Groundhog's Day

“Another Day Sunrise”

Another day sunrise

Moments before dawn

Sails set

Friends depart

But they are not gone.

That was written by my Uncle Stephen who was the greatest man I ever knew.

On February 1, 1952 one of the most important men in my life was born. 

He had thin red hair and a slow steady gait. 

In his office he had gadgets and do-dads and bits and bobbles. 

In his kitchen he had an armada of little model houses.

In his dining room he had glass shelves covered in Star Trek memorabilia.

In his living room he had wind-up music boxes and the world’s largest collection of B-rated science fiction films all stored in brown boxes with thin faded black text describing the movie and some facts about filming.

In his life he lived simple and relatively lonely. He never married. He didn’t have many friends. What he did have were nephews and nieces that he treated like treasured plants. Plants that would look pretty damn badass with a machete and possibly a katana in some pictures. 

In his actions he was direct. He had honesty in spades. He showed me that solitude was not sadness. That finding the silly in the mundane was amazing. That making doo-dads even if they didn’t work was a great thing. That label makers had many uses.

On March 22, 2004 he died at his kitchen table. It took several days for him to be found. His baby sister who lived less than five miles away refused to drive to his house and see if he was alright. The same sister held his funeral in a Chapel with a pastor presiding. This same sister talked of God and what “Stephen would have wanted.” She said he would have loved the violin. She said a lot of things on his behalf. 

I sat for what felt like eternity listening to what she and others said on his behalf. I listened to my brother cry his way through an Edgar Allen Poe poem that he had spent days searching for. I listened to this pastor talk about heaven and hope and the ending of lives. I sat there and cried and looked at this blown up portrait of him. I sat there and thought about how he didn’t like green or red foods and how he always went to Al’s Pancake Palace and the waitress would bring him an iced tea without asking. I thought about the sweat stain in his truck’s front seat that was dark and pungent that I never wanted to touch. 

I thought about how he always made me try new foods and the careful way he went through every row at the Dollar Store. I thought about the time he took me and my brother to the park and tried to play a camera trick so it looked like we had jumped over a huge stone. I thought about the times he took us to the birdcage movies and how at the arcade he always played Space Invaders. 

I thought about all of these things while sitting next to the man who molested me when I was younger and listening to the woman who told me awful things about my whore mother. I thought about all of these things and I got angry and tearful. I thought about all of the cruel and meaningless things the people on the pew set aside for family had done and I was so angry.

Angry that these people had the right to talk on behalf of the one good man in my life. Angry that the pedophile still lived while the greatest man I knew had died. Angry that they had such a right and the privilege to stand there and tell us all what Stephen wanted, who Stephen was. I sat there and burned on the inside and listened to their lies and their legitimate grief and hated. 

I hated the chapel. I hated the pastor. I hated the violin. I hated Stephen’s brothers. I hated his sisters. I hated his friends. I hated everything except that picture. That ridiculously huge picture that was nearly drowned out by the hideous bouquets of flowers around it. 

That night at Stephen’s wake I laughed when my drunk aunt gave me the shirt off her back. I laughed not because Stephen would have wanted me to but because I wanted me to and that, more than the pastor, the chapel, and the awful squeaking violin music is something I knew in my heart that Stephen would have appreciated. 

I will never do anything in his name or because he would have wanted me to because that would go against everything he taught me growing up. I am my own person and the best way I can honor him is to continue being my own person. Proudly and without fanfare, I will be myself. Not because he loved me for me or because he would want me to but because I loved him- love him and this is the best way I can show it. 

Uncle Stephen was the greatest man I knew and he died alone. He loved his toaster oven and worked on traffic lights for a living. His obituary stated he “will be loved” and he is.  

In his words, “I’ve a feeling we’re all just a cornflake / Spilled loose from the box.”

I

I hate my family. And I don't mean the idle "hate" that teens have for their parents because "they don't understand" or "they're so uncool." It's the sort of hatred one has for people who have wronged them. I hate sounding petty or whiny but they destroyed whatever good I had in me. I love them, I do. Really. They are my blood, I have to love them. But... I hate them. I hate what they did to me, either actively or passively. They've hurt me. So much. All of them except one and that one doesn't count because he wasn't there for the entirety of my life.

But it always hurts to realize that they really don't regard me on equal grounds with the rest of them. It hurts when they blame me for things that I didn't do or cannot control. I don't want to be the bigger man, as it's put. I really don't. I just want to leave them all behind. Delete them from my contacts list, de-friend them on facebook and forget their faces. I want to stop having nightmares about the things that happened to me and to stop feeling so afraid and angry because of how they hurt me. Mostly I want to be free to just feel. To really feel and not hold back or keep things back or repress things. I want to be free. Really, that's all I want. I don't want to forget or for it to have never have happened but I want to be able to feel freely.

I want to be able to feel happy without having to pretend. I want to feel angry without it bringing up my anger at what went down when I was younger. I want to feel grief. To really, truly, feel the kind of grief that everyone else does. I don't want my automatic response to every emotion to be repress, forget. I don't want to have to make a conscious effort to feel, actually feel. Because reacting I've got down pat but actually feeling I don't.

I hate feeling like a monster because I don't feel the way I should. I walk around each day and I'm so full of nothing. It's heavy and it takes so much effort to do anything. Every interaction involves so much thinking and acting and it is just so damn tiring.

Like Grown Ups Do (Unsettling Content)

Today I was watching Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the two elderly people I live with were sitting there next to me and neither of them seemed as interested in the program as I.
I was sitting there durring a commercial and it got me thinking. Why do I like this program? It's unpleasant and never happy and it's uncomfortable to the other people in the room as I since I only ever watch it on the T.V.

But I don't really know why I asked this because I know why I watch these kind of shows.




I'm obsessed with them.


I'm obsessed with sexual assault. But it's not a kink or any sort of physical thing for me. It's sort of cathartic to watch police officers run about and try to solve these crimes because it never happened for me or those I know that these sort of things have happened to.
I watch these types of shows because it helps me live with what happened to me.

There is a lot of things I've heard about my childhood but I've blocked so much of it out that I don't feel comfortable relying on other's heresy. I know what is said is at least partially true because I'll have dreams or moments where I remember something from when I was little that I don't actively know. I have memories of seeing my mother get fucked by strangers. I have memories of strange people coming in to my room at night when I lived with her and doing things. Most of my memories are very vague and convoluted because I've spent so long trying to forget them that they're not quite reliable anymore but...

I remember one instance when I was older that I've never been able to forget.
There had been some emergency that called away both my father and my mum and they hadn't been able to find anyone to watch us so they left us with the only option available: my uncle Dale. He was nice, if a bit strange at times but he wasn't so odd for a member of our family. He lived with my other uncle, Steven, who I loved intensely.  Steven collected Star Trek memorabilia and those little plaster houses from the Dollar Store, just to give you an idea of what 'normal' constituted in the family.

Anyway, we stayed over and during the day it was fine. We played at a creek and I was mostly left alone, as most people do with me. I was very into myself from a young age. By that I don't mean that I loved myself and only paid attention to myself but that I spent most of my time in the imaginary world in my head. So my two brothers played with each other and I joined in sort of. My uncle always seemed to like my brothers better so I didn't really mind. I didn't know him too well and he was no Uncle Steven so I didn't really pay any mind to him.

But come that evening is when the strange started. I didn't think it at the time, probably because I was young and because I didn't know any better. But when he took each of us alone into his room to pat down with powder (I assume it was baby powder or something similar) it was strange and it should have sounded an alarm but it didn't. It sounded so reasonable when he took me in there after one of my brothers to "check for ticks" and apply this powder for some reason. He was an adult and as such I trusted him, as most children trust adults of their family.

I remember being confused because I could check myself in the mirror for ticks but I trusted him because I didn't know what a tick was or what they looked like. I know he convinced me to kiss him under some line about doing things like "grown ups". Applying the powder and checking for ticks constituted an all-body search.
An all over the body search.
But he treated me like a "grown up"
I was happy. I was fucking happy because adults never treated me like a grown up. I was small, blond, and had one of those little girl voices and no one took me seriously. Usually they just ignored me or pandered to me.
It ended quickly because one of my brothers was waiting for his tick-check but it didn't stop there.

Later, when we were watching a movie, he sat me in his lap and asked me again if I wanted to learn to kiss like the grown ups do. I was eager because I was small and young and he's my uncle and family means safe, right?
So he showed me what a grown up kiss was and he touched me and made me touch him.

And I think this is about the last time I ever really trusted my family or adults in general.
Because in the back of my head I knew he did something wrong. That he wasn't supposed to do that with little girls like me and the older I got the more revolted I was at what he had done.
The more it made me hate my family and it even got me to start to distrust my brothers and pull away from them. Before this it had always been big brother, me, then little brother against everyone else but I couldn't trust them anymore.

They were there for the second come around of this. They were sitting right there in the room and they did nothing. Not even my older brother who I know has gone through enough bad-touch moments to know better.

I couldn't trust them. I couldn't like them. They had betrayed me. My whole family. I know this sounds a bit melodramatic but that's just the sentiment I have. I can't trust them because they made me damaged.

They have damaged me so much and I doubt there is recovery from this ever. There only seems to be coping. But I don't know if I want to cope with the things that happened to me while I was growing up. Sometimes I just want to drown myself in recklessness so that I can at least pretend not to care about myself. I hate my family and I hate myself and I hate the world because we all let this happen to me and it just makes me so angry all the time.

All this anger and hurt and rage and pain and guilt just makes me feel like I don't quite belong to the human race because there's no way the rest of them burn in their center with this massive craving to destroy everything because it all just makes it hurt and the destruction will make them feel alive and whole. It seems perverted to want to set everything on fire just to be able to appreciate how alive it was.

I love life and I love existence and I love the passion and energy that is humanity but I spend so much of my life inside this contradiction.

I hate everyone and everything but in the same breath I love them all and I feel so much. I don't understand how I don't feel at ends. I suppose, though, that it's simply my nature. I hate and I love in the same breath because I feel as if with every breath I live that I die. I revel in this contradiction. It feels so human and I need that sometimes because there are moments where I'd rather see the world burn than continue on with this mass of sickening and depraved individuals that make up the glorious race I am apart of.

Bell of Morality

I found out a bit ago. I guess some time like December or January that the probability that my mother had been murdered when I was a child was something like 90%. I say that because my father admitted to murdering someone to me and to my brother he admitted he had "gotten rid" of our mother (something to this affect my memory is failing at best and failed at normal).

She has been gone since I was a child. I could regale you with tales of her periodic visits in one state or another or of the few early childhood memories I do have that would explain just what type of person she was and what type of experiences she left behind for her children but at the moment I don't think I'm particularly strong enough to.

My parents were never married and hardly constituted as together if one chooses to believe the stories. My older sister was from before my parents got together for the first time. My brother is from after they got together but most assuredly not my father's child. I was born eleven months after my father's girlfriend had given birth to her and my father's first child. The baby boy was given away to a Jewish family in Encino. After me came my younger brother by two and a half years and this spurred my father's girlfriend in to becoming my stepmother. Though, if I'm honest with myself, she was my mum from the start.

To put the long of it into the short my mother was a whore, an addict, had severe dependency issues and was an all-around moral-less individual. She has left scars so deep and profound on her children that they have created our most defining characteristics. However, the way I remember her leaving, the things she said and what she did left one of the biggest traits that I possess in its wake.

My apologies if this is rambling or doesn't quite stay on topic.

Anyway, years passed by and I was something above first grade but bellow third when my mother left. I remember going to an airport and trying not to cry, though I did anyway. I remember she hugged me and said that she was going away for my good-- for my brother and me. She said she was going to Texas to live with some of her family (never verified). I remember being so sad and overwhelmed and not being "big" enough to handle this. I remember my older brother seeming to be angry and sullen and grieving already. He loved her so much. I loved her so much. She was my mother. She was my heart. She was my mother.

I never got over her leaving me. When I was in school on the following Mother's Day I drew a picture of her on one side of a fence and me on the other as my Mother's Day card. My teacher requested I do another with soft words and sad eyes. I drew one for my mum (read: stepmother). As I grew up and started to comprehend the horrors of the world I began to take solace in the fact that my mother left.

I don't ever remember feeling abandoned by her because she had always had a habit of disappearing and reappearing months later (with a new man or, in one instance, a couple who were "kind" enough to look after her). I guess I always expected her to come back eventually. I remember when we moved from our apartment to a house in another city that I worried that mother wouldn't be able to find us again because she didn't know where we lived.

I remember dismissing this shortly because she wasn't to come again. I wasn't to see her anymore. Besides, I had my mum, why should I look for another mother? (I've always held a certain amount of shame and guilt for 'replacing' my mother, especially when I was young. It wasn't until I was seventeen or so that I started to deal with this.)

I used to have day dreams that my mother would come rescue me from the void that I lived in, from the sheer loneliness and purposeless that was my being (most heavily in middle school).

But no matter how much I wished she would appear (preferably a millionaire and happily well-balanced, as she'd never been when I'd known her) I always was comforted by the fact that she had left.

And the older I got the more I was comforted by it. Because it had been a truly selfless and perfect act performed by a deeply flawed and corrupt individual. I never had to convince myself that when she left it was for the best because I had known it was for the best. She caused so many problems and difficulties that it could only be positive for her to leave our lives and allow our (seemingly) more stable and secure father to raise us. To me, at the time, she had been the only real saint there could be. I didn't, and still don't, believe that a 'saintly' individual is one who avoids all 'sin'. I believe a saint should be an individual whose life is full of sin and corruption and yet still performs extreme acts of selflessness that benefit everyone else and are only a detriment to themselves.

To know what it is like to sin and still act with grace is a more wondrous act than any pure individual can comprehend.

She had been the only person I had ever met or heard of who had truly done something completely morally centered. To me, she was my hope. Not in return. She should never return. Ever. But in humanity. I saw so much in humans that was evil and disgusting and there was so little in the way of morality that was truly deserving that I would falter and fail and fall into these detached episodes of utter dejection and hopelessness. I would drift from myself and run entirely without thinking about my day to day actions. I would lean about, completely out of it, and despairing over how wretched humanity was. Until I remembered her and what she had done.

She gave me my standard for morality. To do what is right and true above what is wanted or easier. But it was more than that. She showed me that one didn't need to be constantly upright or "good" in the contemporary sense to be moral. She showed me that one could have faults a-plenty and still do what is entirely right and true. And I don't mean altruistic because that is merely a sham for those whom feel guilt about their own existence.

Because of her I always expected people to be morally good. I still expect people to be good, at their core. Because it wasn't a matter of flaws or problems or pettiness but of knowing what is right and then doing it.

And then, now, at twenty, to learn what I based my standards for humanity is false more than wounded me, it crippled me. I've been unable to do anything useful or what I should. It isn't so much that I don't believe in the moral center that every individual has but it is an utter and unfathomable grief that my own mind hides from itself.

I've only felt tired and empty since this discovery. It's a black mood, indeed. I don't want to think because it will inevitably lead to me thinking about my dead mother, my childish and selfish stepmother, my overly faulted brothers, my egotistical and manipulative sister, and last but never least, my monster of a father.

He killed her. He lied to me. He hurt us all. And he doesn't care at all. He hurt his children. He hurt us. I know I'm being repetitive but it's so hard to grasp even though I know its verity. He ignored us all for my entire life so far. He only ever recognizes us when he wants something or when it benefits him to do so. This would devastate anyone but it hits me so hard all the time because I can't stop believing that it's possible that he will do better; that they all will do better even though I don't expect it to happen. It's like a new heartbreak every time I have to remind myself that my hope is fruitless. That, for some people, right does not constitute an obligation to act a certain way and that seems entirely incomprehensible to me.

Because if it weren't for them I wouldn't have this unshakable moral compass and this unrelenting hope but everyday they still never fail to fail me.