Though a WWII bomber pilot with a quixotic temper and passionate nature, i never saw my father strike my mother. Aside from the requisite belt-whippings, countenanced with children’s magazines stuffed in our pants, with a younger brother who resembled Tom Sawyer’s cousin Sid enough to evade serious disagreements with our father, i recall two beatings from my normally pacific parent: one was after i had described my sister to her face as a “bitch,” not really understanding the meaning of the word, however appropriate a moniker then, as it has become over the years, based only on the little that i know about her from her actions; the 2nd was when i declared my hair my own and would not cut it for anyone but myself. Imagine my surprise when my normally placid poet parent located me in my older brother’s bedroom asking if i had called her “bitch,” when he, my poet father began to “bitch slap” my 13/14 year-old head from side-to-side - surprise is a good word. The 2nd occasion of serious physical violence was in the same older brother’s room when he my father attempting the same physical domination to make a point, only to find my surprise had been converted to awareness and easily deflected his half-hearted blows after i had put up my “dukes.”
I left the home i’d grown up in hours later and began a pattern of giving up ground to superior forces which has allowed me to remain undaunted, however alone to this day. The most important lesson for me, it seems has been surrender; i’m not very good at it, but i continue to give up and have found over time it not only comes easier, but the only battle worth expending valuable resources is the one that requires that i surrender to myself. That self, however worthy an adversary, has become an even more invaluable friend - the friend i have searched for my lifelong. Mysteriously as that friend to me appeared, so too have any enemies i have had disappear, for with deep compassion and solidarity for anyone wishing to prevail over this solitary pilgrim and his peculiar reticence - i cede to you all, but that of my self the sole arbitrator of good taste and decency within the “Kingdom of The Odd Todd.”
The paradox of course is that the more i eschew strife, the more aware struggle becomes aware of me - incognito is not an option, remember i am a dual-eyed cyclops dying in some foreign nation; i possess a preternatural aversion to convention and lack any proper regard for the importance of conformance - t’was ever thus · so i ease into the current and resist nothing that requires struggle: against, for, with, around, silence or acquiescence to - rather and more importantly is to align as much as i can & learn to understand about the vacuum i am · (don’t blame me, take it up with Madame Paradox & her two offsprings, t’is & t’ain’t). I like to have fun and find no reason to not enjoy that which i am engaged with - just now · words, ideas and feelings. Fun, as i was helped to learn, is the capacity to play, laughing at you, laughing at me; crying for a tragedy or exalting in a victory; however transitory, false, and/or sacred any of those states manifests.
My anima is as best i can guess is a desert rat with bloody knuckles and a horn-toad heart. My mother was man enough to back my father up - himself, not one to be trifled with · he never surrendered to her, and i believe to this day that it is that act which doomed their otherwise passionate and fruitful union. How is one to parse such an example of maladaptive behavior and learn¿ that is a question? Pop the art of surrender - it took a broken hip at 86 and a catheter up his dick for the last 10 months of his life · but eventually, he gave it up to her, his lord god, LOVE. Understand that what i write here is hyperbole in service of a point, an ever receding idea that was born of my early year’s council from Pop, “It is not from accomplishment, but from the pursuit that you find meaning;” or my personal favorite homily - “character is not born in the calm;” unrealistically good son i wanted to be - of course i went in search of every storm i could find and discover the deeper recesses of my character. “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” - Oscar Wilde
I want a kind companion in a gentle world - i’ve had 3 so far and welcome another; if only more wisely and however unlikely one more kind · my last wife left me 5 days after an emergency appendectomy, she took with her my faith, my dog and my “best friend.” She was fun and fooled me completely - i thought i was fun too, but she learned me differently · The fault is my own, and i bless her absence; she reminded me at an advanced age, romantic delusion is not just an affliction of the young at heart. I’d like to think she has had some things to chew on from her escape, but the best i can do is wish her well and spend no more time thinking about that “existential excursion” than there are lessons i can still learn from “dishonesty, cruelty, arrogance and betrayal” all concepts rooted in my own delusions about “candor, kindness, humility and fidelity;” it doesn’t get any better than that - lucky me ·
jts 11/11/2020
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