The Contentment in Disassociation

Today I am lurking around on Facebook, as I generally do when work is slow and/or boring, and it occurs to me to check up on my sister. A few weeks ago, after that whole mess you read about a few entries back, I un-friended said sister in order to prevent further spying and monitoring by my mother. It bothers me that this sort of covert ops has a place in my family life, but it is what it is.

So I wander over to my sister's page and sit there for a moment, feeling sort of depressed at the gulf that's grown  between us, wondering what my other sister is up to, if they're happy, and something catches my eye. A name I've never seen before, where there used to be a comment on a picture from my mother.

Wait.

That's right... she went and got married. Last weekend. I'd forgotten. And somehow I'd never really absorbed that she'd be changing her name, as a good Catholic woman does when she's married. (Actually the doctrine of the Catholic church, as I understand it, is that there's no such thing as divorce, so in the eyes of God any subsequent marital relations are adultery.) None of this hyphenated bullshit the kids are doing these days.

For a moment I simply stare, awestruck. I recently wrote an entry on names, you may recall, and the meaning in them. You begin to associate the near-random collection of syllables with an actual human being, to the point where merely uttering those letters evokes the spirit of a person. It's like a spell. I see this odd, gutteral word "Gregory" and associate it with myself. That's who I am. "Gregory" is me. Say it near me, and you have my attention.

So now my mother has a different name. A new identity. And most importantly, nothing in common with *me*. My family name, which she so often hurled at me like an insult ("You're just like the rest of them!") is no longer attached to her. It feels... cleaner.

I thought seeing it would freak me out, but very quickly I realized that it made me feel free.

Kathleen K. Allen? Who's that? Just someone I used to know. No relation.

Another link in the chain breaks, and my walk towards freedom continues. It's funny, the things that can make you smile.

Quick, Somebody Say Something

Today I'm sitting at my desk, reading my usual morning allotment of random internet crap, and I start looking more closely at people's names. See, I've been reading quotes from the show "House", and one of them threw me off.


Dr. House: [to the crowd in the walk-in clinic's waiting area] Hello, sick people and their loved ones! In the interest of saving time and avoiding a lot of boring chitchat later, I'm Doctor Gregory House; you can call me "Greg." I'm one of three doctors staffing this clinic this morning.


Dr. House and I have the same first name, which I hadn't known until now. (I really should watch that show more, based on the quotes and the snippets I've seen, I would really enjoy it. Anyway.) 


For some reason, I find myself staring at our name and feeling very odd. It's such a guttural little bundle of letters. I looked it up on a baby names website, and learned that it is based on a Greek word meaning "Watcher". Huh. That's sort of appropriate. I've grown into a person whose main interest in life is observation. I relentlessly pursue information and knowledge. I am also a security guard, a job I enjoy very much, whose main job is to watch things. What an amusing coincidence.


Okay, so what about other people? My girlfriend's name is Vanessa. Applying the same painstaking research (i.e. punching it into Google) I arrive at an interesting fact: "vanessa" doesn't actually mean anything. It was invented by author Jonathan Swift as a pet name for his friend Esther. It has no etymology, no linguistic meaning, no nationality. It was simply a pleasant sound. In all probability it was likely a sexual reference of some kind.


So what's in a name? Did my parents comb the baby name books for something inspiring and relevant? They couldn't have; I wasn't born yet. I could just as easily have been blind. "Watcher" would have been sort of silly in that case. Rather than being strangely appropriate, my name could have indicated a trait nothing like any of  mine. I was utterly without personality or background. 


I don't really know what point I'm trying to make here. I guess it just seem strange that we pick names for our children that have meanings and origins, when those meanings don't really indicate anything about that child yet. 


Catholics, at their confirmation, ritualistically choose a new, symbolic name for themselves; maybe there's something to that. Before I left the Church, I was going to choose the name Harry, after my grandfather, who was himself a Catholic. (Which means "Home Ruler.", I now find out.) I don't know that the religious aspect is important, but I like the concept of a person choosing to identify himself personally, rather than being bound to whatever irrelevant bundle of letters their parents chose at their birth.


However, not being a Catholic or any other cult, I remain Gregory. Watcher.


Okay mom and dad, you got lucky on that one.

Feather Headed Bandits

The above racial slur is brought to you by my good friend Ricky, by way of explaining why he may not make it to my casino event this evening.

Oh, hadn't you heard? Of course you haven't, because I've been neglecting this blog something fierce. Sorry about that. I can only be deep and introspective so many days a month, and the rest of the time I'm just loud.

Mohegan Sun casino, tonight! Be there! I'm gonna be 22!

Spring is a Time of New Beginnings, Flowers, Love, and Mud

It's obnoxiously muddy outside the office today, which, coupled with the warm air and suspicious lack of snow, must mean it's Spring. You don't get mud in Winter, no sir. Just hard, dry, oddly shaped frozen dirt.

I don't miss the tundra, but I can't say I like the mud a whole lot better. I've gone back to wearing my crappy gray sneakers to work instead of my excellent new leather boots, at least until there's not so much mud. You think you're about to walk across a regular old patch of harmless-looking grass, then bam, you're in three inches of water and the grass is floating on top like hurricane wreckage. My socks have gone blue.

Honestly I don't see how people with religion can get through the day. If I thought somebody had organized this nonsense I'd be livid. Guess there's no mud in Heaven. Is there mud in Hell? It would really only be a problem if I was wearing my excellent new leather boots, and somehow a Hell in which I get to wear my excellent boots doesn't seem so bad. There must not be mud there. Then again, a mudless Hell sounds okay too.

Lunchtime.

Blaming the Victim, and Other Fun Family Activities

I'll just put it out there, in case anyone doesn't already know: I have mommy issues.

Pretty severe ones, actually. At least a couple of times a month she'll feature prominently in a nightmare, usually the same one. I've lost my job and my friends and everything I care about, and somehow my only choice is to go back to her. And knowing what life is like under her authority, knowing the psychological and occasionally physical abuse she'll be dealing out, often for no apparent reason, and always in excess... Knowing that nothing I have will be mine, that my clothes and money and phone and books are all fair game, to be confiscated or destroyed at any time, for any reason (or none,) regardless of whether I bought them myself or not... Knowing that my life is not my own, and that I will be reminded of that fact constantly...

...that's a whole different article. Which I will write. Eventually.

Anyway. I have mommy issues.

To make a long and disgusting story short, my mother is getting married in less than three weeks, to a man who suits her perfectly. He is just as useless, empty, and cruel as she is. He has verbally abused my brother and both sisters, in front of me. He has stolen my clothes when none of his were clean, despite being a stranger in the house. In short, he's just a weaker, less threatening but still pathetic version of my mother. She's really found her other half. Most people aren't so lucky.

And I was invited to the wedding. Not merely invited, but Cordially Invited, a lovely monogrammed invitation with elegant gold scrollwork and lots of prefabricated cursive. The card is textured like papyrus, and smells vaguely of ink and irony.

Naturally I lost my cool for a moment when I found out. My Facebook status for that precise moment reads something like "ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING WAY", by way of an RSVP. A few minutes after writing it, I felt like it was a little immature, but it was also fun to look at, and I knew she'd eventually see it. Eyes everywhere. I felt just a little vindicated. I left it up.

A few days ago, I got an email from my sister Hailee. I was happy to hear from her, we have so little contact lately. I went ahead and opened it, excited to see what she had to say...

"Thanks for the RSVP - yes, I am you sainted mother and will love you no matter what. If you took sometime and a reality check, you will find that in this world, there is no one who will truly love you like your own mother. I realize you have issues and I hope you will get some help. Someday, you will regret your hurtful actions towards me, no matter what, I love you and always will. You just don't know what a parent is. I am sorry for that" 


-Mom.


I can't decide what, to an outsider, this looks like. To me, in the light of everything this woman has done to me and my family, it seems delusional to the point of insanity. I really didn't know how to respond. I don't mind saying that I literally cried for a few minutes when I read this.

Why? I guess I just couldn't believe what this relationship had come to. Or maybe the letter had that precise alignment of words, ideas, ignorance, and guilt-tripping that my mother has always used to control people. (By way of an example, she once screamed at me and my brother that if we did not clean our room, she would "have a brain hemorrhage and die. Is that what you want?" I spent the rest of the day frantically cleaning and organizing and hoping it would be enough to keep her healthy. Perfectly normal thoughts for a child to have.)

It also horrified me that my sister has begun helping our mother monitor me. I knew she had eyes, but I didn't know Hailee had become one of them, to the point of sacrificing her own privacy and property (Hailee uses her private E-mail on her personal laptop) in order to let our mother see what I was up to. Of course it crossed my mind that this may have been under duress, considering how often mother would demand the use of my money and property when I lived with her, but it was unsettling all the same.

It was the proverbial straw, and I felt like I was close to breaking. Without pausing to consider the ramifications, I composed a response.

That message is shockingly delusional.

You haven't cared for me since I stopped being worth digits on the child support checks, and you made it completely obvious.

You have blatantly told me and my siblings, in plain English, that "it's not about us anymore, and that we're not going to ruin your relationship with Paul". You have finally done the one thing I always believed you'd never do, and put a man before your children. And you didn't even try to hide it. You didn't even put the effort into pretending we still came first. You just flat out said it.

You have allowed that man, a stranger, to shout at my brother and sisters as he pleases. I have heard it myself. There was a time when you would not allow my father to speak that way to us, and now you allow it from a stranger.

You love to talk up my skills as a writer whenever you get the chance, to whoever will listen, despite the fact that you are the only person in the world who has ever hindered my aspirations as a writer in any way. You have torn my notebooks apart because you thought my villain resembled you.

You have beaten me across the face for refusing to surrender my paycheck to you, all while secretly forcing me to pay the vast majority of our shared phone bill.

You have given my clothes to your new boyfriend and shouted me down for protesting.

You have let strangers dance and sing and drink at all hours of the night while your children, meaning me, waited in the basement. The basement where I slept, on a cold corner of a cement floor, when there were empty bedrooms, to teach me a lesson. I don't remember the lesson. I remember the floor.

You are in my nightmares. You torment me as I sleep, often. You are nothing to me but a source of fear and confusion. There are good memories but they are completely poisoned by what you have become.

Tell me, then, what is a parent?

I will be a father someday. I will have children of my own. My great fear is that I will somehow treat them the way you have treated me. I will protect them and place them before anyone else in the world, before my own comfort and my own safety. I will know how to raise them simply by never doing what you have done.
And the only way I will ever feel that they are safe is that you are never within a mile of them. If it was within my power, you would never even know their names.
I will love my children and I will ACT like I love them, instead of just insisting that I love them after they're good and traumatized.

I hate you so passionately it makes me sick.

Marry your stranger. No I will not be there. I have kept this to myself for these years because I figure you'll take it out on the girls if I speak up, but since you're apparently ready to make their miserable situation permanent I can't make things much worse.


-Me


Extreme? Possibly. But for a long time, as I mentioned in the letter, I had kept all these outrages to myself. I had refrained from saying anything because I knew that she would punish the girls somehow. (My brother and I are free, but both girls still live with mother.)

And wouldn't you know it, my father called me only hours later to tell me that mom "said I was writing threatening things all over the internet and she isn't going to let the girls spend any time with me because all I do is make up lies about her so people will not like her".

I guess that's what I get for speaking my mind. And there are those who tell me I made a mistake, that I shouldn't have provoked her and I should have known what she'd do. They are cowards. The same kind of people who condemned that newspaper for running Mohammad cartoons, "knowing what the response from angered Muslims could be".

A major problem I have with religion, with our criminal justice system, and especially with my family, is that they all like to blame the victim. "You should have known what would be done to you. It's your own fault you were raped/sued/disowned. You know better than to walk outside without a man/defend your home/speak your mind to your mother." The evil person in the equation, the rapist/burglar/mother, can't be held responsible. Everyone KNEW that's how they were going to react. It's YOUR fault for provoking them.

Madness.

But that's another family trait, if you really think about it.

The Architects of Mediocrity

Today I was shown a trailer for a short film based on one of my favorite short stories: "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. The movie is called 2081, for the year in which the US Constitution is amended to require all people to be exactly equal.

"Harrison Bergeron" is a very short story about a world of limitations, and a man who is simply too magnificent to be limited. And where once we would have held this hero up, named him Hercules or Paul Bunyan or John Henry, admired a man whose strength could not be measured, whose determination could not be swayed, now we simply put him down like a rabid dog.

He's better than other people. It isn't fair. It's downright dangerous. And everyone who reads this story feels sadness at the tragedy of Harrison Bergeron, that the world could not allow uniqueness to thrive.

Now here we are, at the edge of great structural change in our country, and this story has been on my mind lately. I speak, of course, about the Healthcare Reform situation, and the arguments associated with it. If you show anyone "Harrison Bergeron", they'll shake their heads and say, "It's such a sad story. It's messed up, the way the government makes everyone the same. It's not fair. Nobody's beautiful or smart or strong, just because it would hurt someone else's feelings."

Similar themes are expressed in Lois Lowry's "The Giver", a story about a Community where the highest ideal is "Sameness". Things like art, religion, music, even people's ability to see color are taken away, in the interest of peaceful, simple Sameness. The discontent are "released" into the rest of the world, according to the government, because anyone is free to leave their Utopia at will. In reality, the "released" are secretly euthanized.

Again, anybody who reads this story would be aghast at the idea of individual choice and personality and ability being confiscated for the sake of society. A Government with supreme authority over every facet of your life is a horrific thought.

And yet, many of those same people, my peers and classmates and friends, when asked, would happily vote to socialize Healthcare and hand our well-being over to the Government. They don't see a problem with establishing a "single-payer" health insurance policy. It would ensure that everyone, no matter what, received the same level of healthcare. Sounds nice!

Until you look at it from anything but an emotional stance. Suddenly it becomes all too apparent that single-payer means single decision maker. You notice that Medicare, the only current Government healthcare insurance provider, declines more claims by far than any private insurer. You notice the frightening incompetence of our Government to handle things like Hurricane Katrina, Swine Flu, the War on Terror, etc. Every huge problem we have trusted them with, they have bungled spectacularly. They can't even respond to Janet Jackson's nipple in a reasonable, intelligent way. Why should they be the ones to decide which medications I am allowed?

I, as a benefit of my full-time job, have private health insurance. Each week, a portion of my paycheck is diverted to paying for my healthcare coverage, and the company I work for picks up the rest. My productivity and time are rewarded with the security of knowing that if I am wounded or sick, I can provide for myself. And I do provide for myself. The sense of pride I feel, knowing that my life is in my own hands and that I'm not terrified at the thought, cannot be put into words. This makes me enjoy working. It's very simple.

And I understand why so many people have a problem with that. Lots of people see healthcare as a fundamental Human right. Everybody has the right to live and be healthy.

Unfortunately that's not really true. Healthcare is a service, like a restaurant is a service. You're perfectly free to give it your best shot with homemade bandages and herbal remedies, just like you're free to attempt to grow your own crops and slaughter your own beef. Modern healthcare is not a given right, it is a convenience and often, a luxury.

I digress. I guess what I am trying to say is that it's funny the way people will recoil at the idea of an all-powerful Government... and then take the steps necessary to create one.

I guess they missed the point of the story. My advice to all my readers is to read "Harrison Bergeron" and take your lives into your own hands. Uncle Sam's are a little shaky right now.

The full story "Harrison Bergeron" can be found at http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html It's very short. Read it now.