honky tonkin…

another oldie from the vaults, written when I seem to have been feeling a bit bitter about a (then still living) family member…

Rough and rowdy ways? I can hear the stubies tumbling around the flat wooden top, rolling to the floor as I suspect that you would also, once enough have wobbled across this top, the long wide table of your meals, you sitting as a guest at the supper of some great duke and dame who failed to show up. The feeling of a lifetime of desolation, the self pitying stem rot of all around abandoning you, you whom of course began the abandoning, if it could be said that you were ever close enough for your leaving to be abandoning…

You spend your years… long though they seem, they also go by without your counting, for how are you to tell them apart, do you even want to? All year, you return to your spawning grounds, always back the same route, blindly, your only thought a subconscious need to return and to avoid anything on the way. back to the ground of your death, every minute you lie within is another moment that you have avoided the pain and responsibility of living, doling out that pain to whomever is so foolish as to remain within your reach. those who abandon you by refusing to do so, whose love is the only ammunition you have to prove that you are not loved whose strength for you is the source of your strength to lift yet another half dozen beers this day.

Still though, knowing and living this life, we won’t let you off that easily. Whether we like it or not, you are a part of us and one does not let a part of them wither no matter how unpleasant. you, of course, gain whatever kind of enjoyment you have from us, which is not a service that we are pleased to provide, though now that we have refused to continue trying to give you help, it is only fitting that we provide you with something since you provide us with that which we would rather not have; a basis for making our own lives seem plentiful and organized no matter what befalls us, at least we have not sunk to your pitiful, yet no longer pitied state.

We know that a lucky end will find you dead of cirrhosis in a county hospital, that more feared and more likely end of dead in the gutter being the other range of unfitting wasteful endings to any ones life. We know that our personal visits with death will be in more pleasant surroundings under more satisfying conditions, always thinking well, we made much better use of our one time around here then that old dear, such a waste. Like you say of a child whose youthful ways have doomed their future in society… You, though far removed from childhood, are in a never ending struggle to ensure that you remain a waste. we have all sent chances your way, generally costing us something in the bargain, no more, dear sir, we are done with you, like a brick wall built outside our window, the attempts to stop it from happening have long ago failed and now even complaining has lost its sick satisfaction.

So I say “toast to you”, yes, let us all toast to you in your ever present absence, why the hell not, it should be celebrated when one finally strikes rock bottom, enters their life phase of “it cannot get any worse”. if that be true, then what have you got to lose, damn the torpedoes, the kitchen sink even,

we will even pick up the tab on this round, that was always your favorite kind of drink wasn’t it, another way for you to burn someone behind their back later…

maybe envy is all that we feel though. we live in an at least subtle fear of our encroaching death, that which makes everything we’ve ever done, every thought that we have ever committed an act of pointless forgotten self aggrandizement, ashes to ashes the point where we are all equal, where it becomes apparent to all the worthlessness of all the the loves, fights opinions that we have ever had. you though. do you fear death? will you even know the difference once it is upon you?

Once you have gone, you will probably be the hardest of all for us to forget, why? I do not know, I sense that it is true and that decades after your death we will be pondering it with our last minutes as the beeps getting farther and farther apart, curse of the drunkard? the final punch line to gods most horrendous and evil joke? our just rewards maybe? but for which? for not trying to prevent your failure? For trying to hard? just for the hell of it? one must have faith, we cannot judge gods evil ways. Though I begin to feel that you will rest, half drunk and the other half asleep in an eternal tavern while we will be feeling the burning suffering of our own judgments striking us back as we are all chained together in a circle, covered in blood, beer and shards of glass, shadowy strangers continually running into us, trodding upon our feet and dragging the shards across our skin so deep that they emerge out the other side only to be crushed upon us again from the other direction..

Yes, dear sir. I sit here quietly, gazing across the table at you, your words wash over me for the hundredth time, your breath has become like an old pain, it only disturbs me when i think about it, so much of its vile essence has become lodged in my nose over all of these years that i can barely smell at all. i sit and i stare and i nod and i grunt. do you even know that i am here? do you have any inkling what uncomfortable paths my minds wanders along as it blocks out your every word? no. the path of your thoughts varies none, never even veering in the direction of what someone else might be thinking. you know (you think) that we all hate you and that is all the thought that you give it. you don’t even care enough to think that anymore.

Always though I fall into this trap. I still want some kind of acceptance, I want you to reach across the table, not for the sandwich that you never reach for and not for your beer, assuming that you would ever put it down, but just to touch my arm, subconsciously and for no reason other then to cement that connection that we have never felt, that you have never felt with anyone, though as all of your old acquaintances die off you lament their going as if they, who ever they might be, had always been the one you could count on when the chips were down. me though, us though, those who have, in our own ridiculous way cared for you all of these years, will never get such kudos from you, a posthumous glory reserved only for those that you barely knew. I stare at your hands, trying to avoid the remnants of humanity that hang from your face. My loathing of you and disgust with your being is intermixed with a desire to grasp you with all of my might, to wrap you in my arms as you cry away your evil and your regrets to finally become the sad old man who is the grandest dream that we have for you at this point, someone who the grandchildren won’t be afraid of or laugh at. but would that happen? or would I open an entirely new flask of poison that you could douse me with until your dying day, and beyond like all of the other venom that you have lodged in my heart, never going away, always in remission to remind me. I, your begotten one, am of you and, as such, I should never be allowed to disown the part of me that is you. not that there is any chance of that, all of my moments are filled with hopes for your death and fears of your death. A desire to be at last free of this nightmare, yet a fear of what my future would bring if this all were to end like this. we all live within the shell of how we will live with ourselves once you have died, like little gods, we hope and pray for your redemption on your death bed, your redemption is the key that will free us seek whatever happiness and fulfillment that we may have ahead, without your forgiveness (for what I ask), we will never be free, even if we live many lifetimes beyond yours.

A study in contrast, at the same time that you make all of our actions seem great success, you prevent us from ever feeling satisfied or complete. You bring us feelings of having it all and having nothing, a whole family of Job’s, a test with no correct answers. to what do we owe this? to our reluctance to let you go, of course, how could we ever? This is guilt by association. I should strike you down right on this spot. take every ones fear and guilt upon myself, commit myself to a damnation that will be my destiny either way, but free the rest of us. The beacon of my crime and hidden generosity would distract the others as I rotted away, serving your sentence for all of us. the cigarette I hold seems so much more potent, I imagine it to be covered in rust, it’s coal to be the red hot end of a true coffin nail, a physical manifestation of second hand smoke as I lunge across the table spilling that damned final beer of yours on the floor as I grasp around to the back of your neck and plunge the nail so deep into your throat that it digs a pit in my own finger as it tears out the back of your neck, bringing your blood into me for the second and last time. my hatred of your crimes against us has brought me to crime against you, just as my hatred of your drunkenness has brought me to my own daily need for drunk. like father like son, you salty bastard you, the immunity you have for our pain just causes us to have feel your own all the stronger. our consideration of you is our condemnation of ourselves. the only thing worse then dying while feeling unloved is too die actually being unloved, and that is a fate that we would not let befall even you.

In my dreams, I am a child. Blue jeans rolled up, baseball cap, slingshot in my back pocket walking downs the streets where you were a boy, looking for someone to play with, looking for you. What would it have taken to divert your life’s path, friendship? Communication? Moral support from Ma and Pa? I had none of that and here I am, was what you needed a drunken louse of a father to teach you what you don’t want to be? well you had that as did I but I guess that we had different takes on the lesson to be learned there.

In my deepest suspicions, you feel like we are worms… your obliviousness to our state seems apparent, yet all too apparent is our constant harassment, always at your feet, in your way, popping up wherever you look, you feel that we may have some purpose so you want to leave us alone, just leave us in that back closet of things you see but that do not make it to your fogging cognizance. but we give you no leave, we are not silent but you are unaware of our sounds, drowned out by the thought assassins of your own malefence thoughts, so many of which that we do not need to read your mind for we can see the thoughts and the hate oozing from your nose and your eyes and between the gritting grinning ramshackle wall of your teeth, like the plague, your evil emits through your pores, leaving its trail like the slug of anti-life that your soul is… coursing about waiting to stumble into enough beer that your peaceful melting away will finally occur, nothing but creepy trails of slime for people to remember you by.

Home now I drive, if I can call anywhere home. I think I felt that once, but now it just seems a shelter from the outdoors. When your mind is filled with thoughts, sometimes even your senses cannot get through. Another way in which I have deprived myself of my life as penance for you depriving yourself of what it is that we think you should have.