well, my apologies. i was sicker, apparently, than i thought yesterday. i'm still feeling pretty shitty, but i got stuff to get done today and this is part of it. i didn't finish writing, but i wrote. i didn't see my uncle but i saw my mom. made her a breakfast sandwich. i didn't get to clear up much, but i did see where i need to be more attentive to Syd, because as i think i said earlier yesterday, she's a teen, and teens can't make good decisions ninety percent of the time. that's why they have parents.
so i'm starting today, still going over my systems, stalled out here in space. in space...innerspace. and it's time for me to start moving toward getting ready to do the day, because it's going to take that kind of energy to move things along. i ended with some family stuff, grandparents. i guess i'll move on to peers.
people say kids can be cruel, but kids are just mirrors of the world they inhabit. a baby is born as a feelings monster. it can't enunciate, it only knows impulse and reaction. it takes jelled and cohesive behavior to bring a baby to the point of actually having a personality, making decisions and being a particular way toward another individual. a baby will let you know when something or someone makes it feel discomfort, but a baby won't let you know specifically when it really loves a particular kind or piece of music, or when it prefers one human over another when it likes both. those are the idiocies of adults, and it passes on from one generation to the next. i say that to say, kids were cruel to me. but not all kids, and not the same degree of cruelty. and it kind of segues back to my mom because...okay, i was picked on, but i wasn't bullied or beaten up for being fat. i was called names, yes indeed. i still have a knee-jerk reaction to Fat Albert (i remember early in my sobriety, i was listening to a Bill Cosby comedy album and he did his first HEY HEY HEY, and something in me cried out and ran for a closet. like, literally. that was when i realized, after so many years of drug abuse and alcoholic anesthesia, that there was a place where i hid things that hadn't quite died yet) and i still cringe somewhat when encountering laughter as i walk past people. i sincerely hope this goes away one day, but self-consciousness is not easy to take on, and it's a damn sight harder to take off once you've got it on. it is very symbiotic, very parasitic and it hooks into the nervous system and the respiratory system. brains and lungs, man.
anyway, there were names that i was called. tub of lard, that was always a bad one. it was like one word, like a nickname. i think that's when it gets lower level bad, when you hear the names and they become yours. chicken fat, that was a weird one. that was because of a record, early on, like second grade, that the teacher would play for our exercise time. jesus, exercise in the classroom? does that happen anymore? probably not. probably went out with prayer. i don't know much about the impact of prayer in the classroom, but i'll tell you this: when teachers could enforce silence, could mandate exercise and could paddle when needed, kids didn't grow up killing kids, beating up teachers and punching their parents and grandparents around. some things, the design is evident only by the results attained.
chicken fat. fat ass, that wasn't as popular, as only the worst kids cursed in my childhood, but it was there. the one that stuck, even more than tub of lard (i bet they didn't even know what lard was) was monster. that was the one that made me feel the worst. monster. not human. something that people ran screaming from. that was all i could associate a monster with. i started getting quiet and going inside myself then. monster. i watched Frankenstein as a kid, against my mother's will of course, and the scene where the monster threw the little girl into the water because he wanted to see her float like the flowers, that was heartbreaking to me. because i wanted to do what others did too. and it just ended me up as the target for more laughter. monster. i got quiet. i stopped laughing. i was a very jovial child in kindergarten, in first and second grade. i was a joker, i was sociable, i was a class clown. and then monster came, and i became introspective. i became suicidal. if i was a monster, there was no good ending for me. monster were killed off before the end of the picture. monsters lived in isolation, misunderstood and sullen, until one day they decided, fuck peace, and they went on a rampage and the army killed them. i wasn't that kind of monster, but i didn't realize back then i wasn't any kind of monster at all. so i tried to kill myself in grade school. pills, because after all, i did have a sleeping drug addiction after the AYDS candies. i was sad all the time. and it only got worse as i got higher in grades. i was brilliant, from kindergarten to first grade in weeks, and in the top three of my class all through elementary school. then i plummeted to d's and f's in 8th grade forward. barely graduating. because i was a monster, and i couldn't shake it loose.
so, my school mates. not all of them. i had some great friends, who are still my friends today. but the overview, i learned despair, i learned depression, i began romancing the notion of me not on earth anymore. it definitely affected my social life, my self-esteem and self-worth, it made me wonder about the legitimacy of my human-ness, and really, what could be worse than that? and the only way i knew to dull the pain of living in a tormenting world, at that point, was to eat, and to eat in a way that would numb the pain was to perpetuate the state of existence that brought on the insults and ridicule. vicious cycle.
before i go run my bath, i did get to the gym today, got in a good walk and some machine lifting to keep working on my shoulder. i had breakfast, and i had coffee and water. i'm going to make another cup of coffee and take my meds after i take my bath. more later.
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