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muckefuckTo help sort through my thoughts before making my remarks at the service on Saturday, I've been posting reminiscences to Facebook. This is the unexpurgated version of my draught for yesterday. (The parts I omitted are those between curly braces.)
Of course there's a lot more I'm leaving out. My reaction in '91 was informed by the fact that, a few months earlier, my older brother had a violent episode which resulted in the cops being called to my house. He'd been arguing with our mother (who was the locus of his rage for the first several years of his psychosis) and ended up grabbing her in such a way that her ear piercing tore and she started to bleed. Bourgeois to the core, she worried about getting blood on the couch so my brother decided to get a knife and slice himself in order to get more blood on it. So it was with this in mind that I tackled him when he was yelling a foot from her face.
The other big omission is the fact that, at some point in our teens--and even before his psychotic break--the "fights" crossed the line into real abuse. I remember one particularly dreadful day when my parents were out and he was raging at me and my sister, who were both cowering in the living room afraid that if we tried to move he'd hit us again. Something similar happened a few years later at our place in Clayton when I was lying on the couch and told him to "hypospaz", outraging him further, which suggests to me that there were more times that I'm forgetting if not actively suppressing.
It's not a pleasant thing to bring up when someone passes, but all of us leave a complicated legacy. I've never really dealt adequately with the terror of those years but maybe it's something I can work on now when I start grief counseling.
Speaking of my psychic state, I did get out of the house on Saturday. An acquaintance was having a gallery show that I know he really really really wanted folks to come to and I used that as leverage. It was totally worth it on its own merits; I knew he was creative and had good technique, but until this show I never knew he had such range. I was very tempted to buy a few pieces. There were exactly 666 of them, so I'll need a return visit to really take them all in properly.
From there, I had a birthday party to attend. The invitation said "snacks" so I went and had a walleye dinner at Glenn's. I needn't have bothered; the honoree is lace-curtain Irish from upstate New York and had prepared enough food for a small army, which we were not. When he offered me CostCo brand whiskey, I half-jokingly said, "I'd take something better if you got it" and he opened up a bottle of Angels' Envy. For party favours there were mini bottles of banana-infused cognac his partner had made.
When I was well in my cups, I textedbunj, saying "I know it's a selfish thing to say but I hope you end up speaking at my funeral and not me at yours". He floated the suggestions that we both write our eulogies in advance and seal them up, but knowing someone had done that, how could you not be tempted to peak?
All brothers fight. Well, maybe there are exceptions, but it was commonplace in our generation at least. Mark was only a year older than me, which brought us into conflict a lot. A year makes a big difference physically when you’re young so I always lost.
I can’t remember what started this one argument when we were in elementary school but it ended with us dividing our room exactly down the middle with masking tape. Even the dresser was precisely bisected (because I guarantee M. got out a ruler and measured).
Even our pets fought. He had a gerbil named “Fred”; mine was called “Chipper” because of what she did to paper. After researching how to do it properly, we carefully introduced them to each other with the goal of having them share one aquarium.
It worked at first but one day we awoke to find Fred laid out stiff with a bloody gash. Shortly after, Chipper died without a mark on her. We decided it was a murder-suicide. Our garter snakes died, too. At least, that’s what I said. M. maintained that they were only sleeping and what really killed them was my unilateral decision to toss their bodies into the gangway from our second-storey window.
Eventually I figured out that the only way to best him was not to fight at all. M. had a short fuse {(like our father; I, like our mother, can carry a simmering grudge till Judgment Day)}. If I taunted him until he struck me first, he’d be the one our parents would punish. [Kids, don’t ever do this to someone; it’s shitty.] This became less effective as we got older and Mom and Dad expected us to settle our differences without their intervention.
The last time we fought was the only time I beat him. It was 1991 and I was back with the family after a year abroad. Back then he was prone to violent outbursts due to his disease and at one point got too threatening {towards our mother} for my comfort. I pounced and put him in a wrestling hold. He tried to laugh it off afterwards—“You had me in a full nelson, didn’t you?”—but I didn’t find it funny.
Fortunately, we eventually found more effective drugs. For the last three decades of his life, he was the least aggressive person I knew.
Of course there's a lot more I'm leaving out. My reaction in '91 was informed by the fact that, a few months earlier, my older brother had a violent episode which resulted in the cops being called to my house. He'd been arguing with our mother (who was the locus of his rage for the first several years of his psychosis) and ended up grabbing her in such a way that her ear piercing tore and she started to bleed. Bourgeois to the core, she worried about getting blood on the couch so my brother decided to get a knife and slice himself in order to get more blood on it. So it was with this in mind that I tackled him when he was yelling a foot from her face.
The other big omission is the fact that, at some point in our teens--and even before his psychotic break--the "fights" crossed the line into real abuse. I remember one particularly dreadful day when my parents were out and he was raging at me and my sister, who were both cowering in the living room afraid that if we tried to move he'd hit us again. Something similar happened a few years later at our place in Clayton when I was lying on the couch and told him to "hypospaz", outraging him further, which suggests to me that there were more times that I'm forgetting if not actively suppressing.
It's not a pleasant thing to bring up when someone passes, but all of us leave a complicated legacy. I've never really dealt adequately with the terror of those years but maybe it's something I can work on now when I start grief counseling.
Speaking of my psychic state, I did get out of the house on Saturday. An acquaintance was having a gallery show that I know he really really really wanted folks to come to and I used that as leverage. It was totally worth it on its own merits; I knew he was creative and had good technique, but until this show I never knew he had such range. I was very tempted to buy a few pieces. There were exactly 666 of them, so I'll need a return visit to really take them all in properly.
From there, I had a birthday party to attend. The invitation said "snacks" so I went and had a walleye dinner at Glenn's. I needn't have bothered; the honoree is lace-curtain Irish from upstate New York and had prepared enough food for a small army, which we were not. When he offered me CostCo brand whiskey, I half-jokingly said, "I'd take something better if you got it" and he opened up a bottle of Angels' Envy. For party favours there were mini bottles of banana-infused cognac his partner had made.
When I was well in my cups, I texted
bunj, saying "I know it's a selfish thing to say but I hope you end up speaking at my funeral and not me at yours". He floated the suggestions that we both write our eulogies in advance and seal them up, but knowing someone had done that, how could you not be tempted to peak?
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