Alrighty, I'm feeling reflective, so here's my tale of woe; The *stuff* that went down in 2012 that's got me down.
So, my brother Tim has been homeless after getting kicked out of my parent's house for drugs three years ago. After hitching it to California at the beginning of last year, he'd disappear from the radar with no word from him for months at a time. There were a lot of times we wondered if he really might be dead. He's got a condition that will sometimes completely paralyze him from head to feet for 5-10 minutes at a time; I forget what it's called, but it has something to do with Potassium not traveling in his muscles right. He's also got a big mouth, though, (like me) and that gets him into trouble a lot; he likes to fight, but that's not good if, from time to time, you're suddenly as helpless as a kitten. Keeping in mind that he's also a vagrant bum, he was also in Occupy Wall Street in Santa Monica and got brutalized by the police; Cops broke his jaw on both sides by slamming his face into concrete during a raid. He had no money and nobody to ask for help, so he didn't get his jaw fixed, which was hanging by soft tissue alone.
Then, you got my best friend for six years pulling a nosedive into drugs and rejecting me as a person completely. I'm no clean edge kid; I've smoked my share of weed, popped my share of pills, and tripped on my share of shrooms. Hell, my brother Tim is the first one who got me into drugs in the first place. I remember him teaching me how to use a lighter to smoke from his pipe. Real classy family, we are. Anyway, she's been my only friend for a long time; I was a really angry kid and I didn't want to get close to anyone, but she wormed her way in. To this day, I don't know how that happened, but we were closer friends than most people get in a lifetime in those few years. She saved me from myself, and was the only light in all my panic attacks and madness and struggle. But she cut me off entirely for some jerks who don't treat her right but will get her access to coke.
From there, my mom's family friend Lois moves into our house with her son Tomas, who I've vaguely known since I was, well, born. We weren't around each other much, but we were familiar and friendly like distant cousins. He and my brother were the first gingers I ever knew. So they move in with us, cause Lois has been real sick. She's got Lupus, (Yes, she ACTUALLY has lupus) and can't work cause her feet swell up. Weirdest dang thing I ever saw. So they were on the brink of homelessness, see , but my mom wasn't gonna let that happen. So they move in with us, Lois promises to do housework as payment, everything is dandy. But things start going sour; See, Lois has been "sick" for fifteen years. She's been diagnosed with Lupus for three. But before that, she was always sick with something. She was also in an abusive relationship for several years and has forced herself, after a bunch of false starts, to leave the abuser. He beat her and Tomas but she kept going back. Still, her need for attention and pity, which he gave her in spades (during the 'good' times) wasn't gone. And that's when it all started; She lived with different friends, one by one, who'd take her in because she was gonna be homeless. She'd tell them she was gonna get a job real soon, she just needed a little time.
They'd let her in, and feel great about helping her. Then she'd get job interviews and be "too sick" to go to them, but if you talked to her for a minute, she'd perk up and be just fine. Mention a job interview and "ohh, I feel faint." She did this with every one of her friends till they kicked her out, and I had a bad feeling she'd do it to us, to. She told us she'd need a month at most. Seven months later, there she was, in bed. Mom told her to get her stuff and leave, she needed a new place to live. Now, she lived in a room right next to me, and adjoining my room was a bathroom we both shared. One night, I was going to sleep and I heard her go in. It sounded like she was having stomach problems but I barely noticed, too tired. I woke up, next morning, and headed to bathroom to see the worst thing I've ever seen. She was face-down in her own vomit; Puke was everywhere. The ground, on the walls, in the sink and seemingly everywhere BUT the toilet. I thought she was dead, with her son in the other room next to me, still asleep.
She tried to kill herself in our bathroom, right next to me and her son in the other rooms. I'll never forgive her for doing that to Tomas; If he'd have been the one to walk in there, to see her like that, just a fourteen year old kid, it would've haunted him forever. If she'd succeeded; I can't even imagine.
So the police came and took the two of them away, put her in some kind of program to give her 10 months of intensive therapy and then get her a job and an apartment.
My step-dad lost his job just after this, my dad had skin cancer (thankfully it was removed successfully) my mom's health has been failing due to her drinking whiskey every day for almost eight years and smoking four packs of cigarettes a day, and to top it all off, I was learning some really disturbing things about alternative medicine, ecological destruction, and banks. For a while, I fell into a really deep despondency.
I thought about how the world economy could collapse, and the national debt. I think about how our food and air are poisoned and depleting. I think about how we are destroying our own world. I think about how, even on a small scale, most of the adults I've ever met are deeply dissatisfied with their lives. I wonder if it's possible to live a happy life. I really do. Who do I really know, what real proof do I have that anyone can possibly sustain any kind of satisfaction with themselves, their lives, their choices?
If all humans- And not even just humans! All animals of the world, all living matter, all of it stops so that some politicians can seek out their revenge against the earth they believe betrayed them with the existence of death, so that the super-ego can feed on the destruction of all life force worldwide, and all energy transmitted just disperses into nothing... What was the godda*n point of it all? Babies crying out for their mothers milk, poisoned by the water we drink. We are forced into spiritual numbness by the ones who've never known anything but. It just makes me wonder what the godda*n point of it all was. Sometimes I feel like there is no hope for anyone or anything. Makes me feel like the whole world ought to commit suicide in mourning for itself.
So that's what's been grinding my gears. Back to you, Tom!
