joenobody

"...must be in my blood cuz i don't know how i do it, all i know is i don't wanna follow in the footsteps of my dad, cuz i hate him so bad the worst fear that i have is growin up to be like his fuckin' ass...."
-eminem


white trash.

that's what we were. that's who i am. my parents were never around and i grew up in a filthy house down a dirt road surrounded by auto parts and oil stains. there was always piles of stuff just laying around. trash that never got picked up, folded laundry that was never put away, old books and toys that were just shoved out of the way in some corner for months at a time. the carpet was filthy with dog piss, spilt food, and mud that had been tracked across it over the years. there were all sorts of dilapidated tool sheds and at least 2 or 3 junked cars in the yard at any given time.

my dad's excuse, was that he was always working. work was his excuse for never being around. if he didn't have work to do, he would find more work for himself. he worked a lot because he didn't want to be around us. plus, work always gave him an excuse to bitch about something. he thought could guilt the rest of us because he "worked" and we didn't. there fore i was a lazy and worthless piece of shit. he was saying this to me when i was 9.

my dad has problems, he always did. his dad used to kick the shit out of him. my grandfather was a WW2 veteran. He had psychological problems because of the war, and he drank like a fish. my dad never drank and never went to war, so sometimes i wonder what his excuse was.

my mom's excuse, was that she didn't want to be around my dad when he was home. she found stuff to do. she had a hobby that she took pretty seriously. she told me that one time she threatened to take the kids and leave my dad because he was verbally abusive. he backed off of her, but she still had no idea where she would go. it's understandable why she didn't want to be around, but it didn't do much for me and my sisters.

sometimes my dad would just come home around 8 or 9 and he'd be in a mood. he wasn't drinking. he never drank. he was just pissed off all the time. if he wanted to bitch about something, it didn't matter, he'd find something to bitch about. i was often singled out because i was the only boy. and i'm not the oldest, i'm the middle child.

there was a period of my life, a few years, when at least once a month i would get into a fight with him over something. not really a fight, it would just be me getting my ass kicked as i swore at him.

"fuck you you piece of shit"

he'd smack me

"i hope you die"

*smack*

"you're an asshole! i hate you!"

*smack*

.....until he got tired of it. and went to bed. i didn't want to give him the satisfaction of just shutting up and hiding in my room all night. i didn't want him to think i was afraid of him. because i wasn't and i didn't want to give him an edge. i didn't want to take his shit.

i was a kid. there wasn't much that i could do but swear at him. i only had my mouth because through this time i weighed anywhere between 90 and 130 lbs depending on how old i was. even though i said some nasty things to him, it didn't seem like anything i said ever had any affect on him. i just assumed that he thought i wasn't important and what i said never mattered to him.

"okay dad. you can beat me but you'll never beat me."
-the cherry poppin' daddies

about a month ago, i got into another arguement with him. it was the same as it had always been. he started giving me a hard time about something that didn't matter and when i told him to get off my back he starts yelling at me and trying to put me down.

instead of playing his games and going on with the arguement i just told him what i had been waiting years to say to him.
"you were a terrible father." "nobody in your family likes you." "you treat your family like shit." "we would have been better off without you." and "don't expect me to carry your casket at your funeral."

that last remark that i made was a reference to the fact that i was a pall bearer at my grandfathers funeral about 2 years before this happened.

it was weird because afterwords he didn't talk to me for a while. i think something i said finally sunk in and affected him in one way or another. i felt bad about it at first because he was really depressed for the next few weeks. i felt like if there was a hell, i'd be going to it (i can shake the catholicism, but i can't shake the guilt). but then the more i thought about it, the more i realized how bad he needed to hear it . even if he didn't want to.

*******

i'm not writing this because i want sympathy, or to make myself look like a tortued artist. i write about this because i've been over it again and again in my head and it's time to be honest about it. i've repressed a lot of these memories and been in some sort of denial about my relationship with my dad, so getting it out of my system every now and then helps to deal with it.

******
what's that hipster magazine? vice? vibe? something like that? it sucks. and i hate hipsters. the stupid magazine is only about what's cool and makes fun of what isn't. i'm so glad indie rock came along and took all the douche bags away from punk rock.

i had a great time this weekend with Anarcha and some of my friends. we talked about how there's a bunch of really dumb chichi yuppie hipsters on this website, and how there's also a bunch of great people who you never get to meet. well, at least i met 1 of them. so far so good.