going to the river man, going to tell him all i can about the plan
My job orientation went well yesterday, despite being nothing more than the usual corporate indoctrination. Basically, a group of us sat in a small room and filled out paperwork, and then watched these videos brightly showing every way the company is wonderful and awesome. Some people are impressed by that, but I have dreams bigger than retail. If I can help it, I don't want to even work there for the contracted ninety days of seasonal labor; before then I'd like to be doing the crossing guard thing, and going to college, and possibly some other projects I have in mind.
My first day of work will be register training on the 28th. The schedule has about as much parity with Jen's schedule as we could ever hope for - our hours are only offset one hour from each other, except on weekends, when they're offset three. After three months of unemployment, the longest I've gone without drawing a check since I set myself free at age 18, even retail is a start. It's never going to be a career, though, despite the cheery orientation manager's assurances that [Giant Mass Retail Chain] is the "best job I've ever found!"
Jen's grandparents are going to be visiting for tea or something on Sunday, so they can see our digs before they head to Florida for the winter. So we have to clean and neaten this place like no one's business. Tonight we spent three hours at the laundromat getting a week and a half's worth of dingy clothing fresh and ocean-breezy, and tomorrow we have to straighten out the interior of the apartment - dishes must be washed and put away, papers and loose clothes must be hidden...Ah, the life of twentysomethings is great.
On to even more banal things...
- - -
From the mouths of the homeless insane:
Today's gem from the files of our tame psychopath, my father, is a rib-splitter of shameless projection: "I'm not as smart as Rick but I haven't spent every journal minute bitching about others that aren't to blame."
I couldn't believe the sheer unadulterated disingenuousness of that statement. My father has this concept that his consistent failure to provide a normal, safe environment to bring up my brother and me, or to hold any job for any reasonable length of time, or in general to be a competent, functioning adult, is the result of some vast and constantly morphing conglomeration of conspiracies, based mostly on license plates and surnames and childish puns and basic misconceptions of what constitutes reality. This is textbook paranoia, of course, as anyone can see. (Some level of my conscience feels bad for publically mocking a legally insane human being, who has no more control over his delusions and actions than a drooling lobotomy victim, but between the 18 years of hell he subjected me to and his continuing, unwavering, Republican-esque self-righteousness, that level is admittedly well-buried. Such is human nature.) What Eric's mind believes is that "others" were somehow responsible for his actions toward my grandmother, my brother, myself, and everyone else whose life he's so charmingly touched - in essence, "the voices made me do it," although he'll tell you to his dying day that the Homosexual Freemason Catholic Dayton PD Jew Little League Coach Ex-Wife Hindooooo Jumping Bean FBI Macarena Defibrilators were to blame for everything he did.
Contrary to what he so lucidly claims, I never bitch about "others that aren't to blame," and for that matter, I hardly ever "complain" about my childhood at all. Maybe once a week or two, lately, but that's only because he insists on bringing it again and again to memory. "Not to blame" - my white pimpled ass he isn't to blame. I disowned him in the first freaking place so I could distance myself from my childhood and move on with my life without having to remember how he abused and terrorized and distorted my life for 18 agonizing years. But at every juncture of my life away from him, whether by tracking down my basic training company and sending me illegible postcards, or spamming my email account with incoherent babble, or tracking down my permanent army unit and humiliating me before my entire chain of command with his self-righteous claims of "neglect," or stalking my lj and my friends list with further incoherent ravings, or now with the creation of trailstoyou, he has constantly ripped the gauze off my mental wounds and spat in them. I want nothing to do with him, but he has this bizarre and quite probably pedophiliac (he is positively obsessed with pictures of naked children) fantasy that if I'd stayed with him my life would've been soooo much better, that I'd have graduated college by now, and that eventually I will leave my wife and my life to live with him in a tent or something. (He flat-out stated that he couldn't wait for "the boy" to divorce. Again, classic example of projection. Look it up, Eric, not that you'd understand the concept.)
Well, Skippy, you had 18 years to get your shit together. Everyone bent over backwards to assist you from the moment you started hitting your mother while you were still in diapers. Your mother fed and clothed you and sent you Western Union money when you went gallivanting around the country with Randy and I cowering next to you. Several social workers and police departments and hospitals have tried to give you the treatments you need to live a normal, high-functioning life. Everyone's done everything for you short of putting fucking laurels at your feet. What more do you want, exactly?
I know you expect me to start sending you money, but you sent your own mother to the grave draining her dry, and frankly, I'm not going to be suckered by you. I know you expect my family (you've disowned them numerous times, so they're not yours anymore, not by your own statements) to send you money. They won't either, because they know, like I know, that that only enables you. (Another technical term - look it up instead of looking for child porn on public computers, you asswipe.) The only way to actually HELP you - help you get your life together, help you get on your feet, help you become a reasoning being for once in your miserable, petty, and useless life - is to get you immediate psychiatric care, and this you refuse. Thanks to the state of Ohio (which you pretend is giving you no end of hell, when it's really letting you off mostly scott-free for serious felonies and public endangerment to an extreme degree), it's not the work of a Sunday stroll to have you forcibly committed. So thanks to your illness, everyone who wants to help you is pretty much helpless. And meanwhile you bitch and rant and threaten us, again because of your illness. You're very welcome.
This is what makes the line above so funny - Eric's entire journal is nothing but "bitching about others who aren't to blame." No one is to blame for Eric's condition except for either genetics or Eric's own teenage drug use. The fact that it has been allowed to progress so far is Eric's and Eric's fault alone. He can't say people haven't tried to help him, but he'll say it all the same, in whatever incoherent fashion he fancies that particular day. And it is every day that he bitches about those of us trying to help him.
All of Eric's behavior is textbook schizophrenia. Eric is the only person who doesn't understand this, and that's the beast of his illness. He'll "rebut" this tomorrow with some stock repetition of his usual nonsense, slamming his fists on the keyboard like some demented ape until it garbles out some approximation of "The FBI went to the motel 6 because they know and I said too much and we were in OKC two days before [along with two million other people! hooray!] and they burned the house down to destroy the evidence an dey kill my witness iuogfeuwrughe;ruhugn;u!!!!!!!!1" This, also, is classic manifestation of his illness.
My father dimly perceives that there's "something" that the people he grew up with had and he didn't, that allowed them to become successful and stable and normal. He's actually right, this time: It's called Sanity.
And, like I've known from the start, I really don't need constant refreshers of why I left this 200 pound asscake in the first place. I already understand Eric as much as anyone will ever understand him, and frankly I'm not a better man for the knowledge.
Though it really is intriguing that he's obsessed with child pornography...Maybe this explains some other events of my childhood, too.
My first day of work will be register training on the 28th. The schedule has about as much parity with Jen's schedule as we could ever hope for - our hours are only offset one hour from each other, except on weekends, when they're offset three. After three months of unemployment, the longest I've gone without drawing a check since I set myself free at age 18, even retail is a start. It's never going to be a career, though, despite the cheery orientation manager's assurances that [Giant Mass Retail Chain] is the "best job I've ever found!"
Jen's grandparents are going to be visiting for tea or something on Sunday, so they can see our digs before they head to Florida for the winter. So we have to clean and neaten this place like no one's business. Tonight we spent three hours at the laundromat getting a week and a half's worth of dingy clothing fresh and ocean-breezy, and tomorrow we have to straighten out the interior of the apartment - dishes must be washed and put away, papers and loose clothes must be hidden...Ah, the life of twentysomethings is great.
On to even more banal things...
- - -
From the mouths of the homeless insane:
Today's gem from the files of our tame psychopath, my father, is a rib-splitter of shameless projection: "I'm not as smart as Rick but I haven't spent every journal minute bitching about others that aren't to blame."
I couldn't believe the sheer unadulterated disingenuousness of that statement. My father has this concept that his consistent failure to provide a normal, safe environment to bring up my brother and me, or to hold any job for any reasonable length of time, or in general to be a competent, functioning adult, is the result of some vast and constantly morphing conglomeration of conspiracies, based mostly on license plates and surnames and childish puns and basic misconceptions of what constitutes reality. This is textbook paranoia, of course, as anyone can see. (Some level of my conscience feels bad for publically mocking a legally insane human being, who has no more control over his delusions and actions than a drooling lobotomy victim, but between the 18 years of hell he subjected me to and his continuing, unwavering, Republican-esque self-righteousness, that level is admittedly well-buried. Such is human nature.) What Eric's mind believes is that "others" were somehow responsible for his actions toward my grandmother, my brother, myself, and everyone else whose life he's so charmingly touched - in essence, "the voices made me do it," although he'll tell you to his dying day that the Homosexual Freemason Catholic Dayton PD Jew Little League Coach Ex-Wife Hindooooo Jumping Bean FBI Macarena Defibrilators were to blame for everything he did.
Contrary to what he so lucidly claims, I never bitch about "others that aren't to blame," and for that matter, I hardly ever "complain" about my childhood at all. Maybe once a week or two, lately, but that's only because he insists on bringing it again and again to memory. "Not to blame" - my white pimpled ass he isn't to blame. I disowned him in the first freaking place so I could distance myself from my childhood and move on with my life without having to remember how he abused and terrorized and distorted my life for 18 agonizing years. But at every juncture of my life away from him, whether by tracking down my basic training company and sending me illegible postcards, or spamming my email account with incoherent babble, or tracking down my permanent army unit and humiliating me before my entire chain of command with his self-righteous claims of "neglect," or stalking my lj and my friends list with further incoherent ravings, or now with the creation of trailstoyou, he has constantly ripped the gauze off my mental wounds and spat in them. I want nothing to do with him, but he has this bizarre and quite probably pedophiliac (he is positively obsessed with pictures of naked children) fantasy that if I'd stayed with him my life would've been soooo much better, that I'd have graduated college by now, and that eventually I will leave my wife and my life to live with him in a tent or something. (He flat-out stated that he couldn't wait for "the boy" to divorce. Again, classic example of projection. Look it up, Eric, not that you'd understand the concept.)
Well, Skippy, you had 18 years to get your shit together. Everyone bent over backwards to assist you from the moment you started hitting your mother while you were still in diapers. Your mother fed and clothed you and sent you Western Union money when you went gallivanting around the country with Randy and I cowering next to you. Several social workers and police departments and hospitals have tried to give you the treatments you need to live a normal, high-functioning life. Everyone's done everything for you short of putting fucking laurels at your feet. What more do you want, exactly?
I know you expect me to start sending you money, but you sent your own mother to the grave draining her dry, and frankly, I'm not going to be suckered by you. I know you expect my family (you've disowned them numerous times, so they're not yours anymore, not by your own statements) to send you money. They won't either, because they know, like I know, that that only enables you. (Another technical term - look it up instead of looking for child porn on public computers, you asswipe.) The only way to actually HELP you - help you get your life together, help you get on your feet, help you become a reasoning being for once in your miserable, petty, and useless life - is to get you immediate psychiatric care, and this you refuse. Thanks to the state of Ohio (which you pretend is giving you no end of hell, when it's really letting you off mostly scott-free for serious felonies and public endangerment to an extreme degree), it's not the work of a Sunday stroll to have you forcibly committed. So thanks to your illness, everyone who wants to help you is pretty much helpless. And meanwhile you bitch and rant and threaten us, again because of your illness. You're very welcome.
This is what makes the line above so funny - Eric's entire journal is nothing but "bitching about others who aren't to blame." No one is to blame for Eric's condition except for either genetics or Eric's own teenage drug use. The fact that it has been allowed to progress so far is Eric's and Eric's fault alone. He can't say people haven't tried to help him, but he'll say it all the same, in whatever incoherent fashion he fancies that particular day. And it is every day that he bitches about those of us trying to help him.
All of Eric's behavior is textbook schizophrenia. Eric is the only person who doesn't understand this, and that's the beast of his illness. He'll "rebut" this tomorrow with some stock repetition of his usual nonsense, slamming his fists on the keyboard like some demented ape until it garbles out some approximation of "The FBI went to the motel 6 because they know and I said too much and we were in OKC two days before [along with two million other people! hooray!] and they burned the house down to destroy the evidence an dey kill my witness iuogfeuwrughe;ruhugn;u!!!!!!!!1" This, also, is classic manifestation of his illness.
My father dimly perceives that there's "something" that the people he grew up with had and he didn't, that allowed them to become successful and stable and normal. He's actually right, this time: It's called Sanity.
And, like I've known from the start, I really don't need constant refreshers of why I left this 200 pound asscake in the first place. I already understand Eric as much as anyone will ever understand him, and frankly I'm not a better man for the knowledge.
Though it really is intriguing that he's obsessed with child pornography...Maybe this explains some other events of my childhood, too.