My head is currently lopsided. Tilted, more so. It feels like I have a coockaroo (roll the 'r' for proper pronunciation) tap dancing inside my ear as the ear-wax removing bubbles coagulate and pop, gently scrubbing said wax from said ear. Dutiful slime. The guardian to an unfulfilled desire to make a doctor's appointment that I with an equivalent force will resist to ever scheduling. I wonder what would happen if the coockaroo's did get in my head and decided to dance? I bet they'd throw a jazz party those little amber hooligans, with their insectic music too raw for my tastes. Their home, the coffee machine, is purring a fresh batch of coffee, eager to meet my intestines and eventually their maker. The beans ground to dust. The water heated to boil. Two dazed lovers putting their clothes back on, remembering how to feel anxiety again once no longer stripped naked. Meanwhile, Chet Baker's trying to force his horn in my head because that's all I ever asked for really.
I had a therapy session this week that was quite possibly the meaning of therapy. What do we do in therapy? We talk. Ok. That's fine and good but how do we do the work of therapy? What does that entail and why isn't there a guide? So I'll write as Guide. I'll tell you, my imaginary friend what happened for me in therapy this last Wednesday afternoon.
I have a father that is being evicted from his home this week. Not in some fictional metaphorical way, in a literal way. This week, before the thirty first of the month, so maybe next week, but if there is a thirty first of this month of July, my father will be forcefully removed from his one bedroom apartment that he lives in the valley. Today is the nineteenth so, for all I know, it could be happening right now at any moment. The valley, if you're unfamiliar, is the half of Los Angeles that sucks more than the other half of Los Angeles, according to most people of Los Angeles. The only reason why that's a true statement is because people in the valley would agree that it sucks more. The valley is a hot bowl of desert being tail whipped by the almighty sungod himself during the summer. In the winter it's a place that by all measure is lovely and temperate, and entirely forgotten by the rest of Los Angles. You'll only go there if you live there because it's cheaper than living on the other side of the Hollywood or Santa Monica mountains and if you live on the other side of these mountains you will not make many friends that live on the other side of these mountains. It's just how it goes. In this place called the valley lives an old man, a full year behind on rent and in full belief he'll make some type of million dollar cash prize tomorrow for his existence, which will solve all his problems. He thinks it's simply a money thing and that if he just paid his landlord he'd get all the way off his back about the eviction. Which he won't. What the old man really doesn't know, is that this landlord hates this old man more than any other person on this planet Earth. And the only reason I know this, is because the old man is my father. I am not the landlord, but as son of father, steward to his type of emotional robbery, that he's orchestrated for my thirty five years of life. If you have to be in any kind of relationship with my father, you will be disrespected, manipulated, you will be lied to, your boundaries will be ignored, and your wants will become nonexistent. My father doesn't believe other people's world's exist. It's only his world and every one else fits into his role for them, how he wants them, in the way he wants them. Meek players in his play called madness. They will do what he wants, how he wants, or he will throw a tantrum and leave them, leave them to figure out how they wronged him, never gave him enough, and what they need to do to make amends to him. In my father's mind, he's not broken, in any way, he doesn't need repair because there's nothing to fix. This is a demonstration of what zero out of ten humility looks like. Being flawless and using the word 'perfect' as frequently as he uses the word 'I' and 'am'. Therefore, nobody in life can have a relationship with him, because he tries to become the dictator of their freewill. He will break through boundaries as if they were placed there for practice, a target to obliterate hoping the schrapnel scars you enough so you always remember it was him that existed long enough to hurt you. The thing that people really don't get, is that this person is so guarded from reality in his own delusion of life, that he never grew up into an adult. As if he were half of a man, a boy really, no more than four or five years old, trapped in the body of an aging man, terrified of death and dying alone. This terror has kept him from removing himself, for now. He can't fathom it, suicide. The word, like so many other words, we're no longer allowed to write because the algorithm blocks the message, so we have to do phony work arounds because everybody's too afraid of their own grapes, of their own hopeless unhousing. I once asked my Mom, 'Why can't he just simply take responsiblity for the things he bunked up? Just say, yeah, I made a mistake, I took a right when I was supposed to stay straight? It's no big deal. We will in fact get there. Whether by two minutes or twenty seconds but not taking responsibility for his actions has caused him twenty plus years. Unfair exchange rate right there. He made a bad bed but can't admit that either. He has made no wrong decisions. So how could ending up in a one bedroom apartment, forty thousand dollars in debt, no savings at seventy four, no car, not enough money coming in from social security to keep him afloat, where will he go when they remove him today or next week? Where will he run to then when he's completely out? Nobody knows. Nobody cares. Nobody holds him in their life. Everyone has removed him, blocked him, barred him from their life because he won't stop himself from claiming everyones world and devouring it. So when he shows up at my doorstep, or I should say apartment stoop, will I let him in? Because if I let him in he'll never leave. He will devour me with whatever life he has left. He will take from me the rest of my life and not look back to check the carcass. He'll blame it on the liberal left and their woke agenda. He'll blame it on the mallenial malais that's taken over this country. He'll blame it on the immigrants who took his job as an executive in the entertainment industry. He'll blame it on the college students who want peace in the middle East. He'll blame it all on everyone else and he won't take a shred of responsiblity. Not one iota. Nobody wants to look directly in the mirror until they hold themself there because we hold our wounds in our eyes and in the crinkles of our skin. Tucked in those spaces are our memories that give us some awareness of where we are. He won't confront his wrinkles, or look at his pain or be with it. He won't accept it, or allow himself to be marred, flawed, or injured but when it's time to be the victim, he's definitely ready to play that part. A person makes mistakes. Mistakes a plenty. It's those that hold their mistakes with regard that are the most spiritful, perhaps the strongest but what is the strength for when the world no longer requires that brand of strength you offer? Strength as a weakness? The negative space of that question invites the possibility of predators, hunters, rogues, thiefs, and cheats. You and me are capable of all of that. Aren't we? If we pretend we are not then we are beginning to create the make believe, like my father. That's when we create the narrative that fits our idea of life despite the realities that have emerged, he will be evicted, that will happen. Our skin stretches and wrinkles. Our fat gathers and dwindles. Our choices are not always right and we sometimes make the worst decision. All of it, is ok, if we say it's ok. To pretend everything is top notch all the time, what a bogus charade. A fake banksy. It looks like the real deal. You want it to be a real bansky, you'll even tell your friends it's a real banksy for just one more party until you'll have to finally say, it's a fake. Or maybe you'll just hold that secret close to your chest until your dead, because nobody really needs to know right? You'll just know the entire time you're alive that you don't have the courage to be truthful. Not even to yourself. This is what happens, in my nascent opinion, to people who claim to have everything, want everything, need everything and crave more. The fool hearted aren't the comedians and artists, it's the people pretending they are perfection, or close to it. When we're all just dutiful slime. Spending time with my father is like tar on your tongue, scaring yourself into being choked by your own black tongue. Thoughts and ideas need places to exist. Books and art are formats for these secrets of existence, the ones that never reach reality and turn into deeds. We can be open, but can we really? Those that try will get trampled on.
I'm having this therapy session, that's what this is about. This therapy session I had two days ago. I had something to report to my therapist, let's call her Q. Here was my report...
My father left me a voicemail telling me that the reason he missed his court date for his eviction hearing was because it was the Monday after father's day when he was with me, which was a blessing. He said that he missed the court date because he wasn't feeling well because he got sun stroke by playing paddle tennis that day with me, which was a blessing. So in conclusion the reason why he's being evicted is?... because he was with me on father's day, which made him too indisposed for his court date the following day.
When I was four years old I had a violin recital. My father attended this recital. I crushed. I had always associated that day as being the day my father chose me over his profession and I made it worth his while. My performance was so great, I earned his love and adoration even at the families expense. I had later learned that he had skipped a very important meeting with the CFO of the company who wanted to have an accountability meeting with him about his corporate expenditures and to simply hold him liable to repay the company for said purchases. What I failed to realize until last week, was that he didn't choose me and my performance over his job that day, he chose to use me as the excuse to not take responsibility and accountability for his bad behavior, just like he did this last father's day.
These two examples, one of my earliest memories and one of my most recent memories, tells the story of the type of manipulation and emotional abuse my father was capable of. The way he used people and relationships as scapegoats or havens to hide from the truth, hide his misdeeds, hide his flaws, hide his fears. He used all of us. The amount of neglect and abondonment he forced me and my family through is the most nuanced type of mistreatment and I never really knew how to describe it until now. These clear examples help show me that I never evaded the abuse because I was a trophy for him to use, it made me a mop to clean up his worst actions. I've been here ever since trying to clean up his mess.
--- The Slime Guardian BHIII
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