Intervention for the sober

Yesterday, I woke to the sound of my mother yelling at the babykicker.

I was looking at the huffingtonpost with a toothbrush sticking out of my mouth. There was generic classical music blaring from the den. Papi stood in the doorway “You’re really addicted to all this technology stuff, aren’t you?” He had this smile, this glassy I’m seeing you for the first time even though I’ve said it a thousand times smile. Brown eyes projecting—disbelief? pity? smugness?—an alien vision of reality. He was positively beatific! Was there a USB cord running from my temple to the hard drive? Was I bound up in wires? Were my eyes cracked and dry from spending an entire week playing WOW only to break for pizza and piss? Were there little piles of shit in my room?

I had to suck my cheeks together as so not to spit toothpaste everywhere. I swallowed the red flush creeping up my cheeks. I didn’t know which made me angrier: his condescension, his genuine belief that I really was addicted to technology, or his blindness.

With a pop I yanked the toothbrush out of my mouth, “Really, then why are you the one insistent on blaring the stereo?” That’s what I meant to say. What came out of my mouth sounded more like “muff glufff bigooph!” on account of the foamy soup between teeth and tongue, but the meaning was clear, and he left. He turned off the stereo.

Let me back up. I need to elaborate on my emotional response. As a rule any form of condescension makes me angry, particularly when it comes from a parent or friend. My father is an M.D. an infectious disease specialist. Back in’85 when AIDS ascended to arch-fiend in humanity’s never ending battle against nature, he was one of three doctors in ::censored:::, who didn’t run away from gay men dying the slow death of wasting syndrome; he never freaked out, he never turned a patient away from being HIV positive.

He’s very good at being a doctor, but he’s a luddite, and on top of that he ‘s got that great white ego that comes from being a doctor, so already we have an irritating concoction in the works. All my life he has been saying I watch too much tv or spend too much time on the computer or waste my time reading comic books (yeah, I know not technology per se, but the pattern here is obvious). He’s even gone so far as to call the t.v. my best friend. (that was insulting and it hurt)

Growing up I did watch my share of t.v, but even then he over exaggerated. Soccer and Football didn’t matter. All the studying, the extra time I put in on my honors courses. Getting the lead in the school play didn’t matter. Have you read Neil Simon’s Fools? The lead is in every scene, lines on every page. In order to know the part you have to know the whole script! Here I am, with a Master’s degree in English, I devote about 20 hours a week to the martial arts and conditioning, another 5-8 hours on writing and blogging, and I spend some time with my friends on the weekend. When it comes to my father, I have no life outside of the predetermined narrative he’s constructed for me. Nothing I have ever done has squashed this belief and nothing I do ever will, and I stopped trying a long time ago but hot damn it pisses me off somethin’ fierce, like someone shoved a bottle of Tabasco sauce up my nose.

Then there is the issue of my sister. A person with real addiction issues, who has waged a war of emotional abuse that has left my parents’ marriage entropic. Speaking of the babykicker, I’d say her only accomplishment to date is sucking up well over 100,00 dollars of my parent’s money, forcing them to take out another mortgage and dip into their retirement savings which has resulted in nothing but a shallow, directionless parasite, and papi keeps letting her get away with it. She’s a real Rolo Tomasi. Have I mentioned that I hate and despise her? I really shouldn’t. It should be clear from everything I write.

And yet the term addiction is slung at me carelessly as a way to criticize nonexistent behavior. I wonder though....

Oh, and for the record I've never played WOW (World of Warcraft)