You Just Can't Make This Shit Up

"If you're going through hell, keep going."~Winston Churchill

Well I might as well just get on with this. I'm already actively depressed, so what the hell. Actively depressed means I recognize that I'm feeling sad and maybe worthless. I'm depressed a lot and don't even recognize it.) I actually watched the news this morning for the first time since the Bush debacle. Of course, I was getting dressed for work etc., so they may have had something about him, but I missed it. i don't wish to look at him and I certainly do not wish to hear him. I know this guy really well. He's just like hundreds of other good old boys I've met before. A lot of those good old boys were just a rich as W, but without the long record of abject failure that propels someone into politics. Remember that old axiom, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach?" It actually really applies to politics.

Now the hard stuff. I'm not sure exactly where in time these events occurred. I know that they were sometime between the ages of 13 and 15. As I said before, time is quite mutable when you're living in hell. i may have neglected to say that my father's wife had been getting beaten up for a couple of years on a fairly regular basis. if there was an up side to this whole situation, it was that my dad no longer beat up my mom. ( also recognize that 've neglected to talk about the actual wedding between my dad and his 13 year old girlfriend. that will take some working up to, but eventually I hope to steel myself enough to write about it.)

At some point, I guess she got tired of it or maybe she thought he might kill her (that would have been a reasonable fear). She went back to her mother's house and everything was in chaos. My father knew it was wrong to hit women. In addition to being actively psychotic, he just didn't give a shit.

I remember riding in his truck with him around this time and he was urging me to lie on his behalf. I clearly remember him saying that we needed to "stick together." I think he may have even cried. He did that a lot when he was afraid, but I never saw him cry for anyone other than himself. I'd already determined that he was my enemy, so I was not feeling very much like doing anything for him. However, I realized that letting him see how I felt could be dangerous.

After she'd been gone for several days, I was actually starting to cheer up. I thought maybe we could go back to being "normal" again. (That's just sad, isn't it?) But then she came back. My father broke the news to me in the garage. I have no idea what the deal was with his family and garages. Anyway, I just completely fell apart. I started crying hysterically and I couldn't stop. I almost fainted, but my dad caught me before I could injure myself falling on the concrete floor.

Leave it to my father to come up with the perfect antidote to my despair. He asked me if I'd like to go get an ice cream cone. (Let's just pause for a moment and contemplate the sheer lunacy of that suggestion.) This is one of those many fragmented memories and I don't remember how the garage scene ended, but I know it didn't end with ice cream. She stayed and I focused my energies on not killing myself or anyone else.

I was going to talk about the baby, but I just can't manage that today. I'm feeling a strong need to start screaming and breaking things. Of course, I won't. I'm going to need to calm myself down now, so I'll continue this dreary tale tomorrow.