Supposedly there are those out there who think I am about as stable as an Argentinian government.
My friends have been telling me this for years, but this time it comes from an unknown source in New York, where I grew up.
I’m positive it isn’t my immediate family, because none of them would pass up the chance to call me cuckoo to my face. And the source of this news is unacquainted with the majority of my friends and co-workers. Which leaves the assorted secondary family members; cousins, aunts, uncles, and assorted married people.
My immediate and continuing response to the news has been:Thank God!. I lived in that setting for at least 18 years. After a brief hiatus at a place superficially known as a school for higher education, I got the hell out of Dodge. You can even ask my mother how upset I was when my initial departure was delayed just a few days.
Life in central New York is so humdrum, so uneventful, and so colloquial, that it could make a hot-water-bottle constipated. Ignorance, apathy, and bigotry run rampant.
And the idea of ‘trying’ doesn’t even occur to most people.
I was raised spitting distance from a nuclear weapons storage facility. I’m a cracker who grew up thinking white people are bad. We were so poor that poor people took pity on us. I went to a high school that I hated more than any experience in my life, and would gladly burn to the ground if only they hadn’t built it out of brick. I went through an education system where I was rewarded the most when I did the least work. Physical abuse, mental abuse, and sexual abuse were everyday occurances in the area where I grew up. I put myself through four years of obscenely expensive college only to learn more about my field in the first six months of employment. I moved 400 away from every one and every thing I knew. I occasionally have to talk with guys who have M16s over their shoulders just to walk the streets or get to work. People drop jumbo jets on my head. I live in the middle of the biggest political madhouse on earth, and have yet to meet a politician I could take seriously.
These are the things I will mention in front of strangers.
And you wonder why I am less than coherant?