This is going to be another one of those that, in the highly unlikely event that my siblings ever start reading this blog, they should most definitely skip, because I am going to talk shit about Mom, and in my family, there is no greater sin.

Mother is the name of God on the lips and hearts of all children, after all.

I’ve talked before about the radical dichotomy that forms when you have an abusive parent. The abusive active one becomes the Devil, and the kindly passive one becomes The Saint. It’s what has to happen, but it means that any issues with The Saint becomes very, very hard to see, let alone grapple with. When you are a kid hiding from The Devil every time they are around, The Saint is your only ally and the “good” parent, and so you have to blindly worship them no matter how poorly they perform as a parent.

You make do with what you get, I suppose. But let’s put it like this : it’s not like it was particularly hard to be a better parent than my Dad.

So it’s high time I tried to rationally assess my mother’s performance. I do this not out of malice towards her but out of an attempt to figure out what is really going on inside me and that means finding the truth in the events of my childhood.

First off, I have to say that when I was little, she was marvelous. I have a lot of happy memories of her showing me things in the garden, reading to me before bed, giving me lots of hugs, and playing the guitar and singing with me. What’s more, she showed a real interest in me and seemed determined to make sure I got what I needed to grow up a strong and caring little boy.

Then that all changed. She went away. It was to go back to work after unplanned little old me, but still, this was the beginning of the withdrawal. I still had her in the summer, though, and I suspect that’s why a lot of those happy memories are filled with sunshine.

That’s probably also why sunny days make me happy even when the heat makes me miserable. But that’s beside the point.

But that ended too. She was still home in the summer, of course, but that just meant more meals she had to cook and more housework to do and now she had to take care of all four of us all the time, and that’s when she started to be a zombie mom.

Because, you see, that’s how timid, passive people like me and my mother betray you. Not by stabbing you in the back or even ever making the decision to leave you. We simply fade away very slowly, too slow to be noticed in realtime, but as sure and certain as the ticking of a clock.

I still had Betty, though. My babysitter. And she paid attention to me, unlike everyone else. I am a lot like my mother but I am also a lot like Betty. I learned so much from her.

And then school came, and I went from being a kid with one person he could count on in his life, whether it was Mom or Betty, to being abandoned to a cruel world for which I was ill prepared and rapidly sank down into a world of boredom, terror, injustice, cruelty, depression, anxiety, and neglect.

That’s when the real betrayal took place, because when I tried to tell my parents (by which I mean my mother, because it’s not like I thought Dad would help, he’s The Devil after all), they just shut me down and made it clear to me that whatever it was, it was my business and my business alone because they could not spare any energy or effort at all on me, the unwanted guest who could not leave.

And I tried at least three times that I can remember, and each time it was much harder than the previous time, and after three or so, I just gave up.

I am positive that if it had been one of my siblings telling them that they were getting beat up in school all the time, it would have been treated like the emergency it was. There would have been calls to the school and outrage and reassurance that Something Would Be Done About This and that It Would Stop.

Especially if it had been one of the girls.

But I could barely get out that I was unhappy and that there was a problem before they shut me down because they just didn’t want to allocate any resources, whether physical, mental, or psychological,. at their disposal to the kid they never wanted, especially when they could go back to pretending I wasn’t there just by shutting me down like they did.

Get back in your box and disappear/

This all culminated on that fateful day when the dentist told my parents that I needed some serious dental work or, if unchecked, my life could be in danger, and my mother blinked and said “Well we can’t afford THAT!” and that was the end of it.

That was the real betrayal. That wasn’t my Dad’s doing, it was hers. Clearly, as much as I adored her, she did not feel the same way about me. If it had been one of my siblings, there would have been no question about it. They would have done whatever it took, made whatever sacrifices they had to make, to do what the dentist told them had to be done .

I know this, because they did it for both of my sisters.

Now I ask of you : what sort of parent is told their kid needs dental work or he may have serious health complications later in life, and just shrugs and walks away?

A very bad parent, that’s what.

My mother did a bad job raising me. She was in the forefront of making me feel like I wasn’t wanted, wasn’t welcome, and certainly wasn’t worth spending money on.

Ya did me wrong, Mom. I know you wouldn’t see it that way, but it’s true.

No wonder I am so fucked up.

I had nobody. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Using the visual editor, aka the WYSIWYG one, for tonight’s blog entry. I usually use the text one so I can see my HTML, but tonight, I am going to take a walk on the wild side and use the mode which works just like a word processor. Besides, the real reason I used the text one for so long was that the visual editor messed up video embeds. And I don’t do those very often any more. So it’s visual for me.

Whoop de freaking do.

Feeling sort of dark today. I guess I am depressed. I tried to get myself jump started in the afternoon, but I felt like crap and without a compelling reason to stay out of bed (that is, compelling by depression’s standards, which usually means extremely high reward to effort ratio activities), I ended up spending my Saturday afternoon in a state of confused depression and non-restful sleep. A mode that in the bad old pre-Kwantlen days I used to call “every fucking afternoon”.

So that shit is always there, waiting for me to slip up and fall off the path and get lost. It’s a sobering (and depression) realization to make. That no matter how well I am doing or how good I am feeling, the hot suffocating darkness stretches before me like the mouth of a well, waiting to swallow me down into the belly of the best once again.

Every day, no matter how it looks on the outside, on the inside I am tiptoeing across a tightrope stretched between me and the warm bright world of the living.

And somehow, no matter how far I go, I am always in the exact middle.

Admittedly, some portion of the depression might be coming from the fact that I am currently without a major project. For a while there, I always had the movie to work on, and after that, I worked on my TV spec script, but I sort of finished that.

I saw sort of because I do have a complete script, with three entire plotlines. It is, however, only 52 pages long, and a standard Bob’s Burgers is 62. So I am twelve pages short. I thought I was done because I had written 32 pages before I went in and manually double spaced the dialogue, like they do in the show scripts.

(Yes. I had to manually double space the dialogue, because the program I have been using, Trelby, is terrible and doesn’t have a double-space function. Fuck, it doesn’t even have italics or underline! Because, of course, they are not allowed in standard screenplay format. Which is fine when you are writing a screenplay, but I am writing a TV script and TV people don’t give a fuck about standards. They make their own rules. And one of the rules for Bob’s Burgers scripts is that act headings and sluglines are in bold. And the thing is, I am stuck with Trelby for now because there is no way to export it to some other format and have it retain its formatting, and formatting is kind of super huge when it comes to all forms of screenplay. So I can export it to an uneditable PDF, or nothing. And it is really pissing me off. Rant over. )

So I have to come up with 12 more pages of Bob’s Burgers. That’s a tad daunting, I admit. I have a D plot in my notes, and I can probably add more jokes to some scenes. But I am not sure that will get me 12 entire pages, even with the dialogue double spaced. So I am going to have to strain the ol’ noodle to make pagecount.

Oh well, I am sure I will come up with stuff. I’m a funny dude and I have loads of creativity. It’s just a matter of bearing down and putting in the effort.

I also have to write a presentation for next Friday on the movie Groundhog Day. No pain there, it’s a brilliant movie. I have to come up with my own thesis, and I am pondering having it be that Bill Murray’s character actually dies at the beginning of the movie and the entire rest of it represents his trip through Purgatory.

Then again, I haven’t seen the movie in a while, nor have I read the script yet, so hopefully something a little wittier when I do. I am supposed to consult with the other people who are presenting that day in order to make sure we don’t have the same thesis, but a combination of laziness and arrogant confidence in my own originality has prevented me from doing so up until this point.

Still, that puts the pressure on to come up with something really off the wall, just to be safe. I know, I will theorize that the whole movie is the universe’s way of telling Bill Murray that if he wants to keep his career going, he has to play more likable characters.

Alright, that might be a little too meta.

Otherwise, not a lot of homework this week. My homework for Feature Script is already done. Ditto TV Spec Script. TV History doesn’t give homework. I have to do an exercise for The Second Act where I am given beats for the first and third act of a movie and I have to fill in the 15 beats of the Second Act.

Hey, that’s the name of the course.

That should be fun. I am super good at the whole “three card whatever” game, where you get three cards with random pictures on them and you make up a story as if it was three panels in a comic strip. In fact, when I was given that test I got so excited that I came up with three or four stories before they managed to get me to stop.

I am assuming that means I passed. And honestly, looking back, I realize just what a special little dude I was.

And you know what? All that’s changed is my size.

I’m still special as fuck.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.