random childhood memory + Schubert
because YouTube
Click to viewmy parents split up when I was 2 or 3 but when he was stationed way South (possibly so as to keep a patina of respectability) he talked my mom into us living together again, in a remote outpost near Antarctica
it was very much a disaster. At one pt my mom OD's on sleeping pills and had to go to the ER (not intentional, so we're told, plus she's not the type). It was a cold, soggy, frozen, dismal wasteland all around. School was abysmal. It got dark at 4pm. Their relationship was a joke, and I remember stuff like hearing the Frank Sinatra LP skipping at one pt, then next thing me and my brother hear is expletives and my dad taking the LP and smashing it. He was gone a lot and when he was there he was always sulking because he wanted to be with more exciting people. And of course they were always disagreeing - if I was told by mom to do it one way, he told me to do it another way. Basically it was just living in an environment of constant tension and overall misery.
Aside from random things breaking, there weren't a lot of overt fights that I remember, but in one instance, I forget why, we were all in one room and there was drama - my brother and probably me were crying, possibly mom too, and he was raging or something and I remember looking at my brother and my mother, crying and miserable and I was struck with this weird sense of absurdity and unreality about it all. A voice was like
why are you all so miserable? Is this really the point of existence? What is the point of you people stuck together torturing each other? There's got to be a better way, this is a waste of life
and then it just seemed sort of funny to me, absurd, sort of like insisting on staying for a particularly woeful and long-winded performance of CATS, and (worse!) going back night after night even though you hate it. I sort of both felt sorry for everyone there but also kind of maybe contempt? Like, 'get it together, people.' I was six.
I don't remember at all what happened after that - did I say something? Stomp off? Start laughing? - but I know that a couple of months later the experiment was over and a year or so later my mom was with her new guy and everything became heaps better.
so what is the moral of the story? Beats me. It just occurred to me the other day, probably after binge watching The Good Place which is essentially about a hell where 4 people are destined to torture each other psychologically for all time. So it is, I think, a remake of Sartre's No Exit, so interesting for all that.
excellent show BTW. The geniuses who brought us Parks & Rec and The Office spawned it. I wanted it to be the last thing I watched on Netflix but now am onto some Australian thing
Stopped with the Foucault because it was TOO interesting. It was slowing me down and sending me down all sorts of rabbit holes. But maybe I pick it up again....