2000-03-16

excedrin is the best thing.

ever.

ever.

ever.

i woke up this morning hungover, wearing my clothes... shoes off. contacts out. half of my jacket hanging out of the front door.

last night i went out with my brother. lately whenever we get together at a bar, we talk about the goods and bads of our family life, our kid lives, how things are and were.

we talked alot about the years when he and my mom would battle each other. years of argumentation, screaming, meanness. then the pivotal points when he was about 14 and i was 6, when things all descended into alot of physical violence.

how the police used to come to our house at night, late, close to eleven. often.

how the neighbors all found the time at eleven at night to come out and water their lawns.

how i would run into my room and hide in my closet until everyone went away.

how those were not the most glorious moments in any of our lives.

it's always mildly cathartic to look back on the personal insanity of people running on threadbare emotions, of a family just totally disintegrating into dust.

my brother told me for the first time that my dad went to him for advice on a letter i sent him when i was ten.

my mom made me write it. i didn't want to write it.

its hard to explain my mom, but suffice to say that for years she was drunk and crazy. and she made me write this letter to my dad. she made me write to him, tell him he sucked and that i didn't want to see him. if i didn't write it, i didn't love her.

that sort of thing.

so i had to send this letter to my dad, kicking and screaming the whole way.

and i thought, for sure, my dad would do some very DAD like thing, and say that there was NO WAY he would let his daughter go, blah blah, nono, hell no, that's my kid and i won't let her go.

that sort of thing.

i wanted dad to save things. do that dad thing. keep things together. i'm only ten. make me important.

course it didn't happen like that.

what did happen was that he sent me a letter in response, telling me that if not seeing him was what i wanted, then not seeing him is what i would get. that he would respect my wishes. that he would leave me alone.

i was totally crushed.

i was convinced he just didn't care, didn't love me, didn't ANYTHING. i envisioned him reading the letter, tossing it aside, barely being able to care enough to write me back.

never occurred to me what happened. never occurred to me that he broke out of his stubborn self-sufficient guise and fumbled his way over to the pizza place where my brother was working.

never occurred to me he would buy a pizza and stand there nervously until he got up the nerve to ask my brother what he should do.

never occurred to me that my brother would advise him to leave me alone. never occurred to me that my brother figured that growing up under just one parent would be alot easier than being torn between two.

never occured to me that my dad would get all wracked about all this. never occured to me that he might cry about it, decide my brother was right, decide that he wanted to do the best thing, and kept himself out of my life for that reason.

my brother apologized to me last night, saying he thought he did the wrong thing. that its his fault that my dad is a stranger to me.

oh, the whole situation was wrong, i kept saying. everything was so wrong for so many years, who can say who's fault it is, who's fault it isn't.

who would think it matters, you know? all of this. what my dad did or did not do twelve years ago. but i can't tell you how much it hurt in so many ways, how it drove so many strange things, up until now. up until today.

i was crying all the way home, from the bar, on muni. some homeless man staring at me and feeling poorly for me, as i tried to keep myself from bawling.

i don't know what to do with knowing this.

i really don't.

update::1240pm::

bored at work. bored. bored.

last night i was walking down market, wending my drunken, crying ass home. i passed 15th and sanchez, the payphone there is where i met skaterboy about 5 months ago. oddly enough the night i met him, i was wending my drunken, crying ass home too. tho i was headed in the opposite direction... (for whatever that is worth).

at any rate. i stopped, and i picked up the phone and i called him. it was close to eleven. the phone rang and one of his roommates answered. i asked for skaterboy.

"no. he's not in."

"oh. (pause) okay. (pause) thanks. (pause). *click*"

it made me even sadder... for whatever reason. nobody ever seems to be home when i call them any more. nobody ever seems to be there. its like the whole world is churning and i am not there with it.

lonely again, i guess.

update::418pm::

another gratingly slow day at work today. too much time to think. i am jamming alot of folk implosion. fun. fun. more fun. one of the songs on said album was playing at the little skater art-show i went to with skaterboy the first time that he and i went out. rad song. too bad it is TAINTED! TAINTED! *sigh* so i dunno. not a helluva lot to say. i have the laptop at home again, so all is well with me. the days of having to listen to the phone not ringing are over with. now i can pretend that everyone and their mother is calling me, now that i will be hogging the phone line. wooo me.