Lush Life

I won’t stoop down to anyone’s level. I won’t let the buttons be pushed. I will allow the antagonism to enter and flow through. I do not live under the thumb any more. I will not be bullied or pushed around. I am not the abuser, the one who debases, criticizes, and lulls people to sleep. Let others fall for the act of contrition or religiosity. It is a lie. The thin veneer of normalcy hides a predators heart. But I am no victim. The claws have no bite nor did they ever.

My life is simple. I have people who love me. People I love. A lush life. They merit my attention. They deserve my affection. That person does not. The sooner my family realize that, the better we all are.

Dream a little dream

You know, sometimes I have no idea what my fucking subconscious wants to tell me. I had this weird dream last night. It was eerie in a bright colored sixties Mad Men kind’ve way. The whole time I’m thinking about a woman I love. I’m going home to her. I haven’t seen her in a long time and I have finally admitted to her over the phone that I love her. I know she feels the same way but “life kept us apart” and all that rubbish. I get home and see her in bed. The bed is huge and there a number of women in bed. I notice only the last two in a line. One of  them is a lady I only refer to as “Paulie”. Well, Paulie is what I call her because she looks like Paulie Walnuts from the Sopranos. Yes, I know. She’s not the one I expected to be in my bed, but I steel myself to it because I haven’t seen this girl in a long time, I don’t know what she looks like so I go to the other side of the bed and start removing my clothes. Paulie looks up from the bed. She says, “Let me move over, I think you’re looking for this other girl right next to me.” Well, of course. Why did I think that she’d be interested in a guy like me. I mean, the real Paulie wouldn’t be caught dead with a guy at all, let alone like me. So I crawl into bed and I recognize her immediately. It’s D, the sister of my best friend S. during high school. She’s nice and beautiful, slim and demure, and totally wrong for me, but in the logic of a dream she’s the one. We talk, but I barely remember anything else, the dream fades at this point and I wake up.

The odd thing is, is that I hated D. She was a brat who unsurprisingly hated me right back. She may have been nice to look at but she was an annoying little bitch with absolutely zero personality and an uncanny ability to miss every joke I ever told in her presence. Humorless, automaton, robotic, a girl you could love only if you were fucking Victor Von Frankenstein. What makes this dream insidious however, is that while I despised D, I was really in love with my best friend from high school: her sister S. She was the one I carried a torch for through my 20’s and 30’s despite “falling in love” with another woman who reminded me of her, but who would always fall short in my eyes. S was as beautiful as her sister. Older. Tall, as tall as I was, but awkward, like a swan which is why her name is S here. She lived in San Francisco. She moved away after high school, and two failed relationship with guys who hated her and treated her like dirt. I felt she was running away from Los Angeles, blaming her pain on the city itself, and ultimately running away from me.

Yet, we talked many times a week. Hours at a time. We had the same routine. Talk about what’s happening in our lives, then end with a back and forth questionairre about what we’re listening to, reading, watching. No conversation was ever the same, everyone a painful reminder of what I had and what I could never truly have. I was the best friend. She loved me, I’m sure of it, but she never had the courage to take the next step. She would always make the same mistakes with her boyfriends: Bad boys. White. Motorcycles. Cigarettes. Abusive. I was stable, secure, someone she could always come back to but never quite good enough. She asked me once why I would flake out and not come up and see her like I had promised. Why I wouldn’t call her sometimes for weeks or months on end. Why did I disappear and then step back into the remembered rhythms. It was hurtful, stupid and flaky of me I said, but what I never told her was that there was only so much that I could stand being around her. How painful it was to be so close yet so far away. I too never had the courage to take that step and show her how much I really loved her. By that time the situation was even more complicated. I was married. I kept hoping against hope that one day she’d return from up north and realize that she loved me in the same way that I loved her. Is it any wonder that my marriage ended?

I told her a few months ago how I felt finally. 20 plus years to tell her that the one defining relationship of my 20’s and 30’s was the girl that got away? How much of an idiot I was. How much of an idiot she was I think too. We were both afraid to take the next step. I carried a torch for her for far too long and it hurt everything I held near to me. I no longer carry that torch. I met someone else.

She is everything in a woman. She is smart, way smarter than I am, and highly educated, the sort that quotes Karl Marx and understands what he wrote about. She’s read Nietzche and can tell you what he was really talking about especially because she says people read him and don’t understand what he’s really talking about. She loves movies, cheesy science fiction movies, weird television and comedies, lots of comedies. She can cook but she’s modest about her abilities. She’s beautiful, radiant even at times, but she is modest about those as well. Her eyes are the clearest, sharpest blue eyes I have ever seen. An award winning smile and a cute overbite to boot. She’s short. Athletic because she was once a competitive swimmer. Freckles, so many freckles, skin damage she says, she has the skin of a 70 year old. All the years of working in the sun as a lifeguard. I am marrying her today. The torch has been passed and I no longer care if my friend S is available or not.

I don’t care  that she’s here for the weekend visiting family. What I care about is why the fuck am I dreaming about getting into bed with her sister?

Idiocracy

I have a problem with my weight. I am over 300 pounds. My double chin has a double chin and the flap at the back of my head is pronounced. I have back fat. The folds underneath my stomach are restricting my movement. My thighs touch and I sweat profusely. I get skin-flaps from the irritation and weird pimples to boot. I can’t get into or out of my car without a struggle and my left knee hurts because there’s alot of extra weight on a joint that should have been surgically repaired years ago.

I know I’m fat. You don’t need to remind me. I look at myself in the mirror every morning and I see it. You can’t say anything to me that I haven’t thought in my own head a million times. And yet, I still go out of my way to treat you the way that I’d like to be treated. I hold out hope that there are people out there that are going to look beyond my exterior and everyday I am disappointed. No, scratch that, there are people here that are. My fiancee loves me for who I am, so do my kids, and my friends never tell me that I am any less of a person because I am big enough to be two persons.

But you would think that as my father you would be sensitive enough to know that I am most vulnerable when I am with you. Is it polite for your friends to talk to you and remark how fat your son has gotten, and that your only response is that, “Well he just doesn’t keep an eye on what goes into his mouth, haha?” I realize that your friends are the sort that make up this fine idiocracy that we live in, the sort that complain about others weaknesses while ignoring their own, the tobacco and the cheap tequila and the lousy women, but what of you?

What is it in you that allows that behavior to happen? I walked away, glad I had a book in my hand to ignore you as I have always done, but what is it in you that has always sided with them over me? It is ironic that your failure as a father led to your father-in-law stepping in to instruct me in the manner in which a gentleman is supposed to behave in this life which in turn placed you in my hands when you went blind and couldn’t take care of yourself anymore.

Just be thankful. If I had been taught to be more like you I would have abandoned you to your sorry state long ago. Fuck you and good night.

Rant of the Day

Most people as they get older, they get wiser, they have more to lose so they get more conservative. Me, I’m getting more and more liberal. You see, I used to be an idealist. I believed that the system allowed for a fair and balanced amount of discourse and that Americans could argue and discuss their problems in public, air their differences and commit to a fair compromise. I don’t believe that shit anymore.

Our President has a political mandate to change the status-quo, the current state of affairs, that which  a generation and a half of Conservative, Republican, Free Market anarchists have inflicted on us, and rolled-back what we had, before the New Deal was gutted. Their policies have eroded our infrastructure, destroyed our economy, corrupted the ideals we stood for, the social compact we developed, all for a buck. Our schools have no money. Our banks have no credit. Our utilities gouge us; we can’t afford electricity or fuel, our water isn’t safe to drink, nor is our food safe to eat. What about terrorism? 9/11 happened on their watch. Are we safer now than before Iraq and Afghanistan? Where is Osama bin Laden? None of these questions have been answered after 8 years of Bush/Cheaney. They had a monopoly, a clean sweep of the three houses of Government with the media, the fourth estate as it were, what normally called the counterpoint to their rhetoric, checked on the facts and made the politicians honest, was a willing co-conspirator, no less than a governmental mouthpiece, a propaganda machine.

They ran on a platform, a recipe of just another four years, more of the same, more of the same shit that hadn’t worked in the previous 8. They lost the election on that platform, and instead of offering real solutions, a counterpoint to “liberal bias” they have spent months looking for ways to tear down this Presidency. They say, “Obama is a socialist, a communist, a terrorist, and worse than that he may not even be American.” Close to 50% of people polled recently in Fruitcake-land North Carolina think either that our Hawaiian born President is a foreign-born national or are undecided as to his origin. 50%?!?!? 8% of these knuckledraggers either didn’t know or were undecided that Hawaii was even a State. These weren’t illegal immigrants, ethnic minorities siphoning off the teat of Public Education. These are racists, bigots, ignoramusses content to prostrate themselves at the fat steaming carcasses of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. And they want us to return them to power?

In the past we have backed off, allowed them to continue their lies and propaganda, but no more. We can’t afford to let them take over our debate just because they screem louder. They have had their turn. Their screeching doomsday calls are falling on deaf ears. Their rants have galvanized support from the left and the center. Obama’s numbers are rising. So is my support for him. He isn’t as liberal as I thought he would be. He spends far too much time listening to the extreme right’s talking points. He should get to the business he was elected for. He has a mandate. Do it.

Familial Regret

I said something I shouldn’t. It was something I felt or else I wouldn’t have spoken it, but I regret saying it. Remember I said I’m an adolescent still despite my decrepit exterior? I still want and need my Mommy. Sad but true. See, my Mommy left me not when I was young and impressionable but a year ago. Let me elaborate.

She told me once, awhile back that she didn’t know what to do with her retirement, that she thought of starting over, learning a new trade, buying a new computer. She said if I’d go with her to buy it. She even asked me to lie to my father when the question came up as to where she got the money for it. I bought it for her. She asked me for the basics, turning it on, starting a program, using the dial-up Intenet. AOL. She emailed me. She was so proud of herself, and so was I, that I didn’t bother to ask why she was up until so late at night using it. She was dying inside. People were asking more of her than what she was willing to give. I was the number one culprit. I had just gone through a divorce, my two kids needed somebody stable in their life and I was a hair’s breadth away from the looneybin. To a certain extent I’m still there. My Dad was culprit number 2. He cares about his dogs, the ignored squalor in which they live, the jungle of vines and bananas and mangoes that criss-cross about a backyard festooned with broken masonry, PVP pipes and aluminum siding. What he has never bothered, never asked nor cared about showing, the least bit of tenderness and caring, even thanks for my mother’s selfless devotion to him and to our family.

Is it any wonder that she looked to find a connection with other people? Any wonder that she met and fell in love with somebody online? A poetry chatroom which remains completely ironic as I never saw my Mother read anything until she retired. At first it was just meetings with friends, like a local bowling league only online and amongst people with very diverse backgriounds. Then she started taking weekends away, to visit her cyberneticos as my Dad and my grandfather called them. They visited sure, but my Mom chose instead to spend more and more time, invest more and more of herself in  the lives and families of complete strangers.

Then my Grandfather got sick. We knew he was losing his faculties, that Alzheimer’s runs in the family, but we had no clue that it would come up so quickly, that he would disintegrate so quickly in front of our eyes. With him in that state, my Mother would leave him, with my disabled father and his functionally mute manservant, and she would drive out of state, at first amid the lies of a job editing and translating the poetry of an online friend, but then more overtly. She left the love letters out once, daring, hoping that one of us, my brother or myself, would see. I ignored them.

I trusted her. When she told me there was nothing there, that we were her family, I believed her. When she moved out, to Phoenix of all places, I still held out hope that we could continue as we were. A family separated by hundreds of miles of desert but as close as the nearest facebook page. Not anymore. I have no words to say to my Mother right now. Not any that will comfort her and excuse my behavior in her eyes. She left us, for good reasons as I have said, but she returns, for one weekend a month, and she cleans and she does laundry and she complains about the relative squalor that my Father and I live in here. My sons do not have clothes to wear once they step out of the shower. We have no food in the fridge. We don’t appreciate what she does. So I said to her, “Choose. Where do you live? Do you live here, or there?” She said there.

So again. I am a bad person. I said something I felt right in saying but I said it in anger, as a child would, as a hurt and lonely boy who lost his Mommy at the age of 42 would. If 42 is the answer to the meaning of life, then someone is laughing at me from above.

What this is and what this is not

This isn’t a blog about me. My name is not Herbie. It is not about a middle aged guy with everything right in the world. I have a job, a life, a family, a wonderful group of friends and an interesting hobby. I should be happy. I shouldn’t be this angry all the time. I shouldn’t subject the people I love and the people that love me to my adolescent mood-swings. But I do. Call it moral ambivalence. Call it disdain for people. Call it what you will but don’t call this me opening up to anyone, because as much as this blog isn’t about me, this blog is certainly not a blog about you either. I don’t care if anyone ever reads this blog actually. In fact my ambivalence extends further. I’m not a writer. I pretend to be one. I have a billion blogs with no end in sight. Everything I care about, I blog about, and in the end none of it ever rings true because as you see, I’m not a good person, and I lie all the time.

So don’t read this. I won’t.