Tag: family
my dad the psychotic penpal, episode two
Remember that little note I e-mailed to my father right before my birthday? I forgot entirely about it until today. There are, so far, four replies.
To refresh your memory, here is what happened last time.
RE: Hi dad, it’s my 25th birthday this week – Uhmm …
*I don’t want this to be easily indexed. |
So that one letter pretty much re-caps the general themes of the last batch – the corrupt and evil government that is out to kill him is working in collusion with my vindictive mother to brainwash me and destroy my talents. It’s evident that he hasn’t gotten any medical attention. He is still, yes, bonkers.
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I don’t know very much about my grandfather, except he was a jazz musician and an alcoholic. My grandmother loved him very much when they were young. (They had a ridiculous number of children, too). I don’t know if I’ve ever been to Sardis. It’s in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
Wishing Well, Toots – missing ya huge
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My friend Blake put it best a few years ago when, over dinner in Victoria with the other One Yellow Rabbits, he kindly asked, “So when did your father fall off the edge of the world?”
RE: Hi dad, it’s my 25th birthday this week
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And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I’ve found in there so far. A continued obsession with my mother, her (dead? fictional?) roommate Mary, my ex-stepmother Sarina, the christian government that wants us all dead, and a very strange note on hookers, which may or may not imply my father spent time as a pimp. Rock on.
So, what was your childhood like?
We live in a silent convocation of decisions.
I sent a letter to my father this morning. Yes, my violent, clinically psychotic, paranoid schizophrenic father who I can only hope is now old enough to be toothless instead of terrifying. (There’s a long shot, wow). There is always a chance the e-mail will bounce back. The address I have for him is very old, from five or six years ago. Here are the results of our last correspondance, from 2004.
Subject: Hi dad, it’s my 25th birthday this week
In truth, I don’t know why I’m sending this, given what or last communication degenerated into, but somehow I feel that 25 is one of those vaguely landmark ages, and I wanted to try to say hello again, and at least let you know I’ve made it this far.
Course, there’s always the possibility this will bounce back. This e-mail address is from a newspaper clipping from many years ago. The paper’s gone yellow and brittle, easy to tear. I’ve kept in one piece, though, not even sure how. It’s just been one of those things where every time I clean my apartment, somehow I manage not to throw it away.
I hope you do get this. It’s been a very long time. I haven’t seen you since before I was ten or spoken to you since I was twelve. I hope you are feeling better since our last letters, and have gotten some medial attention. I don’t usually recommend little coloured flakes of chemical to anyone, but there’s always new pills on the market, you know, maybe some of them will help.
At any rate, good luck in your endeavors, whatever they may be, and happy birthday to me.
Sitting at home wondereding where everyone is drinking
Flickr launched a new feature this week, something they call Collections. It’s a way to create sub-sets, (folders within sets). This means that I could, for example, create a collection called Local Events and fill it with sets like Avery’s Video Game Party, Ikea Adventures, and Flashmob Croquet. It’s likely going to be a long and tedious process for me to switch everything over to the new system, (I have an inhuman amount of photos), but I expect it to be worth the effort. Now if only they would announce, like Livejournal, that permanent accounts will be available for sale soon.
I watched new parents on the Skytrain today, smiling, as all three were young, attractive and happy. Suddenly, a brass thought ship-wrecked whole in my mind – “My father was never that young.” It surprised me, but it feels true. He sprang into the world fully formed at age 35 and only got older from there. I remember him smiling, but even before he went mad, he always looked tired.
Imagining my mother young is easy. I am almost the same age she was when she had me. I thought of standing at the bus-stop, hands on my belly, feeling a hard curve there, cradling The Word inside me, and I knew that she felt happy where I would feel trapped, as if my feet had been pierced through with tent-pegs. She has never been hungry the way I am, her aspirations have always pointed in a different direction, but still I can see her in my mind, thin, almost conventionally pretty, and tenaciously practicing the same six chords on the guitar until her fingers bled, until she grew callous, then bled again. The first day I kicked in her belly must have been a small personal miracle, like branches swaying Yes after you’ve asked the sky a question.
It’s my brother Cale’s 17th birthday today. She named him after J.J. Cale but got the date wrong on the birth certificate and they made her fill it out again. We are not the most cohesive family, but biology links us together irrevocably. He is stuck with us, carries us on every official document he’ll ever have to take the time to fill out and carry. See, I gave him his middle names – he’s Cale St. Patrick Gibson – and wear green every year in atonement.
doing things to her that belong to you
Ever speculated on how much of a bad idea something would be, then jumped off the bridge anyway, inevitably changing everything and quietly saying “oops” under your breath, almost as if you meant it?
I’m beginning to think it’s simply how I run things. I can’t escape my name, my natural anthem of love’s disaster. Missing chances to death, walking strong and emotionally detached, I want it to end so much that it hurts bone deep. I feel like a stranger to my own body, to my own needs and choices and liabilities. Upon my breath, Sunday morning I was flying enough to let my impulses die a steady slumbering death, but today, in the smeary hour of midnight, I didn’t bother to keep myself in check.
Wearing myself out with all this sticky importance, I was in my element Saturday, not a visitor. Usually I feel somewhat out of context, a tourist in my own country, but stomping around in work boots and a corset was utterly perfect. This was the first year in five that I was also a visible performer. Pyrotech, dancer, different clothes, different steps. Tiny changes and all smiles. I almost kissed someone when they walked into a room. The partner impulse there and whole, downloaded entire into my frame without thought. Familiar and strange. I almost ruined the edges of my heart.
(Today my feet are criss-crossed with black electrical tape, my answer to the common plaster. In one place, it’s possible to see bone where I wore through my foot. Poor little toes, they will recover, but the body politic, it is not happy.)
I said I was planning on getting a good night’s sleep last night, but subtext occurred instead. I went to bed near five a.m. full of double-meant conversations, explanations slipped between words. It’s been going on all week, all before too. Supportive people, my hand being held, a place to fall to if I need it. It’s terrifying, this encouragement. I’d forgotten what it’s like.
(The mad poet, the awesome-sauce Mike McGee, wants the world to see this.)
more warning would have helped, also, a consultation
by cables and springs. You may safely ignore his other work.
I’m trying to round up people who are willing to help my mother with a leisurely move on the price of pizza, beer, and appreciation.
She’s rented a van from 6 o’clock Friday morning to 6 o’clock Saturday morning. We won’t be moving boxes upon boxes, more just pieces of large furniture that she and I can’t move alone. I know it’s ill-timing, what with the plans to meet here for a movie than night-market, but I’m hoping people might still have the morning free.
Wal-Mart staff ordered to search store after bomb threat.
I did not mean to slam the door. Technically, true. I didn’t mean for it to be painful once I had done so either, the first link in a chain reaction of breaking down shaking in my kitchen, almost crying on my roommate, who wanted to know what was wrong. Usually I am better than that. I hold onto myself. I am polite. I keep to myself and swallow extraneous reactions. Feeling anything is risky, it’s true. Feelings have been nothing but a useless simmering frustration for a few years. There have been no rewards that were not false, no punishments that mercifully ceased. The heart as a holding pattern, understanding that there is no space to land. Dead air. Static. I did not mean to slam the door, but for my sake, I should have done so harder, I have not slammed a door in years. When I was a child, I would shake hotels and houses equally with the force of impact, wood in wood frame. My only vengeful outlet, because otherwise I am quiet, refusing to offer what is not asked and hating that no one dares.
about time one of us did it
congratulations to my mother, vgibson
people keep asking how I am
Fondue was a success thanks to Ryan, Eva, Silva, her two friends, Ian, Ethan, Lung, Michael, Imogyne, Mike, Nick, Duncan, David, Beth, Mike, Alice, and Adam. At one point, the teahouse ran out of seats and I stood, leaning over people to get at the tasty treats.
It doesn’t seem real that my birthday is so close again. Just Monday, Monday and the number clicks over another digit. Three to four. My mother got it wrong, thought I was older. It was her graduation from the University of British Columbia yesterday. I got the day off work to watch her walk across the stage to receive paper proof of her achievement. The pride that thrilled through me was burnished bright by the satisfied smile on her face. I took pictures after of her in her cap and gown, holding the blue folder that contains her degree. Then we took pictures of me in the gown on the basis that it’s very likely the only chance I’ll ever have to wear one. Driving home with her through the sharp rain on the motorcycle, I had to lean forward and hug her, the love and respect simply swelled to more than I could contain. She’s survived a ridiculous amount of harm to get where she is, and though it’s not ideal, she’s still scraping to get by, it’s a testament to her tenacity that she persevered and put herself through university as a single mother with three kids. It’s more than most have done.
Tonight I have dinner with friends, tomorrow I have dinner with Silva, Saturday Ray is rescuing me possibly from my masque-panic hell and sweeping me about town to try and find something to wear, (suggestions bloody appreciated), and there’s (as yet unverified) rumour of a second SinCity to be held at Richards on Richards. (If there is no Sin, who wants to have a party?) Sunday I’m still planning on being down in Seattle with Eliza, though it’s looking less and less likely as the day approaches and no rides have been forthcoming. Monday my mother is bringing me to a soiree at the Mansion, and Tuesday is the last May Mandarin Movie Tuesday.
when he is gone, I feel alright about nibbling on the corners of his food at 2 a.m.
A triff trailer mash-up that hurts in only the good ways, Toy Story 2: REQUIEM.
    link thankfully appropriated from Andrew.
Relaxed, she stands at the bus-stop. Watches a man exit backward, pulling a small wire basket full of fake red flowers, wonders briefly what they are for. A book is folded under her left hand. Her right hand has already fumbled in her coat pocket and found her bus-pass. She’s going to be on time for work with fifteen minutes to spare. She’ll open the store early, she decides, instead of waiting.
In her mind are tiny snippets of conversation caught like film stills fighting against a projector. Nothing stays very fixed, it all moves too fast for words to bind. Outside there is blue sky, her eyes blandly track a cloud as it intersects with an airplane contrail. Seizures, that’s what her thinking can be like. Feelings overcoming her body, twisting her lips or her hands into a smile. Remembering when he kissed her, her eyes warmly close and open again. Curious if anyone else is doing the same, she scans the other faces on the bus. No one interesting today. A cluster of yoga clothing imitators, some people going to work, a couple in the back discussing a television series. Someone is reading a paperback novel but the cover looks too glossy, the book looks too thick. It’s an incarnation of the dime-store novel, the summer blockbuster hit parade. Empty calories and too much talk about weapon specifics.
Her key in the new lock turns harshly. In spite of the extra filing when she replaced the lock with the hardware store clerk, there is still something uneven. An expected alarm sounds when she opens the door, a warning keen, piercing but still quiet. Enough to tell the wrong person that they’ve made a mistake. She half trips on a newspaper someone kindly slid under the door earlier in the morning and pulls the CLOSED sign to OPEN. The useless paper and her bag are deposited on the glass topped counter while she wonders why she never seems to do any of these things in the same order. Some mornings the buttons stick on the alarm console and she has to talk to stoic sounding security people on the phone. She smiles nervously when she does it, knowing she doesn’t have the passwords and not sure if she should care.
A combination of coupled enzymes to construct a simple circuit in which enzymatic reactions correspond to logic operations.
    link cruelly wrenched from the bosom of darling Warren.
My housemate, Graham, is away right now, up with his family, clustering around his grandmothers death. He says in his journal that he got to say to her the things he needed to say before she left. I’m glad for that through the commiserative sadness, though I keep a narrow sliver of being unable to relate. I know when my remaining grandmother goes, it will be barely a family affair. My mother and I will stare at the ceiling a bit, covered with the inevitable and distinctive blanket of pondering about immortality that every death brings. My brothers will ask if we’ve inherited anything and we will ask my mothers sister, Reine, who will be far more affected, the one in charge of all the necessary arrangements that accompany a death. She will tell us of something small that may come our way. Tacky jewelry from her shops, maybe, or an inappropriate coffee-table. Then it will be done. If we were the sort for annals, her passing would be the year of nothing in particular. All the known history in her head is either commonplace or inaccessible. Her drop in the sea has no flavour to leave and savor.
I like how Graham talks about his family. They seem to be a unit, a partition of people that all carry more than just a name together.
Ashes and Snow will be on view in Santa Monica, from Jan 14 to May 14, 2006. I want to go.
[pj harvey – water]
Now the water to my ankles
Now the water to my knees
Think of him all waxy wings
Melted down into the sea
Mary, Mary what your man said
Washing it all over my head
Mary, Mary hold on tightly
Over water
Under the sea
Ashes and Snow
        Gregory Colbert has updated his website.         Remember to breathe.
I’m so sorry there are not more angels. That there are not more years for grace.
I’m sorry I don’t have words for what I feel I want to say.
This is a universal thing, I know, but it brings us down every time.
May you have time to give everything you still have to say to the family you’ve made.
You have my deepest sympathies for your sorrow.
This isn’t enough, but I don’t know how to play the song that needs singing.