Stand back, folks, ’cause this is a big one. And it buried pretty deep.

Back when I was a preschooler, I, like most kids that age, wanted to help out with the family chores. But nobody had the time and patience to teach me.

The fact that I was timid, shy, and clumsy didn’t help either.

In fact, I can see now that a vicious circle formed : the more hesitant and slow I got, the more angry and impatient my siblings got with me, and the more angry and impatient they got, the more hesitant and slow I got.

Because I was scared of them. Wonder why.

This culminated with my sister Catherine losing her shit at me and screaming at me that I was “useless, completely useless” and that if I really wanted to help I should just “stay out of the way”.

This fucked me up pretty good.

It destroyed what little faith I had in my own competence and forced me into a position of just sitting on the sidelines while other people took care of things.

Which is more or less how I have lived my life.

It also forced me into a position of helpless guilt because I had no choice to rely on others but having no choice in the matter in no way keeps you from feeling guilty – or being made to feel guilty – about being a burden on others.

It’s not fair to punish someone for something that they cannot help and did not choose, but that’s never stopped people from doing it before.

They made me feel guilty just for being alive, for fuck’s sake.

So I have gone through my whole life feeling generally incompetent. Like I can’t do even the most basic things to look after myself and have to rely on others.

And yet, because I was so badly neglected as a child, I was forced to be more self reliant than most kids. I could make my own food – Campbell’s soup and peanut butter and jam on toast was my standard meal.

And I could do my own laundry – because at one point my siblings rather rudely told me that “they” (my mom) wouldn’t be doing it for me any more.

These are, after all, the same people who forced me to do my own clothes shopping when I wasn’t even 10 yet.

So I think it’s cleaning tasks where I feel the most incompetent. Basically if it requires fine motor skills and an attention to detail, I’m out.

Plus I honestly think that when I was raped, I lost whatever progress into the anal stage of development I had made and regressed to the oral stage, and I am still there now.

I still feel useless. I still feel hopeless against the big bad world and that leads to feeling like there is no way I could survive on my own – even though I have.

I fell apart psychologically, but I managed to feed, clothe, and house myself okay.

So I don’t know why I am so scared of the Big Bad World out there. When you really look at it, I am perfectly capable of doing all the tasks to make it as a disabled person.

Jobs are another story.

I guess I am still dominated by some very old and out of date tapes that are always ready to play SUPER LOUD.

I have GOT to learn to erase that shit.

More after the break.

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I’m… NOT postmodern?

That up there is the third documentary I have watched (listened to) about postmodernism that describes something utterly alien to my understanding of what being po-mo is all about.

I am thinking these younger people are seeing it through a very different filter than I am. The fellow in the documentary above, for example, was clearly doing some motivated reasoning when he put together his argument against the excesses of the modern wokist crowd and somehow construed it to connect with postmodernism.

Personally, I grew up with what I understood to be a postmodernist point of view. Namely, one that saw media in the Gen X way – we see the picture AND the frame, we grasp that media exists in a context and that the context is part of the message.

That’s why my generation loves meta so much – we love taking one thing and putting it in the context of another because that creates the sort of frisson that directs attention to the contexts of both things.

Hence the Seth Macfarlane reference humour that has, sadly, been absolutely beaten to death by overuse now.

So much so that young people are posting anti-meta rants about how cheap meta-tytpe humour is and how lame it is and so forth and so on.

Nothing is so good that idiots doing it badly (or worse, in a cynically formulaic way) can’t ruin it so that the merest hint of it makes people wanna puke.

And while I try to be realistic about how even my generation ages and becomes the old people just like the rest, to hear these young people – for good reason – trash my beloved Gen X meta jokes still really hurts.

Oh well. I know I’m still hilarious. Jokes get old but funny never dies.

It just changes its disguise from time to time.

Back to postmodernism. It’s particularly weird to here it brought up now because I was sure we MUST be on to whatever is next by now.

I liked that the Millennials brought along a return to earnestness. Whatever happened to that? I was all for it.

Lord knows Gen X couldn’t do that. We’re allergic to earnestness. The only way we can enjoy it is by making fun of it in venues like MST3K.

In our weird twisted way, that’s how we show love to it. The epically bad media we so love to mock actually has a warm place in our cold embittered hearts.

It’s like the right kind of bad media is the equivalent of a puppy trying to growl and look fierce. It’s trying so hard but doing it so badly we can’t help but love it.

So the generation that ironically mocked, say, Plan Nine From Outer Space is the same generation that came to unironically love the movie.

We are a strange and twisted lot.

So what the hell does/did come after postmodernism anyway?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.