Could have been worse

Went to the first counseling session today. It was tolerable. Having been through therapy before I had an idea what to expect. The therapist was an outgoing guy, throwing out plenty of questions, but filled with personal anecdotes, unusual in my experience. My therapist always played the cipher, impassive, sparse, never mentioning his personal life.

He asked us why we were here, which I figured he would, so I answered first since I'd given it some thought. Much of what was said is stuff I've said here, minus MOST of the profanities. The one exception being when he asked me how I felt about my sister, "I fucking hate her."

If my parents commit to it, like I hope they will, they will be the ones seeing the therapist most of the time, then I'll be brought back in, or rotated with the babykicker, assuming she ever agrees to participate (not holding my breath)

Busy Week

Had to lone mom 2,000.00. Never thought I'd be doing that. Practice is on the ropes.

Very busy week: writing/revising personal statements, helping at office, and all the other crazy ga ga I do...and I may get up tomorrow to do a Muy Thai seminar.

Oh, discovered there is a tourney in GA with an open weight white belt division, making it exactly the same as the average practice for yours truly. Will see if I can interest a few people in going.

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)

A Rant

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 Japan, making the rest of us shake and vibrate against our will. We don’t even get to enjoy the song. You can’t hear it! There is only bass, and a smug asshole at the eye of the storm, king of his chrome world.

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.

Just a bit of dialogue

Gave Radar a shower. "Why?" My mother asked. I said, "he smells like dookey." "Don't say that, say feces, you have a Master's degree in english" "Yes, and in my professional opinion this dog smells like dookey, not feces."