Wow...Encouragement
Mood: Fair-to-middeling, I'd venture to say
Listening to: My roommate snoring and residual infomercial type noise accompanied y the occasional siren.
Why MattelMichele, that particular turn of phrase you used about how I ‘have way to much on my plate’ almost sounds like Narcotics Anonymous jargon. Of course this could not be the case with someone whose browsing blogs at 1:15 a.m. on a school night. Could it? Regardless of your standing in the twelve steppen band of brothers (and sisters) I appreciate the fact that you responded to me in some way. And with just that little bit of encouragement, I’m off and running.
Before I start I feel I need to clarify my position about being poor and social status in America. Don’t think that I’m silly enough to think that my complaints about how life treated me unfairly really amount to having it rough in the grand scheme of things. I realize that as Americans we don’t really have any concept of poverty, for most of us being poor is having a slow laptop or having to use a dial-up connection. I don’t understand poverty the same way poverty is understood in Somalia or Calcutta. Just because I’m pitching a bitch about how I didn’t have enough money to buy new clothes when I was a kid doesn’t in any way mean that I truly think I had it rough. With this disclaimer in mind I’ll now mount my pity-pot and commence feeling deprived of the affluent childhood I’m sure I deserved if the Karmic energy in southern California had been working correctly in late nineteen seventy.
As I said before my mother and I are the spitting image of each other. I’ll also tell you, my now devoted readership (I’m sure), she’s a drunk who had been drinking for about twenty hard years at this point. I noticed within two or three weeks that my aunt Betty and Mom had some disturbingly similar quirks to there personality. For one thing both of them went out of their way to let me know that they where much better looking than I could ever hope to be. Like most children, I believed what my parents told me, I loved them and they wouldn’t lie to me. If they said I was ugly compared to them than so be it. The thing that I couldn’t quite get strait in my mind is the fact that my aunt was a straight up bitch, I knew this from age five, I knew she was lying just to make herself feel better but my mother I took her for her word. Betty was always going on about how beautiful she was (she never said I was), and my mother was always telling me about how men loved her because of her good looks. She had me believing that her magic, that unfortunately didn’t get passed on to me, allowed men to ignore her tendency toward laziness and a fascination with light refraction on through the bottoms of empty beer bottles. In her defense, she does make the most incredible Kailua, of all things. Some of my fondest memories of her is drinking White Russians in lead crystal mugs that we kept in the freezer and playing endless games of gin-rummy in the summer. Strange how alike we are in so many ways…we are both good at strategy games and we can pick them up quick. We are both terribly self destructive, as I believe I mentioned before. My destructiveness leans in the direction of opiates; Alana is one of those women that isn’t happy unless her man beats the shit out of her.
Oh, I already know I’m going to be deluged with nasty-grams, but if any of you out there have had the misfortune of witnessing first hand the dynamics of these twisted relationships you know that It’s a two part disease. These people could be in a crowded room of five hundred people shoulder to shoulder and they will find one another somehow. It’s a scent they give off, I swear. You know what’s really creepy, the woman an recognize the potential or violence in the man He didn't even konw he had. She needs that slap or beating to make the union whole for her. If she cant get him to beat her ass, one way or another, she’ll leave him. Man, let me tell you…my moms did some shit to that man. John, who had the buzzard’s luck of landing my mother and marring her before he knew what he was getting into. All I can say is he must have done something terrible to deserve the kind of Karma we laid on him. He was an innocent bystander I all of this. Funny thing is, I convinced myself, at the ripe old age of eleven, that I hated this man. I confused hate with jealousy, and I’ll feel a little guilty for the rest of my life for my part in destroying his marriage and self respect. Ah…again that is another story. If you like this, you’ll love that story.
Anyways, back to Alana’s need to be abused. John point- blank, was not a violent man. He didn’t have it in him to role play even, he was vanilla missionary style with a little head once in a while. Mom’s was AssMasters Two… Sorority Hazing (real title, lots of porn in my house growing up) She wasn’t above playing dress up either. My question always was, how could John not have known? She wasn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed after pickling her brain for all those years. Then again, love is blind and men in Alaska in those days couldn’t afford to be overly choosy, the ratio of men to women was like seven to two.
How much can I blame on my mother not showing me enough love when I was a baby? I’m defiantly broken inside my head somehow. I only truly feel comfortable when I’m around the lowest dirtiest people I can find. If I don’t do something about my astounding lack of ambition I’ll never get anywhere in life. I have a million great ideas and not an ounce of drive. I don’t deserve to breathe, I waste my life when I was blessed with intelligence, talent and a healthy body. If I find myself in a middle class area the only way I can keep myself from having a full on panic attack is if I’m pulling some hustle or selling someone dope or engaging in some other deviant behavior. I could never feel like I just belong, I have to be getting over. I’ll always be that white trash used-up biker trash my mother is in my ten year olds memory. I remember one day in Oregon my mother and her third husband where working in the backyard of their house. He was mowing the lawn with a hand powered grass cutter and she was trying to plant her strawberry patch. I was watching her intently because she always made a point to let me know that she was prettier than I was and I couldn’t figure out how that could be. (As most children do I just took her for her word, it never occurred to me she could be lying.) She would wear these polyester pants with the crease sewn down the front and if you couldn’t see a clear imprint of her lips in front they weren’t tight enough. So she had on these gray tight-ass polyester pants with a yellow polka-dotted bikini top. Alana did not have a BowFlex body. She had already had two kids by then, she had drank heavily her entire life plus she had smoked since she was fourteen and she was a true disco queen sun worshiper. All of that added up to her having stretch marks from her collar bone to here pubic hair. Wide, long dark red stretch marks. She was over-weight, sun damaged and usually drunk. In true trailer-park fashion she decided that she would try to damage her skin some more since she had her bikini on, so she took baby oil put some iodine in it and slathered it all over herself. This had the effect of making a fine layer of dirt cling to her from her gardening efforts. Regardless of all of this she is my mother and she held a certain amount of beauty in my eyes. We look almost exactly alike, me and moms, except she has thicker hair that’s chestnut brown and her skin is a little darker, a fact she always brought up whenever anyone commented on how much we resembled each other, almost like she wanted to point out how much we didn’t look like one another.
Regardless, on this particular day she was hideous to me and I could not for the life of me figure out how she had gotten it in to her head that she was so superior to me physically.
I hate strawberries to this day.
I sat on the back porch sullen as ever with my eyes glued to her sagging stretched out breast concealed just enough to keep the noisy, mean-ass old lady next door from calling the Spanish inquisition on her, or who ever gets called to handle displays of public disgrace. The extremely religious right seems to have one of those red phones Batman and the Commissioner have, ‘cuz one of them gets a hair far enough up their ass, watch out baby, the ‘Ca-Ca shall hit the proverbial fan’. What’s always made me chuckle about these fevered thumpers of the Word is that lets say, hypothetically, one Sunday a stranger rambles in on their congregation, right in the middle of hellfire and brimstone but before the donation plate; this stranger would not be made to feel welcome. I don’t care if he slid a couple of Franklin’s on them. As soon as he left they would all run and turn on “America’s Most Wanted” sure they had a hot tip for 1-800-dial-a-rat.
