Due to their racism, my parents sent me to a private school. The principal was some pompous fat ass Canadian Episcopal sadist priest who beat elementary age children with a hand paddle and a whippy cane with great relish. The horrible acts that would result in these beatings were, for example, whispering something to your friend in class.
Children of alcoholics adopt various behaviors to deal with their embarrassment. Because my father was an alcoholic I adopted the “class clown” persona, an ongoing desperate attempt to draw attention away from the humiliation. Class clown of course made me the whipping boy of fat ass. How stupid I was not to realize this quagmire I found myself in.
A sex scandal became public at that school when i was in my 30’s. 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. I was never sexually abused but I can’t speak definitely whether my oldest brother or my middle brother were (my personal home bullies). My oldest ate a revolver at 32 and my middle brother was with him and couldn’t stop it.
1 day our boy’s choir had a field trip to the beach (now I know why there was no girl’s choir). 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.
There were about 25 elementary age kids out there with probably 3 adults max supervising. Wind sprang up and the gulf started to get choppy. i was out on some raggedy ass float with some guy from the group that wasn’t my bestie just a random kid. I guess we started to feel like we began 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 felt like his whole body is on my head 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, nor had I figured it out for myself. 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 fucker, I don’t remember any discussion about whose float that was or any 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 where life or death is at stake. I swim down and away to come up for a breath. I came up gulping for air like a goldfish out of it’s bowl.
i surfaced 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 we get back to the beach. “ You are just hugely relieved to still be alive.
In school they try to teach you shit like Oedipus, myths, heaven, hell, whatever. I’m just the class clown. I found my role but that resulted in me missing lots of memos.
Here is Freud for anyone interested on the back of a postage stamp. Age birth to 4 years old-the primal. Sucking your thumb when moma’s nipple and bottle are not around. 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.
The Unconscious is a place, space, that you don’t control. You might get to understand it one day if you don’t die before figuring 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 ever again. Road rage. Gun. Knife. Baseball bat.
if anyone was still alive that was supposed to teach me this stuff they would be getting a stroppy phone call. All they ever taught me was to REPRESS, “what dark shit deep down?”. Don’t think about it, don’t 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 styrofoam floatie.
Even if you survive this shit you can’t believe it’s 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 someday.” I say the more you faced the abyss and prepared the best you could for it the more likely you are to live longer.
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 twice, 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 on or die or go back safe to the safe suburb.” 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 as 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 egos, id, and subconscious like a fragile egg 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 it’s an unconscious wish to get back to that 60-200 million home from which 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 fascinated but not sure why.
Here is my stab at birth and rebirth 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 your cards were dealt 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 sand 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/God, virtuous ones as you can. All my life the commodity fetish candy store has seduced me to consume as much stuff as I could afford to fill the emptiness and sadness inside me and hope to acquire social relations with these consumer totems.
Do some grad school. You might have a chance of 2 sides of an argument 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 id and ego under one supervisor. Someone wrote that life is so complex by the time you figure it out its time to die.
Build destroy, Build destroy,Build destroy,Build destroy,Build destroy,Build destroy,Build destroy.
vignettes 