwise predictably dismal results. He went back and interviewed the subjects succeeding beyond ever expectation and found; the parents of these kids told them flat out - “I got nothing for you, all you can expect is a life of shit.” Most other parents in the study attempted to soften the blow and look for ways to buffer them from reality. My parents were the former, pop not so much, but definitely ma. To her credit, ma plowed through a lot of personal shit before she ran out of steam and just surrendered to the luxury of decadence. She got played by a lot of charlatans in the process. I remember a psychologist she dated for a while - greasy - is the only adjective that comes to mind; but lord have mercy, that same woman still got pluck and savvy enough to weather a pandemic of unknown dimensions - specifically dangerous to old people ·
When ma got the “self-improvement” fever, it had not yet become the shrinkwrap industry you see on your screens today. Most people were just feeling their way through the emerging science of mind; one has to give credit to anyone brave enough to plunge into the unknowns of the unconscious, but did it have to be my mother. At first it was just edgy literature in the family bookcase - Ayn Rand · “Atlas Shrugged,” but even as a boy child trying to fathom the undercurrents of an emerging gender conflict i could see ma’s hackles tearing at my father’s poetically chivalrous notion of man/woman roles. He even said to me in one of those uniquely parental discussions, “it is the woman’s role to submit to your will.” Well folks i can tell you when ma hit the university circuit to finish her BA, ostensibly to add to the wherewithal of the sagging family fortune, one could almost feel all hell was about to break loose.
It began innocently enough with explanations about why she had to be gone, “your father does not earn enough for us to live on, so I must go back to school.” We never lacked anything and there was always a box of oranges in the garage to help yourself to. Burgers and Root Beer floats were a regular Friday night event one could count on outside of the intractable prompting to carry groceries inside, one did not know of any deficit. We each got an “allowance” that was hierarchal, not necessarily merit-based, for the eldest son was mostly occupied Saturdays when chores were to be done with fashioning mystical bubbles from his gullet that he could miraculously blow free into the air, and the sister could never be importuned to occupy herself with yard work. When is say yard work, i mean plucking the scum of the flowering peach tree that was never meant to bear edible fruit from the Korean grass that grew in the same mounds it had been planted in according to the Sunset magazine - picture plucking paper bags of vomit poured into the Grand Canyon from dump trucks ·
I was more than saddened when the news came from on high that both were jumping the good ship matrimony, and even more dismayed that it had been determined the eldest brother was to remain with pop, while i was assigned to the more “maternal” influence. Those are 3 years of hell that i have seemingly replayed throughout my life in one variation or another. There is no place to point the finger - each and everyone was doing there best as they saw fit at the time. It is today where i sit as an aged man fraught with self-doubt and an entirely rational fury about things done to me at a time when in nearly the exact same location i now sit, my own nation was enacting heinous brutality on a peaceful population that wanted nothing more than to determine their own destiny, free of foreign influence, any foreign influence. Now tell me Madame Paradox is not one the funniest spirits to ever wander freely on our pitiful celestial body ¿ please ?
If ma can sit up and take nourishment under the questionable auspices of siblings i know to be emotionally myopic and possibly dangerous, then the best i can do is stay healthy and happy searching for some meaningful disentangling of a karma that goes back to the first dead body at the hands of another, moreover - to find that thread of joy and pleasure our ancestors felt watching a newly discovered waterfall empty into a canyon full with fragrance from unknown flora and nurtured in the droppings of fauna that, like us wanted little more from existence than to be petted, loved and played with. The sad as fuck truth which few in the reading audience will own, much less act on - we are not all that far from renewing those conditions and perpetuating whatever truth you can find in that assertion for the next gazillion generations rather than perishing like maggots at the bottom of some crusty tin can whose contents are about to become so desiccated as to be unsupportable to any but the most fundamental of life forms - are we having fun yet ¿ · Where’s Greta Thunberg anyway ?
jts 18/07/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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