Glad to be Home Again

I'm realizing with some regret that I've moved on from my family. Physically of course, but philosophically as well. My dad has always had dreams of becoming rich, but he has always lacked the common sense it takes to harness the momentum that he has made an art of building. I used to look at him with three-d glasses, but now, without them, he's just a fuzzy mess.

God, I feel guilty.

He's all promise and no delivery. Like when I was a boy. He waxed poetic about college, how I was going, and he was paying my way through. But when the time came, we were living in a trailer without the proverbial pot to piss in. Far from having any money saved, he took from me what little I had. Not that I would have spent it wisely. I was too much like him to think ahead.

And still, part of me can't bear the thought of sacrificing a thing for tomorrow. I thrive on the last minute save.

My family is just like my wife's in one aspect. Both dump the entire weight of a failed and frustrated life upon their children. This weekend we spent Easter at my grandma's home, which politically is a controversial move. Dad figures that he's the head of the family now that Grandpa has passed away, but we will not stay with him.

Why?

Let me count the ways.

On our last visit, his St. Bernard bit my youngest son. It turns out, thankfully, that the dog was only posturing. I blogged about it when it happened. But the scare at the time, the helplessness I felt… All just to make my daddy feel loved.

He swears that the house is ready for visitors, but it only has one bathroom, and the access is through the master bedroom. They gave us the master bedroom and slept upstairs, and used a porta potty, the kind that kids use for the first time.

To complicate matters, my dad's wife's son is staying with them, who as it turns out, pisses out the window to avoid having to go through their bedroom at night.

Wow. I can't wait.

I am starting to totally fucking resent the pressure.

So this weekend, dad said he'd come for the day. But when I told him we were going to visit a few relatives, he made a lame excuse for the morning and said he'd be late. With that time off, so to speak, we did a little sightseeing. When he showed up and found out that we still hadn't visited anyone, he made an excuse and left early.

His wife told me it was a "sharing" thing.

Tell me this: am I going to be this pathetic? If so, then take a gun and shoot me through the skull.

Why is it pathetic? Because the man has lived his entire life and made nothing of it. He lives in a home in the middle of Amish country that is barely adequate to sustain life. And that's fine. But he thinks it's an oasis, a paradise retreat, and expects everyone around him to tell him so. He wants me to subject my family to his delusion, and I won't do it.

Man, sometimes I just want to disappear.

I mean it. There's something wrong with him. Something seriously wrong. I used to think it was sorta cute how he would tell the same story over and over, each time growing it just a little. I think he actually believes the stories now. He told one about me this weekend, while I sat there and nodded, affirming the total bullshit.

Basically, what he said, was that I fell down a three story elevator shaft and survived it by grappling all the way down with the various protruding implements. The truth is that I fell one story from atop a wall in a house he and I were framing. Sure I grabbed a few things on the way down, but even if I didn't, I would have been banged up but living.

He told another. When I was a boy, there was a wall -- and I remember this -- that had large bricks with deep hand holds that tempted me to climb it. It was a two story apartment building to my recollection. When dad first told the story, he caught me on my initial ascent, grabbing me by the collar and pulling me off. This weekend, I was three stories up, and he had to run up the stairs and reach around a corner to get me.

You could see as he told it, something behind the eyes. He was working out the logistics. You see, the reality only called for him to reach up and snag me. The story changed even as he told it this time. It was two stories, then there was a stairwell, and oh yeah, it was three stories.

And then! All the men in the family sit around like big fat Buddha kings, waiting for the women to serve them, milking from that experience the only self-esteem they'll ever achieve.

And then all the pissing and moaning about the diseases they've endured, the spouses they've buried, and the death that will surely come soon. The white pallor and the bloated bellies, and the various groups of people in the world that have kept them down, as if they somehow deserve better than they got.

Pathetic.

I'm just glad to be home again.