Happy Birthday, Mom

Tomorrow will be my mother's birthday. I thought I would stop posting here, and I mostly will, but I'm just going to add a little something. She's been gone since the last day of January 2013. I guess that makes this almost 2.5 years, and so it's her third birthday since she died. I don't resent her any more. That was quick, huh?

My brother is doing much better now too. He stopped most of the terrible stuff he was doing with his life and seems to have found a cute young thing and bought a house! What the hell am I doing? Well, swing dancing for one. I know, it hardly compares. But the resentment is gone. She was what she was, and she was a marked improvement over what she had for a mother. I guess a family that pulls itself up from the emotional gutter by its bootstraps takes a few generations to get it done.

I'm going to include the video she shot with me to be played at her funeral. Her arm was paralyzed at the time, which you can see. I debated a long time before I decided to post this online. I wouldn't have done it except that she did specifically shoot it to be shown at her funeral, so I figure what more privacy could this possibly violate? Besides, I was her power of attorney anyway.

One thing that makes me smile when I watch this is how my mother was so not a perfectionist. She was happy doing things good enough. That meant that a lot of her home projects were short of shoddy, or else they looked good until you looked very closely. That's probably why she was able to get shit done. Anyway, my phone goes off in the middle of the video. You'd think if there's one thing you're going to want to re-do if there's a cell phone going off during it, it's is your farewell to the world. Nope! Not my mom. She plows through and calls it a day.

So here you go, her farewell to the world:

The Final Post

I've decided that this will be my last post.  It's been a little more than a year since I moved into this house, and a little less than a year since my mother died.  I'm going back to school now to finish that Ph.D.
My mom is still dead.  Dad too.  My aunt is doing great now, and I'm sad to leave her behind to return to Austin.  Most of the rest of the family is pretty good too.  My dating life has been abysmal, but hopefully that changes.  My old relationship of the last few years has finally ended both officially and in reality. It was a big year of me doing not a whole lot of anything.
Here's to a new year, new starts, and some more new endings.  If you've just found this blog, it's a good idea that you go and start from the beginning.  That's right here.
Thanks for reading my ramblings.
-Jeremy

A surge of resentment upon finding a partial draft of a will

So, I found a part of a will my mother scratched out in a notebook.  It's yet another thing that shows that she was a complete jackass.  It's basically a long list of "This should be split between both of my sons" except that everywhere she wants this, she splits it 60/40, only the 40 is going to me.  Considering that my brother has a decent job and I dropped my whole life to take care of her, this is pretty galling.  But I didn't really expect anything else from her.  I guess she did get to torture my brother a lot longer than me, though she actually did help him through college.  When I went to college, all she did was inform me that she had actually spent all the money I'd given her to save for me, and to let me know that she wouldn't be helping at all.

I've packed up everything, and she had a lot of interesting geology stuff, but I'm giving almost all of it to my brother.  The really cool stuff is mine.  It was mostly given to me by my dad or other people, and not her.  Of course, when I left the house (on a plane, so I couldn't take much) she gave everything I left behind to my brother, and so when I came back to get my childhood things, I learned that I no longer had any.  I'm keeping everything that was given to me, and giving him everything else.  That way he'll not have much room to complain.  Not that he should anyway, since he's put no effort into this whole packing up thing

The funny thing about all of that is that she whined incessantly about how unfair her mother treated her.  She apparently got the short end of the stick and was the least-liked one of five children despite being the one who was doing most of the work.  Congratulations, mom.  You lived your whole life insane and without a scrap of self reflection that might enable you to avoid becoming your mother.

This is one of the many reasons there is a picture of my dad on my phone.

When you find that letter your mom asked you to destroy unread, but instead you post it online

So, I think I posted something about the mystery letter that my mom had written about me and saved.  Well, I found it.  I should preface this by saying that my mother had a very active imagination that she used in re-writing history in the most insane manner.  I've checked some details of this (and I knew some before) and they're totally false.  I'll comment further after the letter:

Hope this isn't blank.  I wrote an email and sent it to 4 people.  Three of them were blank.  It is probably just as well.  The only person who recieved[sic] the particulars actually knows Jeremy and she told me about the same thing you said.  She has two daughters and they both have given her the, "You are such a bad mother and you ruined my life" speech. I think a big part is being a single parent.  Anything that went on can be blamed on us because we were the only one there.

I don't take responsibility for Jeremy's father's drinking problem.  That is the big issue with us.  In hind sight[sic], he doesn't think it was so bad.  He accused me of always telling him only negative things about his father.  I did harp on the drinking, but it has a genetic link and my mom's father was an alcoholic as well.  And it is not as though he didn't witness plenty of the embarrassing drunk moment for himself.

I never told him about the cut brake line, or his dad knocking me off a 15 foot fence on my head and having to go to the emergency room, or his dad kicking me in the stomach when I was pregnant with our second child.  I began hemmoraging[sic] and he refused to take me to the hospital.  I guess God wasn't ready for me to join him yet, because my ex-husbands[sic] brothers and sister showed up and took me to the hospital.  I only found out what was said and done last year because my brother-in-law told my sister and she told me.  She thought I knew.  They came to visit unexpectedly and I was unconscious in a pool of blood, convulsing on the floor.  His brothers asked him what the hell was going on.  He said, "Let the bitch die".  His brother told him, "What do you think her father will do to you if she dies?"  The brothers took me to the hospital.  And Jeremy saw him run into me with the car and drive off.  Somehow, I am the bad guy.  I didn't tell him any of the bad things, though.  I promised myself I wouldn't and I won't.  Not for his father's sake, but for his.  There was a lot of other abuse, but I have tried to put it behind me.

At this point, I really don't care if I see my son again.  I never through I would ever in this life even think such a thing.  But there it is.  He told me he didn't like me.  Where can you go from there?  I am sorry, but I am not going to be merely tolerated.  He also told me a lot of stories about things that never happened.  I am wondering about mental illness, it is hereditary in my family.  It just really hurts when someone you always sacrificed everything for doesn't even care and blames you for things that you had no control of.  I am actually handling it better today.  I didn't cry at all today.  I have called to talk to Gary because he is in Dallas with Jeremy.  I can't think of a single thing to say when Jeremy answers the phone.  I try to come up with something and I can't.  I am just mute except for, "Can I talk to Gary?"

Well, enough of that.  What the hell do you mean you have to go back on the 28th?  Of July?  Hope not.  Got to go.  Leah.

So that's the letter she wrote that she was hanging on to.  I no longer remember the exact details, but I was here in NM for a very short time and she used to do this shitty thing where she would get me on the phone and not let me off.  So if I was in town for four days, I'd block one to spend with her, and then I'd usually also drop by for a bit on another one, but for whatever reason, she felt it was important to call and try to keep me on the phone for 6 hours.  She was always insane, as she indicated in her letter, she just never realized that when someone remembers events completely differently from you, that's not enough data points to determine which one of you is insane.  Oh and considering that she got a lot of information from her sister, Karen, says a lot.  That woman is completely nuts.  I think that because my mom was around Karen and their mother is the reason she assumed that she wasn't insane. She was functionally insane.  You had to be around my mother for a while to really figure it out, but you can feel it rolling off of her mother and sister instantly.

Also, I never saw my dad hit my mother and drive off.  I did see her hit him and knock him down while he was trying to get away from her.  He then left and spent the night sleeping in his truck, I assume.  That's the only memory I have of them fighting.  I do, however, have memories of all the other stories that she claimed to have been shielding me from.  The cut brake line story I got from multiple angles.  There's a building in Deming with an extra defensive wall that was built around one corner.  It was apparently for her, because she hit it twice.  My family is historically poor and so they have had a string of cars that they've worked on and kept barely running.  According to many sources, my mother used to run up to a stop sign and then slam on the brakes.  This is not something you want to do with an old car right after working on the brakes.  She was a pretty horrifying driver all around anyway.  But yeah, the 'cut brake line' was really her driving like an imbecile...twice (at least).  And I had heard about it plenty, and independently researched it long long ago.

Most of the other stuff is just more of her revisionist history.  Everyone is the protagonist in their own story, and most people who have extremely fallible memories seem to rewrite them according to some pattern particular to themselves.  My mother's pattern was always how she is the lone good guy, and everyone else around her is insanely evil or petty with no motivation.  They're like the bad guy in Gladiator.

Okay, that's enough for now.  This wasn't a terribly funny entry, but I wanted to get this letter down, you know, for posterity.

The more things change, the more they don't

So much has changed and yet so much remains the same.  Mom is still dead for one.  So is my dad.  I'm still living in my mother's house in Deming, New Mexico at the moment.  Why?  Because something comes up every time I try to get things in order to get out.  It's always something different, and I know it's June and I've been trying to do it since Feb.  What happened?  Part of it was me working on other things and not being ready, but once that went on long enough, everything else came in to shit on my efforts.

The biggest one of these things is that my aunt went to get screened for cancer because my dad had just died of it, and then my mom did.  Guess what!  She had some.  So she hauled her ass to the biggest and best cancer hospital possible: M.D. Anderson..  I'm not upset about that sacrifice in the least, it's just...  Well I have a thing.  The thing is this: if you tell me something will happen, or if I plan for something to happen on a certain day, and it gets moved, I'll get annoyed.  If it keeps happening, I'll want to kill you. With my aunt, it was fine, because she's really the last vestige of anything parental in my life, and I still really need some of that around, even just passively, because I'm not ready to be an adult.  Is anyone?  My dad said he never felt like one.  I think that might just be how it is for those of us who remain silly and playful goofballs.  You're never not a kid, you just see that these kids who are 20 years younger than you are real morons and maybe they need some advice and help.

So this brings me to my latest thing.  I went with my aunt, she had surgery, we stayed in Houston for a month and enjoyed that M.D. Anderson is a fucking amazing hospital to be in.  It was almost a pleasure to stay there.  And then she recovered for a while and we drove back to Deming.  And now, NOW I can surely have this yard sale and get on with selling the house.  So I set a date and made a plan.  And then my grandfather wanted me to drive him that weekend to a family reunion.  I kindly blew him off, and then he basically begged me on the verge of tears.  So I couldn't fucking say no.  Fuck.  He wants me to drive all night Friday, "enjoy" the reunion, stay the night, and then drive back all night Sunday.  My problems are as follows:
1) the moving yard sale target has me almost just wanting to kill myself because if I come back and anyone does anything that makes me move it one more time, I'm going to prison for murdering that person, and I'll probably do it with my hands and teeth, so I'm not likely to get any leniency.
2) I don't give a shit about family I don't know.  I know lots of people are into their ancestry and whatnot, but I mostly think that people who are overly concerned about finding royalty in their family lines are people who are looking to bask in someone else's glory as their own, because that's all they're going to get.  As for me, being related to me only means that I'm going to be thrust into your presence a lot more often than I would otherwise, and if I like you, it's great.  If I dislike you, the fact that you've got some small percentage of my DNA doesn't mean anything at all to me.
3) I get hypnotized driving at night.  It can get so bad that I have to just look off to the side and not at the road in front of me, because I nod off if I do.  I can be on the verge of falling asleep and stop the car and be wide awake, but once those stripes start rolling in front of me and I have nothing else to look at, I'm going under.
4) Family reunions are the worst fucking things ever if you know nobody there, because at any other thing you at least have the distraction of flirty and witty banter with a stranger.  Though, it is a branch of family from Oklahoma and Arkansas, so I'm sure a lot of them are specifically going to the reunion looking for a hook up.

The only other thing I have to say is that my mother is not 1/4 the handyman she led herself to believe she was.  I'm certain this house is a hydra.  Every time I repair some little thing that she did, two more related problems rear their heads.  When I got back from Houston The AC wasn't working.  I realized my mother didn't drain the pipes up to the roof, and so those were screwed, and her stopgap was apparently chewed-off by a dog, and so I set up a really redneck solution so that I could sleep and recover from the trip for a few days.  That led to the pump going out, and then to me discovering a whole bunch of other problems with flues.  She had the AC flue in the furnace room, and the furnace flue in the AC.  I discovered the last one after I had reengineered the AC flue to fit the furnace.  Whoops.  Guess I best sell the house while it's warm outside.

Okay, rant over.  I'll vent more when I get back from Oklahoma.

Just when you thought your source of familial annoyance was dead...

I am depressed tonight.  There are lots of reasons for it, but I think the main on is having my sleep schedule screwed with.  There are many others too, but that one is always the one that lets the others break out to the surface.

My grandfather is the new nightmare in my life.  He's bored all day and he has taken my living here to mean that I do nothing and have nothing to do and want to spend every free moment with him.  He's great to have lunch with and talk to for a bit.  I don't even mind doing favors for the guy.  I was going to say that I ask of people about what I'm willing to give to them, and that's true when I don't like you, but I have a really hard time asking anything of anyone at all ever.  So the amount I ask of someone is really no indicator of how much I'm willing to do for them.  For this grandfather, it was a little bit.  He used up all of that today.

Yesterday, he asked if I'd go to the auction with him in Las Cruces.  He offered to buy me something if I found something I liked, because I didn't want to go and have no money at the moment.  Today he called at 7:45 and said he'd be right over, so I got ready.  He showed up at 9.  Now I'm not the king of being right on time, but there's a bit of a difference if I make someone get up and get ready and also waste the productive part of their day.  He has some habits.  Apparently they involve asking for EVERYTHING in my mom's house.  He has no use for any of it, but he just wants to grab what he can.  I need to have a garage sale and ditch a lot of this stuff...and make money and pay the mortgage for a month with that.

When it comes to things I need to be doing while I'm here, they are: I need to write, I need to work on a game, I MUST write my dissertation and a talk on what I did in Germany, I need to repair this house to get it ready to sell, and I have got to organize the things in it to go too.  Well I can't use those last two as an excuse to get away from him, because he wants to help with the house, and wants to hoard everything in it.  I've seen his handiwork too, everything he touches looks gnawed-upon.  He fixed my mom's bathroom sink.  The metal is all chewed-up, the pipe has a very slow leak, and the original problem wasn't really solved.  I should post some pictures of that, and of how he fixed the door.

He means well in a suffocating and overbearing way, though.  He also has no respect for privacy.  I should arrange it to look like I'm having a satanic orgy some morning.  He started just coming through the side door without giving any notice until I started locking it.  I then also locked the gates to the yard, only to discover that one of the last things my mother did was give him a key to those.  He gives the impression that he thinks this place and everything associated with it or with me is his to do with as he pleases.  He has a way of asking that is just pushy and quickly evolves in his head as some kind of agreement in which I get totally screwed.  He wants to tell someone that they can just take over the payments of this house, for example.

So, I rode with him to the auction today.  For my time, I got the following: A lecture about how Obama is fucking up the country with no specifics.  A lecture about how Bush was great for chucking the UN out of this area.  Some crazy nutball shit about end times and "one world government".  And then a whole bunch of lectures about Jesus.  If I have to ride with him again, maybe I'll just stop keeping to myself what I really think about these issues.  I try now to tell myself that when someone likes me, they think I believe like they do, so this really is flattery, so I try to not be high school Jeremy, who slapped people in the face with their own belief systems when it even seemed like they were thinking about encroaching on mine.  That was a fun ride.

Then we got there, and they're auctioning farm equipment.  Nothing he wants is even going to be on the auction block until Sunday.  He also knew this in advance, because he went the other day.  Let me tell you, the farm equipment is probably good, but most of the rest of the shit is SHIT.  This kind of thing is definitely for people who are not savvy enough to use a computer to check out ebay and craigslist...which is why it is all farmers there.  They are really old farmers, mexican farmers, and Mennonites.  Those seem to be the last three groups in the area who haven't heard of the internet.

My grandfather kept saying, "Well, if you see anything you want, let me know." So I would say, "Well, I don't have any money," which is short for, "Yeah, I kind of stopped my life to come here and take care of my mom, so I have no income and the insurance company is dragging its feet on paying out on her policy, but that doesn't mean that I want you to assist me in any way." But then he made a kind offer:  "You can pick out anything you want for not more than 100 or 150 dollars...and then you can just pay me back by digging ditches or something for me for $8/hr."  That is, apparently the rate "his Mexican" charges.  You know when you have something hit you so profoundly out of left field that you can't even fathom how to respond until the moment has passed?  That was one of those times for me.  It's mostly that I just didn't want to hurt the old guy's feelings, though, at this rate, that's not going to save him for long.  I should've told him that I'd work it off at my physics tutoring rate: $50/hr, and that he already owed me about $200 for the time I had spent there up to that point.

So we spent the ENTIRE day there looking at nothing.  He got bored with me at one point because I, myself, was so bored that when we got over to the vehicles, I inspected a few really quirky ones thoroughly.  They were: two ancient ambulances, one short bus (that I kind of really really wanted), and a van with a hydraulic arm with a bucket on the end.

I was wiped out, so I was looking forward to sleeping on the 45 minute drive back to Deming, but that's when the final bombshell was dropped.  It was really a minor one, but considering it was one more straw, I wasn't happy.  I got to drive home, because he wanted to sleep.  Having to stay awake when I'm sleepy is the single worst feeling to me that there is.  My body just goes dead when I'm sleepy; it doesn't really even consult me.  So it's a Herculean feat for me to try to make it stay up, especially when I'm driving.

He didn't even sleep on the ride home.

And then I got home finally and took a million hour nap.  Now I'm up at 1, alone, and am trying to think of a way to not go to an auction ever again.  He thinks we're going again tomorrow and the next day.

Lockdown

The little brother is gone.  We spent the day driving around on dirt roads way out in the desert looking for fossils or arrowheads or anything remotely cool.  We found a trough filled with something horrible (so we threw a bunch of rocks into it to make it splash) and an abandoned mine shaft.  You could drop a rock in it and hear it rattle to the bottom before hitting something metal and splashing into water.  Ah the beauty of having an open mine shaft right on your property.

He went back home to go to work tomorrow.  He wanted to take this week off too.  That would make four weeks of unpaid leave for NO REASON.  He really was driving me nuts here, because he was just around enough to fuck up anything I wanted to do, but not so much as to do anything with me, despite that he often lamented that.  It was disingenuous.  He wanted me to feel like he was really wanting to be with me, but he wasn't.  It was okay, because I didn't want him to be here either.  I don't do well living with anyone I'm not banging--at least if they can't leave me massively alone--so I was not fond of him here.  Plus, his whole function was to not have a key so that I would have to leave the door unlocked.  There's a reason why that's annoying, which I'll get to in a minute.

My grandfather has been at it for 1 day and is driving me mad.  He's retired and manic, so if you say, "Hey, this needs to be done," he thinks you mean that he has to help you, and that it has to be done immediately.  He also thinks that you have nothing else to do.  So I basically have to pretend like I'm not here or not awake or something, because he won't take, "Let's do that next month" for an answer.

But now I'm locked down.  I'm going to wake up in the morning, work out, write, and do my other side project.  Only then will I receive visitors.

I still don't have a certified certificate of death for my mom, which means that I still have no money.