The Long Way Round

It turns out that when you don't have capital you have relationships. And when you need help with life, you can spend a relationship to stay afloat, however briefly. You spend a lifetime accumulating friendships and acquaintances so that one day, when you're in a tight spot, you can throw one of these under the bus and make it through hard times. Here's to the people who I burned to survive, and to the people who burned me to live, I understand.

 I grew up Jewish. I still am Jewish, without a doubt. But growing up it was a given that we were all Zionist too. We would rejoice in the fact that we'd been given a "homeland" on seized land by a failed empire, and were being propped up by its successor. It was our homeland, created so Europe could finally be rid of the Jews as a race without having to continue Hitler's dirty work. Now, they could have us do it for them against the Palestinians, remove us from Europe, and solve both problems. And then have a base to control the oil reserves from.  And we took the bait. Now we commit genocide, we have a made-up language superficially similar to our ancient one, we've eliminated Yiddish and every other non-Israeli Jewish culture (self-genocide), and legitimize it with the same justification that Europe used against us: "They have plenty of other places to settle, they don't need to be here". Only we don't settle them, we eliminate them. This is g...

I came from a broken home at a young age, which already predisposed me to abuse, and there were always plenty to go around. Our mother was always out working to support us or sleeping a few hours between shifts, and our father was rarely in the picture. So we had babysitters or weird roommates watching us, someone else's kids, not theirs. At some point I guess I figured out that getting attention for misbehaving is just as effective and a lot easier than for behaving. The US educational music scene is wind bands in rural areas. Wind bands are based on US military bands, specifically the Marine Band of John Phillip Sousa (I won the award with his name because I was so good at playing the game). Being a military tradition, the reward for success is corporal punishment and verbal abuse. The reward for failure is corporal punishment, verbal abuse, and an extra helping of both. But for the first time in life I could control the attention I got. I could skip class to practice, get abuse ...

I finally thought maybe I should start writing again. It's time for my next mid-life crisis anyway, so why not? So here's my blog, in its full high school teen angst drama even though I'm not in high school, or anywhere near one. But I've got some angst. Some drama. Even though right now things are pretty tranquil for a change, and I'm getting comfortable with that, too. Expect a lot of edits. I'm definitely working through things in real time, getting used to a new voice.