Requiem
Well, this blog has had about a one year shelf life, and it's time to say good-bye. I will be setting up shop elsewhere, and if I want you to know my new location, you will get a private invite. To the rest of you, as John Garfield said as he got on the train, "So long suckers!"
The light always burns the brightest in the core of a flame: Grant McLennan
This is long overdue, and harder to write because of how much I miss you. I will never forget the night at Fez, where I stood a few feet away from the stage, taking pictures of you and Robert. One of those photos survives in the biography of your stellar band, the go-betweens. I am sorry that it outlives you. Goodbye Grant. I will "dive for your memory..."
Seems you were gone before... Goodbye Syd Barrett
No Exit Mr. Sartre?
image by Blair Black
"I drank to drown my pain, but the damned pain learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good behavior." - Frida Kahlo
Father's day aftermath
"Stuff it!" he barked "Just stuff it!" as he waved his hand dismissive near my face as if to shut me up., as I chauffeured him in my car.
"Yea, I have been stuffing it all my life, that's why I'm so angry" I replied soberly. ("...and so fat" I thought to myself, all that rage pushed down with food so that I wouldn't end up on the front page of Newsday for killing him one day).
Dad, I am angry with you for things you will never understand, never admit, never acknowledge. I am angry at you for the last three days when you hijacked my life and ejected me from it, as you often do, putting your needs first and making me a servant to them. I am angry that you can't even fathom why I am angry. I am angry that you have made me into your caretaker and surrogate wife. I am angry that on a Saturday night I was out to dinner with you, instead of hanging out with my friends or staying home doing whatever I wanted to, like most adults. I am angry that you made me take you to a warehouse club store on a Saturday afternoon when it is mobbed, and when I'd avoid it like the plague even if I'd needed something from there.
Then, you race all over the store sitting comfortably in a motorized wheelchair, while I have to go in circles around the warehouse five times looking for you, and exhausting myself. I am expended on you, all the time. There is never anything left for myself. I want to run away and never come back. I don't even care anymore that no one else will take care of you, because you are killing me. You didn't earn this either. You never took care of me when I was growing up, all you did was scream, and yell, and abuse me and the entire family. You abused my mother and my brother so much that they warped into extensions of you who abused me too.
I am angry that you have crossed way over the line into emotional incest, inappropriateness verbally, touching and grabbing at me in the past, and that the wound opened again recently when I saw a scribbled note in your handwriting with "girls gone wild" and the 800 number on it. It makes me sick that you are almost 75 years old, and would want to see something so exploitive of college girls, the same age I was when you started abusing me in earnest. It makes me angry and disgusted that you cannot and will not change or evict than demon from inside you.
I cringe every time you talk about God and the Bible, and give me unsolicited spiritual advice about my life. You are no one to talk. I hate you. I want to be far away from you. You make my skin crawl. You make me want to scream or slice into my arms with a knife till I bleed and can cry and cry and bleed you out. If only I could get you out from underneath my skin, maybe I could take the first fucking free breath of my life.
I miss...
being able to come here and feel safe. I feel like I have lost something that, while not vitally important to my life, still held some significance. I suppose that will teach me to be a little more paranoid and cover my tracks better. I knew I should have erased my URL history from his computer. There was a voice telling me to do it, and I ignored it, wanting to trust that it wouldn't be necessary. I was wrong about that, and about a lot of other things as well it seems. *sigh*
