My father is a frantic exclamation point on the inexorably and assuredly fading parchment of my life, one that punctuates most passages sentences and phrases regardless of overall suitability to the overarching tone or structure of the narrative, he pops up in all sorts of places he aught not be.
In an alternate universe an English teacher who perhaps moonlit as a psychologist would have assuredly issued me a mandatory ticket to the guidance counselor after the first few essays, that is if I’d ever bothered to actually attend any classes once I was old enough to slink away and purposefully slip through the cracks.
Alas off I had already flown, rocketing myself from various campuses like a sling from a stone, intent on obliterating my ever growing sentience via the propulsion of every chemical both illicit and legal I could blast my way in to the sweet black gaping void with.
Imagine the aforementioned metaphorical stone breaking the sound barrier and shattering Goliath’s skull in a flash, only to cause the brute to topple over and crush the boy tragically before the Israelites could cheer his victory if you will, for that has been much of my journey unfortunately.
The long dead man is my mythology, faded and dusty despite fervent repetition, growing twisted and warped from it’s originating roots like all religion is prone to do. He lives now only in stories that others tell me and those I tell myself, however this far along in the parable they’re disjointed and confusing and distant. They no longer resonate, they no longer invoke joy or nostalgia (albeit bittersweet as one would expect), they don’t even feel like history I actually remember, rather just fables I’ve been told.
The only thing that is real anymore is just a hollow distant ache, like healed broken bones crying out when the weather suddenly shifts.
To really set the mood I’ll borrow and interject some lines from a personally beloved occultist bard of my era, Daniel Lloyd Davey: “Interdependent as worms to the grave, Allah’s true name is naught/Christ cannot save, locked in a waltz of evermore frantic steps, spells of regret/death magick for adepts.”
That sort of heresy is how my father’s name now sits like ash in the mouth of my mind. He is lost to me and has nothing of worth to offer, all I have left is the pain of his sudden violent passing (which by it’s bombastic grandiosity as a horrific act overshadowed and blotted out plenty of ~other~ relevant traumas… until they bubbled rotting to the surface decades later), which he passed as a final grim parting gift to me and everyone else in his circle.
Even much later where the fresh shock and pain had seemingly healed or at least faded, the scar of his suicide freshly pink and my story seeming to lurch finally towards a somewhat healing path, his memory poisoned everything about me. Everything I tried to treasure and always ruined nonetheless, lurking in the dark recesses of my subconscious. Trauma with a capital T.
I found myself unintentionally building shrines to him long after I’d put him away from the front of my mind and stopped making pilgrimage to his actual tomb, for example: a rather expensive and impressive isolated bookshelf in my home consisting of a full set of a particular science fiction franchise we partook of in during my childhood.
I spent many years and wasted much money hunting down immaculate first print editions without any wear or damage of a rather hefty series, a formidable feat when dealing in pulp sci-fi from the 80’s. Once complete it sat unread and growing dusty: a silent testament to my now merely buried obsessive twitch of despair.
I have plenty such tongue in cheek shrines to him, unto to the point I even wonder if I am really who I think I am. Am I nothing more than a pathetic pulsating whirlwind of trauma based coping mechanisms and craven emulations ~of~ as well as invocations ~to~ nothing more than a long dead childhood hero? Do I even like anything I think I like? How much of this has shaped and warped my personality? Do I even ~have~ a personality, or is all of this my lame excuse ~for~ one?
His memory, influence, and ill chosen examples to mimic as a foolish child is more often than not the root of many of my idiosyncrasies that I’ve grown to identify and despise, and have been working on eradicating the more that I seek and momentarily grasp slippery clarity (as fruitless as either action oft seems.)
I can definitively nail his name to a laundry list of vulgar delectations oh so common to the twisted and broken, an almost generic symphony of maladjusted banality that I’ve carried on as tradition or as learned behavior or as genetic damnation. Behold my flag corp parade of red flags as a person:
☆ A fixation and focus on collecting broken people and cobbling together dysfunctional relationships with them, trying to “save” and “fix” them despite being beyond lost and trashed myself… then stubbornly attempting to forge a family unit to my own exhausting and demanding specifications come hell or high water… the obvious and hypnotic yet invisible waves of karma and their destructive and transitive forces be damned. ~Especially~ when it comes to being clingy and struggling to learn the concept of letting go of incompatible people and bonds already long concluded/defunct. A masterclass in the hubris of man due to a lack of self awareness and honest reflection really.
☆ Addictive and self destructive behaviors like barely subdued alcoholism/having to struggle mightily to control myself and cut myself off from ~any~ sort of mind altering compound once I find myself slipping ravenously closer to the delicious blackness, or the aforesaid social and romantic failures that were just as addictive/compulsory in their foolish and mad repetitiveness (see prior bullet point), all of which I will for now be glossing over in the name of common decency and expediency (don’t worry, there’s always time for more specific gruesome and cringe-worthy stories.)
☆ Social debilitation and emotional stunting, being obviously loved by many but unable to grasp or comprehend or absorb it despite an lachrymose belief ~in~ it’s validity and truth as a concept: a black hole of want and need, repeatedly isolating myself away from everyone to attempt to blunt the inevitable damage I invariably and unwillingly wreak with my fuckery: isolation that ends up disappointing everyone in a different manner than a cycle of prior chaos/instability is wont to do (I suppose sometimes you have to pick the lesser of two evils as you struggle to maintain your humanity and decency.)
☆ a disagreeable focus on the dark and morbid and taboo, which often hyper accelerates and amplifies the reasonably forecast troubles on any horizons of the above bullet-points (which in and of itself is likely a blessing in disguise, as at least most clashes and friction end up being brief.)
In short, he’s haunted my entire life since he took his ball and went home precisely ~because~ I am very much his son and carry a multitudinous array of his traits and behaviors and curses, and as someone still actively on the court of life (if only barely) till the clock runs out, the whole ordeal has left me sour on the entire sport itself. I suppose I’ve never really recovered from it… but that’s pretty obvious now that I’ve written all this out and am reviewing it. Hindsight is hilarious like that.
He haunts me in all the odd unpleasant unwelcome and unpopular foibles he foisted on me either genetically or via his twisted mentoring (be it purposeful or unintentional) or habits and beliefs I poorly chose to imitate as a child to “honor” him especially after his passing, and most obnoxiously he haunts my very dreams (along with a few choice others from this wretched plane, but again let’s not get ahead of ourselves in this unfolding narrative.)
Since he passed over a quarter of a century ago I’ve had vivid repeat nightmares where he finally reveals himself momentarily to me again… in the sort of “stopping in to visit” type of metaphysical experience various family members shared with my in the very early years of his passing. Only he shows up in my dreams often, and it always transpires in the same fashion: him ignoring me on a couch in a drunken stupor and refusing to communicate with me directly, to acknowledge me, or what his final act wrought.
My frantic pushes to reconnect/communicate due to the always ever dwindling sands in the dream hourglass are always met with cold rejections phrased in mechanical and insulting third person, while he rocks an impenetrable thousand yard stare straight ahead, focused on some horror or bliss the rest of us cannot yet perceive.
It took me decades of gutter gnosis via substance abuse and ceremonial pain to understand, but I’ve subconsciously recreated the antecedent nightmarish’s vehement tableaux ritualistically for years via drinking alone on a couch and blocking out the world when I couldn’t/wouldn’t put up with it’s bullshit any longer… that bitter humiliating realization has been one of the stronger touchstones in finding my way out of these various addictive and abusive holes over the years… that I have been reliving my trauma over and over, something I always point out to others and try to help them with. Pathetic irony!
Still… all that being said, holes are dark and comfortable and even after being finally free of one for years… it’s always all too easy and tempting to crawl back in one all over again: especially when the world both at a glance and under meticulous scrutiny sucks donkey dicks while wearing clown shoes full of cottage cheese, all the while blathering pompously on about it’s importance and virtue and achievements. Some of the best advice I’ve ever received in my journey have been the wise words of my mother ever gave me (which I am paraphrasing for dramatic effect as her particular wording was far more blunt and humorous) “It’s normal to visit those dark corners from time to time, but no one should ever live in them.” Well said mother, well said. Oft easier said than done, but still… well said indeed!
For some larger social/psychological context couched in occult terminology that I personally prefer, here’s a relevant quote from Alan Moore:
“Much of magic as I understand it in the Western occult tradition is the search for the Self, with a capital S.
This is understood as being the Great Work, as being the gold that the alchemists sought, as being the Will, the Soul, the thing that we have us that is behind the intellect, the body, the dreams. The inner dynamo of us, if you like.
Now this is the single most important thing that we can ever attain, the knowledge of our own Self, and yet there are a frightening amount of people who seem to have the urge not just to ignore the Self, but actually seem to have the urge to obliterate themselves.
This is horrific, but you can almost understand, the desire to so simply wipe out that awareness, because it’s too much of a responsibility… to actually posses such a thing as a Soul, such a precious thing.
What if you break it, what if you lose it, might it not be best to anesthetize it, to deaden it, to destroy it, to not have to live with the pain of struggling towards it, and trying to keep it pure?
I think that the way people immerse themselves in alcohol in drugs in television, in ANY of the addictions that our culture throws up, can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves, and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self, and then having to maintain it.”
Yeah, sounds exactly about right^.
Since he haunts me so (or I compulsively haunt myself with him, pick your poison), in the last few years I’ve taken to ritualistically binding up his official and original shrine in my home, until I am finally ready to destroy the damned thing and let fully go of him.
Draping his framed memorial picture in multi layered thick black cloth, parchments full of ciphered and sigilized admonishments and rebukes between each layer, mummifying him in a veritable list of his failures and transgressions.
A large inverted pyramidal display of custom (and painstakingly draining to research and fashion) banishment sigilwork hanging symbolically over the picture like some sort of passive aggressive sword of Damocles, the whole profane rite dripping with kitschy occult silver trinkets and charms as punctuation, and despite seeming to do the trick (placebo is a hell of a drug) the goddamned thing is just yet another fucking shrine to him at the end of the day.
After all: who do you think I originally cultivated a love for tacky jewelry and spooky vaguely forbidden imagery from? Ah well, at least I don’t have that particular nightmare anymore. (although to be entirely honest, twas a different nightmare featuring a different person that haunts me what woke me from my rare and treasured insomniac sleep, spurring me to begrudgingly tap this all out. That however, will have to be a tale for another time.)