I wish that I had learned about my mother

Well I guess I did somewhat

I guess what I really mean is

I wish I had learned something more intimate about her

I mean what I learned is that

I was correct in my thinking that

When she says these things that sound really fake they are really fake

It's just that rather than

Trying to sound good

Like she's using words that don't sound natural

Or at least not natural to her

And I thought that what she was doing was trying to sound smarter or more poetical or more something like it was more of a literary decision you know

And what it is is really more of a manipulative thing

But it's the strangest thing I mean really weird because she'll say things

But like for example when she left that food on the table it was like a rotten container of food and I was supposed to pack everything into boxes or into a box

And I ask her did you know it was a container of rotten food on the table

And she's like torn between I mean I can see in her eye she's torn between saying Yes she knew it was there because that proves that she didn't forget

Or no she didn't know it was there because probably you're not supposed to leave rotten food on the table

And so she says I don't know maybe

Which okay I see that I understand that and I'm like was I supposed to pack it into the box

Because she had said that I was supposed to pack everything on the table into the box right and I know I told you about this before I'm not dwelling on it although I did for a while I'm using it as an example

And she stopped

And I could see she's torn because she doesn't know whether she's supposed to say yes because she told me to put everything from the table into the box

Or no because obviously it can't be the right answer that she was supposed to have rotten food packed into the box

But she doesn't want to say I don't know maybe again because that was clearly not the right answer

and so she just does like one of those people in the video games if you go up and you talk to somebody and they aren't character that you're supposed to talk to they're just like an extra then they'll say whatever lines they have available to them to say and then they just kind of wobble around for a minute and go back to to like they just saw you for the first time because that's all they got

Well she's like that

So what she says is you're so cute

Which is also not a right answer

The right answer would be something like I'm really sorry I put you in that position I'm glad you didn't get stuff all over you

But you're so cute

Is at least deflection

Probably attempted manipulation

I'm angry and she's trying not to make me any angrier right

Well I mean to some degree this is what we all do

We don't all with every conversation soul search and apologize for our shortcomings and what not so you see any individual conversation

Kind of can't by definition be all that helpful

And explaining the situation we got going here

And I've known for like you know at least 40 years that she does not believe she is capable of doing anything wrong or maybe she does in her own mind but she won't admit it to anyone else

So you know most of this stuff is not actually new that I'm learning but the thing that I've learned that I hope I'm wrong about I would like to unlearn I don't want to think

Is that nothing she ever says nothing not just like a lot of it but like nothing she ever says is actually sincere from the heart communication

I think it's all just made up in the spot

For deflection

Or manipulation

Or just sounding like the kind of person she wants to appear like

And again

When I put it like that it doesn't sound that different from anybody because of course everybody monitors or edits what they say to some degree

Based on who they're talking to you know

But I feel like

That while if I was talking to a stranger

I would not necessarily expect them to be speaking you know from the heart sincerely or whatever but I sort of feel like that most of the communication that I have with strangers is more real than the conversation that I have with her

It makes me sad

And it kind of creeps me out

Surely

Surely there's something in her that is authentic

And of course where she's always running to trouble she says these things that aren't true but they're just in the moment she doesn't store the information and so she has continuity issues that you know a lot of people probably wouldn't catch but I have typically caught them

So now pretty much my feeling about her is that I know she's lying because her lips are moving

She's a completely unreliable witness

I don't I don't know if I believe that she loves me

We went to lunch the other day she's like do you want to go to lunch and I'm like oh it's 12:30 that's peak lunch time I'm trying not to be in crowds of people and she's like well by the time we get there you know it'll be almost 1:00

I'm like well that's still kind of peak lunch time

But she wanted me to go right and she wasn't going to go to lunch if I didn't go with her and she was very hungry so I'm like okay fine

She's like I want to sit and look at you for a while so we went and we ate and then she like had her purse in her lap and she was clearly wanting to go but I wasn't done yet

She got a Mexican Coke and I haven't had a soda in I don't know like I think I've had a soda in years and I was like well you know this will be a fun thing I can do it'll be a different experience see if I still like Coke

But it's very very sweet so I had to put a lot of ice in it and kind of let it melt a little bit and drink it slowly right so I wasn't ready to go yet but we were in separate cars

So I saw her with her purse in her lap I'm like you know if you're ready to go you can go you don't need to stay to watch me finish the last of my Coke it's okay

And she's like no no like she had to stay until I finished and that meant I should go faster right but you know it might be that she had stuff to do and she did have stuff to do but

This is not a new phenomena

She wants to be with me

But then she gets bored with me and she wants to go she stops listening or whatever

And I wish we didn't have to play that game you know like she doesn't really want to talk to me she just wants to look at me she's really like what she sees but she wants to look at me so I don't know why I can't just sit quietly let her look at me until she's bored of looking at me and then she could go I'm not emotionally attached to the idea that she needs to be interested in me

It does not hurt my feelings that she's not interested in me but it wears me out to have to pretend like she's entertained by my talking couldn't I just sit quietly

So I feel like I haven't really learned anything and I really did want you know for it to all make more sense

and though I guess technically you could say it makes more sense because I have a more complete pathology

What I wanted was to understand better what makes her tick and I don't feel like I do know that I don't really understand what she cares about

Maybe that's just me maybe I'm not letting myself see something

We kind of came through my being so angry and irritated to a place where I'm more just detached about it

I don't really understand who she is

But then I kind of feel like I don't really understand who I am either

I'm sure I've gotten some valuable lessons out of this I'm just not able to process what they are exactly

I have been kind of thinking about a book

Working title: throwing Bob away

I have sort of odd feelings about Bob

I mean I was kind of fond of him after a while we kind of got off to a rocky start cuz apparently my mom was talking all kind of smack about me to him and so he thought I was a bad willful badly behaved child which I wasn't

So by the time he moved in with my mom he was pretty convinced that I was trouble

But it didn't take very long of him actually interacting with me to realize that I was not trouble

So we had kind of a amicable relationship

And he was

Kind of a bundle of contradictions

I mean he was supposed to be from LA

You know big city fairly sophisticated

But he didn't know anything about LA like if you ask him anything about LA he didn't know anything like it seemed like a lie

And he had this weird kind of hick accent

He was you know a gun collector

And the kind of person who you know would print up a bunch of stuff about gun control and the government and blah blah and take it to the local radio station to try to let them see that they had the wrong idea about guns and you know I don't know he thought the government was going to come take his guns he like hit him in the wall

But for years she took classes at the esoteric philosophy center he would do these like chants and you know real metaphysical new age stuff and for a long time that seemed those two things seem very contradictory to me

Perhaps as a part of the metaphysical stuff he was very interested in collecting crystals and so he had gone to Arkansas many times and dug up crystals right and so his accent and all this information he knew about Arkansas whereas he didn't seem to know anything about LA I teased him and told him he was really from Arkansas and he was lying about the whole LA thing

And he watched wrestling and he watched football and you know I would kind of wander through when he was watching these things and every time he'd be watching football and I'd wander through I try to learn something else about football

And we'd have conversations about the wrestlers and their soap opera stuff

And you know the house we were all living in was the house that my mom bought that was split up into apartments so she and I had lived an apartment three and he moved into apartment four and she made him pay rent but then she kind of moved in with him and then you know that was I mean she was basically she had her stuff in the whole house One apartment was supposed to be her studio and then the other one was supposed to be storage

But none of it had air conditioning except Bob's apartment had a window unit in his bedroom so so she had air conditioning in her bedroom too because they were sleeping together

In my room was in the attic of apartment 3 cuz that you know put me further away from them and I had kind of a little bit of autonomy even though I mean we were living all together we weren't exactly you know

But whatever

When I moved out

I looked at him and I was like

You're going to miss me

Cuz you're going to be the only one she has to focus on so you're going to get all of it

And he kind of gave me a little bit surprised look like he hadn't really thought about that

I mean not that he was anxious for me to go

But I kind of felt sorry for Bob

I mean there are a lot of ways in which he was totally a boomer

In the okay Boomer sense

And they were fair amount of ways in which he was I mean not maga exactly

He was definitely not a white supremacist

He was definitely not a fundamentalist Christian

But he was a person who did not engage in a lot of critical thinking

He was against abortion because his mother had had an abortion once and apparently his father had not been on board with that and they fought about it a lot

He was like I said before very pro guns

He had been in the military and you know I really don't think he should have been in the military

His father had been in the military

And I think was injured physically in some way but for sure had emotional issues

And Bob thought the reason why he got stationed in Thailand during Vietnam

In addition to the fact that he had flat feet and was almost legally blind without his classes

Was the fact that his father had committed suicide apparently something related to his military emotional issues

And Bob thought that they kind of went easy on him because of that although I don't really know if that's true or not

He had a lot of emotional issues

And bad dreams he would wake up screaming or crying he would get up not awake and walk to the doors and check to make sure they were locked checking the perimeter

If it was really cold I slept in the recliner in the living room because it had it was a heater a radiator kind of thing in their living room

Well you know there are all these pictures that Bob took at the Renaissance festival That's where they met at the Renaissance festival

And so when I was going through stuff and sorting stuff and I was putting my mom's photographs in boxes and whatnot but I mean she didn't need pictures of all of his friends at the Renaissance festival nor would she care about pictures of all of his friends at the Renaissance festival and you know they wouldn't mean anything to his family either so I kept a few of them you know especially if Bob was in it with some you know group of people or whatever

Not so much because it was Bob exactly but it just represented a period of my life and sort of a spirit that was conveyed in the pictures that wasn't really represented by any of the pictures that I took that were more documenting the place I wasn't really living the '70s lifestyle when I was you know 11 or 12 years old you know so I wasn't taking pictures of the kind of things that a semi youngish guy would be taking

And then I found some pictures later of him with people he was going to college with or whatever and Bob had told me a lot about his college cuz I asked a lot of questions

Like when I went to Chico I was shocked because I didn't realize it was like a serious party school think it was Chico maybe it wasn't Chico maybe Chico was the junior college at any rate I went to the place where he went to college to see a show and they were like packs of college kids roaming the streets looking for alcohol

And he I'm sure I told you this he got a degree in agriculture because I mean he was going to school in the GI Bill and he didn't really know what he wanted to do and he was hanging out with some people he was going to go to Canada with this guy and this girl and grow pot with them or something

No I don't know if Bob smoked pot I feel like he did probably but I can't recall him ever saying that he smoked pot and I don't think he drank I think his father had been an alcoholic so maybe he didn't smoke pot either

And I mean the kind of things you told me were I don't know maybe not the best choice like he had a friend in college who was a girl and she was working her way through college at a massage parlor and they were some stories she had told them about things and f*** I don't know maybe he went there and paid her I don't know

But he thought he was going to go to Canada with these people and like have a group marriage or probably not even marriage just a group thing but I but they either broke up or they left without him or something anyway so that didn't happen

But you know his choices about what he did with his life they did not seem very directed

Seem like when he got back from Vietnam or Thailand that he was wanting to go to college and make a better life for himself but he didn't really know what he wanted

And I mean it's not like I can't relate to that but you know he's still got like subscription to mother Jones Wait no not mother Jones what is the name of that magazine it was the one that had all the stuff about homesteading and gardening and I can't remember I can't remember now what it was called but anyway he had a subscription to that and I would sometimes read things

I think that's where I got my idea that I wanted to live off grid

Anyway with his agricultural degree what he ended up with was a grain inspector job at the ship channel which is how he ended up coming to Texas from California

And he f****** hated that job

But he worked there until he retired because he wanted to have you know his retirement he didn't want to lose out on that so he did that but he died very shortly thereafter

You know when my mother she has his pension she's having a much more comfortable life than she would have had without it

but she doesn't feel grateful to him at all she doesn't have any kind emotion for him at all

And I found these plaques you know like 20 years of service 30 years of service retirement 35 years of service which I think includes the time he was in the military

And she's like oh you can just throw those away

So yeah I'm going through and I'm finding all this stuff and I'm like well you know I hate to just throw them away but I mean he hated that job and the plaques were never something he put up and had any you know I'm so proud of that about and you know I threw away most of those kind of things so I was like well I don't know and I did end up throwing those away but I found like his high school diploma and his junior college diploma and his college diploma and some pictures of him when he was really young I mean not like a child but like you know maybe maybe in Thailand or before he left or right after he got back I mean really young and some other stuff and I ended up putting you know some of it into like one of these little plexi boxes and bringing it away with me because I don't know it just I wanted to look through it and think about it

Seems to me there's a way in which he represents a whole generation of people that don't fit in with I don't know for sure or not with the political correct world but just not even with the world at all and you know if I had to enumerate his personality traits and all of the things about him you know it wouldn't necessarily sound like he was such a fabulous person

And I mean he wasn't my father and he never had a paternal type role for me but there's a way in which I have a real fondness for him

Then when he was in the hospital my mom and his sister were they are visiting him a lot they would stay there all day or whatever and I went to visit him and nobody else was there at that particular moment I don't remember why and he kind of grabbed my hand and started trying to kind of rub it on him not like on his crotch or anything just on his chest or something he was like you know talking about how he needed human touch or something and it just I don't know it hit me kind of creepy

I mean he was in the hospital and he was vulnerable and maybe he did need that you know but he didn't say you know hey can you rub my back or hey could you just hold my hand or anything like that he just kind of grabbed me and was kind of forcing it on me in a way and that it just felt bad

Like when Myron was chasing me around the house and tickling me and stuff and I was like you know feeling really not good about it and was telling him to stop and he wouldn't stop and I called my dad and that got him to stop finally but then I got in big trouble for my mom and it's like well what was I supposed to do had to get him to stop

So

And you know when I was in college we would have these conversations and I was talking about flag burning or something one time

And he's like oh yeah I think you should have the right to burn the flag when you wrap yourself in it and douse yourself in gasoline and set yourself on fire

And then you know years later I don't know what brought it up but I was reminding him of that conversation somehow and I'm like you know the symbol of the freedom is more important than the actual freedom and my life wasn't as important as a piece of cloth or something

And that sounds kind of harsh but I wasn't saying it like I'm recriminating you I know that's I don't think that's a word but I'm using it as one I wasn't using it like that we were talking about something else and it was just kind of a something I don't know it sounds bad but I wasn't saying it to upset him is my point but it made him cry and he was telling me how much he cares about me and everything and he always called me his daughter and stuff I just didn't think of him as my father cuz you know he wasn't my father and he wasn't really in a fatherly role but you know whatever

Anyway so I guess I'm kind of using him as a metaphor for whole generation of people who well and it's not the whole generation but it's a particular swath of white lower middle class you know conservative non-critical thinking you know

And you know he went to the esoteric philosophy center and stuff but I don't think it was so much that he even believed I mean he kind of he kind of believed but I think his reason for starting to go there was honestly that he was lonely and he wanted to meet some girls who might put out and you know you could go to church but he's from California supposedly so he's you know more I mean he was not hippie he was not a hippie but I don't know I don't have a completely thought through idea about this it just I had so much reluctance in just throwing him away