This Will End In Fire (Or: Different Parenting Strategies) (S.)

I don't like to pass up any opportunities. But I tend to see a lot of bullshit as opportunities. And some of it comes from me. And some of it comes from my family. The pieces arrive as the pieces will, gradually, like some real-time Tetris-puzzle of your emotions and your environment, a lack of allies or supportive-figures or a preponderance of toxic, imitation allies and supportive-figures: enemies in disguise, enemies disguising their enmity as Concern. 

Okay. So I get tired of saying this so many times, and I certainly can't tell you to go and read something else if you haven't read it and then you have to go and read that and try to come back here in the same headspace as when you started: So, I'm telling you what I've told hundreds and millions of people and maybe this is new and maybe it's a refresher. 

My mom left my dad when I was about 14. No big fight. No sudden death in the family. She just ended her bullshit marriage as arbitrarily as she'd apparently started it. Except this time her fucked-up whim effected a third party to their casual sociopathy: Me. And I really don't want to come off as some whiny white brat from the suburbs (which is usually the reaction I get, from one party or another) and I don't want you to think I'm ordinarily a dangerous person--in spite of having some pretty fucking violent stuff (incidents) in my life. Like, whenever I've told anyone I was part of a gang of dumb kids who robbed a grocery store in Nowhere, New York...their reactions are usually Concern or thoughtful acclaim and never have I experienced a response that blended the two...well, at least not until I met Jerry Ratbaum, but we're coming to that. 

After my mom left, it was just me and my carpenter/handyman dad in the house in Carmel, that house echoing with the mocking curse of her absence. (Someone actually told me, way later, in 2037, it sounded like a Bukowski poem in reverse. Betting On The Muse, I think? I don't know. I read way more History and Random Journalism than anything else.) A lot of times, my life feels like some bizarre/unbelievable Psychology/Psychiatry Experiment--a God I don't believe in, way, way up there pulling the strings, fucking my anatomy and emotions according to some predetermined set of Divine Laws No One in the last (approximately) 14 Billion Years can decipher or interpret. But who's to say? 

At any rate, I tried studying psychology, or what can also be pathos. I thought I did alright. I did alright. I didn't leave school because I got bad grades. I left, mainly, because people who I thought saw my point--my points--treated me like I was inherently wrong. Automatically wrong. The kind that makes you good enough to be bad enough to luck into & follow thru on crazy, atavistic decisions. I used to call it social crime. Think of shoplifting become pickpocketing to card-counting to semi-armed robbery. (*The way some people graduate/accelerate in variation of drug use from anything as "simple" as cigarettes or marijuana to narcotics and meth-amphetamines.) It is. But it isn't.  

Supposedly, difficult decisions can absorb the majority of potential/available space-energy in the frontal lobe of the human brain. Really, any animal brain. We think about what applies to us and we go through our personal-registry of responses to said application and apply ourselves. What turns out is the result. (What turns out is the result.) 

Okay. So, 'they' and the dumb voices in my head, keep saying: Make It Sound Normal. 

We're automatically attracted to: enormous wealth; endless praise; altruistic concern. By psychology. And neurology. And culture. 

Listen. 

Don't. 

Vote. 

Trump. 

Anymore. 

**** 

Speaking of Jerry Ratbaum.... 

Be kind, as our beloved Kurt Vonnegut put it, to each other. 

We've been making that harder for a while now, I think. 

It means, be polite if you're not confidently sure what to say. It might be wrong. (Also, sometimes people are "sarcastic." And sarcastic. And other variations of sarcastic. Bugbears, included.) 

Don't eat shit no matter how many times someone gets on your nerves or you get on theirs and someone forgets how words work and some potential King of Shitheads actually plucks a fece-candybar from the toilet because they're a moron. 

There's a slim, barely-pivotal difference of worlds between being reckless, going too far, and doing so on/with purpose. (The difference seems to control, or at least influence, a lot of statistics.) Jerry Ratbaum led, actually led, one of the last drug/sharing groups I had to do before I "found" Sisyphus with a couple thousand other people/folks outside his & Samantha's apartment in Brooklyn in 2036. He hadn't assisted-murder/suicided with Larry Fiskovitz for about a year yet, at that point. 

How do you start to summarize Jerry Ratbaum? You could say he was always, perpetually, in the throes of things. And he wouldn't acknowledge he was in the throes of things. Or if he could acknowledge he was in the throes of things he'd project all his built up complexes and animosity over the oldest, most insignificant horseshit a regular life comes prepackaged with (at least if you can logically & morally understand something like organic dharma) and tell you some horseshit about how You should do what he told you to and not worry about when and why and how Jerry Ratbaum was doing. 

He'd maintain this. 

He'd tell the same almost-nothing stories--as plenty of us like to do--and essentially just insist nobody really got them, what the point was: Why? Because Jerry was too smart for his own good. (His own good?) Jerry was some kind of double-reverse, anti-anti, washout of what could have been the start of what happy, content nerds (introverts) like me just think of being intellectual with some eclectic boundaries but careful to keep our hearts as decent as possible and not become robots in the process. 

That Robot Apocalypse people since just before the 2020s were anticipating, fearing, misunderstanding and actively rumoring until the Rumination actually started to happen and by the time Our Collective Society, good & evil all the way down...wound up fucking up something as altruistic & progressive as a Universal Basic Income... 

If Doomed Enterprises divide lives forever into the then & the now, surely Surveillance States can eventually render something, anything, like preserved Social Peace altogether impossible, or certainly close the fuck enough. 

Okay. I'm gonna try to remember the conversations as best as I can and tell you my memory is generally pretty sharp about these things, but you can't come after me and sue me for misleading you if I misremember some minor details. I'm not talking shit. I'm not gaslighting. I'm trying to say how far this nonsense has come and how much farther it's likely to go if we continue to let Mega Corporations dictate every aspect of our lives and some fuckhead like Robert Sapolsky telling everyone Free Will is an illusion isn't only going to continue undermining whatever chance is left to live up to some real ideals, if they're 200 years too late, or if we only get 200 years to enjoy and expand on them. 

So. 

Let me catch my breath. 

**** 

Okay. So, really, if we talk about life at all, there's at least going to be some passing mention of alcoholism, which inherently includes anger issues. Why people drink. How much they drink. Who gets an opinion. What takes priority. I'm still an alcoholic, now, in spite of I've had a more-than-decent string of years moving to ____.... I'm allowed to be random? Everyone where I am, now, seems to be encouraging it. Sometime in jail, since everyone I was around either already had tattoos or you were talking about what tattoos you were going to get or how many other tattoos you were going to add to the tattoos you already had. I thought up some beetle, or a bug like that but I'm not really sure of all the names (like other, brain things) and it has a paperclip in its mouth? Needless to say, I don't have any tattoos.  

How did He always start meetings? And who was the first person in History who started raising your hands? (In rehab, every single day gets organized like you're in grade school. And then some finally get alright-jobs as counselors.) (And this camp has been getting slightly larger, lately.) 

Okay. So you remember some variation of what was actually said or what was actually said and based on your emotions you measure different random-yet-associated things. Like, for instance, who said 'Hi' first. 

I wasn't trying to stab Him to death in the ribs with a pen. 

The police, way later, said, "It'll be alright." 

(It took long enough for that waste-of-life to die, though.) 

How do you explain Cassandra. "Cassie." That's hard. It's strange. You learn how things work. You learn how to move, better. You learn how to talk. Languages are increasingly arbitrary. How kids communicate? That's insane. I mean, literally insane. It's all actually based off of something called a mirror-brain. Society 101 stuff. Complex. Yet basic? 

At any rate, when we were going around the room/table, saying Good Morning, etc. etc. I pointed out/tried pointing out to: "Cassie," Cassandra, how her name was the...Prophecy of Doom Hero/ine. The one who was right who wasn't believed. Being any child who was born post-Millennial/after, Bruce Willis might as well have been the Thalidomide Kid. --Damn.... 

There's a dark trend among women, peculiar, insidious, of becoming villains as a in/direct result of being victims. It barely makes sense but it's very reasonable. They: have the same anger as men yet are deeply inherently possessed with other logic. As of this: I haven't heard strong enough cases of where the anterior cingulate cortex/orbitoprefrontal cortex determines higher executive function without/within the frontal lobe to suit my liking. They must be there. (Like he, our beloved, said, Search Me.) 

"It sounds like Randal hasn't been doing his homework," Jerry said--that was one of the first things that really started pissing me off. Seven (7) other people besides me and Him and I'm always the one who has to be the smartest, and yet I can't? Again, I don't mean violence is ever the best response... 

"I been walking away," said Boy Orange, who wouldn't give his real name beyond some mumbled, hurried whisper. 

"Randal sounds like some boyfriends I've had," said Corrine. (No one asked for clarification.) 

Two of the other guys, Kirk and Stan, I think, usually looked at me when they wanted/expected me to say something, right then. Since whenever I did I got into more petty trouble I didn't deserve to be in after I did that, I stopped doing that shit around the mid-2020s. (If it weren't for Baxter and them, I'm not even sure I'd be writing this.) 

"He does always have to be a little smarter," said Cassie. "It makes sense, but it also doesn't." 

"And that's what we must seize upon," said Jerry Ratbaum; He was sitting right next to her. 

"You eventually run out of ideas," said Stan Paulson. "It's indefinite, but it's also inevitable." 

"So what are The Right Ideas?" said, exclaimed Jerry Ratbaum for the 5th or 6th time in a 72-hour-period. 

"What are the right ideas," said Jamie Parks, who almost never spoke. (He also didn't glare, or ever once, in my personal recollection, ever speak at.) 

"Well, that's different for each of us," responded Jerry Ratbaum. "Mm-hm," added Corrine. 

"I mean, people used to own slaves," she said. 

You couldn't pretend that this didn't fuck up Cassie even more. If you saw her. 

"Wait...how are we incorporating slavery into this again?" 

"We're not actually talking about slavery," she said, playing with her long, dark hair like some counterfeit Egyptian Monkey Princess or whatever-the-fuck-ever. "Boys always make things about sex before they're supposed to." 

"Before we're supposed to?" 

"Now," said Jerry Ratbaum, of course, "we're all feeling a little tested, so let's just be careful." My eyes were perpetually scanning back to Cassie, I think, because maybe I thought if she said the right thing at some point, I wouldn't be getting talked-at and spoken-around by most of the people in a room with close-enough to a dozen un/consciously treating me like an angry spirit--but, of course, when you're her age you're still closet to being a kid than someone trusted/regarded as an adult at that point. Like, you have more expectations than responsibilities? (And a lot of it really does have to do with endocrines & chemicals: free will/executive function, included.) "Randal?" Jerry said. He put those childmolester eyes on me and it was like his voice would never, ever raise above certain octaves, no matter what he said, "We all have to eat a certain amount of shit in Life: just as a general rule," that voice that could freeze-up everything in your better, inner-ear, where you could still get at the wiser, more nuanced parts of ideas & words. "So when someone like Corrine talks about Slavery, it's very important that you not confuse that with sex, or something even more personal." 

"Ain't nothin' more personal than sex," said Boy Orange. 

Cassie looked like she wanted to ask him a question. 

I looked at him like I was pretty sure this man-twat of a fucking retard hadn't had his first-kiss yet--if he ever would. 

"So you treat it pretty seriously, then," said Stan Paulson, dry confidence in that way that makes a neutral voice sound really, really therapeutic. 

"Puh-shuhhgh," Boy Orange countered, "you ain't got no business asking me about that. You lucky I don' mess you up sayin' and talkin' like that." 

"You just brought it up," said Stan. 

"I didn' bring up nothin'. I'm just talking about what y'all are talkin' about." 

You could see Jerry Ratbaum looking at Boy Orange, studying him, his view switching from Boy Orange and the papers in front of Jerry where all our names were printed out so he could keep track of who & who said what from day to day to day... Jerry started looking at Boy Orange like He meant to memorize him, or as though He'd been witness to an actual Dinosaur emerging from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, or a tiny, unlikely/impossible creature had spoken thru the ether of nothingness & eternity, calling Jerry Ratbaum by name.... 

At any rate, the meeting finally wound down, and a couple days later, at our next meeting, is when I accidentally tried to kill Jerry with a ballpoint-pen I'd brought from home. 

In the very end, they wouldn't even call it "attempted murder" at that point because no way even an insane person or an insanely angry person could logically expect to finish, complete a murder with a fucking writing-instrument. Veritas numquam perit. Tomorrow's another day. 

I didn't expect anyone to take my side, exactly. They just tried to leave all the emotion out of what they finally could all agree on. There was a certain amount of blood. Just about everyone can spare a certain amount of blood, now & again. You have to be careful with the blood you keep in your body, or at least try to. That stuff can be important. 

Jerry could never hear someone tell Him to go fuck himself or eat shit without telling the same, overused virgin-jokes over and over, like someone who insists on not getting one thing and maintaining some obvious lie forever and ever, after? For all we know...at this point...He actually ate shit. I don't want to think about it. He didn't have to. No one made Him. 

They did make Him resign from His job a couple months later, after a couple nights in the hospital, Jerry answering some basic questions. I wonder what He must've looked like on the other side of the desk. Explaining how He'd got into such a fight/predicament. A micromanager's case/logic tends to unravel into naked entropy once it's put up/tested by another match of logic with superior kindness. There are actual studies anymore that demonstrate this: Oxytocin begins to nurture the executive function/decision circuits most closely related to the homunculus brain areas stored in the temporal/parietal lobes, and well-versed liars like Jerry practically shit their entire bodies out like stale pudding. It's almost the opposite of an amygdala-hijack: the body becomes drained of defensive strategies, and therefore compromises to wherever the pathetic mind can reach. 

Various counselors recommended Jerry get work as a cabdriver--since at least He could keep His driver's license after using His "professional" authority the way He did, and He'd still need to earn a little money if He didn't want to live in one of those massive, concentration-camp shelters in the Five Burroughs anymore or just be straight up homeless. 

He'd be dead within a couple years. 

I think we're meant to socialize with some of the people we're in groups with, but I pretty much gave up on that somewhere in the 2020s. You want to talk to people who've had the same sorts of experiences as you, but it seems like a lot of them are just a little too crestfallen or apathetic about their situation and what's happened to them. It bothered me for the longest time, especially when I was in living in Carmel, just before everything with Sisyphus...and I still don't know how much I believe in reincarnation or resurrection or any of that. I've certainly never seen a conscious being who I thought gave "permission" for the Universe to exist. I'll leave that up to the remaining Jerry Ratbaums of our suffering Earth to field. In maybe 500,000 years, when the tectonic plates have their way, by default or design (take your pick), and previously quiet volcanoes go to speak-up once more, and the ground is of proper condition to rumble, to tear its seams into debris, to make everything we now walk upon return to the indifferent sky and the furthest depths of oblivion, this will end in fire, eventually. Perhaps even moreso, first. 

****