I Hate Secrets

I got up early again this morning. There was no way I could roll over without extreme pain. I might as well get up. The humidity is so high that I was laying there sweating anyway. I can't afford to run the air conditioner. The pain is out of my control now other than taking OTC pills. They sometime numb the edges of it, but it never goes away. My appointment at the VA is still ten days away. All they've done so far is to give me higher dosages of the OTC medicines and tell me to come back in a year or so. They won't give me pain-killers that actually work for fear that I'll get hooked on them. What do they think will happen to me if I do? Get painful withdrawals? As if what I'm experiencing now is not painful? Sadists.

So, I was watching some weird documentary on PBS, and the pain starts crying for it's own predicament. Mentally, I'm detached to a large degree. As much as I can be. I'm watching my body cry for itself, and the fact that my poverty will prevent me from getting any relief from going to a doctor. It also prevents me from buying from the black market. The only source of relief possible in America. The country that has declared war on it's own citizens, and in particular, it's citizens that risk their lives to defend it in it's war again the world.

I don't really hold these views about the government. What I hate about the government seems pretty run of the mill. I don't like waiting in lines, but I don't know anybody who does. I don't like the medical profession's attitude toward helping people deal with pain, but I do think they cop that attitude because of political or religious interference.

I accomplished the first part of the song lyrics. I lived fast and played hard. The rest of the lines I'm probably gonna miss out on. In fact, I'm already past the stage when it might be said that I died young, and it's a pretty certain that i won't leave a beautiful memory. Not because I've been so terribly mean, but because of the one statement I get from people more often than any other, "You make me think." along with, "What I like about you is ___?"

I kind of don't believe them any more. I used to. I took it as a compliment, and their comments used to inspire me to try even harder to make them think even more. That was stupid. I'll allow that I make people think. It's just a little talent of mine if the results are positive. I just don't believe people like me because I make them think. Au contraire.

Currently, I think my propensity to make people think makes them afraid of me. It hasn't tempered with age. Sarcasm combined with gray hair and sagging wrinkled skin seems to make the usual suspects even more afraid of me because I'm purportedly wiser. My wisdom doesn't require age or experience to develop it. The kind of wisdom I attend to can be had at a very early age. There be prodigies espoused to this sort of wisdom.

It's eerie and unearthly. I enchant people with the beauty of it's unusual logic, then build their hopes up of acquiring it easily for themselves, and subsequently and deliberately dissemble right in front of them to show it's faults and inborn flaws. Otherwise, they cannot make it their own. What scares them is that for them to give it away in the same manner they acquired it requires them to dissemble too. Dissembling is a hard act to follow.

I first encountered the term "dissemble" in the story of Prince Chi in the Yellow Book. I knew right away that I didn't have a clue what the term meant in the context the authors of the comments in the I Ching used it. The closest word I was familiar with then was disassemble. These two words are similar in meaning. Dissemble most often refers to mental states of being. Particularly in regard to integrity (or not) of care-actor (character).

Prince Chi, in this story, was the eldest son of King Wen, who along with his four younger brothers were held hostage in the court of the tyrant who had defeated them in war. This was a very perilous situation they all needed to escape from as quickly as possible. King Wen couldn't leave because of the repercussions it would have on his countrymen, and Prince Chi couldn't leave his father due to his duty as oldest son. The younger brothers escaped in one way or the other, but the only was Prince Chi could survive was to feign insanity. He pretended to have dissembled his integrity by portraying a person reduced to an animal state and didn't act like he cared about what sane people care about.

One of the ways my father worked his way through college (he didn't graduate until he was thirty-three) was to work part-time as an attendant at the state hospital for the insane. This was a long time before the medical profession had anti-depression drugs to chemically calm people down. He frequently told me of how he and the other attendants would gang up on a particularly uncooperative patient and beat him into submission using soap melted into a sock. It didn't leave open wounds. He told me that and other stories about his cruelty to animals to frighten me into obeying him. I didn't understand why he felt like he had to do that. I worshiped him. He was my father.

I emulated Prince Chi decades before I became aware that his response to evil was a classically legitimate way to survive.

In some way I'm satisfied I committed myself to the state hospital to spite my father. the thought of what the attendants might do to me must have been very stressful for him. He knew what he did, why would things have changed? In some way I felt driven to find out if I could survive what he had done to others. Committing myself to the insane asylum was like stepping off into the abyss. I felt like I had to prove to him that I could and would survive the worst he had to offer. I didn't want my own children to have to go through that. The fact that if I raised them would have required it as much of them as it did of me.

Like Everyman, I eventually became my father. My children have never been around me enough to learn my despicable ways. Blood tells, but there is so much more to it than that. My father's father died when I was two years old. I never knew the man enough to love or hate him. I reckon I sort of hate what he passed on to my father for him to pass on to me, but he wasn't there for me to love or hate.

The possibility that he was the love child of his oldest sister still lingers. That could have easily have happened back then in Mississippi. That thought just crossed my mind recently. If true, whether he found out about it or not, it could have stood as his reason to be so violently oriented. I didn't know his oldest brother, my only uncle on my father's side. He was eighteen years older than my father. There was bad blood between them. The family stories suggest it was over me. Whatever it was, my father never took us to visit his brother nor would he permit his brother to visit us. My father never talked about him much at all. Secrets. I hate secrets. My mother was even more secretive than my father.

I may create another blog to write of things I don't even write about here. I'm not all that sure writing my history is all that therapeutic, at least it anonymous to some degree, and mostly unread besides.