I’m Not Right in the head
And If I Could Teach My Problems to Sing, It would Make the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Sound like a Kazoo. Really… It’s that bad.
I come from a long line of fairly crazy people, and by the time that bloodline worked it’s way down to the generation that raised me, the art of driving others nuts had been very well honed indeed… There is so much pathology in my family I could probably generate a 1,000,000 page document in an attempt to convey to you, my faithful readers the horrors of it all… But quite honestly I’m kind of lazy and also probably too scattered to make any real sense of it… Heck I’m not even sure where to start… Hmm… Being raised to questioning reality… Okay, I’ll start there.
Family Dynamics
I was raised by my Grandparents up the age of 2 or 3 because my mother was divorced and worked as a Go-Go Dancer…
Even after my mother married my step dad, my grandparents played a starring roll in my up bringing… My Grandmother had a PhD in Philosophy and My Grandfather was a high school drop out (Pay attention here to this educational duality… I think it is an important part of the insanity). Now aside from my grandmother thinking too much, she didn’t sleep so from a very early age it was drilled into me that sunrise was time to finally fall asleep… She was also Agoraphobic and wouldn’t leave the house. Now my Grandfather was sort of normal and worked as a carpenter but had a very complex and dry sense of humor that was just a little too mind bending to laugh at (Seemed like he was hiding something… Like an IQ of about 150+).
My mother was the oldest of 4 and so I kind of fit in like the 5th child raised with my two uncles (Both high school drop outs that later went on to work in the film industry) and one aunt that (worked very hard to behave normally but wound up with worse Agoraphobia than my grand mother had*).
Inflicted Identity Crisis. AKA: How to Brainwash a Generation
I also grew up thinking I was a Jew because that was what the whole family told me “The Jews that emigrated to America in the 1800’s to escape persecution“…
At least until I was about 30 when they explained I was actually Irish “The Irish that emigrated to America in the 1800’s to escape starvation” …
Well…
Now my surviving maternal relatives tell me we we’re Gypsies, “The Gypsies that that emigrated to America to escape…” So all I really know is we were running from something…
Inflicted General Confusion
My immediate ancestors / family consists of my Atheist Communist Mother that gave up Go-Go Dancing after marrying my Republican Christian Dad (step) and my younger brother that would often dress like a Catholic priest. Mom and dad hate each other but have been married for a solid 44 years… I left home at 16 and my brother split at 17… We both would have split sooner if my mother hadn’t kept calling the cops to drag us home every time we tried to escape prior to giving up on us.
… Both my brother and I went on to college and studied Psychology… All these years later I’m a Grease Monkey and he’s a Waiter…. We don’t talk much… I wonder if he’s figured out why he’s not right in the head yet… I know I’m still sussing it out.
The Quest for Sanity
My attempt at living a normal life was pretty much was screwed right out of the gate… Nothing about the world made sense to me and I’m sure the world was just as puzzled with me.
I was kicked out of high school because I was a “Constant Disruption” I questioned everything and would rant in class because I disagreed with the validity of the curriculum… The police even showed up to haul me off once because I flipped out in history over “what was being taught was BS propaganda”… This is kind how I wound up in College at 17… Held a 3.85 GPA even though I was drunk 80% of the time and intermittently on every illicit drug I could get my hands on.
I wound up in the nut house a few times and jail often before getting married at 21 to a girl that knew how to take charge of a lunatic… That marriage lasted for 5 years, she left me when I got sober, and up to that point she probably saved my life… This is where the tires met the pavement.
The first 10 years I was sober were a disaster of epic proportions <insert bad craziness story with out the aid of sedation here>. I did settle down again, got married again and had a couple of kids… This ended in coming home from work one day to find the refrigerator in the lawn, the kitchen cabinetwork scattered in the garage and two screaming kids covered in paint stripper… At least I wasn’t the one going to the Nuthouse this time. <insert $300,000 custody battle with a psychotic Xanex addict here.I got custody just before she managed to kill them so…>… life goes on. And yes… Wasn’t long at all that I indeed got married again and had two more kids…
The past 10 years I’ve spent a little more time reflecting and a little less time reacting… And I’ve settled into this groove where things are almost under control but still… Everything bothers me.
If it wasn’t for the fact that drugs and alcohol would mean certain death I’d go back to it in order to knock anther 20% off of my IQ so I just wouldn’t notice things are not okay… But I’m stuck with trying to do the right thing now.
No… I’m not crazy.
I’m sure that I would feel better if I was crazy though… At the very least I’d have an easier way to explain the all neurosis and eccentricities.
I know I’m strange and I have a fair grip on why I’m that way… I know that most of my “”problems” stem from this and all I’d have to do is not be so strange but I’d rather have my problems than their problems.
I don’t watch television for a myriad of reasons… Consequently I have no idea what anyone is talking about at least half of the time… Quit watching TV, and after a while you’ll understand what I mean here… People will think you are crazy because you are out of touch with the imaginary people everyone knows but you… Go figure. And then you will see that after 10 of 15 years you will have a much longer attention span than most of the population and because of that things that don’t bother them because it takes longer than 30 seconds to think through drive you nuts and you know there is no way to explain because you will lose them 29.9 seconds into the explanation.
This is one of the more complicated aspects of my tortured mind is that I have reasons for the odd things I do, and I know that they are “reasonable” but for most people the connection from reason to action is just too complex to follow… So I generally don’t even try to explain unless pressed into it, and then more often than not I’ll just make up some BS explanation that will fit into a fortune cookie…
And even if I could hold their attention for a whole minute and told the whole honest truth they just wouldn’t believe it, and do you know why? It probably is that they are the crazy ones.
Okay, I know I’ve left a whole lot out here, but if I survive… The holes will get filled sooner or later.
To Be Continued…