Mar 08, 2011 02:42
I wrote a long post about drawing dead rakes and whores and about procrastinating and trying to clean up artwork on a laptop with a grubby screen and no graphics tablet. But LJ ate it.
After that I started on about nostalgia and Edith Road which was the victorian Kensington house we all lived in when I was small. (Seven in all, parents and five kids.) And how it encapsulates for me a time before things got bad. (Before my parents lost the house because of a man called Fred Brogger who was essentially a fraud and a fucker and a clever one to boot because his bastardry didn't show up on the usual checks one does with Company House etc etc. My father twigged and shopped him to the police, but not before he'd whisked away enough 'investment' money to mean the house had to be sold and my parents spent fifteen years working themselves into the ground to pay the debt and make ends meet.)
There are in this world, two people I'd actually stab. I threaten violence on a semi-regular basis but the truth is I'm not a fan. The most violent thing I've done to anyone else since the age of seven was punch a boy who'd tried to drink bleach, and that was because at the time I loved him and thought he was an unspeakable idiot and really couldn't get over the fact that out of all the suicide attempts he'd tried he'd picked something so skanky and nasty. (yeah, I know, my morals are weird).
Anyway. The two people I'd actually coldly visit violence upon up to actual GBH and maybe death are 1) the guy who raped my sister and 2) Fred Brogger. Because whilst there's no way of knowing this sort of thing (I understand that entirely) were it not for what they both did, I think at least seven people would have spent a decade *NOT* fucking themselves up in some way and would have been a lot happier and healthier at the end of it.
(Would it have fixed all financial/emotional woe? No, but there's a difference between woe and outright fucking disaster. Would it have meant my little sister never tried crack or that I never slashed at my wrists? Not necessarily. But it would have meant my parents had the time and energy to notice immediately and deal with such issues as they arose instead of having to pay attention to the greater of two evils ('she's behaving weird but if I don't fix *this* - NOW - we're all gonna be out on the street at the end of the month...')
I'm very tired, and don't have the consciousness to take this post to where ever the fuck it was going.
Let's just say talking to my eldest brother about past times was odd and made me look back over a lot of stuff I haven't looked at in years.
Conclusion? My mother was beautiful and brilliant. I say that not out of loyalty or something but because looking back she really bloody was. (No, I didn't get it then, I thought everyone was that good - I thought her energy, grace, verve and competence - not to mention intelligence - was 'normal'; years pass and I realise at least 75% of the population is really falling short of the mark.) And yes, I'm writing this here to remind myself as much as inform you because in the past five years I've watched all my mother's brilliance be stripped away. And she isn't that old. She's 65 now, which is rather young to have irreparably advanced dementia. What's worse somehow is she looks 50. And my father is left to deal with things; the final stop-gap, as ever. And he deserves far better too.
That possibly wasn't much of a conclusion.
How's this? - In a perfectly cold and unemotional way, I'd happily duel against the Rapist, Brogger, and Dementia - and I'd fucking cheat too because they have no honour so I'm fucked if I'll bother, I'll gut the sodding lot of them. No matter the karmic backlash, it's still the less of two evils.
.......Piss. I need to wake up tomorrow and do accounts and filing. SHIT.
memory data,
random acts of bastard,
family