Where Now?

I haven’t wanted to write. Well, that’s not true. I’ve wanted to write, indeed have attempted to slam it out, but in the end, have come up with very little of value in a growing number of months. It was weeks, but it’s blossoming like a cancer.

There is an ugly milestone that brings me no joy coming up on Wednesday and this being the third anniversary of my mother’s death, I find it isn’t any less lame. No, I don’t sit around weeping, don’t flog myself emotionally in an acute inability to handle her loss. No, it just sucks, and has continued to suck now for three years. Thinking about going to her home the day after her death, seeing her little computer setup, with her card game notes on the notepad, her reading glasses, and her gum, is no less pathetic and empty now than it was then.

I realize now that her being gone has changed me. Subtly, perhaps, as it’s taken me three years to start to see it, but still, I have changed.

I’m not really any angrier at the universe than I was before, I think that’s virtually in critical mass. I think I feel a bit more rudderless without her now, even if I could perhaps always be defined that way.

This is no way to memorialize her. I’ll change tack.

My mother was brutally honest with me in many ways, about many things, and I will be eternally grateful. She was a sly, tough, and scathingly funny woman, who never missed a trick, and was nearly impossible to fool. She had a very formidable mind, and I watched many foolish people get embarrassed by her wit and her directness all without her ever trying to be so piercing. In fact, she was a very tender and careful woman when it came to the way others felt around her, it just took some time for her to let her guard down enough to trust that the person before her wasn’t a total idiot. I alway loved that about her.

But writing, writing, writing ... here I am writing again, about writing (or maybe not writing as the case has been lately), and there has been so much. Still, I will only share so very little.

The bloated murk of the summer heat is starting to wither, and I am deeply pleased about this. As our mild but very comfortable winter rolls around, I will take the time to go camping with the Griswolds as much as we can, because, well, that’s just what we do.

So what has happened lately? Where has this end of the Butcher shop been, what with my being virtually absent from this forum?

There was a big shakedown in my world that I found rather disturbing, as well as fairly infuriating, and knowing how I am, it will be the sort of thing that will effect my thoughts for quite some time. I may appear to magnify how much I sell myself short, but that’s all wrong, because I know my flaws so deeply, so intimately, and so innately, that it is insulting to be led down a path that stinks of ignorance and misdirection in the light of blind arrogance. In this I feel an amount of anger that borders on myth. Enough on that.

In many ways I am ridiculously happy. I am insanely in love. Have been for a while now, and that has given me not only purpose and focus, but also an emotional boost during a time that I quite honestly would most likely suffered greatly alone. I am so thankful for the love I have and the family I have carved out of the massive stone facade surrounding me.

Beyond that, I am a man who thrives on anxiety. I just do, and I can’t avoid it. I can perhaps manage it (more or less), but it will never go away.

Sometimes it’s simply crippling, and then it can go away, waver back and forth like this in a matter of minutes, hours, days, etc ...

I make a chore of bearing my presence in many ways, and again, this is something for which I am acutely aware. I should come with a manual, or a warning sticker, or something.

And now I will end the open book, and shut it down once again; and in the process, I will dole out the garbage, kick it to the curb, and make you suffer through it, were you still here, and were you dumb enough to take that bait ...

we turned over the log at the bottom of the pile and they scattered, a swarm, a colony, a cancerous mass running from the light. and there in the remaining heap, an albino, a horror, a curiosity, something to focus upon with the scope of your fears. and then kill it at all costs. you left notes for me at the bottom of your closet. maybe too silly to send on, to ultimately share, wrapped up in their tiny envelopes. and yet, I found them, because you maybe wanted me to. and I want you to know how much I loved, still love, you in that moment, and that your job is never done as long as I am still alive, and that this is true power. I sat, red-handed, completely without fault, and yet completely at the mercy of a machine as cold as they warned it would be. and it all comes flooding back, why you don’t play, why you never were given the rule book, and why you ball your fists and bring them down, like massive unyielding hammers, and crush everything that gets in your way. it’s all about belief, isn’t it? it’s all about what you believe, at any given moment and why. am I foolish to see the grass blow in the field, wet, the ground dark and soft, the smell a slight tang, a sting that almost burns my nostrils? am I foolish to escape to places that are cool, enveloping, muffled, and dank? am I foolish for ever spending this time, making the effort, heralding the arrival of another packet of meaningless grey? am I? is it worth explaining, because is it even there at all? this is a slow march, this is a cold tide, this is a half-opened door, this is the way towards ... what? towards what, anyway? anyone? I’m begging you, show me where I go now.

Hoarders

A couple of weeks ago, I watched about 5 episodes of the documentary series "Hoarders." First I watched it alone, and then one morning, Electra hung out with me and we watched it together. I was a little hesitant about her seeing it, because she is so young and because the content of the show is actually very disturbing. At least to me.

Hoarders takes you into a world of 3 million people in the United States who suffer from the obsession and mental illness of hoarding. They are people that you bump into at the grocery store or flea market, who seem to be HAPPY about the fact that they are shopping and finding deals and accumulating things that they may or may not ever use. In most cases, they never use what they buy. Sometimes they buy several cases of perishable items and put them somewhere handy- for when they need it. They also save garbage, afraid that if they were to throw anything away, it will somehow curse them. To throw away the pie your mother gave you two years ago is very much like stepping on your mother's back.

Small pathways are cut through the debris piles of their homes in a horrific representation of what they do every day. What they do everyday, is try to reason away all of their problems by collecting everything that falls into their path. Good as prey you are if you live with them.

One woman explained it like this. One reason why she was a hoarder, was because when she was a little girl, her father was the garbage man. She was ridiculed and harassed in grade school by other children because her father was the garbage man. She would go home after a long day of torture in the learning of all things worldly- to discover her father loading more found objects onto their plot. She went from one to the other, day in and day out for about ten years at least... Now her home is basically condemned by the city she lives in. She sits on a pile of garbage and cooks herself a meal from half rotten ingredients. I can only imagine what it all smells like. I would be looking for the exit immediately.

Who wouldn't be a hoarder after that?

The alternative is to be someone who is obsessive compulsive and can't live a life at all because they cant stop cleaning.

Have you ever seen this behavior? Do you know anyone who can't leave their house, because it takes them 3 hours to complete the ritual they are committed to by mental illness.. Their goal? To take a shit without getting feces on their hand while they wipe their ass. If all goes well, they can leave their house within the next two hours, if they didn't get shit on their hand. Sometimes, their houses are so sterile and clinical that no life should be allowed to exist there at all if they had their way. The most insane example of a sterile and completely whitewashed home I saw, belonged to a gay man who had been the victim of some kind of unspeakable abuse as a child. You wouldn't just think he was clean and worthy if you went into his home- which he sited as the main motivation behind his clean freakishness. I would be looking for the exit quickly.

Ironically, both hoarders and OCD people suffered a similar childhood trauma, but express and demonstrate it in almost polar opposite ways. They were never made to feel worthy, an eternity after they themselves had been victims.

I can be both. I can find sentiment in every scrap of every crappy inch of my day- just to hold on to something. I can also over-analyze every stain on the muddied ragged pulse of the "sinless" Universe around me... and SO discard it in fear, awe or ignorance... and repeat - by either throwing away or saving ALL I ever do. Balance is as balance can measure. You follow?

Today, Electra climbed in bed to wake me up, and asked me if she could look at the shoe box under my bed of my grandmother's possessions. She is a grandmother I met once as a baby, and that was the last time we met. My daughter knows her as I do, from this box of trinkets, of depressingly personal and average artifacts that you have tried to draw the energy of a matriarchal bloodline's soul from... who's voice once rang clearly through your skull.

I think Electra took something magnetic from her great grandmother's box today. I don't know what it was, because even though this box is so important to me that I keep it, and I keep it in the original condition that I received it in.. I let her take it.

I don't have every object memorized that she could have run with, because I am afraid to disturb this box of artifacts and equally afraid to keep the box under my bed and take no risk with airing and scattering it's contents. It means so much to me and equally so little that I cannot face either sentence.

What does this box mean to my daughter?

We all live under a microscope, regardless of how it pays off.

I read to my daughter- the fairy tales that my mother read to me. I saved or recollected them and she and I repeat them together. Sometimes, she brings home the capture of one I have forgotten or a new one, which I fully embrace.. and sometimes I choke it trying to memorialize it.

And so we hoard.

Take Me To Your Vulgar.

"We don't do fucking peach salads anymore. " I thrust out in our shared 'fuck this shit' tone.

Across the room, the Ginger Glam Giant yells back at me "Oh Yes We Do."

"Bull-mother-fucking- shit. There's no peaches in house. Shit has been 86'ed since there isn't a single peach left in this Dimension, dude." I drop my volume.. "even if we see 2 ton totes of those bitches in the chain grocery store on every corner." hahaha. It's a verbal high five. I am tired of high fives. These things are more like low 1.5s. Even if I participate in this dynamic interaction with more reserve.. the result would be the same. I leave it, happy that I am released from its windowless grip. And whenever anyone else leaves before me, I shout after them, "Run Forest Run".

Silverback emerges from the back of the kitchen and says something about 'was it the bartender again?'

"I didn't realize you were here sir, or I wouldn't have been so ... vulgar."

Hover. Make eye contact 3 seconds longer than most situations would warrant, and believe that you are a god among men is my assessment. He believes that he is commanding the immediate space of all atoms around him if he behaves this way. Commanders command... and the rest get commanded. Oh really? What if you aren't the boss of me? What if I didn't ever work for you again?

We all know, based on very basic context clues, that it WAS the bartender who had placed the order. But more importantly, WHY would the bartender be asking for something we don't provide anymore? Is he stupid? Is he lazy? Does he have a death wish for fucking with us?

We dig our hearts out, digging the graves for our souls in the basement of this poorly designed uncreative DREAM and 'Rick Moranis' wants to fuck with us?

Not so. Turns out he was just going off of the menu. We had fucked with him and fucked with ourselves in the process.

What if the last command you gave was your last?

Not allowed to skip from War to Fantasy?


Silverback blocks my station as he eats whatever he wants that he sees. He (it) lounges and intends to simultaneously have rapport as it exercises ancient robotic tactics of dominant posing. "You should be more approachable," he says. Its like he cut it out of a magazine and pasted it in the air between us. I grab towels and make the stainless steel all around us look stainless as I can handle.

When I pause long enough to figure that he is in fact expecting me to come back to that, I say that I am the most approachable person that you probably know. What you see is what you get. There is no mystery here. I am approached seven ways from Sunday every second of the day when I am not at work. I can go through a crowd of a thousand without making eye contact, but if you grab me or tap my shoulder just to tell me that you are praying for me.. You will get real close to me real quick. Sound macho? That was the macho-lite edition.


The highlight of my day was when I stood in line at the post office with my daughter for 1/2 an hour. I love her. I won't go into why we were at the post office and what we gained from the experience. You wouldn't care and I'll totally lose you.

Command your own ass. it's all you've got left that cares.

If the abused phrase "I'm sorry" doesn't make it into my going away party... then I'm sorry.