Fuck you, Homefries

 This is in part taken from a "journaling letter" to him and in part the background to it.

Homefries, No. 3 of my three older brothers, and No. 2 of my abusing brothers, sent a group text a month ago to me, my sister, the other brothers, and other family and friends. He's been furloughed from his oil and gas industry outdoor sales job for a couple of months now. (I was going to post his actual first name, but eventually decided not to.)

Saying he didn't want to be a "goldbrick" or similar, and talking about all the "other people" he thought were, with expanded unemployment bennies and such, he said he was thinking about taking a courier type driving job, even if at near minimum wage and having to Obamacare on health. (He's still getting bennies, plus unemployment-furlough pay.)

Homefries is the most Trump Train of my three brothers, and the closest to a full-on racist, having called Obama a "blackie" when talking to me, and presumably worse elsewhere.

Well, right after this text, visiting the dentist for the first time in many years, I found out I needed the stump of one tooth pulled, likely another, then a root canal and other things. For a variety of reasons, I don't have dental insurance and haven't. 

I refused to text Homefries back at the time because I didn't even want to cosign his Trump Train virtue signaling bullshit. But, my new medical status led me to the "journaling letter," which is now excerpted.

===

Dear Homefries:

Just fuck you. 

Years and years ago I accepted your non-pology for the abuse, indeed, what was even a non-admission of your sexual abusing me, when you said you regretted not protecting sis and I from Billy Bob (the oldest brother) as an actual covert admission.

No more.

The virtue signaling crossed a line.

First, given your "Blackie" and many other things, I have little doubt who you thing these "other people" are. That's not just because of your words, but because the oilfield industry tilts heavily toward racist white people in its employ.

Second, as far as goldbricking, start iwth Trump and his his family.

So, again, shut the fuck up.

Third, you work in an industry that sucks heavily off the federal and state teats.

Fourth, it's also heavily exploitative of our land and planet, even if you're a climate change denialist.

That leads to the intellectual and personal side.

First, you work for an industry very exploitative of its employees.

Second, you're 61.

It's not easy finding better jobs without a college background.

Related? You've got a bad back already from a driving-heavy job background. And, you want to continue that for less money?

Back to the moral side. 

As I set here staring a boatload of dental work in the face, your virtue signaling also has a degree of personal offensiveness.

I'm still not replying to you, still not co-signing your bullshit.

===

Update, Nov. 4: Turns out Homefries took the job. I don't know for sure if it has O-care or "bennies." I briefly acknowledged his text saying he'd taken it. Didn't realize it, but he is only using his late wife's phone now, so he had to go to "his" phone to get it.

Update, Dec. 3: Also, as far as people "not wanting to work," should I, in a dying industry, ever get downsized or whatever again, and because of age and dying industry, have extra trouble finding work? If I'm eligible for the federal 99-week extended unemployment, and it still exists, I'll take it.

22 years, and I forgot that, too

Just as I forgot that dad would have been 90 this year (although I did not forget mom's 90th a year ago), I forgot my sobriety anniversary for a week or so since it passed.

I don't think there's any big deal to it (although others might think otherwise), but forget I did.

Rather, as I type, I see three other angles.

One is that coronavirus-related additional busyness at work has just burdened my mind in general.

Maybe because it's not a "milestone" anniversary like my 20th, is another reason.

The third is that I'm not the same person I was years ago. I define myself less in terms of being a "sobrietist," per the term many in Lifering use (and also less in terms of being an abuse survivor) and more in terms of someone who, being past a certain age, and counting the clock just from the start of adulthood, is officially in middle age, and has the worries of middle age in general, and some additional ones particular to Merika and to my career at this time.

I also have one other issue, or thought, related to that.

I saw in the latest Johnnie Reporter that Bruce Klassen died. Now, if Bruce still had his Winfield weight problems, he wasn't the healthiest of persons by any means. That still doesn't make it nicer.

I hated college, too

Not as much as grade school, junior high or high school, no.

But, in hindsight, I hated St. John's to some degree.

Not just "had regrets" about the college and career path I was "steered into," which I've had ever since I escaped the fowler's snare.

But hated. More than disliked. Hated.

Just popped into my mind June 5, and I decided to do a journaling-type blog post about it over several days.

What prompted this was looking at Marie's friends lists on Facebook, and the number of St. John's girls who I thought were diffident at best, stuck-up at worst. None of them seemed "relatable" to me because ... I was a runt who had zero relational skills and a life crushed by sexual abuse by brothers, covert sexual abuse by mom, and a few sexual putdowns by dad, along with one instance of sexual competitiveness and other things.

I wasn't bullied by guys as an albino wolf. But, no girls "hit on me." None.

Brenda and Debbie did at Gallup. Cathey in her twisted way at Hobbs. And what's her name, in a sick way, the lesbian manhunter in Mineral Wells.

And that's it.

Maybe, without the outwardly expressed anger — and it wouldn't be at those girls, ladies women — that, in addition to the "be married to the church" idea, or maybe even as a subset of that idea, is why seminary was appealing.

That's not to say that my young adult development might not have been worse yet at a state university of 3,000, let alone 10,000.

On the women, maybe, just as boys saw me as the white wolf to be bullied as a kid, girls, then women, saw me as the white wolf to be rejected. Maybe they recognized that I had some subconscious fears, in part because of mom's covert abuse, plus feeling "dirty" otherwise.

Sidebar: Dad would have been 90 on this date. I totally forgot about it until sis mentioned it to me. It's progress that I didn't even remember it. When he died and I cried, I missed what I wish he could have been. I missed still being afraid enough of him to not make that clearer. And I missed "closure," at least to a degree.

But, I also missed that that past couldn't be undone. I still miss that today. And that's all.

Recovery from religious trauma

The Dallas Observer has an in-depth story about Kathryn Keller, a Metroplex counselor who specializes in recovery from religious trauma.

And, yes, it's real, and as the only one of my siblings to move beyond my fundamentalist Lutheran childhood, it's needed.

As with the sexual, emotional and physical abuse of childhood, I don't think I've totally recovered from this one, either.

Keller rightly notes that religious abuse, like other types, occurs on a continuum. And she's active with her church tradition herself, so she's not an atheist trying to tear down faith.

She says that it can, like other forms of abuse in childhood, if ongoing, cause not just PTSD but complex PTSD. Agreed.

And, if you have a parent who is a religious leader, even if the abusiveness isn't that bad, that increases the ongoing factor.

I rejected my childhood beliefs on both intellectual and emotional-psychological grounds. I probably would have done so anyway, even without seeing the hypocrisy firsthand. But, that did add to the issue.

The year in review

The first big thing was moving to Muenster, and getting out of Sulphur Springs just before Moser bought the paper there. No idea how much he would have held Marlin over my head, but he would have.

It's not been perfect here. Transitions from an old guard team, and mistakes. Add to that Shannon's anxiety and perfectionism levels, and feeling put too much under a microscope by my one column.

At the same time, I overall like it, and overall have less stress than Sulphur Springs. Plus, I make more money, especially with the gamble of not buying Obamacare. That's even more true after a raise.

Off the job, Gainesville's library does ILLs, which puts it ahead of Sulphur Springs for sure.

And Denton? Learning more and more than for most "ritzy" groceries and more, I don't have to go to Dallas. Has an art museum I've not yet been to, an old courthouse museum (ditto), a pretty funky square area, a great quad at TWU and more. And all almost 10 miles closer to Gainesville than Paris was to Sulphur Springs for Kroger, let alone the Metroplex.

Muenster itself is not bad to nice for a small town its size. But, it's cliquish like Rosebud, and even more inbred than most Protestant small towns its size here in Texas.

On the personal growth side? I decided to try a paid membership in a hookup-type website. Never again. Got my credit card hacked via there, and more than ever, the parent company dumps half a dozen chat sites together. Plus, little local selection, and not even decent nibbles beyond the local. And, 98 percent of "nibbles" are clearly fakes.

That said, overall, I've become a bit more detached from such things. A little more often, I feel a bit less like staring at a screen like that.

On the rest of the personal side, I'm becoming more aware of interpersonal dynamics and others' personalities more quickly than in the past. This last year saw definite growth there.

I still dream about work at times. Weirdly, I dream more about things that need to be done that aren't actually part of what I actually do, than I did in Sulphur Springs. I have no idea why. That wasn't the case in Marlin or Center, as best as I can recall.

And that's where we're at on the new year.

Facebook clean-ups and timeouts

Well, I just whacked about 10 friends from my Facebook friends list. Of those that remain, about one-quarter of the non-St. John's friends have been marked as acquaintances.

I had just returned from my second Facebook timeout. This one was four days; I think the first was five, if not a whole week.

It was enough, and I think good enough, for me to think about doing it one week a month. It would help social media detachment. Now, do I do this one week a month with Twitter? If so, the next step after that is to do it some week with both at the same time.

As for the whole issue about whether online friends are really friends or not, to the same degree as meatspace friends?

Outside of Leo Lincourt, I don't think a single non-Lifering friend would be a meatspace friend. That's not to say that all Lifering friends would be that, either.

Cutting and other stress relief — thoughts from the past

Below is a draft post from 2009 that I didn't realize I had saved as a draft. It was three months after moving to Odessa, Texas, to stay employed as something more than a C-store clerk in the middle of the Great Recession.

Free-flating (sic) anxiety still running in my head.

Did some fairly serious "picking" this afternoon.

(I never did "cutting," but, picking at my fingernails down to the quick, then, picking at the skin until it bleeds, or a hangnail bleeds? Yes.)

That's it.

But, I wanted to think about that more.

The fingernail deep picking I had identified as cutting by that time already. Do I have other such behaviors today, though?

Free-floating anxiety I still have, though less than 10 years ago for sure, and I think less than five years ago. Continuing sober life, continuing acceptance of the dailyness of life and continued aging, to be honest, are probably all factors.

My brother, the Lutheran gun nut

Having just read a pretty good (but not quite great) 2017 biography of Martin Luther, as I was finishing a review of it, I went nosing around for other reviews. I then, eventually landed on another, 1980s, Luther bio that I knew I needed to read.

Among the reviewers was a semi-familiar name. I googled it and "Paul McCain" became more familiar as president of Concordia Publishing House. I then, among links that brought up, eventually saw one for a Facebook group called (no, really) "The Armed Lutheran." Shock me that my oldest, political wingnut, Lutheran pastor primary abuser oldest brother is a member.

But he is.

I don't think Walt's probably bought any guns since what he got out of the division of Dad's property. Rather, this is likely virtue signaling first.

It's a "virtue" I could do without.

Children abhor an emotional (and intellectual) vacuum

In progressing through my recovery journey, and looking back at my parents, I have regularly contrasted dad's emotional fire (mainly of anger management issues along with emotional and physical abusiveness) with mom's emotional ice of not being there.

But, in some recent poolside meditation of sorts, or at least pondering, between pages of a re-read of Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Knows the Score," about which I have previously blogged, I had some new insight.

Ice is still something "positive," in the sense of actually being there, and actually having empirical, sensual evidence it's there.

A vacuum? It is nothingness.

What led me to that was, after a bit of my pondering, I started doing something Gestalt-like, which van der Kolk talks about a lot. I started having a dialogue with an image of mom.

After the dialogue was done, as I noted previously in my most recent post before this, I realized that I didn't hate mom. I didn't really even loathe her.

Instead, I abhorred her, or more accurately now, I abhorred her emotional vacuum. From there, I jumped to Harry Harlow's experiments with rhesus monkey babies and maternal or pseudo-maternal bonding.

I know mom bottle-fed me, but that was normal in the 1960s. She didn't have much tactile interaction with me otherwise, nor a lot of emotional interaction either on "positive" or "negative" emotions. I did see her once or twice in fear of dad's anger when directed toward me, but I have no idea if she ever talked to him about it further.

Anyway, this carries on to mom divorcing dad.

She claimed that she was tired of him trying to force us into religious careers. (I have proof of this; my dad apparently destroyed a partially completed application of mine to New Mexico Tech, and I know this because after I was put on academic probation at his religious alma mater after my first semester, he wrote me a letter to "shape up" or I'd never get into it. I found the letter back almost 30 years later, going through a box of old items of mine he had in storage. J'accuse!)

And yet? She never fought in court to have primary physical custody of me and my sister, as far as I know. I do know the court said we could make our own custodial parent decisions as long as we didn't bounce around too much and show detrimental effects.

Unlike dad, who for surface appearances (and maybe some stress relief, but I don't mean to buy his explanation that mom "caused" his temper let alone his acting out on it) did change for generally the better (setting aside "grooming" me to move with him — not sure how much of that he did with sis), mom never did that. It's like, even given the truth of what she claimed about dad, she was still telling a story more than a reality, and that the focus remained solipsistic.

(More on that word below.)

Because of who she worked for, and my SAT results, I got a corporate National Merit Scholarship, which actually pays more than the regular ones, even if a half-cut lower in prestige. Years later, she told me that she had considered writing her corporate headquarters to see if it would revoke the scholarship because I was attending my dad's religious alma mater.

And, no, she'd not contacted me at that time. She wrote me ... half as often, or less ... in college as dad did.

Let's see.

Knocking the props out from under me financially would have done what? Make me even more distant from her, for sure. Angry, even if I didn't realize it at the time. And hence, the "(and intellectual)" I just added to the header.

I mention the word "solipsistic" above. I used to think of mom as "narcissistic," but at that previous blog post, I realized that's not right, either.

I think a true narcissist, whether conscious of it or not, has different internal motivations than mom did.

The "solipsistic"?

By the time I was 12, this abused and emotionally whipped pre-teen, and "old soul" of sorts (no, not in any metaphysical way, New Agers) from that abuse, realized emotionally and psychologically that he did not want children when he grew up. In part, I knew that my mom was mentally ill in some way and I didn't want to pass that on.

It is an "old soul" of sorts that feels that way, and that accepts that stance as necessary, just as it's a similar old soul who can think in his mind of peace-promoting bible passages when his dad thinks he should attack the leader of neighborhood bullies because the rest of them will all cave in.

There's many more ways in which I simply had no connection with mom. Part of that, per van der Kolk, of course may be being "shut down" in some way. But, already when I was 5, I had issues of physical and emotional abandonment from her.

And, the apparent mental illness (neurotic, not psychotic level) behind that is another reason I abhor, but don't loathe.

Dad, on the other hand? Genetic tendencies to anxiety, as well as to anger management, are mental health issues. But, they're not mental illness.

While there are several good things he did for me throughout life, ultimately, while I don't hate him, and I don't think I loathe him as a person, I do overall loathe how he was as a father.

Powerless vs made a decision

Alcoholics Anonymous, and the 12-step movement it launched has been chock full of logical (and arguably, ethical) inconsistencies from the start.

Beyond that, the religious angle (it is, because it mentions a deity and because courts have said it is for First Amendment issues) is off-putting to the non-religious and to many religious people that don't agree with its particular religious take.

Beyond THAT, the "powerless" issue is offputting to women, minorities, abuse victims and others.

Step 1 of AA’s 12 steps says:

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

But Step 3 says:

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

See, in religion, Lutheranism recognizes this problem and Martin Luther says that people by their own power cannot come to faith in God. 

But, AA hoists itself in its own petard. A decision is an act. Power, not powerlessness.

Of course, Lutheranism has its own problems. It essentially reduces a human being to an automaton, like Buddhism's claim that there is no individual soul, just a life force. And so, Lutheranism has its own petards.

The way to reject this is to reject an omnipotent deity (and an omnipotent karma), and accept a humanistic world. That world may still have an imperfect deity that some call god, though I don't see that, and that in turn raises philosophical issues about what creature would merit the term "god."

In any case, "powerless" is an absolutist word. Good humanism rejects that. And good sobriety rejects that, too. No need to hope for a "daily reprieve" from the AA version of a Calvinist double predestination tyrant.