A previously recorded dispath
This message brought to you by my brain a few weeks ago.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Banging down some things while I am stuck waiting at the plant…
Some of you have thought I was pretty tacky in discussing my pay rate on LJ recently. I can see why you might think that and I normally would probably keep that sort of data to myself. But I did have two reasons to talk about the numbers:
1. Some have thought that I am a lazy and unrealistic guy who has been looking for excuses not to start a career in another field. Some have thought that with a child on the way, I should be setting more ‘realistic’ goals and stop slacking off. Well…unless you can find a way for me to make at least 75% of what I make contracting…I suggest you take any superior attitudes about what I should be doing for a living and shove it horizontally into your vertical food exit.
2. Too many people who do my job have had their salaries reduced over the last seven years. Too many people have had their jobs threatened for daring to discuss pay rates with each other. Corporate America’s philosophy is that if they can prevent us from comparing notes on what we make, they can keep our wages down and gradually reduce them. I have seen it happening. So discussing hard numbers is one more way for me to poke the American Oligarchs in the eye. Fucking greedy pigs. I’ll take a pay cut when the boys and girls in the boardroom do.
If you still think I was tacky…well think what you want. One of the few advantages of getting older is that you cease to care what uninformed people think about you.
Almost fourty…FUCK! As of today I will be thirty eight years old. Fucking Wow.
(The following cut is long and very self-reflective. Read if you want a peek behind the curtain. Some of this I wrote about earlier, but things have become clearer on reflection. This is an emotional purge...feel free to ignore. It does me good to flush this out.)
I was never supposed to make it past thirty. I expected to be dead long before that. It probably had something to do with my old man constantly telling me what a lazy bum I was and how I would never amount to anything, support a family, pay my bills or own a home. (Funny…I still rent.)
Don’t get me wrong. My dad taught me many valuable things. He was a freaking dream compared to a lot of dads. But I will never make him out to be saint.
So…confessional shit coming. Some of you know about some of the following things in my past and some of you don’t.
Now that I am going to be a father myself, I find myself facing these memories and sorting them out. I know I won’t treat my children like my father treated me, but to make sure of it…I have to review my relationship with my father carefully.
The memories are a lot more vivid than I ever expected now that I am evaluating them. Bright and shiny and in fucking Technicolor.
If you want to get an insight into the real me, here is a peek behind the curtain of my past. If our childhood builds the basis of who we become…here is a look at my foundations.
I always say that my dad used to mentally abuse me more than he ever physically abused me. My dad couldn’t seem to go more than a few days without raving a long litany of my uselessness, laziness, stupidity, etc, etc, etc. That sort of crap happened thousands of times more often than the physical abuse.
I find that I have been avoiding dealing with the memories of the physical stuff by focusing my attention on learning methods of fixing the mental abuse.
I have developed some pretty good methods of fixing or at least redirecting the effects of the mental abuse. But now that I find myself sorting through the memories of the physical abuse…the clarity of the memories is suddenly stunning.
Writing about it helps. So read on if you like. It gets ugly, but I must purge some of this tonight while I have time.
The first time my dad beat the fuck out of me, I was five years old. It was the day my little brother Ken came home from the hospital. I pissed the old man off somehow and he spanked me with a rod and sent me to bed. He stayed so angry he came back into my room in the middle of the night and started waling on me again with the rod, waking me up from a dead sleep. I remember crawling into the corner space at the foot of my bed and the wall trying to get away from him. I remember very clearly cowering in that corner while my father stood over me, face red, raving at his miserable excuse for a son while the rod came down on me over and over again. I remember my mother had to physically interject herself between me and him to keep him from killing me.
My dad didn’t beat me constantly…only every few years. If he ever got REALLY over the top, my mom packed up us kids and left. I think we had to do that two or three times by the time I was thirteen.
The first time I physically engaged my dad I think I was nine. My father only struck my mother once in his life. We were in the kitchen and he slammed her into the refrigerator. I hurled myself into the middle before I even knew what I was doing. I threw myself against him and pushed him away from my mom, screaming at him to leave my mother alone. I think I shocked myself as much as I shocked him. But my dad had enough shame at what he had done to my mother that he backed off and disappeared for a few days. She bore those bruises on her side, shoulder and back for over a week.
The first time my dad threw me out of the house I was eleven years old. Some of the Jehovah’s Witnesses from our Kingdom Hall (JW church) took me in for a few weeks while he calmed down. They were always there to take me in when he threw me out over the years (six or seven times). I may be furious with the way that the JWs exercise cult like social control of their members, but I owe the people themselves a debt and I will always remember that.
I started to verbally fight back against my dad when I was fourteen years old. I think the adolescent testosterone was starting to kick in and I couldn’t let him rave about what a useless bastard I was without shouting back. If I didn’t fight back, I likely would have just killed myself.
My bedroom was in the basement so we spent a lot of time screaming back and forth through the floor. Thank gods for the floor…it kept us from physically fighting more than we did. Over the next few years we spent a lot of time screaming through that floor.
The second time I physically fought with my father I was sixteen years old. He was pissed off about something or another and picked up my little brother Kurt by his head and threw him into the couch. It was the first time he directed his anger at my little brother…my middle brother had always managed to avoid his wrath.
I had always accepted his anger toward me, but something snapped inside me when he did that to Kurt. I told him that if he ever touched my little brother again I would break his neck. He charged me.
I was a pretty big sixteen year old. I managed to slip behind him and throw him in a bear hug, trapping his arms to his sides. I was strangely calm. He raged and threw himself against the wall repeatedly, trying to smash me into it and screaming for me to let him go. I managed to retain control and told him in a calm voice that I would let go when he calmed down. I said it calmly six or seven times.
I recall the strangest feeling of wanting to laugh when I realized I had him immobilized and that I could keep him from hurting me by just keeping my grip. Eventually he exhausted himself enough that I let him go and walked out of the house. I came back a few days later.
We faced off a few more times in my adolescence, but managed to avoid a lot of physical fighting. I mean he tried to stab me with a screwdriver when I was seventeen, but I remember the fear in his eyes at the time. I think his age was starting to bother him and I was 6’2” by the time I was seventeen. He seemed genuinely afraid of me.
The last confrontation I ever had with him was in my early twenties. I was long out of the house and living on my own. He lost it and punched my little brother (I think Kurt was about ten or eleven). I found out about it and was not aware that my mother decided to make my dad move out over the incident.
I thought long and hard for about a day. Then I made a phone call to a friend. A few hours later I picked up a sawed off, pistol gripped 12 gauge shotgun from that friend. I bought some shells, loaded the gun and put it in a duffle bag. I drove to my parent’s house and sat my mom and dad down at the table.
I remember sitting down and calmly explaining to my parents that I knew what had happened to Kurt. I then pulled the gun out of the bag, racked in a shell and explained to my father that if he ever touched my little brother again I was going to blow his fucking brains out. The old man took it pretty calmly. My mother made him move out that week.
Anyway…some of this I have mentioned before…some I haven’t. Writing about it helps deal with it. Maybe when I am dead and gone my children will read this and understand their own father a little better.
Now maybe you know why I have always been so freaked out about having my own children. I was always terrified I would treat them like my dad treated me. I distinctly remember being about six years old and telling myself over and over again through a haze of angry tears that I would NEVER treat my kids like my father treated me. Somewhere in my adolescence that changed into me never having kids at all.
I know better now. I don’t have the brain damage they discovered in my father in his late fifties. He had a double whammy…physical scarring in the brain regions that control anger and rage responses as well as brain chemistry imbalances in the rage centers (probably multiplied or even caused by the scarring).
My father’s brothers and sister helped solve the mystery of the scarring. They explained that my grandfather used to regularly grab his sons by the hair or ears and smash their heads into the walls of their farm house while he beat the fuck out of them. Repeated trauma to his temples from being slammed into the sturdy farmhouse walls produced the damage.
It seems my father was MUCH less abusive to me than my grandfather was to him. I am grateful to the old man for that. And I plan to completely break the cycle of abuse with my own kids.
Because I promise to the gods and all mankind that I will end my own life before I ever abuse my own children. If I find myself loosing control and becoming the abuser…I will simply remove myself from the equation.
Fortunately, I don’t believe I will ever find myself in that position. But I had to make the bargain with myself before I could bring myself to be a dad.
My father did teach me many good things when his temper was under control…and I learned some important lessons by watching what happened when he lost it.
Things my father taught me directly:
Work hard and do your best in all your endeavors.
Hard work and effort often pays off.
Any physical thing can be taken from you by people with more power and force than you have…but they can’t take away what you have learned.
Work hard to learn and educate yourself.
Travel and learn about other people and cultures. Gain perspective on the world and the people in it.
Things my father taught me indirectly:
You can be a good man and have many friends, but if your temper repeatedly leaves your control…your friends will disappear one by one until you are left alone and lonely.
For a father, being a good provider is a high honor.
If you have wronged someone and recognize it, apologize. If you don’t, you are slowly burning bridges you may need to cross later…all for the sake of your foolish pride.
When you find someone in need, help them. When you find someone without a roof over their head, shelter them. When you find someone without food, feed them. (I think I took this lesson a little too far with the infamous Yan.)
If you spend more time tearing down your child’s self esteem than you spend building it up…you are doing them more harm than you can ever imagine.
When you are proud of your children, make sure you let them know. My dad said he was proud of me twice in his life…and I remember it vividly.
I don’t hate my dad anymore. I understand him now and understanding helps to bring compassion and forgiveness. Understanding does not ease the pain, but it helps in the recovery.
The strange thing was how great my dad was when he wasn’t angry. How smart and caring he could be was amazing. You just had to weather to storms in between.
He died when I was twenty eight, shortly after I was married to Holly. In the last two years of his life, he knew he didn’t have much time left and tried to reestablish some level of relationship with Kurt and I. I am very thankful for those two years.
Wherever you are dad…may the storms of your anger be quiet and your friends abundant. I know your rage made you loathe yourself and your loneliness only made the self-hatred more intense.
I wish you peace. I wish you happiness. I wish you a more comfortable incarnation the next time around.
Maybe his soul is already back. Maybe somewhere he is running around as a nine or ten year old, learning a different set of lessons this time.
I hope your new father is a kinder man than he was last time, dad.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Banging down some things while I am stuck waiting at the plant…
Some of you have thought I was pretty tacky in discussing my pay rate on LJ recently. I can see why you might think that and I normally would probably keep that sort of data to myself. But I did have two reasons to talk about the numbers:
1. Some have thought that I am a lazy and unrealistic guy who has been looking for excuses not to start a career in another field. Some have thought that with a child on the way, I should be setting more ‘realistic’ goals and stop slacking off. Well…unless you can find a way for me to make at least 75% of what I make contracting…I suggest you take any superior attitudes about what I should be doing for a living and shove it horizontally into your vertical food exit.
2. Too many people who do my job have had their salaries reduced over the last seven years. Too many people have had their jobs threatened for daring to discuss pay rates with each other. Corporate America’s philosophy is that if they can prevent us from comparing notes on what we make, they can keep our wages down and gradually reduce them. I have seen it happening. So discussing hard numbers is one more way for me to poke the American Oligarchs in the eye. Fucking greedy pigs. I’ll take a pay cut when the boys and girls in the boardroom do.
If you still think I was tacky…well think what you want. One of the few advantages of getting older is that you cease to care what uninformed people think about you.
Almost fourty…FUCK! As of today I will be thirty eight years old. Fucking Wow.
(The following cut is long and very self-reflective. Read if you want a peek behind the curtain. Some of this I wrote about earlier, but things have become clearer on reflection. This is an emotional purge...feel free to ignore. It does me good to flush this out.)
I was never supposed to make it past thirty. I expected to be dead long before that. It probably had something to do with my old man constantly telling me what a lazy bum I was and how I would never amount to anything, support a family, pay my bills or own a home. (Funny…I still rent.)
Don’t get me wrong. My dad taught me many valuable things. He was a freaking dream compared to a lot of dads. But I will never make him out to be saint.
So…confessional shit coming. Some of you know about some of the following things in my past and some of you don’t.
Now that I am going to be a father myself, I find myself facing these memories and sorting them out. I know I won’t treat my children like my father treated me, but to make sure of it…I have to review my relationship with my father carefully.
The memories are a lot more vivid than I ever expected now that I am evaluating them. Bright and shiny and in fucking Technicolor.
If you want to get an insight into the real me, here is a peek behind the curtain of my past. If our childhood builds the basis of who we become…here is a look at my foundations.
I always say that my dad used to mentally abuse me more than he ever physically abused me. My dad couldn’t seem to go more than a few days without raving a long litany of my uselessness, laziness, stupidity, etc, etc, etc. That sort of crap happened thousands of times more often than the physical abuse.
I find that I have been avoiding dealing with the memories of the physical stuff by focusing my attention on learning methods of fixing the mental abuse.
I have developed some pretty good methods of fixing or at least redirecting the effects of the mental abuse. But now that I find myself sorting through the memories of the physical abuse…the clarity of the memories is suddenly stunning.
Writing about it helps. So read on if you like. It gets ugly, but I must purge some of this tonight while I have time.
The first time my dad beat the fuck out of me, I was five years old. It was the day my little brother Ken came home from the hospital. I pissed the old man off somehow and he spanked me with a rod and sent me to bed. He stayed so angry he came back into my room in the middle of the night and started waling on me again with the rod, waking me up from a dead sleep. I remember crawling into the corner space at the foot of my bed and the wall trying to get away from him. I remember very clearly cowering in that corner while my father stood over me, face red, raving at his miserable excuse for a son while the rod came down on me over and over again. I remember my mother had to physically interject herself between me and him to keep him from killing me.
My dad didn’t beat me constantly…only every few years. If he ever got REALLY over the top, my mom packed up us kids and left. I think we had to do that two or three times by the time I was thirteen.
The first time I physically engaged my dad I think I was nine. My father only struck my mother once in his life. We were in the kitchen and he slammed her into the refrigerator. I hurled myself into the middle before I even knew what I was doing. I threw myself against him and pushed him away from my mom, screaming at him to leave my mother alone. I think I shocked myself as much as I shocked him. But my dad had enough shame at what he had done to my mother that he backed off and disappeared for a few days. She bore those bruises on her side, shoulder and back for over a week.
The first time my dad threw me out of the house I was eleven years old. Some of the Jehovah’s Witnesses from our Kingdom Hall (JW church) took me in for a few weeks while he calmed down. They were always there to take me in when he threw me out over the years (six or seven times). I may be furious with the way that the JWs exercise cult like social control of their members, but I owe the people themselves a debt and I will always remember that.
I started to verbally fight back against my dad when I was fourteen years old. I think the adolescent testosterone was starting to kick in and I couldn’t let him rave about what a useless bastard I was without shouting back. If I didn’t fight back, I likely would have just killed myself.
My bedroom was in the basement so we spent a lot of time screaming back and forth through the floor. Thank gods for the floor…it kept us from physically fighting more than we did. Over the next few years we spent a lot of time screaming through that floor.
The second time I physically fought with my father I was sixteen years old. He was pissed off about something or another and picked up my little brother Kurt by his head and threw him into the couch. It was the first time he directed his anger at my little brother…my middle brother had always managed to avoid his wrath.
I had always accepted his anger toward me, but something snapped inside me when he did that to Kurt. I told him that if he ever touched my little brother again I would break his neck. He charged me.
I was a pretty big sixteen year old. I managed to slip behind him and throw him in a bear hug, trapping his arms to his sides. I was strangely calm. He raged and threw himself against the wall repeatedly, trying to smash me into it and screaming for me to let him go. I managed to retain control and told him in a calm voice that I would let go when he calmed down. I said it calmly six or seven times.
I recall the strangest feeling of wanting to laugh when I realized I had him immobilized and that I could keep him from hurting me by just keeping my grip. Eventually he exhausted himself enough that I let him go and walked out of the house. I came back a few days later.
We faced off a few more times in my adolescence, but managed to avoid a lot of physical fighting. I mean he tried to stab me with a screwdriver when I was seventeen, but I remember the fear in his eyes at the time. I think his age was starting to bother him and I was 6’2” by the time I was seventeen. He seemed genuinely afraid of me.
The last confrontation I ever had with him was in my early twenties. I was long out of the house and living on my own. He lost it and punched my little brother (I think Kurt was about ten or eleven). I found out about it and was not aware that my mother decided to make my dad move out over the incident.
I thought long and hard for about a day. Then I made a phone call to a friend. A few hours later I picked up a sawed off, pistol gripped 12 gauge shotgun from that friend. I bought some shells, loaded the gun and put it in a duffle bag. I drove to my parent’s house and sat my mom and dad down at the table.
I remember sitting down and calmly explaining to my parents that I knew what had happened to Kurt. I then pulled the gun out of the bag, racked in a shell and explained to my father that if he ever touched my little brother again I was going to blow his fucking brains out. The old man took it pretty calmly. My mother made him move out that week.
Anyway…some of this I have mentioned before…some I haven’t. Writing about it helps deal with it. Maybe when I am dead and gone my children will read this and understand their own father a little better.
Now maybe you know why I have always been so freaked out about having my own children. I was always terrified I would treat them like my dad treated me. I distinctly remember being about six years old and telling myself over and over again through a haze of angry tears that I would NEVER treat my kids like my father treated me. Somewhere in my adolescence that changed into me never having kids at all.
I know better now. I don’t have the brain damage they discovered in my father in his late fifties. He had a double whammy…physical scarring in the brain regions that control anger and rage responses as well as brain chemistry imbalances in the rage centers (probably multiplied or even caused by the scarring).
My father’s brothers and sister helped solve the mystery of the scarring. They explained that my grandfather used to regularly grab his sons by the hair or ears and smash their heads into the walls of their farm house while he beat the fuck out of them. Repeated trauma to his temples from being slammed into the sturdy farmhouse walls produced the damage.
It seems my father was MUCH less abusive to me than my grandfather was to him. I am grateful to the old man for that. And I plan to completely break the cycle of abuse with my own kids.
Because I promise to the gods and all mankind that I will end my own life before I ever abuse my own children. If I find myself loosing control and becoming the abuser…I will simply remove myself from the equation.
Fortunately, I don’t believe I will ever find myself in that position. But I had to make the bargain with myself before I could bring myself to be a dad.
My father did teach me many good things when his temper was under control…and I learned some important lessons by watching what happened when he lost it.
Things my father taught me directly:
Work hard and do your best in all your endeavors.
Hard work and effort often pays off.
Any physical thing can be taken from you by people with more power and force than you have…but they can’t take away what you have learned.
Work hard to learn and educate yourself.
Travel and learn about other people and cultures. Gain perspective on the world and the people in it.
Things my father taught me indirectly:
You can be a good man and have many friends, but if your temper repeatedly leaves your control…your friends will disappear one by one until you are left alone and lonely.
For a father, being a good provider is a high honor.
If you have wronged someone and recognize it, apologize. If you don’t, you are slowly burning bridges you may need to cross later…all for the sake of your foolish pride.
When you find someone in need, help them. When you find someone without a roof over their head, shelter them. When you find someone without food, feed them. (I think I took this lesson a little too far with the infamous Yan.)
If you spend more time tearing down your child’s self esteem than you spend building it up…you are doing them more harm than you can ever imagine.
When you are proud of your children, make sure you let them know. My dad said he was proud of me twice in his life…and I remember it vividly.
I don’t hate my dad anymore. I understand him now and understanding helps to bring compassion and forgiveness. Understanding does not ease the pain, but it helps in the recovery.
The strange thing was how great my dad was when he wasn’t angry. How smart and caring he could be was amazing. You just had to weather to storms in between.
He died when I was twenty eight, shortly after I was married to Holly. In the last two years of his life, he knew he didn’t have much time left and tried to reestablish some level of relationship with Kurt and I. I am very thankful for those two years.
Wherever you are dad…may the storms of your anger be quiet and your friends abundant. I know your rage made you loathe yourself and your loneliness only made the self-hatred more intense.
I wish you peace. I wish you happiness. I wish you a more comfortable incarnation the next time around.
Maybe his soul is already back. Maybe somewhere he is running around as a nine or ten year old, learning a different set of lessons this time.
I hope your new father is a kinder man than he was last time, dad.