God, how I hate you.
From failing to prevent my being raped at The Spa when I was four years old (why did you leave me alone in that shower stall anyhow) to taking me out of school and making me move back home when I was 20 just so you could take early retirement (which was bullshit because you totally could have paid for the rest of Dave and my education with your severance but just…. um, didn’t) and through all those years in between spent walking on eggshells and being scared of you because you were too much of a pussy to control your temper, somehow, you were always there, fucking things up.
Your entire façade of competence and practicality was a lie. You were penny wise and pound foolish. That’s why you bought that snowblower and that’s ESPECIALLY why you started that STUPID home based “business”.
Helping people with their resumes? Extremely amateurish desktop publishing? You really thought there were a lot of people in Summerside who would pay for that shit?
How thuddingly stupid were you? And how stupid was I for falling for your bullshit for as long as I did? You didn’t know jack shit.
I would have made a far more competent head of household than you by the time I was ten years old. At least I knew the difference between actual pragmatism and your particular brand of competence theatre.
Then there’s your dinner table tirades. That was your most frequent and beloved way to fail your family. You’d go off on Anne or David, dumping all your frustrations at how you were too much of a wimp to stand up to your boss Ian and all the ways he abused you onto the people it would hurt the most, the family you supposedly loved.
Not enough to keep you from hurting us, apparently. Then again, didn’t you once tell us that if we loved you, we’d just take it?
Yeah. Shit don’t work that way. You don’t get love for hate. You can’t buy a Maserati with dog turds. And you can’t expect people reward abuse from one of the few people who is supposed to protect you from the exact sort of thing you did to us on the daily.
If you’d been any kind of a man, you would have done absolutely anything in order to keep us from harm.
But apparently learning basic self control was too much to ask.
And in the midst of all that, you had the nerve to play the victim. Oh, we’re all so mean to you for not giving you the love you wanted despite the hurt you visited upon us. You’re just an innocent hard done by hard working man trying to do right by his family despite us having the gall to beg for mercy.
Did it really never occur to you that you didn’t get love from us because we were all scared shitless of you? That’s why getting us to do things with you was like “pulling teeth”. We couldn’t wait to get away from you because every moment in the presence of a ticking time bomb like you was like torture.
All because you couldn’t be bothered to control yourself. How very weak. Snapping and shouting at your kids like some trailer bark reprobate.
You should be so ashamed of yourself you dare not show your face in public.
More after the break. Maybe more of this, maybe not.
Preservation without purpose is waste
I’ve spoken before about the Miser’s Paradox.
The classic case is, of course, Scrooge, who wrings every last farthing out of life, to the point of making half of London miserable in the process, and yet the money does not make him happy because he is so twisted up inside that he’s incapable of spending any of it on anything not strictly necessary.
And even then he mourns each penny spent like it was a beloved child.
So all his wealth serves absolutely no purpose. His life would be more or less the same if he’d thrown it all out the window or burned it for fuel. All that effort, all that self-denial, all that misery inflicted on himself and others, all a total waste of time.
After all, why hoard something you can’t use? You might as well be a bald man stockpiling brushes and combs
It’s such a tragic waste of precious resources such as time, personal energy, potential, intellectual investment, and emotional attachment.
And so we come to my own case. I’ve never been lucky to have the opportunity to become a serious money hoarder but I definitely see a lot of Scrooge in me and I could totally imagine developing a serious case of financial constipation just like his.
Hence my having a floating surplus of around $500-$800 in savings for a long time due to my inability to think about what I would spend it on.
It’s all gone now. Dammit. I waited too long, expenses increased, and now I don’t even have a buffer any more.
And that really hurts. Why? Because that buffer gave me a sense of security that was very soothing. That’s the real reason I couldn’t make myself spend it.
And it’s not hard at all to see how that could lead to a Scrooge-like situation if I was ever in the position to make money in an open-ended, effort proportional way like Scrooge’s moneylending or some kind of commissioned sales job.
In my life right now, I feel like on a spiritual level, I am saving up for an occasion I know will never come. Even all my toxic flab is a testament to that.
All this energy saved up biologically, and I know it will never get used unless I’m on a plane that crashes in the Andes.
And more than that, there is this cold but compelling instinct deep inside me telling me I have to preserve every bodily resource so I can extend my life as far into the future as I possible can, without limit.
That leaves very little to “spend” on living life now. And what is the point of living to see tomorrow if it’s going to suck just as much as today?
So I need to trim back this overgrown hoarding instinct until it no longer keeps me from relaxing and enjoying myself with the time I have right now.
Winter isn’t coming, instincts. There is no foreseeable time of hard austerity coming. Now is the springtime where we laugh and dance and feast.
Or at least learn how!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.