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aleatoryalarmalligator · 7 years

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Life Story Part 72

The monumental 2008 election was upon everyone's mind in the small town of Pinehurst while I was visiting my grandmother. Somehow, I just hadn't noticed there was going to be an election – I was too wrapped up in my books, my collage art, my old horror films and television shows, and my interest in various religions. Of course, my grandma and my uncles and aunts up north all were McCain hopefuls. I have never met anyone from a small town that far north who weren't on the embarrassingly far right on just about every issue. My grandma was still upset about hippies shirking Viet Nam like it had happened yesterday. I pretended to agree with whatever people said – it's how I survived and maintained some kind of life for myself relying as I did on the charity of others, but the truth is I had no idea what to believe. I was often times told something terrible would happen in response to a left wing policy being passed, and I really didn't know. My head was a jumble of complex philosophical criticism of society on the whole, but I also had been misinformed politically for so many years when I was younger that I had abstained from listening to anyone about anything. I couldn't just 'pick a party', though my grandma's always had Fox News on, and as nonpolitical as I thought I was, I sometimes wanted to reach through the television and throttle the television personalities for their callous view of the poor, their subversive racist ideals, and their focus on none issues and fear mongering. In fact the only things I was certain about were now putting me to the left, legalizing gay marriage, legalizing weed, ending the war in the middle east, ending the death sentence and not bailing out the banks.

I didn't understand healthcare, but I was told Obamacare was essentially the end of my existence as I knew it – which given my life up to that point I questioned if that would be such a bad thing really. The current system was confirmably insufficient though too. For instance, had my father paid for me to finally get confirmed for having PCOS, I would have had to take medication that insurance companies could and would bar me from ever being able to be on their insurance for having a preexisting condition. So as far as I could tell, the system that had currently been in place had in it's own way, low key let me know that my health was not in consideration, and I was not really a member of society that anyone should care about. Maybe it would be better for the system if I just died, preventing future misery to myself and the taxpayers. I didn't ever say anything about it openly, but I had contempt for the current healthcare system, what little I understood, so Obamacare didn't scare me, and actually made me a little more hopeful about the prospects of maybe getting the healthcare I needed.

This was also a turning point for my grandma and members of my family to begin embracing the absurd. I think something really mentally unstable was happening to the right. This isn't to say that there was never something deeply troubling about that rhetoric, but there was this weird desperation, like they were losing their country and a tree was no longer just a tree. There was no agree to disagree, and most of the right wing folk I knew where elderly, or very bitter and the ideas of Alex Jones and many others were beginning to reach them. And that fear was becoming something. Everyone was raving about Barack Obama being a Muslim, being born in Africa, and even more insane theories. My grandma told me that Obama was going to make everyone over seventy-five go into death camps that he had already started paying the Chinese military to come over here and build. And then at times, the same people who accused Barack Obama of being a Muslim would also say he was an atheist commy. I couldn't see how a person could both be in support of Sharia law and simultaneously be an atheist communist of the Stalin variety. I didn't understand how you could be both, as there seemed to be very little unifying features in the two ideas.

I didn't really have anything against Islam anyway. Aside from the fact that he just clearly was not, honestly, who cares if Obama was Muslim? And even if he wasn't technically born in the United States (and he completely was), what threat did that pose against my well being? He was clearly not working for any other country. As for the Muslim accusations, furthermore, it bothered me no more or less than someone being a Christian, as I am not religious and I prefer it when wisdom comes from a different place other than socially accepted myths and a really old book that was at odds with itself.

I was a top expert at letting people take control of my life, but finding ways to either undermine that power or slowly but surely gain that person's confidence and gain sway and maybe some level of equality in so doing was always an undercurrent for me. In my heart of hearts, I didn't want to be anyone's pet, or to have to attempt to manipulate others to like me when, had I been given the same independence and freedom I would have been able to stand my ground or walk away. My grandma quickly over the course of these two months, opened up to me more than she had to anyone in a decade or maybe more, and it was in part because I didn't ever argue with her about her beliefs. Instead I listened, until I got to the heart of what she was trying to say and where she was coming from. Nobody realized who I actually was, or what I thought, and it was one of the few power dynamics that I had over those around me. If she really truly knew me, she would have thought I was awful and nihilistic, and likely wouldn't have wanted much to do with me. There is a lot of emphasis on being yourself at all times, but it's very hard to live up to when you are completely reliant on everyone around you. I let her see the side of me that she wanted to see – and that side of me wasn't a lie. I just hid the other half.

My eyesight had diminished even further. My eyes were so runny by this time from a need for glasses that people noticed me in the store. I looked like someone with an eye condition in the dark ages. It was sort of ruining the symmetry of my face, due to my constant squinting. I didn't even open my right eye anymore. It was tightly shut at all times, and when it opened at all, oozy liquid ushered on out and ran down my face. My eyes burned and stung almost continuously. It looked horrible. And of course, nobody really had done anything for me in this regard. Nobody wanted to take me to the eye doctor, or pay that kind of money. They just watched the years go by as my eyes became worse and worse. Somehow, I had become so accustomed to it, that even though it was kind of ruining things for me – even with my facial expression. I looked like I was glaring all the time and people thought I was mean - my grandma Marie, bless her for this, saw this problem for what it was and said no more. She set me up with an eye appointment. She had to pay out of pocket, and it amounted to several hundred dollars that had taken her months to save for, but she chose to spend it on me, to save my eyes. I remember feeling this weird confusion that she was willing to pay full price for me to see the eye doctor and for me to get a pair of glasses (which I now was not too good for). I didn't feel like I deserved it. I apologized and told her everything would be fine. I didn't know how comfortable I felt about anyone actually caring about how I was doing, or what my future held.

I went in and came out with a three hundred dollar pair of glasses and the appointment had cost another three hundred dollars. The idea of anyone spending six hundred dollars on me nearly gave me a heart attack. Thinking I was going to die at a young age had set in motion this idea that I didn't deserve equal treatment. I had very low standards for myself. I hadn't even realized how badly my eyes were, even though it was chronic and psychically obvious. Regardless of the dynamic of control, I will now and forever more say that my grandma getting me that pair of glasses might very well be the greatest acts of kindness ever bestowed upon me. Truly.

The eye doctors told me that one of my eyes was damaged in such a way, that had I not gotten glasses within the next five years I would have eventually lost eyesight in my right eye. Wearing glasses was actually going to improve my vision. The moment I put those glasses on, I was finally seeing the world in a way I never had. The whole world looked completely different, sharp and dramatic and intricate. I didn't realize that when you are driving you are supposed to be able to see the divots and individual gravels in the road. I didn't realize you could see individual leaves on trees even at a distance, or that pines had more depth to them. I could see things in people's faces that I hadn't before. I could see the imperfections of my own face in the mirror, and though this bothered me, it was probably the first time I was having a good honest look at myself – pours and all. Everyday items in the kitchen seemed brighter. Things seemed shinier. The carpet looked interesting with all it's individual soft clumps coming together to make a carpet. Psychologically, getting those glasses created an incentive for me to see the world in a new way, and for me to actually want to see it. I had long stopped going outside in the daylight if I could help it. The sun had just hurt my eyes too much. And now, I could go out and my eyes didn't hurt anymore.

Also, I suddenly realized how hard I had been squinting my eyes and what that had been doing to my cheeks and eyebrows. My eyes looked twice as big now – and when friends and family saw me, they said I looked like a completely different person. When I put those glasses on, I realized that there was no reason for me to clench my eyes, and when I stopped my cheeks began to tingle furiously for days, as this was the first time I had relaxed my face in about six years. It was weird to me that most people just relaxed their faces. I had been squinting so hard that it had permanently caused a slight difference in the muscles of my eyebrows, causing them to become slightly crooked to this day. I notice this more than others do, and it can be hid with make up if I am feeling up to it.

I didn't want to but my grandma hated my hair, so I let her take me to her favorite republican hairstylist and change my hair. Having literally bestowed on me the gift of sight – I didn't feel in the position to be complaining. She thought I looked like a hardened criminal with my bleached blonde hair. Besides I didn't really like my own hair either. It was totally fried due to me wanting to make it as white as possible. The hair near my neck had basically fallen out I learned later, from all the bleaching.

The salon in question wasn't your typical hair salon. It was in a very small building with American flags with matching red, white and blue hibiscus growing in pots by the front door to match. The hair stylist was extremely republican, and she loved the Bush family so much she actually had a picture of George W. Bush on the wall. They gave me the Rachel hair-do – as I was clueless and unsure of what I wanted, and dyed my hair a sandy soft brown. It looked better. I was nervous about having 90's Rachel hair, but my hair being as it is naturally curly, wouldn't take to a true Rachel look unless I straightened it and styled it that way each morning. My grandma and this hairdresser went on about how Obama was going to ruin the world, about how Obama was going to force abortions, and a lot of stuff that never happened. I had thought that controversial subjects were not good for business, but in fact, people seemed to like her because her ideas reflected theirs in this part of the world. I was basically opinionless on who should be president at the time, but I secretly kind of liked Obama – I liked the way he articulated his ideas. He was just likeable.

I was skeptical of 'hope and change'. I couldn't see escaping from all the corruption on an individual anecdotal microcosm of my own life, or the macrocosm of humanity as a whole without the world basically coming to almost an end I didn't think Obama was going to fix everything – and at the time I thought that you couldn't be liberal unless you were obsessed and agreed with every person in power with liberal values – an obvious fallacy. I think the underlying hatred was because Obama was black. Maybe not everyone who disliked him were against him for this, but from my personal experience, it was the deciding factor for many rural white voters. What ignorance.

There was a visit to my aunt Margie, who lived in Bonners Ferry, this gorgeous little town up in the northmost part of Idaho close to the border. My great aunt Margie is this fantastic woman with astounding character and energy, 96 years of age. She grew up incredibly poor. When she was still a teenager, she had decided she would travel the world and shirk conventionally acceptable female roles and lead a life of adventure instead. She left the United States and traveled on her own for several years all over Europe and other continents. She wore pants in the thirties and forties and was a complete contradiction of the typical women of her time. She chose not to have children.

When WW2 came around she became a nurse. After the war, she worked at a post office, where she met her her husband. He died six years later of a rare illness and she never dated or remarried or was with anyone else for the rest of her life. She became a machinist/carpenter/artist/inventor, and started her own successful machine shop that she ran herself in Seattle where she let sculptors and inventors use her shop to make their creations, often with her help. She became a well loved person in the Seattle art scene and she helped entrepreneurs make their ideas become real. I am told that she helped invent certain components to the pellet stove that are still used today.

Margie was a vegetarian for most of her life, though she sometimes ate fish at her doctor's behest. Margie wore whatever she wanted. She would dress up in bright colors, often favoring black and white striped tights, purple dresses, and large sunhats that she would put plastic fruit on. She was famous for her hats, which often times seemed bigger than she was. Obviously Margie was and is the gem of our family.

I had up to this point, never really met my great aunt before. She was having difficulties running her very sizable household and menagerie of animals. Margie was a devout Catholic and I remember when we parked, the day was overcast, and looking at her front lawn which was scattered with various Mother Mary's and crosses of every shape and size (some of them life-sized) and the bright colors and the expressions on the faces of the Mary's was somehow intense and dark and beautiful. We walked in, and blasting from every room (and there were many rooms) was the Catholic channel. She couldn't hear very well, and it was important for her to always be showing her devotion to the church. I watched distantly for hours, seeing nuns and priests chanting in Latin, carrying out Catholic strange traditions involving fancy goblets, crackers and pieces of cloth. It was world I could never fully understand, but there was a mysterious loveliness to it. Mother Mary's were, as I said, absolutely everywhere – even in the bathrooms. She had about six dogs, many of them being Pomeranian fluff balls of happiness, and I spent quite a bit of time with them. Outside she had these crazy Alpacas and a bunch of chickens and ducks and rabbits. It was hard to imagine a woman in her nineties being able to keep up with this.

Margie having all these animals was a bizarre story. One of her closest friends was this Catholic priest in the community who was about her same age at her. He and Margie were probably the last two surviving people from their generation in the town dedicated to Catholicism and for this reason they were very close. This priest was driving down a rural road one day in the middle of nowhere. There had been construction on this road that lead to a bridge, and the bridge was taken down, but there were no people around and there were no signs that indicated that the bridge was essentially a dead end that lead into a deep ravine. I can't imagine this happening in the 21st century but it did. He was pretty old too, and was losing his sight. So he ended up driving right off this bridge, and breaking just about every bone in his body, but somehow miraculously he survived (a good portion of his body was replaced by metal), and sued the company for several million dollars for their negligence on informing drivers that the road was basically a death trap.

He had nothing to do with this money really – he was old and donating it back to the church was probably what ended up happening to most of it, but I guess he wanted to make the best of it in the short time he had left (he died only a few years after the incident), and so he started buying animals like crazy. I guess thinking it would make him happy. And when he couldn't take care of those animals, he gave them to Margie, who was also going blind and was equally as old and would have difficulties taking care of them. However, Margie was very much in denial that she was going blind, and she drove till she was in her nineties even when she should have stopped, and she didn't think she was losing out on any of the spunk she had when she was young. She thought she could run a farm by herself (I think it was something she did at some point in her busy life, as well as build her own house). But she couldn't, and nobody in the community really stopped by to help. The only living relative that seemed to care about Margie was my grandma, and a great deal of my grandma's time was spent trying to convince Margie not to try doing home improvements anymore, and to try to start downsizing her life and changing her lifestyle to match her age, which, for someone as ambitious and independent as Margie was a real challenge.

We spent that rainy day packing things in boxes for Margie. She gave me special rosaries and Catholic charms. She started talking at one point about my grandma's upbringing. She wasn't someone who had a filter. She talked about things that made people uncomfortable sometimes, I am told she was always that way. It's strange because it seems like my grandma has this thick skin about everything that had happened to her in her life, but Margie seemed to see right through that. She started talking openly about how my grandmother had been wounded and mistreated by just about everyone she had ever loved at a young age, and I could see this strange vulnerable moment where my grandma seemed to sort of shrink uncomfortably. This one moment really helped me understand my grandma deeper. It was something I had never really thought about up to that point. I always saw my grandmother as rather invulnerable – a force of perfectionism and ultimate judgment, and it was at this moment with Margie pointing it out, that I had a small opening to see a crack in that facade. My grandma was still a child underneath all of that.

There was/is something very warm and special about Margie's presence. She's very honest, and unusual. Looking at her life and her character, she makes it all look so easy. I like to think of her as someone I should aspire to. And proof that you don't have to become dull with age.

We went out to eat with these two people earlier in the day at Bonners Ferry. Margie forgot she made these engagements. It was a couple, both were both in their mid-fifties – obvious churchgoers. I thought they were phony and I didn't care for them much. We went to this small cafe and ordered breakfast food. I let my grandma order for me, as I had no idea what to order for myself (I was too nervous to think at restaurants most of the time). It was a very awkward encounter for me because they kept on asking me questions about what I was studying in college, or what my plans were to get married or have children. When people asked me questions like this it made me feel like a loser. When I explained that none of those things were happening, they looked at me weird, and back and forth to each other. I guess it really seemed particular to them that I wasn't going to college.

Back at my grandma's, I spent a great deal of those dark late fall days cutting up children's books and gardening books in the back room, adding to my collage collection for when I got back, listening to Stephen King novels on audiotape. My grandma was annoyed that I did this to the books – cutting them instead of keeping them, and looking back, I think there were a few I should have not cut up. She let me though, because she wanted to encourage me artistically. She really wanted me to become a successful painter like she had been. I felt some of this was projecting herself onto me, but getting that kind of encouragement meant a lot nonetheless. No adult had encouraged me artistically before. She gave me a large supply of acrylic and oil paints she was no longer going to use, as well as large stacks of canvases. It was a lot. I was set for years. Between getting me these glasses and giving me all these art supplies, I was besides myself.

She eventually offered to let me stay there. It was something she was hoping I would do. She wanted me to live in the back room perhaps, to help her with her garden, to maybe get a job in that small town, painting on the side – and eventually becoming good enough to maybe sell those paintings. She might have been hoping that I would become a small town person, choosing to marry a local and having a family up there. She promised to help me learn to drive. She explained that I would be away from my mother and father and older sisters, away from all that chaos and negativity, that my grandma saw me as too good for.

She didn't want to be alone for the last years of her life. I would have a place of my own. But ultimately, I knew it wouldn't work. For one, I had held back a lot of my personal beliefs and opinions, and I knew I couldn't live that way if it was permanent. She would eventually discover that we had different values. Secondly, my grandma was racist, and this was big issue for me. She didn't think she was of course, but she actually was extremely racist. Yeah, she liked me, because I am white, but it would never feel right to me. It bothered me to hear her go on about how whites were being suppressed, and how black people are basically inherently violent and I couldn't live with that. I would eventually have exploded. And she was too old to change her mind. Perhaps I didn't want the narrow politics and thinking of the small community to rub off on me.

Fox News was blaring in the living room everyday too. I loved her dogs, but if you know Yorkies, they get old really fast, licking you in the face each morning with their weird face hair dangling. They seemed to constantly need me. And I already had Shorty down at my mom's place to take care of. I couldn't abandon him. I would also have missed Allison. I don't think I could live without Allison in my life. My father was beginning to fight with her, and with David too for that matter, and I was afraid he was going to become physically abusive towards them in the same way he had been me. I wanted to be there for her in her early teen years at the very least. I wouldn't see much of her if I lived up north. I didn't feel right leaving her. Ultimately, though, I think my grandma wanted me because she thought I was a younger version of her and she liked the control she had over me. She wanted to be able to control what I ate, my hair, my clothes. I was a project that could have kept her busy. I hesitate to try to paint her as some kind of selfish evil being. She really wasn't – she showed more decency to me in particular than my parents had. But she had issues. She was projecting her own personality onto me, and if I continued to take gifts I would begin feeling more and more guilty about accepting them, and I would get trapped. Plus, this stuff was all comfort. She offered me a sort of stable comfort that didn't match who I was inside. I really felt there was some great calling to me, out there somewhere. I didn't know what it was, but I did know I didn't want to marry some local car mechanic and have two children and own a house and have McCain signs in my yard, regardless of how cheap real estate was.

People often think I am them. It might be because I am submissive, or because I can entertain other people's beliefs without adhering to them. Maybe I am open in a way and it is relatable to others. I can be chatty at times, but there are certain kinds of people I just prefer to listen to. Perhaps it's just this incredibly big hole in my identity, some void that was created that has caused me to I stayed a child, or some kind of wound that caved in on itself and became a black hole. I seem to know who I am – but then is anyone ever a static entity? We are all in the process of constant change, and the older I get the less I see myself as having a core identity. Perhaps I am vulnerable to people in a way. There is something a little choppy and malleable about me – often times in my psychological blind spots. I often times feel more or less like I am playing a part in a play – tricking myself to believe it's all real. Not like a sociopath. But like someone who's not really a total someone. I just have this void in me, and it's hard to explain. And I think people identify that void on a very primitive level and fill it with their own identity. I don't know if I am explaining that well.

My grandma was right in seeing the symbiosis of the situation, but ultimately, it was a role I was not willing to fill. There were a lot of unspoken aspects that would have become painful future problems And I didn't want to become a miniature her. I would eventually reject what she had offered me. I didn't want to sour a good relationship with her. I can definitely see how me rejecting this offer might strike people as being very foolish. I had less than nothing at my parents who more or less used me as a punching bag, and I suffered a lot of abuse from the both of them. I still felt this inner fire of wanting to be something more. There had to be more to life than becoming stable. I didn't want to give up that something, and I knew that living with my grandma would have involved me living a very controlled lifestyle that would have eventually cut into who I was as a person. Ultimately, I felt like would be settling. I couldn't just be myself and live up there. There was a price.

I really wanted out of these small towns. I wanted bright lights of a large city spanning out as far as could be seen – so I could see infinite lives and existences crammed before me. I wanted to be around all kinds of walks of life. I wanted to walk down city streets at night and see all the nightmares of human beings up close and personal, and also experience and see the greatest of human potential. I love looking at nature. I love lakes, and the way the mist would gather around the mountains and in many respects, I loved walking into small town diners and being able to see the stars at night. But I would never connect to anyone and it wasn't the kind of growth I needed. And think, when you are fortunate enough in the rare set of circumstances when you get one opportunity in a small town, either you find someone you can connect with, or you get a job you are like, in that small world, once you lose that something, there is no future and every part of that town is tinged with regret and sadness, in a place that small. In a city, there is always a new beginning a new face, and a new way of life waiting for you. It's never the end in the city. You can grow all over. There is always something new to move onto.

Lastly, and perhaps most critical to my decision to continue my futile struggle with my parents was that Sarah emailed me around that same time, and she told me that she was done with living in Texas. Working there was killing her soul, and she didn't see her and Alex going anywhere with their lives. They didn't end up writing songs or making music. She had told Alex that she was moving back to Idaho, and he could stay or go, but she was going. He chose to go with her – but her having decided individually to leave alone – or with him was indication that in a way their relationship was already on the rocks – even if they didn't fight. Sarah told me she was going to do everything she could to help me get back on my feet. She was going to help me get my social security card, help me find work, help me integrate back into society somehow. We were both ready to try being close again, this time without fighting like insecure teenagers that we were. We had both learned a ton of humility from our separate existences, she working and realizing what she actually wanted in life and how to take control of her life situations, and me, having had to confront my own insecurity and ego. I truly missed Sarah. We both wanted to be in a band together still, and to work on manga comics together. We were so excited. I didn't feel like I had to be anyone I wasn't with her. And eventually, we wanted to move away from Idaho altogether, maybe Seattle or something. It almost sounded too good to be true, so of course I was going to move back to my parents and wait it out.

PART 71 - https://tinyurl.com/y6v3ln9a

My Life Story in Chapters, PARTS 1-60 (this link below will lead you to a list of all the chapters i have written thus far).

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/168782771574/life-story-sections-1-70

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