Feelings Are Tricky

Shrink and I have been talking alot about feelings. It seems I'm getting much better at expressing anger. I'm alll over the anger. But now, Shrink's been getting nosy. He wants to know what the feelings are under the anger. What it's protecting.

That gets trickier. You see, I'm not even sure myself what's under there. I've spent most of my life hiding it. I have layers of walls, protective shells, and, of course, more anger, designed to keep them tucked away.

You see, I don't know what will happen if I let them out. I worry that I might explode. What if I let these feelings loose and I can't get them under wraps again? I have a whole lifetime invested in keeping the world at a distance. Keeping myself at a distance.

I don't want to hurt. I tried that before. It wasn't fun.

Shhhhhhh

I am torn. I want to write, but I am afraid to tell. I need to figure out what it is I'm hiding from myself.

Anger and Fear

Well, as promised, a few words on anger as fear turned outward.

That is at least partially true. My anger at Son's doctors is based on fear. My son is sick. He is sick and we can't figure out what is wrong with him and we can't make him better and I can't do anything about it and the doctors, the doctors don't know what's wrong with him and they aren't working hard enough and we ask questions and we get no answers and I want to grab them by the throat and squeeze until they stop fucking around and my my son better.

That is anger as fear turned outward.

And then there is just anger. Anger like the feeling I have about the old asshole with his prostate cancer. I agonized. I argued. I sought counsel and took heart in counsel offered unsolicited. I thought and agitated and thought some more and meditated. How do I respond to the call from out of the blue? The man whose stupid failure to wear a jimmy hat 47 some odd years ago created the chain of events that makes me call him father. We hardly speak, but he calls out of the blue and he's got cancer and he's coming to town for treatment.

So I tell him to let me know when he comes in to town and when he is going into the hospital. And as I said, there was much wailing and lamentations and gnashings of teeth. But finally I resolved to go visit. I was persuaded by many voices who told me that I was going not for him, but for my peace of mind.

And they didn't call. Mom didn't call. Dad didn't call. Apparently, it wasn't that big a deal to them. Am I mad about it? Hell, yes. All that time I wasted trying to decide whether I had a filial duty to him, a personal duty of loyalty from within myself? Poof. Nobody fucking cared.

That's anger. It isn't born out of fear. It's pure, hot, unadulterated rage. How dare they? How did I become optional?

I know some will read this and think to themselves, "well, he's ignoring his fear they don't love him." No I'm not. They don't love me. At least not all the time. My parents aren't capable of unconditional love. I can't fear what I've already accepted. And I'm not afraid of their rejection. They did that a long itme ago. I rejected them a long time ago, too, when they started pulling the same abusive shit with my kids that they pulled with me.

Like I said. Pure anger, no fear. And trust me, fear and anger have fueled me for most of my life. I know from fear and anger.

Just a Bookmark

Anger is fear turned outward

I have heard this same line no less than three times this week. The first time, I nodded and thought "hmm, that makes sense;" the second time I thought "wow, it's a cliche;" the third time, got me thinking it may be worth more consideration. I don't have time for that right this minute. More to come.

Oh Yeah, You Too.

Well, for all the time I spent working it over and over in my head, talking it out with friends and my shrink. Agonizing over whether I would seem disloyal to my children or disloyal to my duty as a son, whatever that might be. For all that time, He didn't call. My mother didn't call.

I got an email from my brother. I called the hospital. I wasn't needed. He came through okay. He was sleeping, probably going home tomorrow or the next day.

I'm such a jackass.

That's God. Sometimes He Likes to Go Down to Earth and Pretend He's a Doctor

"There's no change."

We can't see microvessel blockage, so we pretend it doesn't exist unless you know to ask.

"Your enzymes came back normal."

But the one enzyme that is most indicative is suppressed by two of the medications you're taking.

"Your ejection fraction is 35%. That's very good for someone with your level of cardiomyopathy."

And as long as you continue to swallow a small pharmacy every moring and evening it will stay that way.

"We did notice some fatty deposits on your liver, but nothing to worry about right now."

Of course, the drugs are what is causing those fatty deposits. They, along with your kidney function will start to manifest themselves as life-threatening over time, as long as you are taking this level of medication.

"Tell me, are you still taking your Paxil and Welbutrin?"

Sure thing, asshole. It must be all in my head.

"You take care now, and stay healthy, ha ha; we don't want to see so much of you, old friend."

Fuck you.

Going Back to the Cradle

I'm sitting in front of the idiot box, watching a WTTW show on Stax Records, the birthplace of Rhythm and Blues. They are running interviews and clips of Isaac Hayes, Mavis Staples, Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, Booker T and the MGs, and a host of others.

This is music that changed my life. Stax was at its apogee in the early 60s, when I was a toddler to a tween. I was listening to the Partridge Family and Witchy Woman while Otis was asking the world for Respect. My uncle Ken, a mere 14 years older than me, introduced me to the Beatles and folk music. I started to get it. But I only started.

It was Ken's friend Boozer, who lifted the blinders when I was about 13. Every so often, my parents would take me down to Rogers Park, to spend the weekend with Ken. That's when I met his best friend.

Boozer was a fork lift/wrecking ball/jackhammer hiding in the body of a 350 pound Black man who always wore Wayfarers. Boozer's idea of a joke was to wait until Ken and all his buddies were high (something Ken intorduced me to that was almost as important as the music), and he would slip somebody's keys out of their pocket. He'd go downstairs to the street and park the victim's car about three or four spaces down from where it was. Somebody owed Boozer some money one time, and Boozer was pissed off about not getting paid back. So he rented a truck, went to the guy's place, picked up his MGB and put it on the truck. Boozer got paid off that afternoon.

But I digress.

I was at Ken's one weekend, and Boozer was over. I was listening to some old Beatles covers of R&B tunes, songs like Hippy Hippy Shake and Memphis, Tennessee. Boozer asked me if I liked those songs. I replied enthusiastically. Boozer told me to hang on a second, ran down to his car, and came back in with a stack of records.

Try a Little Tenderness, I'll Take You There, Soul Man. My body moved involuntarily. My eyes popped out of my head. I listened to Solomon Burke. I listened to Otis Redding. Isaac Hayes.

This was music that had pain behind it. Music with a piece of the artist left bleeding on the disc. This was msic that spoke to me. These people sang pain. They sang frustration, anger, and defiance. To this day, Respect Yourself is what I put on when I need to feel strong.

I have grown to appreciate a lot of different music. I have found other forms that had the same sort of power and life within it. Musically, the Beatles are still my first love. But Otis and Booker T were my first hard-ons.

The Old Asshole Gets Cancer (Pun Intended)

My father called earlier this week. He has prostate cancer. They caught it early. the prognosis for recovery is good. But it's still cancer and he's still freaking out a little. Which leaves me in a bit of a quandary.

We are on speaking terms, but barely. I call him to wish him a happy birthday, usually timing the call so I am more likely to get his voicemail than actually get him. He does the same with me. He and my mother invite me to their annual Hanukkah party, confident that we will demur. We demur, generally lying about how wew'll be out of town that day.

Those of you who are regular readers will know that I am not fond of my parents, and they will generally be familiar with the reasons why. And perhaps my personal disappointment with them, my sense that they betrayed, abused, and generally screwed me over will strike you as justification. Others of you probably think I'm a whiny jackass who ought to get the fuck over it by the time I turned 47.

Somewhere in the middle, there will be those of you who feel that with him being seriously ill, I should use this opportunity to make peace before it's too late. I confess there is a part of me that feels the same way. But there is a big obstacle standing in the way of any potential rapprochment -- my daughter.

Two years ago, my Dad came into my home and sat my daughter down at our kitchen table. He assured her, that, notwithstanding that her father had failed to set aside enough money for her to go to college, he, magnanimous man that he is, was going to rescue her. He promised her enough money to cover the tuition and books at our state university. He said that she wasn't obligated to go to the State U., but that any costs over that would be her responsibility and mine.

A very generous offer, no?

I wasn't working at the time, but I had interviewed for my current position, and things looked good. Ultimately, I got the job. We laid aside a litle bit of money for Daughter's tuition and room and board. She had gotten into a very prestigious university, and she was very excited about going there. She had also been given a very generous aid package, so that, between the aid and the money my father had promised her, we were able to allocate most of my income on foolish things like food and shelter, and used most of the rest to start paying our way out of the deep hole unemployment had left us in.

Fast forward to fall, and time to pack Daughter up to send her off to school. We hadn't heard anything from my parents. Daughter was getting nervous, and, quite frankly, so were we. Except for Wife. She, being generally smarter than me, had never really taken Dad at his word. She figured he would back out at the last minute. So I made the call to my parents and asked them about the money.

Well, this next part will amaze you. Dad claimed that he had only made the offer because I was out of work. He figured once I got my job (a whole seven months before), he no longer needed to subsidize Daughter's education. He denied ever telling Daughter that he would provide her with the money for her entire undergraduate tenure. In fact he denied even telling her that he would pay part of her tuition for the one year.

My daughter was crushed. She had largely been ignored by my parents for most of her life, with them paying favor to her cousins who were younger. Now, here Dad was, in effect telling her she was a liar and yanking the one decent thing he had ever done for her out from under her.

See, I can try to forgive my father. I can at least try and forget what he has done to me over a lifetime. But I can't forgive what he did to Daughter. At least not unless and until he makes his peace with her. He hasn't spoken to her since this all took place. She has no interest in ever seeing him or dealing with him again.

So. Do I go with Dad? Or with Daughter? The choice seems clear to me.

If I Curse Myself, Do I Wash My Mouth Out with Soap?

My shrink tells me I have an inner teenager. He's fractious, angry, reckless, and very, very scared. Apparently he's stuck around for the last 35 years or so because he never really had a chance to come out.

My parents were never around. Dad was always at the office or traveling, becoming a Master of the Universe in the exciting and romantic world of corporate tax. (How Freudian is that?) Mom decided to go back to school when I turned about 10. For a year or two, she went part-time, so I only had to keep my sisters and brother from burning down the house for a few hours. But then, when I turned 12, she decided I was old enough to become a parent.

Mom was at school all day and all night. I did the baby-sitting, the cooking, the cleaning, tutoring, etc. If she hadn't been too cheap to buy me a car and too uptight to risk my getting busted, she'd have had me running errands and doing the shopping, too.

Now, I don't want you getting the impression my parents didn't have an adequate work/life balance. They went out just about every weekend. They went out and spent money on themselves during the day. They went to expensive restaurants and movies, plays, and concerts at night.

I got to do the lawn during the day, cook dinner and clean up at night, and get the kids into bed at a reasonable time. Of course, when you're 12 or 13, it's hard to carry much authority with kids ranging from 10-4. So the kids often didn't quite get into bed every night. And I didn't necessarily get the kitchen or the rest of the house spotless while cooking, dealing with the kids, and, oh yeah, trying to be a kid myself.

So Mom and Dad would ome rolling in at Midnight or two, and they'd go in to inspect the kitchen and find maybe that I had not wiped down a counter or swept up well enough. So they would head down to my room, wake me up, and express their displeasure, while at the same time affording me an invaluable opportunity to see if I could do better.

I turned into, amazing as it may seem, a pissed-off kid. I started fighting back the only way I knew how. The more my parents freaked out about my inferior parenting skills, the more I went out of my way to piss them off.

By the time I turned 14, my father was throwing me out of the house every few months. Either that or I would split. I'd stay at a friend's house or crash in the storage room of a place I worked for a week or two, and then my father would show up, acting all baffled at why I hadn't been coming home, like it was my idea to leave. Finally, my senior year in high school, when I was 17, I stopped going home.

I lived with my friend Jamie, at his house for the rest of my last semester in high school. We graduated and after that first summer, Jamie headed off to Colorado and I moved into transient housing at an SRO in Evanston.

There you have it. The creation myth of my inner teenager. And my shrink assures me he's still there. He tends to turn everybody into a proxy parent eventually: my boss, my wife, the landlord. And of course, the worstest, most evil motherfucker parent figure of them all - Me.

He hates all of us. Everyone who stands in the way of all he really wants to do, just roll a big fat doobie and go sit in the sun somewhere and listen to tunes. But he has to deal with me. I'm the guy with the mortgage, the wife, the daughter in college. I have all these "responsibilities." Things that keep the teenager from being free, escaping all those responsibilities that he's been saddled with all his life. Those things that kept him from being the teenager 30 years ago.

In the words of Pogo, I has met the enemy and he is Me.

I Feel a Rebirth is Upon Us

Courtesy of my friend Leila