nccotus

my father was beaten to within an inch of his life as a child by his mother. There was a war. And there was only just enough to eat.

Her husband was a small skinny man and a dock laborer. She was a small but stout little woman.

He had endemic OCD.

She did not help him in this regard.

when I went to the state hospital I was drawn in by the countercultural community there. It felt good at the time. But when I got out, I was looking at society from the bottom up. A strange place for a Harvard Graduate.

when Alex and I were in California, he talked a lot about going out into the desert and living “off the grid.” It’s something we never did literally but it was like that. We saw his friends from work at times but we mostly we kept to ourselves. Took off in the car in weekends and went driving all over the West Coast, Arizona, Colorado, San Francisco, Nevada, San Diego, Mexico, British Columbia. It was an incredible time. An answer to the loneliness of my PA seizure driving. So healing.

Alex took pictures, endless pictures of the open road and the desert and mountain scenery.

and we watched movies on the VCR every night, R-rated films that were an education to my heart, soul and mind, classics like, Midnight Cowboy, Glengary Glenross, Jacob’s Ladder. Instead of the banal Hollywood romance crap my mother and father favored that I had lived on all my life.

then, Ian, and we were back East, in Buffalo, a beautiful city, a paradigm shift from Boston/NYC.

But we couldn’t stay.

Alex was not a wimp. But he related well to my father, he was so thrilled with him as “intelligentsia.” Something Dad lost through the stroke. Dad had to lose his piano playing. I found this so terrible. He moved the baby grand out into the shed. His stroke affected his visual processing and he couldn’t read the music any more. He had already lost his sense of smell through the sinus operation in the 80’s. He started sinking inside himself in a way that was visible to me. Now it’s his hearing. He hears just fine when he wants to. In other words he is becoming a cantankerous old man.

As for Alex, I have lost him. The two of them used to talk over my head and manipulate and abuse me right in front of Ian in there heads in a way that I did not appreciate. Back at the house in Seminole.

You have to be a wimp to abuse a woman and child. My father had his reasons to be one and I know what they are. My mother was a manipulative and abusive bitch and I know she scared him to death. I don’t know all of Alex’s reasons but my mother was an element there too. I do forgive them but I wish to be a free agent now and free from the history of abuse in the family and the accusations of abuse made against me as I have been the subject of so much abuse myself as I try to harbor and protect Ian since his infancy while being unable to help myself in this regard.