Despite the general tone of my last post, I didn't intend to convey the idea that I might have wanted my relationship to end. I was hot under the collar, as it were. Despite misgivings in the past, for all intensive porpoises I wanted my relationship to continue on for a long time. I think. Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes I was like OMFG REALLY BITCH?, especially toward the end here, but I'm totally digressing.
That said, I totally got dumped last night. Over the phone! At least the three times prior that I dumped her, I did it face to face. Twice. One time it was over instant message but that was the "Uh I cheated on you, ah... hah? :\" kind of break up and I was at work and I mean come on, listening to a girl cry is such a waste of time. I guess you could say that this whole being dumped thing is bittersweet... in that I totally deserve it. It's especially funny because her reasoning is the same "I don't even really want to see anybody else, I just feel like I don't appreciate you, so I think maybe I need to be single," bullshit I used to feed her when I actually meant "I want to go and try to find someone better than you 'cause you're not really cutting it right now, honey." So that's... whatever that is.
There's a lot of perks to being single. I'd been thinking about writing about them recently because of how bizarre it is that I was pretty much totally over the idea of being single. It's funny that the second I'm kind of like, "You know what, a good three or four years of this might be nice, let myself age on the shelf like a fine wine"---which isn't to say I was just going to age my girlfriend and then ditch her for greener pastures... just, if, you know, she didn't age to the same fine quality I plan on getting myself to---I end up getting dumped.
What's also annoying is that she got nearly two and a half years of almost consistently free meals out of me, and then once she gets a job I get maybe two weeks. Two weeks for my two plus years I put in. What a fucking lousy investment. If I've learned something from the incredibly & disappointingly large number of failed personal relationships I've had with women, it's that if you start your relationship with a job and then lose it, you've got about two months before your woman flips the fuck out and dumps you. (And if you start your relationship without a job you've got about 8 months of fucking hell on earth until she dumps you.) Sometimes they say "It's not about you not having a job!" but it's a subconscious thing, uncontrollable. When she was unemployed I was thinking about dumping her all the time, and I only actually did it some of the time.
Yesterday a reddit thread made me realize something I knew deep down but hadn't ever realized before: I don't have any good memories of my parents. When it comes to my mother, it's as simple as that: I can't recall a time when she appeared to be genuinely happy, and I can't really think of any times where I actually had fun with her, as a child. Neither can I remember any occasion in which my mother really made me happy---unless it was when she gave me something she bought for me, which was often and in retrospect didn't really make me all that happy.
With my dad, however, it's not just that I don't have any good memories, it's that I seem to have a cache of bad memories. It started on reddit when I made a comment about how my parents are pin traders at Disneyland and I said that they have nothing else in their life. Someone replied that "if you feel that way about your parents maybe you should spend some time with them."
I was shot back: Nah. My parents didn't spend any time with me as a kid, so as far as I'm concerned they can go fuck themselves. Story time! One of my earliest and most vivid memories of my father is when I came up to him with a fist full of Ninja Turtles action figures. "Daddy," I said. "Play ninja turtles with me?" He responded: "Sorry kid, but I don't have any imagination," changing the channel on the TV and ignoring me.
From there I started scrolling through other memories of my father: when I was young we three (mom, dad, & me) walked up the street to get ice cream. On the way back, a stray dog started to follow us. I, of course, wanted to take the doggy home. My dad, on the other hand, didn't, and started clapping and shouting at it. We were just on a sidewalk right next to a busy street, so finally when my dad startled the dog enough, it ran out in to the street into the path of an oncoming car. It didn't even get killed by the car, right in front of me, no. Its back half got crushed---as my dad forced me to walk away as if nothing happened, I watched over my shoulder as the dog drug itself by its front legs to the other side of the street where a hopefully much nicer person was.
I remember countless nights I couldn't fall asleep for elementary school the night before because my dad got his feelings hurt and decided to hold "family meetings" in which he would scream at my mother and my two sisters for hours. I was never really involved, I just got to peer around the furniture into the living room and see him red faced. I don't remember what any of those were ever about, but the one I do remember makes me even more angry at him.
Around the time I was about to graduate from elementary school my father had started snoring very loudly. It was so loud that my mother couldn't sleep next to him because she would just keep waking up. She'd even put in ear plugs and it didn't work. So eventually she started sleeping in my bed, across the house, next to me, or in one of the other beds in the house. Apparently this was too psychologically damaging for my father, so he held a "family meeting" that consisted entirely of him screaming at my mother about how awful it is to "have a wife who won't even sleep next to you". Nevermind the fact that it was for a totally justifiable reason---and even if it wasn't, I wouldn't have wanted to sleep next to my dad anyway because of what a raging prick he is.
I remember getting into the minivan in the mornings before class and asking my mom why she doesn't just leave him. She couldn't really give me an answer back then (I was maybe 10 after all) but I realize now it was probably because she hadn't worked a job in 20 years and couldn't imagine going back to a life that didn't revolve around being alone all day doing laundry and watching soap operas.
Stray dogs aren't the only thing my dad kills in my memory. Used to have a black dog named Bandit, and to take him to the vet my dad wouldn't just let him ride in the cab of the truck, he was a dog, so he had to be tied into the back of the truck. My little kid self always thought this was terrifyingly dangerous, so I'd always ride with my dad the short 5 minute drive to the vet, turned around, eyes pressed to the glass, anxiously waiting for my dog to yank the rope loose and jump out of the back of the truck. I felt like as long as I was there nothing bad could happen.
Of course, I got a bit older, and one day I decided that I'd rather hang out with my friends than monitor my dog's life. My dad leaves for the vet and an hour later I get a phone call: my dog is dead. On the way to the vet, it jumped out of the back of the truck and, while hanging from the side of the truck by the rope around its neck, was hit by another truck passing by. My dad tried to console me as I looked at my dog, dead in the back of the truck, with blood coming out of its eyes, by telling me the vet said that he probably broke his neck when he jumped from the truck and didn't feel the truck hitting him. Then my dad went and buried the dog in the backyard, right outside my bedroom window. I put Bandit's tennis ball on top of his grave, where it stayed, until my dad threw it out while clearing weeds.
I remember going to my elementary school on the weekend with my dad, with the bikes in the back. We rode on the pavement and the grass in the back of the school---this was back before all the schools in the area became caged in with 7 foot high iron fences and you could, say, play soccer on the fields when school wasn't in session. I played on the swings a little bit while my dad rode around, and thinking it would be funny I jumped off the swing and then laid in the grass playing dead. I expected my dad to come over and go "oh no!" and I'd be playing dead it'd be funny. You know, kid stuff.
I laid there, eyes half closed, squinting at my dad waiting for him to come over, but he didn't. Instead I saw him get off his bike, march (literally march with that angry determination that you can always identify as "my dad is pissed off" from miles away) over to my bike, pick it up, throw it and his into the back of the truck, and drive off. I sat there in the grass for a couple minutes wondering if he'd come back.
He didn't.
I walked home, watching for my dad's truck to swing around and pick me up the whole time but it never did. The truck was parked in front of our house, my dad was nowhere to be seen, so I pulled my bike out of the back. He'd thrown it in there so hard that it had bent my handlebars. I still, to this day, don't know why. I guess he didn't appreciate his son lying in the grass for no reason?
I don't want to sound like I am bemoaning my childhood too much: these are just the facts. Of course it could have been worse. My dad never hit me, not that I can remember, not at least until I was 15 and my desire to go see "Requiem for a Dream" with some internet people was such an enraging thought that he felt it necessary to choke me---signalling the end of my youth, which seemed to go out the same window I did but took off in the opposite direction. I went to live somewhere else, and the small amount of youth I ever had went and got fucked with a knife to death in a gutter somewhere I assume.
People who meet my father think he's just a funny and slightly weird old man. Age does that to men, it seems, it erodes away their hard edges so that the things that used to be scary about them merely become bad memories we have, but those edges still exist. When I hear my dad start to get annoyed, when his voice rises a little bit, all the hairs on my body stand on end just waiting for the screaming to begin. I'll never forget what it was like to cower in the dark under my blankets on the floor while my dad screamed at me about how horrible I am for making my mother call him at work and have him come home so he can scream at me for some reason.
So, there is is. Here's to you dad. Here's to the many memories I have of you...
Every time I post a Nilsson track, I feel a little sad, because there are so many other Nilsson tracks I could post. If I don't allow myself to repeat a Nilsson song more often than all the others, then I'll only be posting four Nilsson songs a year. Four songs a year! It almost seems unacceptable. Maybe at some point I'll just do a "Nilsson Week" because it's clear to me that not enough people listen to him.
Harry Nilsson is a legend. A friend of John Lennon is a friend of mine. Yadda yadda yadda.
I like this song a lot. It's not a song that got me into Nilsson (that would have been all of Nilsson Schmilsson for sure) but it's definitely one of those songs that sticks with me.
I've joked about cutting out one of his "ALRIGHT!" shouts and having that as my notification sound when I get a text message on my cellphone but I think it would scare me probably just about as bad as this did when I had it set as my ringtone for a friend of mine:
I'm a big Harry Nilsson fan, so you'll be hearing a lot of him around here if you stick around. According to iTunes this is my most played Nilsson track. It's a unique song, in that it's about absolutely nothing relevant to me at all, and there's nothing else like it in the whole eccentric and vast Nilsson catalog (and probably not in Randy Newman's catalog though I am less familiar with his). But when it comes on while I'm driving down the street, I can't help but sing the whole thing.