Hopeless

I was born into a family history of abuse.  My female progenitor, “Louise”, (who I stopped calling mother years ago) was raped by siblings and step-parents and ignored by her female progenitor who favored the boys according to Louise.  She got pregnant with me seemingly to “catch” her boyfriend, who didn’t take the bait and left.  I suspect they were both damaged, shitty, selfish, childish people who couldn’t love.  Louise then neglected me from birth and abused me mentally/emotionally for several years as a single mother on welfare.

As an example, when I was a boy of maybe 8-10 years old, I wrote Louise a poetic bit of prose about how much I loved her.  I didn’t understand yet that my desperate desire for her love was not the same as true, healthy, reciprocated love.  She, of course, didn’t care as much about love as getting what she wanted.  Her response to my effusive and deeply heartfelt, page-long statement of love to her was, “If you love me so much, why don’t you obey me?”

She then married “Jack”, a US Air Force guy 15 years her senior.  I suspect she may have chosen him for his “children should be seen and not heard” attitude.  Or because she could manipulate him well and deeply.  Before much longer, and in addition to how Louise acted, Jack was beating me.  Jack apparently beat me due to her private provocation, I remember early on the discussions started in front of me and soon moved into private.  When Jack came back out, I was usually due for a beating.

Jack didn’t beat me to make me obey, no matter what he thought.  He beat me to get out his feelings, such as the vitriol and poison Louise dumped on him when he arrived home.  Do you know the old TV show, “Wait till your father gets home”?  If you take out the cute, that’s my life.

At the age of about 8, Jack whipped me until I had bruises and welts from the middle of my back to my calves.  After his orgy of violence, he and Louise became concerned and conspired to keep me home from school so my injuries wouldn’t be seen.  The assholes had me convinced I was an awful person – something that I still have trouble fighting – so I HELPED them cover my abuse.

Louise continued to conspire with Jack to devise sufficiently awful punishments that wouldn’t leave a mark.  In my mid-teens, they chose a novel method – torture.  Jack gave me a stack of encyclopedia volumes to hold in my hands, straight out from my shoulders – like the ‘iron cross’ maneuver in gymnastics but with my hands facing upward.  He stood there, watching and getting his jollies of vengeance, as the pain increased.  The pain got so bad I couldn’t control my muscles, I had spasms in my legs so bad I could hardly stand, brought on by the pain of trying to hold those books up at shoulder height.

In my late teens, I attempted suicide several times.  My “family” knew about the overdose on pain and sleeping meds stolen for the purpose from Jack’s prescriptions.  They knew about the overdose on acetominophen.  They may have suspected when I attempted to asphyxiate myself using the household gas line.  They didn’t know about all of my experiments with discreetly cutting myself, testing to see if I could stand opening a vein.  I was no longer living with them by the time I bought a shot gun and sawed it off, planning a successful suicide.  At that time, I learned that my fear of suffering as I was dying was too great – I couldn’t kill myself.

As another side note, when I was in the mental hospital after my first suicide attempt, I got a chance to confront Louise and Jack.  All they did was defend themselves, not seeming to care that Louise’s firstborn had almost died of sadness about how they treated him.  I don’t think they even felt bad.

When I realized I couldn’t kill myself, I made some decisions.  I decided that I would do what I could to reduce my own suffering since that seemed my only way out.

Fast forward a few decades.  I was born under Nixon, came of age under Reagan – effectively, I think, I was born into the final phase of destroying the “New Deal”.  Things didn’t seem great since then, they seemed to be getting worse all the time, one step at a time in places all over the map.

Then, during the presidency of Barry O’Bomber, the drone-assassinating-est POTUS, I came to realize that DNC and GOP are one party, the GOPDNC, serving the billionaires.  I realized it from his murderous ways, from the ways he did nothing to help the black community, from him successfully taking away habeus corpus (the protection against being held without charge forever – it’s been around since the Magna Carta, almost a thousand years), from him keeping the anti-constitutional “Patriot Act” in effect, from him continuing the illegal and unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping in place, from him doing nothing to protect the 99% – in fact, taking away those protections as fast as they could.

Following Barry O’Bomber it seemed we were being given only one sane choice – Shillary “Goldwater Girl” Clinton.  Tinyhands von Fuckstick seemed only a threat to keep the masses in check – vote for Shillary or you’ll get the monster.  Except I was one of many people who saw that the neoliberals like Shillary and Barry were a worse danger than Tinyhands.  Shillary and Barry actually did the things that Tinyhands liked to talk about.  The establishment, the GOPDNC, were clearly (to me) easing us toward the quiet and uncontested loss of any meaningful civil rights.  Now that Tinyhands is POTUS, I am terrified of what he’ll do but at the same time glad that Shillary and the smooth-talking establishment are not as fully in control, seemingly, as they were – maybe, just maybe, we can defeat Tinyhands where the public wouldn’t even stand up to Shillary / Barry / etc.

Another factor for me – I cared about pollution back when it seemed to just be “litter” and “clean up after yourself”.  I was born in Los Angeles and lived nearby for about a decade – surrounded by oil rigs pumping death out of the ground.  I had freqent sinusitis headaches from the smog and migraines that I didn’t recognize until adulthood.  As the years progressed I learned about carbon, oxygen, greenhouse gasses, Milankovich cycles, atmospheric circulation, oceanic circulation, ocean acidification, in short I learned about climate change.  Now I feel very confident that the oligarchy has royally fucked us.  I look at the charts showing how they expect greenhouse gas emissions to drop off in a miraculous way without any real concerted effort being taken and I feel bitter and lied to.  I look at the POTUS and congress, current and previous, fighting like rabid dogs to INCREASE coal, oil and gas usage.  I see all of this and I think, if life on Earth OR humanity survives (neither is certain), we are in for a really shitty time that may last centuries.  (I think the establishment fears losing power more than death.)  I fear that the next step is the 99.999% being locked up in labor camps, probably underground, “for our protection”.

My professional life fell apart during this time.  Management took a decidedly Tinyhands turn, offshore contractors became preferable to onshore FTEs and people like me – smart, creative, experienced, strong – were pushed out in favor of compliant drones.  In the end, I got fired because my employer chose to force me into a contract with another company where the exchange of value was between my employer and the third-party company and I was just the product being sold, or rather stolen.  I am aware that a contract forced on me under duress isn’t binding but that doesn’t matter when the other party is ready to take advantage and profit as soon as they have my forced agreement.

Now I am facing homelessness.  Again.  I don’t even want to go back into IT, into technology, because the whole field is nothing but lies, theft and the usurpation of human rights.  Do you read the EULA?  You should, it is legally binding with few exceptions.

And the capper is that I am facing trouble with my wife.  She is also dealing with her past, her rapes, her abuse.  Some of our hurt places fit very well together.  Sometimes our hurt places painfully conflict.  Today, while I was trying to understand my feelings of hurt and sadness, she told me, “You don’t like me very much right now.”  All I could hear her saying is what Louise said, “If you love me, why don’t you obey me?”

I tried, over and over, to tell her what was wrong.  Over and over she stopped me to disagree with me, even though I was just trying to tell her what I felt and why.  I tried to talk to her about it and she actually seems steadfast.  She won’t let me explain to her if she disagrees, doesn’t matter that I am being honest about my feelings, if I try to tell her that “you don’t like me” sounds exactly like “you don’t love me because you don’t obey me” from Louise.

We’ve been in this place before, where she just seems to care more about winning than about my feelings, understanding what happened, making it better.  She can’t hear that either, she calls it playing games when I tell her she only seems to care about winning at those times.

She has been my only happy thought, my only support, in my life.  If she were not here, I’d have left this world already.  And this fight, this repeated scene of not being able to express myself to her because the truth seems like an attack, left me more hopeless than even what Louise, Tinyhands and climate change did.

I am torn between wanting out of this shitty, savage, primitive, dishonest, raping, thieving, killing world and wanting to not abandon her to it.

I really want out.  I feel that this life is meant for learning and growth but at the same time…if I am supposed to NEED this learning, WHY?  What kind of shitty existence requires that I know this?  Is “God” just the “Dubya” of the higher plane of consciousness?  All I am accomplishing here that I can see is supporting a corrupt, evil system.  I don’t want to feed it with my labor, my taxes, my consumption of branded products.

I don’t know what to do with this war between not wanting to hurt my wife and not wanting to stay stuck here.

If it stay like this, I will leave.  The pain of life has exceeded both my capacity to endure and the rewards that life offers.

I can’t tell my wife, she’s not able to hear me the way I need right now.  I can’t tell a mental health professional, I think they’ll just want to lock me back up in the worst prisons on Earth (see Washington’s ‘McNeil Island’.)  I have no family or relationships, my wife is the only real relationship I’ve had in my life.

I can’t take it and the only person I can talk to is not there for me.

She just came up and asked me if I was going to come out of the office.  She surely thinks it can just be smoothed over and forgotten until the next time she hurts me the same way.  I don’t want to be near her right now, just like when she said that I didn’t like her, and just like then I am actually drowning in pain and sadness and it hurts to be near her.

I think she’ll force me to come to the front room and then she’ll try to distract me from these feelings.  That just leaves me open to be surprised again the next time my pain is offensive to her.

This is not life worth living.  I pray for a giant meteor to wipe out humanity before we kill the whole planet.  I pray for a small meteorite to hit me, or any piece of space debris.  I hope for my flaky, crappy, defective body to finally fail for good.  I hope for my psycho brother-in-law to lose his shit and come shoot me.

I don’t know what to do.  I know from my teens that I can’t just live for her, my will doesn’t last forever.  I don’t want to lose her, I don’t want to live, I don’t want to hurt her, I don’t want to live, I love her so much and this fucking world sucks hard and doesn’t look to get any better in my lifetime.

Please kill me so it isn’t my fault.  Let there be a pipeline explosion that takes out the whole neighborhood so I don’t have to worry about my wife.  I don’t belong here, I am not suited to this world of “we make piranhas look friendly” humanity.  I am the kid who thought when I broke the pinata that we kids should pick up the candy and share it and I’ve never gotten over the shock, dismay, disappointment and hurt of looking up to see Louise and the other two adults urging me on into the candy frenzy, the fact that we were in fucking CHURCH notwithstanding.

I am made for a world of love.  How did I get sent to hell?