In their racism, my parents were sucked into sending me to a private school where some pompous fat ass Canadian Episcopal sadist priest beat elementary children with a hand paddle and a whip cane with great relish. Because my father was an alcoholic I adopted the “class clown” option in a desperation to draw attention away from the embaressment he was for me. Class clown of course made me the whipping boy of said fat ass priest. How stupid I was not to realize this quagmire I had found myself in.
It did come out when i was in my 30’s that 2 priests and the choir master had been playing a bit of the old “chase me Charlies” for all those years. That’s politically incorrect speech from 50 years ago in England for gay boys and predators. Perfect, my oldest brother’s name was actually Charlie who was the eldest of 3 boys 4 years apart. I can’t speak definitely whether he was sexually abused or my middle brother (my personal home bullies). My Charlie ate a revolver at 32 and my middle brother was with him and couldn’t stop it.
1 day our choir had a field trip to the beach. Wet inflatables with sand sticking to them, us riding in a seatless panel van. That was nails on the blackboard for me.
In Florida that long ago we knew nothing about sunburn and skin cancer. Everybody just eating and drinking. If we were a tribe and i was running it 1 person would be assigned to constantly analyze if the distribution was even. For fucks sake, food and drink wasn’t invented 55 years ago and at age 8 no one was posting me up for that grown ass type of job. Everybody on cruise control.
Its about 25 elementary age kids out there with probably 3 adults max supervising. Wind sprang up and the gulf of Mexico started to get choppy. i was out on some raggedy ass float with some guy from the group that wasn’t a bestie just a random dude. I guess we started to feel like we were being sucked out to sea (we didn’t know what a rip current was, etc.). Suddenly, on a freaking dime, this other kid went 0-120 panic mode. At that second of time I was still trying to figure out the situational awareness picture and not panicking. Yet. Next second my brain registers that this kid is using me as his second float. I feel his whole body is on me and he’s batshit crazy.
At that point in my life no one had ever explained boundaries to me, physical, mental, emotional any of it. Of course I had no clue about social boundaries. The social, I would learn way later, is instinctual and learned. I’m starting to drown and I’m thinking “hold on now bitch, I don’t remember any discussion about whose float it was or emergency plans.” No collaboration was held yet this kid had seconds before me gone into “every man for himself mode” (another type of mind fuck). I remember cloudy green water and his foot on my head.
About 5 seconds into this nightmare I am thankfully forced into that flight or fight mentality with life or death at stake. I swim down and away to come up for a breath. I came up gulping for air like a goldfish out it’s bowl.
I surface one breath away from black out and I see 2 lifeguards coming out to get us.
In that situation you aren’t thinking I’m going to whip this kids ass when i get back to the beach. You are just hugely relieved to still be alive.
Ok put your seatbelt on were about to go Freudal. Not postal just Freudal.
Your’e in school and they’re trying to teach you shit like Oedipus, myths, heaven, hell, whatever. I’m just the class clown. I found my role but I missed the memo bad.
Here is Freud for anyone interested in a version that would fit on the back of a postage stamp. Age birth to 4 years old. The primal. Sucking your thumb when mom’s nipple and bottle taken away. Fetal position. Maybe you have to pass a giant shit and you don’t know if your gonna make it and when you do you are so proud of your triumph over that monster turd. Proud. Anal stage.
I’m no shrink but bounce with me. the Unconscious is a place, space, that you don’t control. You might get to understand it one day if you don’t die first trying to figure it out. The unconscious is that “lizard brain” that maybe someone explained to you. It’s 60 million years old. It’s where spiders and snakes live, that you just instinctively fear, or someone in your environment who doesn’t understand any of this. Someone yells fire in a crowded theater. Some other head case brings an AK to the crowded theater. You’ve never practiced for any of this, no one has warned you because if they did and you believed them you would never go out of your safe space again. Road rage. Gun. Knife. Baseball bat.
If anyone who was supposed to explain all this to me was still alive they would be getting a stroppy phone call from me. All they ever taught me was to REPRESS, not worry about any of that dark shit deep down. Don’t think about it, prepare for it, God has your back, fuck the devil. God was nowhere to be found when that kid was using my head as his floaty.
Even if you survive this shit you can’t believe its real, that it can happen again somewhere else. It can and It will. You put your head back down and go back to trying to figure out life again. Freud says the most important thing you can do for yourself is to “make friends with the idea that you are going to die some day.” I say the more you faced the abyss and prepared the best you could for it the more likely to lengthen your stay here.
I survived that. Faulkner would say I endured it. I would say I had to repeat this multiple times in my life before I really learned it once and for all, deep down. Nietzsche would say you will go through this over and over maybe just once, maybe 10 times. I’m in the 20+ club, the “you thought you were escaping to Sweden and when you get there you learn that there are 2 major Kurdish street gangs that control everything, your safety, no cops anywhere. You either adapt, survive and move back to your safe suburb or die.” Nietzsche’s metaphor is a sand castle: we build one, admire it, knock it down in orgiastic violence and start over again building a new one. Over and over until that last castle kills you for real, for good, empirically.
50,000 people die every year in the USA in car crashes. Same number of dead Americans the Vietnam war took in 10 years. That 50k is only 90-95% of car carnage. The other 90% are in wheel chairs, broken limbs, major surgeries, etc. Your vehicle is the belly of a crocodile welcoming you in. It is alligators, every spider and snake, every disease and cancer hoping you will come on in. When I was a freshman in high school a junior, who was our costumed mascot, got a brain tumor and was dead in 6 months. Mind fuck for a 13 year old. I had to process that shit with no warning and no support.
How you gonna raise your kids? Throw them in the pool and get that first near death experience behind them. Or are you going to cradle their tender little safe as a warm house boxed up egos, their subconscious like a fragile egg shaped snowflake? I wish i could trade in half of my former for half of that latter.
Why do people like to go to the beach more than the mountains or theme parks? I think its to get back to that 60-200 million year home, when we slithered up out of the slimy muck. The oceans are our placentas. The line on the horizon that we never reach is the earth’s womb. We just stand on the beach and stare at it as a home we are not quite familiar with.
Here is my stab at birth and rebirth days in Nietzsche’s eternal return to the same. Age 0-4, hopefully. then 4-8, 8-12-16, then 16 to 18/21. Best case scenario is 6 sand castles built and destroyed by adulthood. If they dealt your cards from the bottom of the deck add 20. If your life has been filled with ease and unearned privilege all laid out for you subtract 20.
What are other names for the castles? My first divorce. My child custody case. New kids with new wife. Parents die with all that stuff you never had the guts to ask them. Bankruptcy. You are steering your life vehicle through an asteroid belt trying to destroy the bad ones, the satanic, evil ones and collect as many good ones, Godly ones, virtuous ones. All my life the commodity fetish candy store has seduced us to consume as much stuff as we could afford and hope to acquire social relations we felt too intimidated to ask for without these badges of class. It was/is Gender neutral. Heavy on consumption and spending and leisure. Fuck the environment, it hadn’t been invented as a rallying point yet although somehow the industrial revolution started in the late 1700’s. Our contemporary canary in the coal mine was “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson in 1962. You are not the patron saint of doom goblins Greta no matter the social media winds at your back.
Do some grad school. You might have a chance that 2 sides of an argument will show up there. Get married. Start a family. Raise them (don’t just ship them off to school at age 6 and wash your hands).
Freud’s Id is too easy. That’s just pleasure to try to get you through your pain. Superego, is just all of it under one supervisor? Somewhere, somehow there is a dome cross fertilizing 100s of millions of Darwinian adaptations.
Build destroy, Build destroy,Build destroy,Build destroy,Build destroy,Build destroy,Build destroy.
I’m highly suspicious of the number 4. College, med school, get child to 4 years old, pair bond duration in our DNA is 4 years, and if you make it to the end of your life/marriage etc. you have crushed the 4 year cycle 10-15 of them. We tell ourselves we pair bond for life yet the actual divorce rate is 50% and most marriage/romances last 4 years. The other 40-50% are happy ish especially if they get to the empty nest and then go their separate ways.
vignettes 