Dear reader,
Good morning. Coming at you today from historic Lenox! It's disgusting out today: rainy and cold and grey. I spell grey with an "e" because it's aesthetically pleasing, in other words 'fly', to me, rather than spelling it with an "a". Both ways are correct, mind you. Anyways, I'm wondering when this never-ending Berkshire winter is going to take its bow and get the hell off the stage. The cold is seemingly perpetual and I feel trapped more often than not. I felt trapped last night and this morning, not due to the weather, but due to the fact that my uncle needed a place to stay, so my mother, ever gracious, took him in out of the kindness of her heart.
Unfortunately, he's an obnoxious, foul mouthed, confrontational drinker with nothing but opinions in his head and time on his hands. Normally I find him quite entertaining, even jovial at times, but last night was not one of those times. I came downstairs from some editing and there sat the cliched man with his hair disheveled, dirty feet up on my mother's coffee table, and an empty plastic bottle of whiskey in his lap. He had been kicked out of my grampa's house for mouthing off, or blowing up, or sticking his nose where it didn't belong concerning the fact that my gramps is going through the process of talking to lawyers about my recently deceased gramma's trust. I don't know much about trusts, but I do know that my mother's side of the family consists of a bunch of entitled, codependent teenagers (though they are all in their 50's and upwards) who have spent the better part of their life griping and comparing their worth to which one of them can put a bigger dent in my grandparent's fortune.
So far, it's difficult to tell from the six of them which one is ahead. One thing is certain, my mother is in last place having been a financially independent mother of three who never asked for a thing in her life. (THAT'S an independent woman, by the way, ladies: someone who doesn't expect anything out of anybody but herself, who stands up for what she believes in and makes her own life choices. She's a total bad@ss.) So my uncle, as I said, was kicked out my grampa's house for being, well, himself. He was in town because my parents (who are not swimming in money, mind you) hired him to put a back-splash in their new kitchen. "Keep the money in the family" I guess is their philosophy, which I understand to a point.
So, not only have my parents graciously taken in their despondent, cynical son for a temporary (albeit, indefinite) stint while he chips away at the block of clay that is his novel ("oh, he's a writer") ... now they are also forced to harbor my mother's brother for the weekend on top of that. Apparently there are no hotels in town, as my dad and I sardonically observed.
Needles to say, I gave up writing yesterday after the noise of my uncle's arrival overtook the house. I don't know if you've ever been in a scenario where two dependent losers are forced to share a roof that doesn't belong to them. Normally, if at least one of them is in a pleasant mood, there is little more than passive aggressive jabs, lighthearted digs and conversations soaked in delusion and denial about how "things are looking up."
PSA: I'm in a mood today, dear reader, I'm not normally this cynical or bitter about my living situation, career path etc, and at my young age as I work towards success, it's an entirely acceptable thing, and becoming a societal norm in this region/economy, to make different sacrifices in your life (I.E. living temporarily rent-free) in order to achieve a greater goal. Buuuuut... that's not how I've been feeling lately.
My mood was sour yesterday. I have been having many sleepless nights lately and haven't been chipping away as much clay from my metaphorical sculpture as I'd like to be. I've been letting fear overtake me and fill my head with too many op-ed articles where "progressive" well-meaning, authoritarian leftists want to sensor and change and be overly sensitive and pedantic and pseudo-intellectual about people's art Then I follow that by reading too many counter articles riddled with paranoia about how people's right to express themselves and be offensive is at more of a threat than it has ever been, and Marxist pathology is suddenly leaking into the mainstream of college campus's and soon dangerous Utopians are going to round up all the free-thinkers and send them off in boats to Bulgarian work camps and starve them to death.
Obviously these are complex issues to sort out, and obviously there are bigger issues in the world to concern ourselves with, because most of those other issues are rooted simply in paranoia: but as a selfish, fragile loser with nothing but a creative voice to his name: I have a dog in this fight. Both sides have valid arguments, some more valid than others, and that's what makes this all so frustrating, that's what fills me with such deep angst and tortured anxiety.
So with this all on my brain, crippling me from writing anything and assaulting my ability to think unfiltered...I then had to deal with an evening of my drunk uncle. What sort of family visit would be complete without me feeling guilty about living under my parent's roof, making me feel professionally inferior because I'm out of work, and making me feel intellectually irrelevant because I decided to "waste my time majoring in theater." Cool. So now, dear reader, you're up to speed.
My mother's family has never gotten along. This uncle is mad at that uncle, my aunt won't speak to my grampa, gramps won't speak to this uncle, that uncle owes this uncle money, and on and on it will go until my brothers and I are the only ones left to plan all their funerals. The key element here is that my mother is the safe-space for all these desperate, adolescent mental-patients. She, the good willed, fortitudinous peace-keeper will always be there to lend her siblings an ear, a roof over their head, and access to my father's liquor cabinet. Each one of them projects their failings onto the other, or blames my departed grandmother for not loving them enough, or blames my gramps that though he spent the better part of his retirement cutting checks for thousands upon thousands of dollars to support them, he still owes them more. My mother calls it being a good sister, I call it being an enabler. The same way they all enabled my gramma to continue chain- smoking well into her 80's and surprise surprise, it was asphyxiation by lung cancer that ended her life, may she rest.
They are all, each one of them, in a collective stage of anger in their grief. I've never seen anything like it. Of course, they've always been petty, bitter little antagonizers, so this almost isn't a surprise...almost. They're all just griping over inheritance, rather than respecting the memory of their mother, and it's terribly sad. I've actually begun to outline a play about it all. A way of dealing with my own grief, I suppose, and I will hopefully not focus entirely on the petty grievances of the American Failures that make up my mother's side of the family. The scariest part is that last night, as my uncle took a break from making me feel badly about myself and started to rave on about my grandfather's (the man who built my family's fortune) "unwise financial decisions", and how his little brother is draining my grandfather's retirement trust (the black pot and the blacker kettle), I couldn't help create the scenario in my head where I might end up like him. That is another one of my fear's dear reader, and I think we all have someone in our life that we look at and judge and resent for fear that we might end up like them...I have several in my life, however.
So, rather than analyzing why his second wife has left him (it's the drinking, believe it or not,) or why his daughter from his first marriage hasn't been in contact with the family for ten years, or why he's bleeding through his inheritance to take a trip to Florida on the evening of his mother's funeral to meet with some woman he found online... let's ignore those topics and talk about how everyone else is dragging the family down, let's talk about how Trump is going to lead us into a war with Russia and the Liberal media is spying on us, let's talk about how in a downward economy, I should have gotten my degree in something worthwhile so I can stop living off my parents and contribute. This is just another case where the black pot strikes again, for he's the only man with I know who used his Masters degree in Communications to work as a part-time carpenter and collect money from two separate alimonies. Eat a d*ck, man. Okay I'm officially lashing out.
And yes, I'm aware that I currently live in a milieu of artists and cultural progressivism, so the idea of unemployment is even more frustrating for me as I wait to hear back from theaters, writing groups and cultural conservation groups and the like...because of all places for a Bachelor of the Arts degree to get me work, this should be the f@cking place, No? These are the types of things that bubble to the surface when too many American failures are under one roof, I guess. I should probably work on finishing a chapter today, dear reader, I've been stuck on it for far too long and I'm at a stage in my writing where I can't move on from a certain part unless I've worked through exactly what I want to say. I'm a perfectionist when it comes to this novel, which leads to dissatisfaction, envy, and a deep, DEEEEP sense of helplessness.
But hey, this ranting helps. So thank you, dear reader, for spending time inside my brain and getting to know my family. Hope you enjoyed feeling better about your own life as I expose you to the needless drama of mine own. Or maybe you have problems of your own and think I'm being a whiny little b!tch about everything, I wouldn't disagree with you. Though I would defend myself by saying that reading a blog and expecting it to not be filled with ubiquitous whining and complaintive moral superiority is the same inane expectations as when people go to stand-up comedy shows expecting an enlightened, inoffensive, and politically correct discussion.
In conclusion dear reader, in regards to drunken visitations by unwanted guests, I guess we have to remember that life is short, and everybody has their own demons, their own perspective, and their own journey to which they are either afraid is almost at an end, anxious that it hasn't yet begun, or desperately bitter that it led them to a place they never wanted to be. And, to offer a glimmer of hope before I sign off: maybe we aren't America's failures... maybe we just haven't succeeded yet. After all, life is not a sprint, life is a long, long, looooooong marathon.
-CjM
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