#fixture!!!!! and i cannot argue with my parents about this because they will not hear it and apparently nobody 'makes things like that

[porciaenjoyer]

i HATE change get me out of here!!!!!!

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story Part 62

When I left the alt. school, I took with me three books unintentionally from the school – which turned out being great for me, and it probably didn't hurt the school too much (in any case I went back and returned them a year later). The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, The Painted Bird, and Native Son. In a way, I look back at these three books as having a very big impact on who I am, and I suppose it's in part because I think these books are fantastic and in part because books in general were replacing contact with other people. But a lot of my later insight was built off the ideas of the books I read for these years of my life They are hard to put into words. They effected my psychologically.

I was taken to go get my GED – so at least I would have that. I figured it would be easy enough. They in later years set up the tests a lot harder with mandatory classes you had to take for about four months, but when I got my GED it was definitely easy. I arrived early at the LCSC college, was taken down long confusing downstairs twisty college hallways. Most of the rooms were empty and silent. I wondered what schools did with all these empty rooms and facilities. I suppose they all serve a function and may not always  be empty, but they were that morning. I was put into the room they had mistakenly thought I was supposed to go to – and then twenty minutes in they realized I was not there for the courses. I was there to test out and I was in the wrong room. So I was lead into a room where I now had fifteen minutes to finish mathematics testing that I should have had all that other time I wasted in the other room for. Fortunately, I finished and passed it. Not with flying colors mind you, but it got finished. The rest of the tests were essentially basic grammar and being able to assess information that you read tests. I made a day of it, and I got out of there passing. Getting my GED wasn't ideal of course as opposed to a high school diploma, but given the circumstances, I still felt as though I had achieved something. I had at least – some filed away fact about the legitimacy of my basic abilities, and something to show for twelve years of getting up at ungodly hours of the morning to go to school five days a week.

I worried about fighting with my dad. We didn't fight, at least not that fall from what I remember, but I felt especially vulnerable given my new found set of circumstances that basically left me stranded with no future. I no longer had school to go to, or any friends to turn to. The idea of going out and becoming a musician on my own now felt a bit silly. I had to sort of face up to the fact that some of my younger teenage dreams didn't seem quite the same to me as they once had. It felt as though something had come and taken everything away from me. I felt very distant a lot of the time. I felt very alone. In a sense I enjoyed it. At best it had that pleasant tingly feeling of being in a quiet house that has been full of people for several days, and they just left, and now you are alone and you can hear the ticking of the clock and your own heartbeat and everything in the fridge is yours. I guess I was emotionally exhausted. I didn't know who I was really. I mean, I did know to an extent who I was, but I didn't at the same time. This was the first time I think I consciously realized that we can be more than one person when we are by ourselves, if we are with a significant other, coworkers, friends, a grocery store, in a position of authority, with our parents individually and together. I am particularly divided in this regard. There is no telling who I am actually. It can be a little frightening and confusing for me to this day. Identities are very fleeting, but seem very real and unshifting in the ever present moment.

Because of the fact that I was afraid of the emotional violence towards me from my father, I flirted with the idea of moving to my mom's. Allison and David would be left sure, but my mom worked a lot at the nursing home, these really long shifts that nurses sometimes work that are sixteen hours with a small break. I guess there are times when watching over the patients is relatively easy – like you can sit down and stuff, but still – who wants to be at work that long? My mother has/and does volunteer to take absurd amounts of hours whenever she can. She will go several months without a day off at these understaffed facilities. She didn't get paid all that well at the nursing homes she's worked at, but she worked so much that she managed to have money. And when she wasn't working, she was of course doting on her boyfriend Danny. She ended up getting this very cheap rundown apartment on the outskirts of town in some old buildings that were built in the seventies that occasionally got the cops called. It was for the most part quiet. I didn't mind the apartment or the occasional noises of the neighbors, in fact I rather welcomed the sound of people running water. I didn't feel so out of touch or alone. I don't know. The sound of people doing something in the next apartment has always given me this strange tingly sense of comfort.

I would be alone all the time in this apartment when I visited, sometimes for nights on end. There was no internet. We did have about forty channels of cable, most of them totally boring, but seeing as I was raised without television I found it really a step up for me to have it going. I sometimes would watch the History channel when there was history, or I would watch the travel channel or ghost hunting shows. I took a strange comfort in listening to insane religious infomercials in the middle of the night. I surely cannot be the only one that thinks there is something perfectly insane about television. Like, TV rapidly changes the dialogue or the premise for your thoughts. It subconsciously has recreated the thinking patterns of modern man – it's an altered image of our own creating that has taken the reigns and decided to recreate us. The media and it's effect fascinates me. I am not even per say going about that thought on the preconceived notion that television is bad and we should all be doing something else (though we probably should). I am just fascinated about the underlying psychology of it and how mindless it is. It made me feel extremely comfortable and unsettled and mysteriously empty at the same time. I like that madness and I do not.

It was a one bedroom and the bedroom was filled to the top with my mother's boxes – and it would never in my entire time with that place, ever be something you could call a proper bedroom, though people did manage to fit a mattress in there. My mother would sleep on the couch when she was home. She set up a bunk bed in the corner of the living room where I would generally sleep – and Allison and David when they came over. She always blasted the television so loud – and I found that rather frustrating to sleep through. On a good night she would turn it to old movies. So randomly in the night I would hear that old screamy noise from the intense moments of old movies. I would listen to Clark Gable or Bette Davis professing their love, or hear Shirley Temple hear once again that her parent had died and the innocent sobbing that came with that. I rather like old movies and could sleep any old time I wanted now, so it was okay for the most part. But she would also watch Lord of the Rings, and though I sort of like Lord of the Rings okay, it could get a little obnoxious. You would listen to Gimley's lines over and over. How many times did I wake up to Soromon and Gandalf the Grey having it out? She would set it on repeat. I would eventually sneak out of bed and try to turn it off, but as soon as I tried that she would wake up and be cantankerous about it.

I didn't exactly live at my mom's at this point, but I stayed there about half the week most of the time. My father had the internet while my mom did not. My mother didn't even know what the internet was fully, so I could not convince her to spend her money on it. I was mostly divided for this reason. I had to keep up with Sarah and I simply had to tend to my MySpace account. Just thinking of all those MySpace notifications gave me this strong incentive to never want to leave the computer. Having this time to myself though held a lot of value for me as well. It gave me sense of childlike peace I had almost forgot about for the years I had spent in school, living in delirious anger or despair about boys or longing for some big dream of the future. I had forgotten how to enjoy the small details. And in that I had lost my ability to really achieve anything since everything that ends up being big starts out being pretty small. I remember spending hours watching Bob Ross, just like I had when I had been four. I remember Jenni telling me that I was likely going to waste my time when I left school, and maybe she was more right than not, but I had to argue that I needed this time. Or I would listen to Neil Young, who was a new and permanent fixture of my musical existence. I would listen to Down By the River sometimes three or four times in a row. I connected with his guitar style very deeply.

I went to the nursing home with my mom on a couple of occasions. It was a very weird experience. Personal aspects about who my mother actually is to me aside, her working in the kind of jobs that she does really gave me this strong understanding of our society as a whole. Because she worked with the feeble, the mentally disabled, the unstable and the dysfunctional folks that we pay not to see. This is what we do in modern society. We hide it away. Just like we hide from death and decay in most everything we do. It's not something I particularly like to think about either, but we do it to the point of being dishonest with ourselves. We are afraid of it happening to us. I know that European sometimes saw the elderly differently. They were seen as examples of God cursing the wicked, or sometimes those with schizophrenia were seen to be possessed by God, or Lucifer himself. Nazi's would likely have done away with a society that cared for the unwanted and elderly by killing them in many cases had they won World War 2.

I got used to a lot of the elderly patients in the home. The atmosphere in the morning was very strange. These old people were unlike anything I was used to. It fascinated me that they all used to be highschoolers just like I had not long ago been. They had all had lives. And this was the end. One of them would be walking around the room. It would take him forty minutes to make one round. Some of them didn't move or blink anymore. They all seemed highly aware of me though. They all stared at me intently. Their eyes were gleaming with fascination. One old man named Olly who was senile would like his lips sadistically with this mad glint in his eyes as he looked at me. It was the most perverted look I have ever received – but I let it pass realizing his mind was gone. I am sure the teenage Olly would have been horrified by old man Olly's behavior towards women.

There was also an old man named Lou. He had had a stroke that had turned him from a fully functional elderly man who still chopped and brought in his own wood to a sort of vegetable. He would begin speaking randomly in this loud clear voice that was alarming in the quiet room, but it would soon fizzle out into the most insane gibberish I have ever heard. It was language and it was not at the same time. I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of it. It always degraded from gibberish into this weird buzzing noise that didn't sound even human. He would be silent then for five minutes before starting up again. I asked my mom about it, and she didn't seem as curious about what he was trying to say. Maybe I am more curious than most, and she had probably seen a lot of old folks come and go and she was pretty used to it.

Allison sometimes went too, but we always went on separate days. I don't know that the facility really wanted my mother's entire family coming in. Allison made friends with this old woman named Raquel. She didn't understand English, but it didn't particularly matter because she didn't understand very much. Her family did come and see her frequently which was good to see. She was a very sweet lady – though very far gone mentally. She would giggle and clap her hands in delight when Allison even used one or two Spanish words. It was also very easy to make her cry. She was afraid of spoons and nobody knew why. Getting her to eat was a challenge.

The old lady that latched onto me was this ninety five year old ex school teacher from I imagine the thirties through seventies named Jenny. It was amazing to look at her and know she had been around for so long. She had been born before world war one. She had been alive when pictures were black and white, and people danced to Al Bowlly and Glen Miller and stuff like that. I was told that she had been a very strict teacher in her day, and she had been a perfectionist. She first came up to me because she wanted me to straighten things in the room. She had lost most of her clarity and could no longer reason very well or speak very much, but she still knew when something was wrinkled or crooked. She was too old to fix these things herself and they must have constantly been eating at her that she no longer had control to do anything about it. So she came up to me and pointed to the corner of the table. The table cloth that was set up was slightly wrinkled. I went over and straightened it. She then started pointing to other tables, to random things in the room that were ever so slightly askew. If it was reasonable, I would attempt it. Occasionally she would point to someone's shirt, or to something hanging up on the ceiling and I would have to gesture that I couldn't do it.

The one thing I ever heard her say was she started calling this one other older woman who was there fat. It was a bit alarming. Jenny was of course too old to scold. The woman in question was this very obese woman who could no longer stand. She wasn't as old as the others were, but she had nobody to care for her and was eventually taken to this home which I imagine was very hard. Jenny would look at this other woman with this bitterness in her eyes, and she would sort of croak, FAT! And she would point at her as though she expected I might be able to do something about it or I would agree with her. I felt a little sheepish and embarrassed. It amused me though to realize that she had probably been that way her entire life. I imagine she had had this prejudice when she was a capable young school teacher. I stated earlier that identities are fleeting, but at the same time can really stick to our core perceptions of the world. It also was amusing to me, because I generally came in wearing a hoodie, and for that reason I could use my hands in my pockets to stretch the hoodie over my own belly. It seemed that in Jenny's mind, as long as there were no wrinkles in the clothing, and you couldn't see the fat, that therefore meant that there was no fat.

Lastly, there was this quiet mysterious woman who always sat in the corner. I never had any dealings with her directly. She was incredibly tiny. I guess she wasn't that old. She was in her early sixties, however, she had drank her mind away. She had once been a San Francisco hippie, well read with a liberal arts degree. But she couldn't put down the alcohol, and it took her mind away. What was really so shocking about her was that she had this flowing beautiful straight shiny hair without a single bit of gray in it. It looked honestly straight from an ad in a magazine. It would have been striking in a crowd of random people my age, let alone, on this vacant old lady in the nursing home. As far as I know, the only person who ever visited with woman was her ex husband, who would come in sometimes baring flowers.

Honestly, my mother was one of the nicer nurses. I never saw any mistreatment of the older folks who lived here, but there was an impatience in the eyes of most of the orderly. Allison eventually had to stop going because she got openly mad at one nurse who was aggressively and angrily trying to make Raquel eat from the spoon that she was afraid of. She started yelling at Raquel which made Raquel cry and throw herself on the ground. The woman was even angrier then, and she kept shouting at Raquel even though it was clear that Raquel didn't understand and had obviously not chosen this for herself. My mother came over and smoothed it over, but Allison ended up getting in this nurse's grill and it was unsaid after that, but my mom stopped bringing us.

I don't know why at this point my mom was dating Danny still. He was completely degrading. The situation was degrading. I didn't particularly care at this point, but it was degrading to watch. She would sometimes come home drunk, and it just seemed sad. She seemed uncertain if he even loved her or liked her at all. He would do the thing where he pushed her away and insinuate that they were no longer a couple, but then when she gave him space, he would call her up in the middle of the night accusing her of cheating on him. He was still cheating on her when he could get away with it. I sort of wanted to punch him in the face. He was still calling her stupid and gaslighting  her. And yet, their meaningless relationship went on and on. I remember once she came to pick Allison and David up on Friday after school to come to her house for the weekend. We went to the store to get our cheap ass dollar store food and cheap ass TV dinners and maybe some cheap ass dollar menu McDonald's (if we were lucky [gross]), and maybe a carton of cheap ass ice cream, and he drove by her house, noticed that the motorcycle helmet he bought her was no longer by her door and accused her of going out on a night ride with some other dude she didn't even know. He kept calling her and demanding she tell him the truth. I felt incensed enough to yell in the background while she was on the phone to confirm that yes, we were with her – it was Friday and that is what we all did on Fridays and in any case it was none of his business. He then accused all of us of being liars.

Soon after this, we were driving her car to go get Allison and David one night. It was getting to be winter  yet again and it got dark early. It was pitch black and probably not even eight pm yet. About four miles out of town with all of us in the car, the vehicle broke down in a very inconvenient place. There was nowhere we could legally park where we wouldn't get towed. We were not strong enough to push the car anywhere. My mother didn't have money to pay for someone to tow the vehicle. We were left in this conundrum. We had no one else to call except for Danny. He was amused and mean spirited about it over the phone. He seemed to want to use this as an opportunity to berate my mother on how worthless and stupid she was, which of course pissed me off, but furthermore was not helpful in any way. In an attempt to maybe bypass having to pay a towing company, my mother decided to push the car into gulch on the side of the road. It wasn't that deep, and she figured it would be cheaper to pay to have it towed out of that one area than it would to pay the money it would take to bring it all the way to the place where they take cars, which was quite a ways away. When Danny came to pick us up, he called my mother stupid for having done this. She then began talking in her pathetic baby talk voice, saying she had made a stupid mistake, and she should have not done that. Which Danny then told her was also a stupid idea. Basically, nothing she could have done was right. She apologized for calling him to have us pick us up, which he then humbly told us all was not a problem since he was 'a nice guy'. But then he just continued to berate her about any of the options. It got to the point where she was cornered and no matter which option she chose, she was stupid for it. He had never been quite so open about his psychological abuse around me before this. I had tried to hold my tongue initially. We all just wanted to get home, come what may – but it was getting to the point where I definitely couldn't listen to this anymore, and I was confused in a very technical way of what he was even trying to say logically. So I was like '..So, like, she couldn't just turn the car back on and continue driving. She had few options given the situation. She had those two options pretty much. There were not any better ones. What is it you think she should have done? I don't know what you are trying to say and I don't appreciate how many times you have called her stupid.' He got really annoyed then and sort of backed off. He low key accused us all of 'ganging up on him'. After this, I don't know that I ever had any personal contact with Danny at all, though my mother continued to see him for a time.

My mother ended up having a bunch of legal troubles for her driving. She had driven for years without insurance.  She didn't drive horribly, but she wasn't always a decent driver either. It started one night while driving back to Lewiston and there was this sting operation in Lewiston that night, about a month after my mother's vehicle had ended up getting towed regardless. We actually got pulled over for going two miles over the speed limit. It was more or less some excuse to pull everyone over. People were getting pulled over left and right and searched. There were a bunch of state police driving about. She not only didn't have proof of insurance on her, but she also didn't have her license on her at the time. My mother seems to not understand cops very well. She started telling the cop about how she was divorced and had to find work that she could barely feed us with on the weekends, and how she worked in nursing homes and had two older daughters and grandchildren and on and on.

The cop looked at her blankly and  bored, with no interest in her life story. I was a bit embarrassed for her actually since he wasn't going to let her off on the basis of anything related to her life as it was. He stated that he would have thrown her in jail if she hadn't had me, David and Allison with her. He wrote her up heavily. He then demanded that I get out of the car to be searched. I don't know that I would have minded on the account that I had nothing on me – though, on looking back. I don't trust that he might have slipped something on me. It would have been highly unlikely, but you never know. Fortunately for me, my mother started getting mad and telling him he was not allowed to search me. I was her daughter and he needed to leave me alone. He was caught off guard, his attitude softened and he complied. So we had to take a taxi home. Which ended up being really awful, because when we were nearly at the apartment, she realized she had left the apartment key and her wallet in her car that she needed to pay the taxi, so we ended up driving all the way back to the car. It costed sixty or seventy dollars.

She ended up driving anyway, and getting pulled over three times. The cop who kept pulling her over liked her car, and wanted her to sell it to him and kept asking every time, so she stood out like a sore thumb when she was commuting. Her fines were enormous. Then she got a  DUI from her drives home from the bar. Which I actually did understand since driving drunk is legitimately awful and dangerous. She eventually started walking home or getting rides which was good I guess. She tried to fight the DUI given she wasn't that high over the legal limit. In her fantastical silly vision of the world, she took this fighting back against her DUI as some kind of courtroom drama where she was going to change history by proving to the courts that the cops were corrupt for collecting money from DUI's and she was innocent and not even drunk. Which didn't work out. All told, I believe she was pulled over in one year period about ten times. Eventually, she got her license back and was insured. But it was a time consuming costly ordeal to say the least. I was in the car with her about six times when it happened, so I started wondering if I was bad luck.

When we weren't getting pulled over, or she was not working, we would sometimes drive up these strange roads that paralleled the Washington side of the Snake River till the sun would go down. In this really hard to describe way, my mother and I have some core similarities even though we function and express ourselves differently. It's not in how we talk (I don't see a lot of my behaviors being all that similar to hers), but I think in an inner self kind of way – like that part of us that exists before there are words to describe it. Like, I can tell that when she looks into the distance at a sunset, she gets that same sparkly delusional romanticism about life that I do. She has the same needs to express herself and live on a certain vibration that is hard for people to understand, feels suppressed by the world – much like I do. And I feel this wasn't something she raised me to be. We didn't do much talking growing up. Like, there is some kind of inner delusional traits that are similar enough to mention. It must be genetic. So even though I know there are elements to my mother that make her a truly awful person – I can't help but feel that kinship. I know what it's like to be one of our kind.

During these mini road trips, she would always want to listen to this Eagles Greatest Hits tape on the tape deck of the van she was driving (she avoided driving her white Camaro now at all costs). I would sing along even though I have never  been quite sure how to feel about the Eagles. On one hand, there is something incredibly cheesy about them. On the other hand, I associate them with a certain love I have for the area I grew up and all the good times I have had with my mother. I hate the culture as well as all the limitations of growing up where I did, but there is a certain love I have for the mountains and greenery of northern Idaho and the dry eastern Washington deserts, the dingy gas stations, the quiet streets at night, the rivers. The sky looks different somehow in every area you are in. I don't know why. Both of us were terrible singers, but it almost made it even funner and I will admit that I never tried to sing well in these situations. One time, skip to years later, we were singing You're So Vain by Carly Simon which was on the radio and for some reason I had a tape recorder in the car with us, and we decided to tape record ourselves singing, just the two of us. So we drove around just singing our hearts out, and we eventually ended up in some strange dead end part of Clarkston. We stopped at an empty church parking lot to listen back to our singing, and though we knew it was going to be bad, neither of us even imagined just how much worse it was than even our lowest of expectation. We both shrieked, and decided to never tell anyone what we had created. This is the first time I have ever mentioned it to anyone as a matter of fact.

I still spent a good deal of time at my father's however. Allison and I would share a bed to stay warm in the winter nights, and we would often talk till midnight or later. I ended up finding The Kink's album, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, and I adored that album, and grew over time to absolutely fucking adore The Kinks as well. It's unnecessary to make this some kind of contest since they are both decent, but The Kinks were so much better than what they ever got credit for. They were theatrical, experimental, I felt that they stayed decent a lot longer than any of the solo Beatles did – or the Rolling Stones. This isn't to say that the Rolling Stones and the Beatles don't deserve their due, but – had the Kinks not been banned from America for inciting a riot I feel like they would be remember with a lot more clarity for much more than just 'You Really Got Me'.

I would space off a lot and a part of me felt like I was almost living a double life. One side of me was here in the present, eating saltines, feeling poor, dirty, futureless, postmodern without prospects, lost and defining myself only by the past and if I let myself think about it – which I did everything I could not to – completely and totally unlovable and pointless in a very fundamental way where every breath I took seemed totally wasted. But there was this other version of me that lived in the 60's. I liked listening to older music, to Bob Dylan and others. I would reminisce about Woodstock when I most certainly was never there in any fashion. I would imagine a world where the late 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's had never happened at all. I tried to experience what living in that new reality of the 60's must have been like. I suppose I grasped the spirit of it to a certain extent. Though in reality obviously, I was never there, and I was/am very much a person from the age I was born in, whether I like it or no.

Winter was very cold that year I remember. My sister's friend's grandfather Harvey, who was mentally challenged and lived at the end of town found this cattle dog outside his house that winter. She was starving and sick. She seemed to have been dropped off by someone to die. Her leg was broken. Harvey had a problem with animals in the town swarming his home since he left food out frequently for some of the cats, and I believe he was afraid of dealing with this poor dog, so he ignored her and refused to feed her – probably taking on a false sense of harshness he gathered from the truckers down at the diner downtown who often bragged of taking unwanted kittens, putting them in a bag, tying that back to a brick and throwing that bag into the icy river. Harvey I suppose really just didn't know how to feel, or what to do in a number of different situations, this being a tragic example. My father didn't like the idea of that poor docile dog dying out there at the end of town, so he volunteered to take her in, and for a time we had a pet dog.

She was a very sweet girl. She was a little skittish, and you could tell that she was afraid of men, who had likely abused her. She never tired of being pet. Her leg was really messed up. It looked as though it had been broken, and had grown wrong, and wasn't very usable. She had a swollen bump on her chest that didn't look good. We tried to wash her, but she just wasn't well enough for a lot of that. And she smelled too bad to be in the house with us. We set up a bed for her in the back room. We gave her an electric blanket to lay in. I named her Pegasus. She didn't resemble the flying elegant mythological horse in any way – in a great many ways, she was the bitter opposite of mythology. A suffering old dog. I tried to pet her and visit her as often as I could. At some point though she stopped getting up. She stopped eating food. Obviously, dogs are natural gluttons so this gave us the strong indication that something was very wrong with her. She began to smell worse and worse. I pet her anyway. It sort of broke my heart. Someone had known she was sick and had decided to dump her to die alone. She was too old to be anyone's exciting new pet. She also didn't smell too good. But she needed to be cared about just as much as any social creature.

Obviously, we had to take her to the animal shelter eventually. I knew it was the right thing to do. She obviously had cancer. She was old, and her leg being broken as it was would be a major challenge. Her body was shutting down, hence the smell. And still, she was so sweet. I sat in the back seat with her, and pet her the entire trip to the animal shelter. She looked lovingly up to me for much of the time, with this glazed over look. I truly believed that dogs feel love. She cared more about being given affection than she cared about food or even her own freedom. When we got to the animal shelter she couldn't walk and this woman who worked at the pound had to grab her and carry her in. I pet her one last time. She looked scared, though I could tell that the people at the animal shelter felt badly for her, since she was such a sweetheart. Honestly, I am fairly confident they put her down. As I waited for my father to make some kind of of final contribution to her welfare, maybe giving the shelter a few weeks worth of food money, I sat in the area with all the caged up cats. There were so many of them. Some of them hissed at me, many looked at my inquisitive and bored. This one cat in particular was yowling for me desperately. Purring and cherishing every spare second of attention and contact that could be had. I felt so bad for all these animals. I know there are a lot of differences between human being's cognitive awareness and animals, but it was easy to tell all of these animals felt abandoned. I imagine many of them never found homes. I also imagine it would be very hard to work in one of these places, being put into a situation where the most financial and humane thing to do would be to put them all down. It really irks me to no end when people get animals and don't take care of them. I hate it when people don't get their cats neutered and spayed. Ignoring all the animals in the wild we ignore as they go extinct, or the slaughterhouses or whathaveyou, we aren't even good to our own pets. Between abandoned pet dogs and cats that people simple , puppy mills, and so on, we bring these creatures into the world that they cannot survive or thrive in on their own, and they suffer. Call me crazy, but I honestly believe in some wild reforms in pet ownership.

That Christmas was probably the best Christmas I ever had. I had professed that all I wanted for Christmas was paints, canvases and brushes. For whatever reason, possibly guilt from the years my father had primarily bought gifts for girlfriends, he spent close to three or four hundred dollars on Christmas just for me. We went to Michael's and he bought me brushes, every color of high quality acrylic paint I would ever need, several different sizes of canvases. He also bought me some art books, for inspiration. They were these strange little books that presented different kinds of Art. One was simply called The Art Book, and the other was 20th Century Art Book. There was a House book, a Face book (of photographed people). It was from these two little books that I would flip through and study for hours that I got some grasp of what it meant to fill a canvas with pure expression. It was to date I think, easily my favorite Christmas besides a few I experienced as a child because I believed in Santa and all that.

We had a perfect Christmas dinner, and my father had thought to get me Blue Velvet. He didn't know very much about David Lynch, but he knew enough to know that David Lynch was something I would really like. And he was correct. He didn't want Allison and David watching Blue Velvet, so he made them close their eyes when Dennis Hopper's character was being a disgusting pervert. Call me weird, but as long as you have good communication with your children, and given they are eight or older, I am not that strict about what children watch. Obviously not just pure out of context snuff films or porn for the most part. Though I am not apposed to strong violence or sex within context of the story. And i imagine it is possible to put context into what you are watching. For instance, you could show when Saddam Hussein was being hung in context to showing what capital punishment looks like. If you want to eat meat, you should watch the full reality of what the animal goes through. It’s painful, but life was never meant to be jolly.

Raising children into being aware adults, I think it's important for them to grasp complex concepts, moral dilemmas and realities of our depravity and fragility mentally and physically. Media can be a great way to show children this stuff - if put into context - i cannot stress enough. Obviously if your child shows strong levels of delusional behavior than perhaps it's not a good idea. If you child suffers from severe anxiety as well perhaps take baby steps. I mean, it’s individual with each case, but more or less i think you should always present the challenge as best you can.I think earlier than eight a child is more or less in strictly monkey-see monkey-do mode, and it's not useful or desirable to confuse them about what is appropriate when they are still learning how to engage with the world as an individual in a fundamental fashion. My father was trying to be decent by telling Allison and David to shut their eyes, but what I thought was funny was the fact that the disturbing Frank Booth scenes were even worse if you close your eyes and simply listen to his lines. God what a fucked up character.

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