Mike Burr - log

[Charlemagne] I no longer care what you think about me (part 2)

It's hard to put something like that in practice. I imagine facing you and saying it to your face. I imagine writing it in an email to cleanse my sole or someshit. But it's a real bear of an upgrade to put into production.

You may not know, but a father has enormous leverage over the way his child "thinks". When you have a confused definition of the word "think", say, you don't really recognize the humanity in other people at certain times and under certain conditions, that leverage can be profoundly abused. On accident, I guess.

Your five year old does not want to think of himself as a little hopeless turd. He wants to think of you as a capable, generous, judicious person who will bestow upon him your sweet, sweet approval. If that gets used in a "constructive" way (that is, shaping another person's mind) it can start to seem like a carrot that's dangled out of reach forever and ever. And you are on a treadmill and the stick keeps coming over and over, because, in comparison to such-n-such you are such a little embarrassing turd of a son. Or you are treading on becoming one of the Most Hated Demographics if you don't loudly declare such-n-such. It's just a simple blood oath, it won't hurt at all.

It hurts like a motherfucker and it starts to feel like a brain slug that will not leave your skull. Constant self-disapproval, built right in for convenience! Keeps me off balance. Doesn't let me get above my station.

It's hard not to just rage. But I think I recognized something very important.

The problem is all mine to fix.

I've said this infinity times, and I've told myself I believe it infinity times, but it really just does not want to sink in.

I don't know, I had a "feeling" today (you get those, right?). It really is just all pointing in my direction and it's always been mine to address: you are just a rando guy who's a little fucking crazy like the rest of us, but you've got a very large and very fragile ego, and you also know how to give that knife a twist, if it looks like I'm gettin' all book smart and libril. Everything you like is stupid. Behold! Airplanes!

You missed out. And I think that's part of your bitterness. If I was was touring the U.S. Marine Corps Ballet troupe with my "transitioned" partner and was smoking loads of cannabis to treat my PTSD from Operation Enduring Freedom... I suspect you'd be quite proud of me (If I have all the opinion math right). If I worked at a truck stop as a diesel mechanic, secretly dallied with "nigger whores" (hello, admin) and wrote Skinhead poetry secretly, I suspect again, you'd be quite proud (some terms have a zero coefficient).

But living in my own skin and finding my own way in the world, and falling in love with ideas and exploring different experiences and people and trying to understand what it's all about. Well, that is hipy-querfagit-libril pusy-ass shit. That doesn't have an an ounce of real manhood in it. [Why? Because I exist, that's why. Coulda drown him in a sack if it weren't for those meddling librils.]

After all, if you're not around to tell me what to think, how am I to make the right decisions? Hmm? Just guess and check with you later?

It's me that constantly invents theories to explain all this. It's me that doesn't understand that, far from superman, my dad is kind of a piece of shit, on the "regular joe reckoning" spectrum. This will never become general knowledge because, again, zero coefficient ("seeecret").

It's only something you really let out of the cage when you're all alone with maybe just one or two family members. You can make loud pronouncements about what should happen to demographic X or Y, with great detail. It amounts to a "spanking", but sometimes it's lethal. Let's not dilly dally, it's always lethal, it's just a question of the extent or severity of the pain.

And these are just pronouncements, mind. It's not something you're supposed to respond to. "Should be run out of town on a train." Um...ok. No comment?

I've gone ranting again, haven't I.

The bottom line is, it is my goal to not care what you think. You're just a regular guy with a lot of loud opinions. Explaining that is a much more difficult problem. My only objective needs to be, snip the threads that bind.