Lots of things have been rolling around in my head lately. Here's one.
My real father and step mother have been together for a long time. Probably since i was seven (my parents got divorced when i was about four). My dad wasn't the one woman type. He said that at the time all he cared about were fast cars and fast women. That had to of lasted for an easy 15 years where he cheated on sandy pretty bad. Her family (my mexican side; marriage counts) hated my dad. There was one time they thought he had killed sandy (he was just hiding out from bad folks) and they sent the police after him. Shotguns were pointed at heads, rights were read, but it turned out that sandy was hiding out with him and that was the end of that. It did get so bad for so long that he only started to mend his ways when he woke up to her sitting on his chest pointing a cocked and loaded .357 at his face. The real turning point wasn't the birth of my (half) sister, but the death of my (half) baby-brother. I only put those words in parenthesis for clarity. In my mind she is my full sister. He said that he was so traumatized by the death that he spent everything he had on the funeral and as he drove into the graveyard in his camero, bearing the casket, "spirit in the sky came on". He said the finality just hit him and he started weeping like a baby. You have to understand that my pa was a very hard man. He had zero problems in prison. He never ran with a bad crowd, he was the bad crowd. That day changed him. He stopped cheating and drinking. Him and sandy were suddenly very good together. Even my grandma gonzales liked him after that. It was because he realized that time never stops and you'll never be able to get back those wasted moments. The thing that get's me though, is how did sandy know? She always knew that he was her man, and she was willing to kill him because of it. Now they seem like a pretty tight team, each looking out for the other and playing one's strengths to the other's weakness. For instance, money. I was very surprised to hear that my dad was on an allowance of $1.25 a day because he's so bad with money. He's not a gambler, but he just doesn't have a concept of paper being worth anything. It was very hard to reconcile the image of this ex-bounty hunter recieving $20 spending money when the family went out on a trip to an old west gold-mine town. He just spent it on the kids in the first 10 minutes and the whole thing just seemed perfectly sensible to him. And it was.
Anyway back to death and dying...
Myself, i haven't had a whole lot of death in my life. Mostly grandparents whose funerals i've never attended because they were too far away and we were too poor. But my step father (bob) died maybe seven years ago. Bob had a pretty stressful job. He would get calls in the night from a port facility were if there was a problem, then they would start losing huge amounts of money until he came in and dealt with it. He got so stressed out one time that his eye actually burst and filled with blood. They guy was so on edge. Eventually the place closed and they forced him to take an early retirement around the time i got out of the navy. He was a completely different guy after that. Previously, our conversations involved him yelling at me and me cringing, but after the retirement we actually talked about shit and got along. I introduced him to the daily show and south park and he introduced me to conspiracy theory. I rather regret not taking more advantage of the time he had left because not too long after he had to get a quadruple bypass. A few months later he threw a clot and brain died of a stroke. It took about a week for his body to follow. That's when I learned the lesson my father found to an old 60's song. The question had struck me, "how many people have to die before you learn the simplest of lessons?" And i answered one.
I'm a pretty bad procrastonator. It's hard for me to get started doing just about anything. But i think my saving grace is that i'm at least always doing something. I try very very hard to be attentive to every moment that goes by. Even when i'm doing nothing, I'm doing the FUCK out of nothing. I'm still rather reclusive (i don't even see my room mate that much and we live in the same house), but I don't half-way love people or have sorta-friends. Sure, I try to recognize all my brothers and sisters, but if you're are my friend then you are my capital F-riend, ya know?
If i may bust out a koan:
In the turning of time back and forth,
the gaps are not enough to draw breath in.
Too soon and you've gone too far;
too late, and you can't catch up.
Now, the moon revolves as the sun retires,
and the hours do not travel alongside humankind.
Do not consider a foot of jade worth money,
but value an inch of time.
My real father and step mother have been together for a long time. Probably since i was seven (my parents got divorced when i was about four). My dad wasn't the one woman type. He said that at the time all he cared about were fast cars and fast women. That had to of lasted for an easy 15 years where he cheated on sandy pretty bad. Her family (my mexican side; marriage counts) hated my dad. There was one time they thought he had killed sandy (he was just hiding out from bad folks) and they sent the police after him. Shotguns were pointed at heads, rights were read, but it turned out that sandy was hiding out with him and that was the end of that. It did get so bad for so long that he only started to mend his ways when he woke up to her sitting on his chest pointing a cocked and loaded .357 at his face. The real turning point wasn't the birth of my (half) sister, but the death of my (half) baby-brother. I only put those words in parenthesis for clarity. In my mind she is my full sister. He said that he was so traumatized by the death that he spent everything he had on the funeral and as he drove into the graveyard in his camero, bearing the casket, "spirit in the sky came on". He said the finality just hit him and he started weeping like a baby. You have to understand that my pa was a very hard man. He had zero problems in prison. He never ran with a bad crowd, he was the bad crowd. That day changed him. He stopped cheating and drinking. Him and sandy were suddenly very good together. Even my grandma gonzales liked him after that. It was because he realized that time never stops and you'll never be able to get back those wasted moments. The thing that get's me though, is how did sandy know? She always knew that he was her man, and she was willing to kill him because of it. Now they seem like a pretty tight team, each looking out for the other and playing one's strengths to the other's weakness. For instance, money. I was very surprised to hear that my dad was on an allowance of $1.25 a day because he's so bad with money. He's not a gambler, but he just doesn't have a concept of paper being worth anything. It was very hard to reconcile the image of this ex-bounty hunter recieving $20 spending money when the family went out on a trip to an old west gold-mine town. He just spent it on the kids in the first 10 minutes and the whole thing just seemed perfectly sensible to him. And it was.
Anyway back to death and dying...
Myself, i haven't had a whole lot of death in my life. Mostly grandparents whose funerals i've never attended because they were too far away and we were too poor. But my step father (bob) died maybe seven years ago. Bob had a pretty stressful job. He would get calls in the night from a port facility were if there was a problem, then they would start losing huge amounts of money until he came in and dealt with it. He got so stressed out one time that his eye actually burst and filled with blood. They guy was so on edge. Eventually the place closed and they forced him to take an early retirement around the time i got out of the navy. He was a completely different guy after that. Previously, our conversations involved him yelling at me and me cringing, but after the retirement we actually talked about shit and got along. I introduced him to the daily show and south park and he introduced me to conspiracy theory. I rather regret not taking more advantage of the time he had left because not too long after he had to get a quadruple bypass. A few months later he threw a clot and brain died of a stroke. It took about a week for his body to follow. That's when I learned the lesson my father found to an old 60's song. The question had struck me, "how many people have to die before you learn the simplest of lessons?" And i answered one.
I'm a pretty bad procrastonator. It's hard for me to get started doing just about anything. But i think my saving grace is that i'm at least always doing something. I try very very hard to be attentive to every moment that goes by. Even when i'm doing nothing, I'm doing the FUCK out of nothing. I'm still rather reclusive (i don't even see my room mate that much and we live in the same house), but I don't half-way love people or have sorta-friends. Sure, I try to recognize all my brothers and sisters, but if you're are my friend then you are my capital F-riend, ya know?
If i may bust out a koan:
In the turning of time back and forth,
the gaps are not enough to draw breath in.
Too soon and you've gone too far;
too late, and you can't catch up.
Now, the moon revolves as the sun retires,
and the hours do not travel alongside humankind.
Do not consider a foot of jade worth money,
but value an inch of time.
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
It is weird you speak of death today. My great-aunt, aunt & Sharon's ex beau just all died in the same week afew weeks back. I was only semi-close to all 3, but it is still damn weird & I am alittle freaked out. What is weirder is I had an "impending doom" feeling for weeks before. After the last person in the trio died, that feeling went away.
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I hate when I "veg out", which happens more often then you could imagine, but I hate it because time passes unnoticed & I feel that I was so far away from any "moment" that nothing existed to me at all for that time... too much of the ole SSRI's I think rotted my brain alittle, but I will still try to "be present" as much as I can. It is really hard sometimes though.
veg veg veg