Wow: Three weeks have gone by since my last post on here! Apologies for that. I’ve been busy on Sincere American Writing, swamped promoting my literary novel about rebellion and literature, THE CREW, as far and wide as possible. People are liking the novel so far! One reader, also a teacher—I lovingly refer to her as my ‘de facto literary agent’—is trying to get the book injected into the bloodstream of academia. We’ll see. I’ve been getting solid Amazon reviews but I still need more. Buy the book HERE ($1.99 eBook, $13.99 paperback, $16.99 hardcover). If you buy and read it, please review, especially on Amazon.
MY NOVEL is also now available at BARNES and NOBLE!
Besides all of the above, life has been interesting, full of a weird mix of routine, boredom, excitement, love, devotion, [mini] crises, inner and outer struggles, expectations and realizations, disappointments and epiphanies, etc. (On and on, ad infinitum.)
My father has been dead 10 months, coming up here on April 2. I remember when I wrote a deeply painful, wildly personal essay about him when he was in the hospital with Pneumonia and worsening skin cancer six weeks before he died. June 2 will be one year since he died. One year! Lord how fast the time goes by.
My mother has been struggling. Of course she has. Ten months ago she lost the man she’d been married to for 47 years, and that after two hard, rugged years in the trenches, with myself, combating his brutal, complex terminal cancer. Immediately after Dad died Mom had to get both her knees re-replaced; they’d been done 20 years before, at age 53. Now they were in desperate need of full replacement. Six months later, after that had been done—I’d been the one going down to the hospital and helping her out at her house for days at a time; my older half-sister is absent despite living one hour south of my mother—it turned out Mom also needed back surgery for a severe slipped-disc. They did the surgery six weeks ago and she’s been slowly recovering since then.
My sister (13 years my senior, 54 to my 41) lives one hour away but hardly does a thing to help my mom. (This is changing very slowly.) So it all falls on me, just as it did with “our” father. My dad was not my half-sister’s biological father but he co-raised her starting around age 3. And yet she was almost totally absent the two years of his battle with cancer. Such is life. Clearly, I hold resentment around this. It's something I’ll have to fully face at some point. I know I need to forgive my sister, who has her own issues and struggles (such as my teenage niece’s serious suicide attempt in 2021 which landed her [my niece] in the hospital for three months where doctors had to rebuild her pelvis.) But I’m just not there yet. I’m still holding on to anger. I still can’t forgive.
My mom has never been more emotionally needy than she is right now. She lost her man. Her body is crumbling. She’s 73. To add insult to injury—and I’ll avoid the details here—she started a silly bourgeois “war” with her younger, narcissistic neighbors over the height of their mutual bushes which divide their property line, and the city is now involved. (She even got the cops called on her one day for purposefully blasting her music in order to piss off the next-door neighbors.)
Mom feels entitled and angry when it comes to the neighbors. Partially what I see is classic projection; she’s screaming at God for taking my father and the neighbors are convenient scapegoats. She’s retreated into victim-mode, saying that she’s a “single woman dealing with bullies and she can’t let that stand.” She’s not wrong, really. But all I see is a bright-glowing ego. Pride. To me, she sounds like a bitter child. But at least she started taking pot-gummies which seems to help with the physical pain due to her not being able to take her arthritis meds because these meds get in the way of the healing of her back surgery wound.
Tired yet?
Meanwhile, Britney and I are desperately trying to save money for the wild fever-dream which has become our Goal of Moving to Spain. We hired an immigration lawyer months back. We sent in our passports and are waiting for them to be renewed. And we’re slowly, slowly saving money. It seems like this never-ending financial cycle of expansion and contraction: We save some money, then we have to spend more money (or part of it) to pay for fill-in-the-blank. We have to do work on Britney’s house because we’re going to rent it out. (Because we need the extra income.) We have the usual vast array of bills to pay: Medical, psychiatric (for me), electric, car, phones, etc. It adds up. It’s exhausting. Yet we both feel excited about the future.
I also can’t help feeling some low-level anxiety about my mom. What if her body continues to fail her and she gets worse? What if something else unforeseen happens, getting in our way of going to Spain?
Then there’s the [cognitive] conundrum of living in Lompoc. Now, look. I know. I’ve bitched about Lompoc enough. We’re still very lucky: We’re living in a nice little two-bedroom house on the beautiful, mountainous central coast along Highway 1—PCH—with three uppity cats and a 15-year-old border collie we both love. Things could very much be worse in life. I get it: First-world problems. For sure.
And yet: I do not want to live here.
Britney is on the same page, of course, and she wants to go to Spain as badly as I do…but she’s also in a different situation. Her father was born in the former-hospital-turned-drug-rehab-building across the street from our house. Britney herself was. And her son, now 18, also was. Generations of her family go back to this town and this area. Not all of her three strains of family—mother’s side, father’s side, step-father’s side—reside in Lompoc, but a major chunk do. We can’t leave the house without bumping into someone she/we know(s).
That’s not to say there’s anything bad or wrong with her family. Actually, almost everyone in her family is exceedingly thoughtful and kind. They make me feel welcome. That’s a LOT more than I can say for my ex’s family. (Her father hated my guts because: 1. I wasn’t Jewish; 2. I had tattoos; 3. I’d once had a drinking problem; 4. Did I mention I wasn’t Jewish?
And it’s really nice feeling like I’m a part of a genuine family. My “family”—if this is even the most accurate word—is tiny, fractured, superficial and broken. Always has been, but especially now. They’re mostly scattered around the greater LA area, minus my persona-non-grata aunt who lives in New Zealand.
And yet: I also find it exhausting. I am a man of social ambitions…but also of solitude. There’s a reason I’ve lived so much of my life in many ways alone. Often, when I was younger particularly, I felt alone even when I had a girlfriend and many close friends. Now I feel less alone. I am married to a wonderful, complicated woman who also understands solitude and loneliness and the wonder of being silent and with yourself for big chunks of time. Solo backpacking has always been one of my top pursuits, and that tells you something important about my nature.
I’m also just a weirdo, and an artist/writer. Writers are their own breed of human animal. Sometimes I feel like an alien. Misunderstood is an easy word to use but that doesn’t get to the meat of it, the dense core. It’s more like I’m a freak of nature, but not physically or mentally; more like emotionally and spiritually. I tried to explain not too long ago to Britney that “real life” is more challenging for me than the average bear. Most people can just get up and go to work, pay the bills, raise kids, go on typical vacations, spend time with family and friends, etc. Not me. For me all these things are terrifying; they’re all a whole new alien terrain requiring courage, guts and stamina.
I get this feeling from my mom. More and more, as I get older, I see myself in my mother, both the good and bad sides. The good: Creativity, intelligence, loyalty, communication. The bad: Selfishness, anger, control, exaggeration, emotional neediness, creating mountains out of molehills, an inability to sometimes cope with life on life’s terms. But I do have a hidden engine which my mother, God bless her, lacks: I have self-awareness. My mom is steeped in denial. She always has been. I understand it. She didn’t really have a childhood. Her childhood was a story of desperate survival which culminated—in the 1960s—with two rough years in a public psych ward before becoming an emancipated minor at 17. Read my mother’s “novel” about her teens HERE.
My mother’s overreaction as a mother herself—reacting to her own mother’s tragic sociopathy—in turn helped oil the engine that was my own sordid story of sadistic sin. Such is the nature of the bastard beast: Life is cheaply mechanistic: A mother acts, a mother reacts, a son does the same. This is the way it works. Were I to have a kid—I won’t—he or she would certainly react against me and my flaws.
And so I don’t blame my mother for her survival instincts, her [psychological] self-defense mechanisms. She is what she is. I am what I am. I have forgiven myself, and her. I have done the 12 steps, changed my ways, and moved on.
Yet I also can’t help seeing my mother as a broken machine sitting on the side of the metaphorical highway that is existence. Instead of getting the machine (car) fixed, she has abandoned the thing and is miles and miles down the road on foot now. Me? I’m still driving the car. And so she and I are close and yet not close, and that’s probably going to be the way it is for the rest of her days. Without self-awareness; without a knowledge of your true self, you simply cannot change. That is a simple rule of human nature. Nothing changes without awareness first.
Which brings me to Britney’s father, who, ever since his ex of three years suddenly left him two weeks or so ago, has been riding his inflatable blue river raft down Denial River like my mom. And he’s rolling down some intense, harsh rapids. A week ago he called Britney drunk, crying, claiming that all his exes are “evil” and he’s just a nice guy who always gets the short end of the stick. To say it’s inappropriate that Britney’s 60-year-old father calls her drunk whining about his romantic foibles is an understatement. Britney feels frustrated and fed up with her father for this and multiple other reasons. He spoke to me a while back about drinking, recovery and AA, and he even stopped imbibing for a few days…but that window has now been smashed.
Britney and I have each other, and for that I am grateful. And we have the animals. We have a goal: Spain. I have writing and books. And I took a three day, two night trip to San Francisco/Oakland last week which was spectacular. I attended a “bestseller” Substack meetup in the Mission District of S.F. It was a lot of fun. There were perhaps 75, 100 people. I crashed with a new Substack buddy of mine in Sausalito. We stayed at the event for several hours and felt socially sated by the end. Taking these little mini-trips makes me feel at least a little plugged-in, as if I’m still at a minimum getting my hands around some vestige of culture and intellectual stimulation, which, let’s face it, Lompoc sorely lacks. (At least they’re selling my novel at the one local bookstore in town!)
There are more “problems” and things going on, but I’ll leave it there. It’s all fine, really. Real life is not Facebook life. Real life is often boring and slow and tumultuous and frustrating. Expectations are shattered. Disappointments are bumped into. People let us down according to our own hallowed (often unrealistic) standards. It’s when we can simply tap into the simple, basic truths of life that we can feel calm and free.
And as I said, I have a whole LOT to be thankful for. I’m not young anymore…but I’m certainly not old (41). I have half a dozen or so good, close friends. I have a beautiful, loving wife who wants the same big things in life as me. We have animals. I have writing and books. We are in gorgeous, coastal California. We have plans and goals. Dad is gone, but Mom is here, despite all her current emotional needs. (I am a needy person, too.)
When you really boil it all down to one white-gray paste, this thing called life is pretty spiritually nourishing. Does it always look exactly the way I think I want it to? No. Does that matter?
No. Not really.
I appreciate the honesty of this article. Particularly the part where you shared: "My sister (13 years my senior, 54 to my 41) lives one hour away but hardly does a thing to help my mom. (This is changing very slowly.) So it all falls on me, just as it did with “our” father. My dad was not my half-sister’s biological father but he co-raised her starting around age 3. And yet she was almost totally absent the two years of his battle with cancer. Such is life. Clearly, I hold resentment around this." This is such an underlying thing for most people (and so few people actually talk about it). The responsibility of caregiving elderly parents is so undefined, unclear, and undiscussed that I think maybe it might be because as a society America is slightly fearful of aging? I grew up halfway around the world and caregiving is assumed to be a communal responsibility (and everybody just does it, chipping in however way they can). And 1-hour drive away is not enough of an excuse to not partake. So it's a bit odd now to see how in the US, it's all upside down.
Congrats on the book!