to the end of the world with father
dad would be driving my brother and i somewhere in the little yellow datsun. as we passed east nashville high school where oprah winfrey went
we asked:
where are we going?
father answered:
to the end of the world.
eventually i came to understand this ruse to mean belle mead, across the river.
he did have a melodramatic way of spooky parenting, which wasn't unusual for a fantasy horror poet born on halloween.
i found the "scary library" bit genuinely scary, and then off-putting, as clearly he was overhyping the scariness of the somewhat scary old vanderbilt university library.
now i think of his vibrato proclamations as very laurence olivier, as it was the musicality of his utterances that gave meaning.
then once he took us over an abandoned train trestle.
i was three or four. mike perhaps one and half.
at some point i realize my little creepy crawler not even a toddler brother is crawling over this train bridge thing which is crumbling with perilous gaps.
i was barely verbal, but was eventually able to relate this tale to mother, but not in time to get us out of harm's way.
it must have been about then, age three or so, i was proof positive for sure, father was incompetent at parenting safely or wisely.
he was never locked away for it, nor mum.
although the prisons of one's own making are prisonly enough.
i am always grateful at the absence of child sex abuse in our home.
the worst thing i ever saw was bob lind in his red underwear, or father darting about in his horrid white ones.
they were hippies, but not those kinds of hippies.
mother scolded me about the french kissing article in seventeen mag, in the library room of the home where Ransom left all his CIA B-52 books (for me??????)
so really, between reading about cyanide capsule suicide over cold war russia, versus kissing, well.
it was the dogmatic you are going to hell, for hours lecture, that really dragged on. (it's called religious abuse now)
writing about things on the internet has been deemed illegal by the ministry of propaganda of my family.
so, we're soviet like that.
i joked about how about i do MAO style massive posters about glamourizing my mother's epic role for the family.
which somewhat played off well, as a joke.
as could there well be that interpretation.
i've been terribly worried about money and education for years, and find it ghastly to have so little familial support.
they care about other things like big house, gardening, alcohol, religion, brawling, vendettas.
so i don't find it very helpful to associate with them.
as the economy crushes us all again, the money-love games will disappear.
i suspect real love may re-emerge the consolation of the poor.
but in the meantime, this reliving other people's rat race cold war stuff, has grown tiresome.
i woke up one morning, the 31st of July, jumping into father's coffin, knowing i'd take the eng name to my death, father being such a good sort.
i could be annsdottir too, or kangas dahlman, driscoll balsey stephens tobin nedergaard hansen whomever.
but eng will do.
to the end of the world we go.
i explained it was all those confessional autobiographies i read as a kid, stuck at the great escape book and record shop with father for hours, that influenced my sense of disclosure
perhaps it was wrong for me to read, and wrong for everyone to write.
i have been informed that "your brother doesn't like you"
and sister says mum's always trying to stir things up
i can see similarities to father in all of us. none of us care for children, all of us like to be alone, all of us can hyper-focus at times, none of us have too firm a grip on "reality"as mother always had that department completely cornered.
i do sense that solitude is the best prevention of future catastrophe, and proffer it with love, that in isolation, we may be disinclined towards anger, or wars of aggression
i feel as if the two year sentence of hard labor at Maggie's Farm almost killed me, and then to top it off, they almost killed my love
it always felt like being a part of the family, or human specie, was a guarantee of wrongdoing, sinfulness, transgression, criminality
what with dad and his bank robbing jesse james obsession of the eighties (he'd work on his cript at McDonalds)
and then
iran contra
i remember watching that fellow oliver north.
father never left the CIA, you see. it was built into his hard drive.
channeling it into arts and music was just a foil.
ultimately, we we were a military family, with mother in the trenches of Vietnam Veteran's Administration alcoholism and PTSD in the eighties, us kids in the trenches of the nightly news sorting out Oliver North, Nicaragua, and such.
i took refuge in Richard Simmons dance shows, realize now he was my first "gay best friend" and tried to break my parents of their caffeine addiction.
it's seems he molested someone according to youtube.
by the time Elizabeth died, things were long past the good days.
i was no longer pondering the song "take this job and shove it, i ain't working here no more" as i crawled up father's expensive fantasy bookshelf packed with london gems.
once i accidentally smashed my elbow into the glass of the book case.
mr. rogers made me cry.
we'd play the orphan game.
father would shoot at the pigeons with his beebee gun.
then when we went to Washington DC he'd put a real gun under the car seat.
i finally realized no one told me to take a gun to LA, or to any of these abusive men who have haunted my days.
it's as if what they did to me so completely smashed my soul down, i could never get to the bottom of the pain.
but what i realize now, is that much of my childhood confuses me.
no matter how hard i worked to make the family function, i never got credit.
poor father's basement was an environmental tragedy with furious amounts of black mold and mushrooms and damp, destroying his books.
no children or human life should have been allowed there.
that is when the brothers began making huge fires in the back yard, with father's gunpowder.
no one was injured, but they get to call me names, as it's always a hot potato with sanity, in our family.
i envied family ties, and liked michael j. fox.
my friend katherine todd had different hippie parent problems. like too many brothers. loads. four or five.
too many.
catholics.
i don't even see how catholics can get the nerve to sleep with each other, what with all the pedophiles in their operation.
mother stopped continuing with St. Joseph in madison tennessee when she noticed one of the priests getting overly huggy with the young altar boys.
my personal opinion, is that Catholics have always been the biggest Gay Pride event in history, but it's just so closeted.
recently appalled at the filthy low age of sexual consent at the vatican.
i've dumped my ludicrous fool of a new friend, who came out of the pedophile defense committee closetcase one week ago.
i was comfortable finally with his tranny chasing, but pedophilia brings down the iron curtain.
i should have asked and got it on the table.
it bothers me it took longer, what with the help of david kif davis and his tirades against pedophiles.
i got peeved and mailed it off to everyone in town.
not only does he want to arrest your city council, but have his way with your 13 year old grandkids.
now father was writing his last book about such things.
too many dreadful things going on these days.
the woman down the street from us in nashville, was knifed upon opening her door.
the boy was lynched.
the black man was beaten by cops.
there was never any alternative, to the steady violence of our american environment.
i've decided to nickname it "crime island."
and then i have to justify how USA gets to be an island, not a continent, etc, where clearly it is INSULAR.
now silver jews or gold, was a story i wrote about losing an abusive friend.
i don't have to rewrite that.
it was the poignancy of liking someone a lot, and abhoring other things.
i couldn't even consider a pedophile's rights activist a friend.
i have no tolerance for such things.
might i boldly state:
NO Pedophiles need apply!
and then, it doesn't strike me as a good opener,
hi, nice to meet you are you a pedophile, but so close to portland and with Oregon's sex offender registry enforcement so lax, one might as well.
and then, i am coming out to wirt, what more specifically happened, all of which i find good for a defend the realm empire sort of politics, like good work, once again.
but what is the long term answer.
for me, as childless, i'll never worry about his ilk all over my children.
but i awoke today, to the confidence of my dearest niece-in-law telling me he was abusing her.
the night before i was dying in a blue plastic bag trying to fetch bankchecks out of it.
what terrible nightmares!
and so, for diana's death day, i made my appearance, pushed my pencil, so to speak, for my conscience's sake.
sad, at ackerman's pronouncement, that one is broken.
yes, yes, but so proud i am.
one is stronger, wiser, richer.
and then the worry starts.
the telepathy is almost as overbearing as presence.
i have something to say, which i am forbidden to say.
---mother chased the contractors out, with a gun under a towel.
they were roughing up my father.
which i guess trumps me chasing kyle nice off my friend with a stick of nag champa and some om mani padme he's famous on Portland Copwatch, Independent Police Review blah blah.
her latest contractors undid all the work i did in her garden, for a pig pile of money. predators. swindlers.
they move in the second i'm gone, and make for her money like a mugging.
father did the best jack-o-lantern one year. perhaps 1982.
connie chung was my favorite news person.
peter jennings i liked.
i struggled with big concepts: such as the difference between "persons" and "people" and "peoples."
the difference between yesterday and tomorrow had me baffled about age three.
father told me of a place called school.
he told me i had an imaginary sister called angela who did everything perfectly, and who was famous, on TV, and singing.
it did start to make me jealous, and mother would scold him, not to make up fictitious stories.
i was confused, because i wanted a sister, and imaginary sister was not cutting it.
little things like this seem even stranger when you are so young and impressionable.
a copyright lawsuit.
against johnny cash's people for ripping off a script pa wrote.
mother did an immense amount of work on that.
i was nine or so when that was amping up.
helen and ransom were this great wave of respectability and order.
they were truly flamboyant hippies too, but with grander furniture, and cherry flavoured frozen yogurt.
they were all the way in love, and treated eachother nicely, which is a very kind grace to behold.
perhaps my parents were in love, but it developed into some strange love-hate, for which we the kids became like marriage counselors, which even at the time, i realized was a preposterous load of responsibility on children.
about then i wished to die, or wished i was never born, because i couldn't stand all the shouting and melodrama.
there was no getting out of it, until high school offered the time-consuming theatre department as a diversion program for kids with rowdy home lives.
i have to admit i don't know much what happened to my sister after that, as i was her primary mother figure.
it must be that it seemed i abandoned her.
i don't imagine how fun it was with my rowdy brothers and my unruly dad.
father used to park in the fire lane of the library, bc he was a punk like that.
it didn't matter how many tickets he got, because he was a VIP unto himself.
he'd take the illegal easement.
eventually his driver's license was taken for wrong side of the road driving.
i think he was trying to own both lanes.
and was clearly incomprehensible.
now when i forget things, i start to worry. but it's worse than worry. i know. i know i have whatever father gave me.
we all called it absent minded professor syndrome.
practically have to tie and pin my whereabouts down, to keep them from vanishing.
so don't leave it to me to be the responsible one.
when i make friends with these other spacecase types, and i'm supposed to be the one, not getting a ticket, not crashing the car, not losing losing the keys, not forgetting to pay the bill, it's really not okay.
i need someone to be good at these things. someone besides me.
so there is that.
it is ten times more taxing to do what is against one's nature all the time out of necessity.
in some ways, as children, we performed as "Personal Assistant" to my father in rather extreme ways.
combing through his wastepaper for the lost library card, filing the bits and pieces of his life.
easing the sense of his own personal chaos.
checking on his editions of historical quarterlies.
i never had a better job as with my dad, besides possibly shadowing that old rascally FBI at their absurd show trial down in Portland.
father taught us there was infinite data.
i figured i had achieved what my father could never, as in, freedom from the human bondage of abusive love.
but it's not so.
true love, even when abusive, remains true.
and so that's the terrible part.
one is never really free.
i envy they who have never tasted it, and pity they dying of it.
clearly one can never really shake off one's family or the familial monsters such as "Blahhh" whose diagrammed existence sprung up in ransom's 1501 eastland house.
father detailed the sharks in the sewers, and seemed to have no sense of impropriety about terrifying my sister.
mother stopped working so much, at my insistence, and then spent more time over the younger siblings. i hoped it helped.
terrible things started to happen in the world like 9/11 and columbine, and everyone was blaming each other, or themselves for the unraveling economy.
it was all wall street cash that built the cia, so pity cash vanishing into the ether? i don't really.
it was just the horrid depression eating over it.
all the cruelty and manhandling i experienced in malpractice inquisition which was never properly litigated.
i madly beat myself up, for not making a better war for my love's health.
i could have done more.
but what was most, was being there, even as it came unraveled.
one hopes one's heroes are not criminals and vice versa.
if i could make a heroine of mother i would, what as she was walking across villanova with a gallon of milk the day John F. Kennedy died. in her nun's habit. people shouting it. in shock. across the campus.
tell me about that.
i was sure listening to bob dylan was proof my parents were kooky. mother tried to explain leopard skin pillbox hat and sad eyed lady of the lowlands.
she had this militant political hippie freak thing, that went side by side with the sudden rashes of catholicism that came on like hives.
father always said he was a "card carrying atheist" until age 16 or something like that.
there was this ambiguous thereafter.
i didn't realize frank sinatra's huge social role.
father might have been more fun if he were more conversational, but he could mainly only rattle off stories like a recording machine. and it was your job to flip the record. as the listener.
i guess he was aspergersy for sure.
so what do they call that these days?
was it the pertussis vaccine, which killed my sister, and to which i had a very bad reaction, a cause of my depression?
we asked:
where are we going?
father answered:
to the end of the world.
eventually i came to understand this ruse to mean belle mead, across the river.
he did have a melodramatic way of spooky parenting, which wasn't unusual for a fantasy horror poet born on halloween.
i found the "scary library" bit genuinely scary, and then off-putting, as clearly he was overhyping the scariness of the somewhat scary old vanderbilt university library.
now i think of his vibrato proclamations as very laurence olivier, as it was the musicality of his utterances that gave meaning.
then once he took us over an abandoned train trestle.
i was three or four. mike perhaps one and half.
at some point i realize my little creepy crawler not even a toddler brother is crawling over this train bridge thing which is crumbling with perilous gaps.
i was barely verbal, but was eventually able to relate this tale to mother, but not in time to get us out of harm's way.
it must have been about then, age three or so, i was proof positive for sure, father was incompetent at parenting safely or wisely.
he was never locked away for it, nor mum.
although the prisons of one's own making are prisonly enough.
i am always grateful at the absence of child sex abuse in our home.
the worst thing i ever saw was bob lind in his red underwear, or father darting about in his horrid white ones.
they were hippies, but not those kinds of hippies.
mother scolded me about the french kissing article in seventeen mag, in the library room of the home where Ransom left all his CIA B-52 books (for me??????)
so really, between reading about cyanide capsule suicide over cold war russia, versus kissing, well.
it was the dogmatic you are going to hell, for hours lecture, that really dragged on. (it's called religious abuse now)
writing about things on the internet has been deemed illegal by the ministry of propaganda of my family.
so, we're soviet like that.
i joked about how about i do MAO style massive posters about glamourizing my mother's epic role for the family.
which somewhat played off well, as a joke.
as could there well be that interpretation.
i've been terribly worried about money and education for years, and find it ghastly to have so little familial support.
they care about other things like big house, gardening, alcohol, religion, brawling, vendettas.
so i don't find it very helpful to associate with them.
as the economy crushes us all again, the money-love games will disappear.
i suspect real love may re-emerge the consolation of the poor.
but in the meantime, this reliving other people's rat race cold war stuff, has grown tiresome.
i woke up one morning, the 31st of July, jumping into father's coffin, knowing i'd take the eng name to my death, father being such a good sort.
i could be annsdottir too, or kangas dahlman, driscoll balsey stephens tobin nedergaard hansen whomever.
but eng will do.
to the end of the world we go.
i explained it was all those confessional autobiographies i read as a kid, stuck at the great escape book and record shop with father for hours, that influenced my sense of disclosure
perhaps it was wrong for me to read, and wrong for everyone to write.
i have been informed that "your brother doesn't like you"
and sister says mum's always trying to stir things up
i can see similarities to father in all of us. none of us care for children, all of us like to be alone, all of us can hyper-focus at times, none of us have too firm a grip on "reality"as mother always had that department completely cornered.
i do sense that solitude is the best prevention of future catastrophe, and proffer it with love, that in isolation, we may be disinclined towards anger, or wars of aggression
i feel as if the two year sentence of hard labor at Maggie's Farm almost killed me, and then to top it off, they almost killed my love
it always felt like being a part of the family, or human specie, was a guarantee of wrongdoing, sinfulness, transgression, criminality
what with dad and his bank robbing jesse james obsession of the eighties (he'd work on his cript at McDonalds)
and then
iran contra
i remember watching that fellow oliver north.
father never left the CIA, you see. it was built into his hard drive.
channeling it into arts and music was just a foil.
ultimately, we we were a military family, with mother in the trenches of Vietnam Veteran's Administration alcoholism and PTSD in the eighties, us kids in the trenches of the nightly news sorting out Oliver North, Nicaragua, and such.
i took refuge in Richard Simmons dance shows, realize now he was my first "gay best friend" and tried to break my parents of their caffeine addiction.
it's seems he molested someone according to youtube.
by the time Elizabeth died, things were long past the good days.
i was no longer pondering the song "take this job and shove it, i ain't working here no more" as i crawled up father's expensive fantasy bookshelf packed with london gems.
once i accidentally smashed my elbow into the glass of the book case.
mr. rogers made me cry.
we'd play the orphan game.
father would shoot at the pigeons with his beebee gun.
then when we went to Washington DC he'd put a real gun under the car seat.
i finally realized no one told me to take a gun to LA, or to any of these abusive men who have haunted my days.
it's as if what they did to me so completely smashed my soul down, i could never get to the bottom of the pain.
but what i realize now, is that much of my childhood confuses me.
no matter how hard i worked to make the family function, i never got credit.
poor father's basement was an environmental tragedy with furious amounts of black mold and mushrooms and damp, destroying his books.
no children or human life should have been allowed there.
that is when the brothers began making huge fires in the back yard, with father's gunpowder.
no one was injured, but they get to call me names, as it's always a hot potato with sanity, in our family.
i envied family ties, and liked michael j. fox.
my friend katherine todd had different hippie parent problems. like too many brothers. loads. four or five.
too many.
catholics.
i don't even see how catholics can get the nerve to sleep with each other, what with all the pedophiles in their operation.
mother stopped continuing with St. Joseph in madison tennessee when she noticed one of the priests getting overly huggy with the young altar boys.
my personal opinion, is that Catholics have always been the biggest Gay Pride event in history, but it's just so closeted.
recently appalled at the filthy low age of sexual consent at the vatican.
i've dumped my ludicrous fool of a new friend, who came out of the pedophile defense committee closetcase one week ago.
i was comfortable finally with his tranny chasing, but pedophilia brings down the iron curtain.
i should have asked and got it on the table.
it bothers me it took longer, what with the help of david kif davis and his tirades against pedophiles.
i got peeved and mailed it off to everyone in town.
not only does he want to arrest your city council, but have his way with your 13 year old grandkids.
now father was writing his last book about such things.
too many dreadful things going on these days.
the woman down the street from us in nashville, was knifed upon opening her door.
the boy was lynched.
the black man was beaten by cops.
there was never any alternative, to the steady violence of our american environment.
i've decided to nickname it "crime island."
and then i have to justify how USA gets to be an island, not a continent, etc, where clearly it is INSULAR.
now silver jews or gold, was a story i wrote about losing an abusive friend.
i don't have to rewrite that.
it was the poignancy of liking someone a lot, and abhoring other things.
i couldn't even consider a pedophile's rights activist a friend.
i have no tolerance for such things.
might i boldly state:
NO Pedophiles need apply!
and then, it doesn't strike me as a good opener,
hi, nice to meet you are you a pedophile, but so close to portland and with Oregon's sex offender registry enforcement so lax, one might as well.
and then, i am coming out to wirt, what more specifically happened, all of which i find good for a defend the realm empire sort of politics, like good work, once again.
but what is the long term answer.
for me, as childless, i'll never worry about his ilk all over my children.
but i awoke today, to the confidence of my dearest niece-in-law telling me he was abusing her.
the night before i was dying in a blue plastic bag trying to fetch bankchecks out of it.
what terrible nightmares!
and so, for diana's death day, i made my appearance, pushed my pencil, so to speak, for my conscience's sake.
sad, at ackerman's pronouncement, that one is broken.
yes, yes, but so proud i am.
one is stronger, wiser, richer.
and then the worry starts.
the telepathy is almost as overbearing as presence.
i have something to say, which i am forbidden to say.
---mother chased the contractors out, with a gun under a towel.
they were roughing up my father.
which i guess trumps me chasing kyle nice off my friend with a stick of nag champa and some om mani padme he's famous on Portland Copwatch, Independent Police Review blah blah.
her latest contractors undid all the work i did in her garden, for a pig pile of money. predators. swindlers.
they move in the second i'm gone, and make for her money like a mugging.
father did the best jack-o-lantern one year. perhaps 1982.
connie chung was my favorite news person.
peter jennings i liked.
i struggled with big concepts: such as the difference between "persons" and "people" and "peoples."
the difference between yesterday and tomorrow had me baffled about age three.
father told me of a place called school.
he told me i had an imaginary sister called angela who did everything perfectly, and who was famous, on TV, and singing.
it did start to make me jealous, and mother would scold him, not to make up fictitious stories.
i was confused, because i wanted a sister, and imaginary sister was not cutting it.
little things like this seem even stranger when you are so young and impressionable.
a copyright lawsuit.
against johnny cash's people for ripping off a script pa wrote.
mother did an immense amount of work on that.
i was nine or so when that was amping up.
helen and ransom were this great wave of respectability and order.
they were truly flamboyant hippies too, but with grander furniture, and cherry flavoured frozen yogurt.
they were all the way in love, and treated eachother nicely, which is a very kind grace to behold.
perhaps my parents were in love, but it developed into some strange love-hate, for which we the kids became like marriage counselors, which even at the time, i realized was a preposterous load of responsibility on children.
about then i wished to die, or wished i was never born, because i couldn't stand all the shouting and melodrama.
there was no getting out of it, until high school offered the time-consuming theatre department as a diversion program for kids with rowdy home lives.
i have to admit i don't know much what happened to my sister after that, as i was her primary mother figure.
it must be that it seemed i abandoned her.
i don't imagine how fun it was with my rowdy brothers and my unruly dad.
father used to park in the fire lane of the library, bc he was a punk like that.
it didn't matter how many tickets he got, because he was a VIP unto himself.
he'd take the illegal easement.
eventually his driver's license was taken for wrong side of the road driving.
i think he was trying to own both lanes.
and was clearly incomprehensible.
now when i forget things, i start to worry. but it's worse than worry. i know. i know i have whatever father gave me.
we all called it absent minded professor syndrome.
practically have to tie and pin my whereabouts down, to keep them from vanishing.
so don't leave it to me to be the responsible one.
when i make friends with these other spacecase types, and i'm supposed to be the one, not getting a ticket, not crashing the car, not losing losing the keys, not forgetting to pay the bill, it's really not okay.
i need someone to be good at these things. someone besides me.
so there is that.
it is ten times more taxing to do what is against one's nature all the time out of necessity.
in some ways, as children, we performed as "Personal Assistant" to my father in rather extreme ways.
combing through his wastepaper for the lost library card, filing the bits and pieces of his life.
easing the sense of his own personal chaos.
checking on his editions of historical quarterlies.
i never had a better job as with my dad, besides possibly shadowing that old rascally FBI at their absurd show trial down in Portland.
father taught us there was infinite data.
i figured i had achieved what my father could never, as in, freedom from the human bondage of abusive love.
but it's not so.
true love, even when abusive, remains true.
and so that's the terrible part.
one is never really free.
i envy they who have never tasted it, and pity they dying of it.
clearly one can never really shake off one's family or the familial monsters such as "Blahhh" whose diagrammed existence sprung up in ransom's 1501 eastland house.
father detailed the sharks in the sewers, and seemed to have no sense of impropriety about terrifying my sister.
mother stopped working so much, at my insistence, and then spent more time over the younger siblings. i hoped it helped.
terrible things started to happen in the world like 9/11 and columbine, and everyone was blaming each other, or themselves for the unraveling economy.
it was all wall street cash that built the cia, so pity cash vanishing into the ether? i don't really.
it was just the horrid depression eating over it.
all the cruelty and manhandling i experienced in malpractice inquisition which was never properly litigated.
i madly beat myself up, for not making a better war for my love's health.
i could have done more.
but what was most, was being there, even as it came unraveled.
one hopes one's heroes are not criminals and vice versa.
if i could make a heroine of mother i would, what as she was walking across villanova with a gallon of milk the day John F. Kennedy died. in her nun's habit. people shouting it. in shock. across the campus.
tell me about that.
i was sure listening to bob dylan was proof my parents were kooky. mother tried to explain leopard skin pillbox hat and sad eyed lady of the lowlands.
she had this militant political hippie freak thing, that went side by side with the sudden rashes of catholicism that came on like hives.
father always said he was a "card carrying atheist" until age 16 or something like that.
there was this ambiguous thereafter.
i didn't realize frank sinatra's huge social role.
father might have been more fun if he were more conversational, but he could mainly only rattle off stories like a recording machine. and it was your job to flip the record. as the listener.
i guess he was aspergersy for sure.
so what do they call that these days?
was it the pertussis vaccine, which killed my sister, and to which i had a very bad reaction, a cause of my depression?
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