What I Never Want To Be

I remember when my parents were married. Two twenty somethings, tension, like walking on egg

shells. I'm digitizing all of these old tapes for my mom for Mother's Day and I'm thanking God how much therapy and communicating helped me. My parents divorced when I was 5, they were so unhappy and so much better off. My mom really tried. My dry drunk dad failed to communicate with my mother. He chose to scream and yell, break shit, and force feed me stringbeans instead of having a conversation. Mom reconnected with her high school sweetheart, innocently, one of the tapes is my dad filming a BBQ at my stepdad's house. Group setting. Totally kosher. I watched hours of video that appears to be happy but it's not, I was born and that VHS camera clicked on.... the sheen started to fade, they had my brother, cracks started to form. I don't know that my parents were ever actually friends.

I saw the light come back to Mom's eyes when she and my Stepdad were catching up. My parents divorced shortly there after, Dad moved out, Mom moved to Stepdad's, I got to be the new kid in town, Dad moved back into the house that Mom moved out of. When Dad was a bachelor, he lived like me, except without sex, drugs, rock and roll or friends. He weaponized my brother and I against our Stepdad... couldn't let go of it, would seethe with rage at times. So much done by Dad to twist the knife into my mom. My stepfather, God bless him, that dude never ever gave up on me. I love that man so much. He makes my mother so happy.

My life is solitude and squalor playing aggressive rock and roll with my miscreant friends and that elates me. No dependents. All of my friends have kids and a nice house, they're settled down and they're happy and I am so happy for them. I don't have a fear of missing out on that life. I have an immense fear of that life. The first 25 of mine weren't an experience I feel to relive in any role or timeline, ever again. A lot of therapy brought me here, It's been a long road.

Because of how I was raised, I have a real problem with people from that or any generation who try to be authoritative with some threat of violence. I have immense aggression towards them and their piss poor views on mental health and prosperity, and now that they're mostly old I could beat the shit out of them, but that's something I'm working on. With every fiber of my being, I strive to not be like the male role model I had for the first 21 years of my life. That intense hostile nastiness, that's what I work to this day to undo. I double and triple down so hard on being this shithead asshole character everywhere and anywhere, for entertainment purposes, and people laugh, but its the tears of clown for me, a reminder of what I never want to be.

After all of this therapy, I do my best work alone. I'm not boyfriend material, I'm not husband material, I'm not father material. I am friend material.