Families And How To Escape Them; Update/Chapter Twenty Nine

It seems astonishing to me that I could write twenty eight chapters about what so far is about three years of life. I knew it was a good life, even when it was difficult and intense. And in the narrative of those times I am still several months away from the actual epiphany, what became the central change; my actual 'coming out'.

I can remember much of what happened, the material is still there. But for the minute I am resting from writing more, resting before committing to print the events that became the change I did not know was going to happen, and was not what it appeared to be at first.

It has become a cliche to say that the four most emotionally intense changes we can go through are changes in relationships, changes in jobs, changing where we dwell, and lastly for most of us, bereavement. In the eighteen months that follow on from Autumn 1991 I would experience several changes of address, and a rather dizzying change of direction in my life where I would end up in places that I did not know existed. 

Writing about changes and moves that are that fast and cover that much ground takes preparation So the rest of the story-another eighteen months of it-will get told but it will be told best in the right time for me to write it-probably next year; in 2025, if the world I am publishing this reconstructed diary into lasts that long....

to looking like this a little
over two years later...

In the meanwhile you can guess
how I got from looking like this
in December 1989...

        

Humour Is The Solution

Whatever you do in life,
develop a sense of humour.

Whether mild and innocent,
or streaked with shades of black,
it will pay you back, and do more,
when it finds recognition
with the right neighbours.  

The Secret With Machines

'Hold Your nerve' Is fine advice for anyone with a laptop
who is keen on using it to communicate with the world,
But it always helps to have another, more experienced,
person to tell you and show you how to hold your nerve better.

Every machine requires some instruction
and with laptops every learner talks to the machine
as if it was like them, human, when the proof required
to show the difference between the learner human
and the machine they learn from comes quicker than they think,
particularly when the human listens to themselves
and the machine shows every sign of being deaf.   

The Freedom Of Tears

We are free to cry all year round and through out
the length of every election cycle, but always
we want cry and hide our tears most when
the latest election result has been announced;
that is what being addicted to 'breaking news' means.

Today we could cry for the forty years
of polarisation of an American media by
the lack of requirement of balance and objectivity.
 
We could cry for the contorted electoral boundaries
that are the result of both main parties parcelling up voters
by profile of race wealth to disguise the divisions by riches
that the rich prefer, which they know hurt the poorest most.

And lastly Lady Liberty should have
a good cry about what preceded those divisions
and the Jim Crow laws which made some citizens
forever 2nd class and unrepresented
- as if opportunity was purely the chance to fleece
those with less as they started life  where what faith was in most
was the love of money. which left no room for the love of anything else.  

 

Putting The 'Dis' Into 'Disowner-ship'

I was not present at my conception,
I don't know how well the occasion went.
But then again, from the way my dad behaved
towards me after, and well into me becoming an adult,
I doubt my dad was that present, either....

How Much Do I Owe to Adverts For Products I Never Bought?

As a 70's teenager I was starved of reading
that might extend my understanding
of the complexities of the world,
the more to make me companionable.

The word 'adult' was euphemised to describe
the girlie magazines that married men justified
buying in secret and hiding from their wives,
where their secretive reading, if that is what it was,
led them deeper into a male juvenilia
which was as rhetorical as it was profitable
to the publisher, not that anyone said so.

I could never fathom how deep
the mutual dishonesty went, there
or what the profit motive destroyed. 
I rarely got near that stuff, though I sensed
from my family how often when male want
faced off against female rejection, the discussions
led to disgusts that were always too disagreeable 
for children's tender ears to understand. 

What I read were my mother's women's magazines
which supposedly reflected how women thought,
from the headlines on the front through to the articles inside.
But fifty years on, I have at last been corrected.

With those magazines what the advertiser had to sell
had to be cheap, for Mother to think she might want it,
which then set the agenda of the articles being defined
by what rich men did not want working class women to know.

The days of mass circulation of print media,
narrowing down what people might learn
have been reversed, thankfully, thru how much
the self made programmes on YouTube
are supported by adverts, where the breadth of opinion
is that vast nobody knows where it is likely to end.

Give It Up

I don't know how completely anyone can abandon
the hope of 'being loved' and still like themselves.
It is like abandoning vanity. However close to zero vanity
anyone might get there is always further they have to go.
And who knows what their freedom is for if it is not
to make their vanity seem useful, or for them to be loved?

This freedom from love is surely more about
making absurd announcements with confidence.