I get the distinct feeling I’m viewed as a parasite by my mother. This is not a groundless claim. I live at home. I eat her food. She still takes care of my car insurance. She screams at me, that or reminding me that “you’re not a college student anymore, stop acting like you live in a dorm” by which she means I’m messy, even though I confine the mess to my room. Any fight between my sister and mother will inevitably make a turn at “Why does he do the dishes?” She demands with her tuneless southern twang. “Well yeah, your brother’s no better, he’s next on my list.”
Or it is about a car, or something the babykicker said. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not mom always agrees with her, and I’m in my own room stunned, feeling sold out, angry that mom would accept such reductive infantile logic, instantly put me on par with that piece of shit who harms people carelessly and without regard. We’re not people to the babykicker, merely things, obstructions to her grand quest of loafing 14 hours a day while everyone else works—unless she needs something from us.
So that’s that then. Her crimes are my crimes; she should be allowed to hurt as many people as possible.
How did this become the status quo? I work. I pay my own credit card bill. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. The only bad habit I really have is jerking off to porn, yet I am struggling for a satisfactory counter-argument. No, I don’t want a satisfactory one, I’m searching for one without peer. I want a coup de grace: a simple retort that says “that settles it, he’s a self sufficient adult who takes care of himself. There’s only one parasite in this family.”
I can’t. Is there a difference between being a loser who lives with his parents and an adult with a different set of priorities? Right now, in the age of the idiot king, the economy is in the shitter, more people are getting more jobs that pay less, working longer and longer hours, achieving nothing. Seriously, what do they have to show for it? It hasn’t lowered the price of gas, or repaired our relationship with the world writ large or given our children a better education. Hell, most people are easily controlled authoritarian puppets, they’re just waiting for the right leader to tell them what to do.
This excuses nothing though. I’m not talking about everyone else. I’m talking about me. When I was 19 I remember the first night I was in my dorm room. I had this revelation “I’m a man now!” I’ve doubted that epiphany ever since.
Look where I am. My girlfriend was raped and I was powerless to stop it. My track history in relation to grad school is piss poor. I chose the wrong program, and I was miserable, now I can’t get into MFA program because you can read the misery in my grades.
My girlfriend is hundreds of miles away. I moved because I thought I was sparing her. I was afraid I’d lose it and knock her brown eyes right off her face. The only thing the decision engendered were feelings of betrayal and nervous breakdowns. When was the last time I made the right decision about anything? Hell when was the last time someone offered me advice that didn’t bite me in the ass?
Joseph Campbell wrote about the call. See before the hero’s journey begins he hears the call. He is summoned by light or the powers that be or George Lucas or whoever. But there are heroes who resist the call, and they are punished. Jonah and the whale: man is called by God to do his work, man runs away in fear, man is eaten by whale. Only when Jonah repents and accepts his ministry is he released.
What if you’re tone deaf though? What if you can’t hear the call? It might as well be static, covered in noise pollution, trampled over by car stereos with bass five miles high, a giant arrogant robot, straight from the big-eyes-small-mouth fantasy world of
I wrote this and I haven’t inched to clarity, not one bit.
I doubt, and it scares me. I doubt, and it tires me, wears me down.
2 comments:
I keep waiting for life to give me a sign, or a signal, and before in the way, it's carried me off in some direction, and I've been saved.
I keep listening, to the wind, to everyone around me, for this signal. What am I suppose to fucking do? Stay? Go? Lay down and die somewhere?
I don't know if your mother is abusive or if she adds to your feelings of low self-worth, but if she does, you need to leave. I think you feel helpless in general, and that's paralyzing. Like, no shit, right? I remember when I was in the hospital, and everyone in group therapy gave me the same advice, and I wanted to tell them to fuck themselves...because I was so trapped.
Jerk off to porn. I cum at least once a day with my vibrator. It's the only part of my day I actually enjoy.
I don't think my mother is abusive, thought as a child she wasn't always sure what to do with me, if that makes any sense.
The real problem with my mother is she is a neat freak, at least she's obsessed with the cleanliness of the house. I don't have to pay rent so to an extent, I understand her desire to keep things tidy.
It is quite a thing to live with a neat freak, to grow up with one. You actually live inside their neurosis!
Jerk off to porn? ha! I'm jerking off as I write this...that came out wrong.
Some days my ego is rock solid, but others not so much. It's like someone hit a reset button and I'm stuck in 1993 all over again.
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