Oh yeh I have to say I have had third world styled food poisoning - at a moment when the only toilet in the house had been taken out - and I was really in the shit sprays for days - still left with a severe headache from all that. More evidence if we needed any that life here in the US is a third world country - food poisoning. I got hired today in some under-employmend situation but under-employed is better than un-employed - and despite being sick as a dog at that! Plus I contacted my old job and got them to FAX my W-2's and I have an appointment to get my taxes filed tomorrow... so once that's done i'll rest a little easier...
I keep asking myself if today has any religious effect on me in some lingering memory like way? I will say today I got a lot done despite being sick and felt like someone was looking out for me - maybe that was because I visited my sister yesterday - and seeing Margo is like seeing an old friend and hanging out with the good ol' Crouch family for Sunday Roasts... (back in the early 70's) plus seeing her connects me back to when mom and dad were around and even before Margo ended up incarcerated when Grandma (Crouch) was around - before all this that I now know as life caught up with and depressed me down to near half dead paralysis of a road kill life.
I still have to pinch and remind myself that I am also a Belgian and a "gay divorcee'" of a Belgian at that... But moreso - what seems ever more dream like is the time I spent abroad - Yemen now seems so exotic and dream like - I can't believe I not only went there but thrived there better than in Belgium.
For the short time I was there I still have vivid memories of the UAE. And then Pakistan except for some rough times there (which despite what I remember when I kind of tripped out in Lahore - from stress of all that full on culture shock that caught up with me there - where - I still remember the internet cafe in vivid detail where those e-mail correspondences to Bart and other friends in the west occured from - where I was saying "help, what did I get myself into?" - but then later recovering lol) is equally an exotic memory experience that I am tremendously proud of.
I never stop being amazed at how freaked out Midwesterners (even hip urbane ones) can get when I speak of having been to those places... (and sometimes all the Belgium years included).
...So somehow Margo and where she is connects me to the good past parts of the Crouch family - and my kinda cousin who is Margos only friend in the free world left - well - my visits with him connect me to my moms side of the family - and makes me feel less detached and like a lost soul here - that I feel that way here where I am from (meaning central Ohio) is baffling to me - maybe because this place lacks any real sense of place other than all the wal-mart super paver parking lots - oh the horror of wal-mart as Betty Butterfield says on Youtube.
But it is odd that, that old communal visiting hall, at ORW, which hasn't really changed in 31 years - now is an architectural construct memory in my mind more familiar to me than the home we were all brought up in. I must say it is weird having 31 years of my 40 years revolve around my sisters Margo's incarcerated, prison, check point, razor wired, humiliated, dehumanized life - and that somehow even when she needed mental health care and medicine - when she got nothing but a plea bargain poor persons prison (way to go Ohio) - she managed to succeed within the state imposed limitation on her life. She, not me, is the remarkable person here.
I should really think about all that some more because too many memories are coming back...But Margo has some great stories about Mom and Dad that either Mom and Dad would never have told me - for who knows what reason - propriety or their ideas of parental responsibility or because with their rigid twice monthly for years visits to see Margo - in some ways my living under my parents roof then kept me at a greater personable distance those years - I don't know...
I do like hearing the family stories from Margo and my cousin that I just, stories that I never knew about. But really Margo is heroic - we all have to admit that now in her ability to survive - Including that Kafka-esque Parole Board.
My ex-teacher pal from dads old widowered condo life post mom was telling me about this LD kid an artist kid who burnt his art (in the sink in the high-school art studio - responsibly no less - and ended up being forced on medication - then when he turned into a zombie from meds he got put on more meds - which is ultimately the real control formula that made my condo pal retire from teaching early) - To which I said that really good artists have always burnt the work that they didn't want created - which I think is a virtue and a sign of some genuine rare genius...
The post Bush II Administration system in place that puts this sort of bright lived lives down is just plain wrong. I also told my pal that Americans need to admit that public school in the US is day care so that parents can be unhindered human resources - and that college in the US is really just to get those Americans who do go on to that to be on par with European high school kids. And that Grad Students here are only equal with European undergrads.
Until we can admit this is the education reality in this country we can not evolve and better this place as a nation - until we can admit that this country has huge population mass third world debt traps (houses, schooling, cars, healthcare etc). Even the whole idea of a middle class might be a myth of a pipe dream - an ever elusive pie in the sky American Dream - but life here is in reality an unending ever unfolding multi-faceted nightmare of debt and traffic.
While at the grocery foods car park today I saw by accident some female goose made a nest out of fresh mulch in the parkinglot under a parkinglot landscape area tree between parked cars. I remember when that whole area was a big wooded wetland that ran over the hill between the Scioto and Olentangy Rivers where it wasn't farmed - generations of geese later on still collectively remember that too.
Then while sitting in the car just taking in the suicide sky an old little woman walked up to the geesette offering bread and said in this little voice "you are doing a good job" to the mother goose - like the goose was some little teen mom living out in the parkinglot. Imagine what the goose was thinking - fight or flight... what is this crazy, upright, two legged, scary, white headed, two uncontrolled flaying armed, human doing to me now?
Everywhere I look I see Palestine under the Israeli Occupied Forces seige - even in the nature and parkinglots here. Well that little old woman meant well but can only think in humanizing terms with nature - as if nature were just like a childrens Beatrix Potter story - where all of Old Englands wildlife are characters like people...
This country needs more dissent - more public protest in the streets. Corporate/politician heads should roll in their own blood more often. Well despite all this and the house nearing completion and ready to be flipped (as if that is going to happen any time soon in this market! lol HA!)...
If I can't travel abroad like I used to again then really I don't care if my life ends early because this American Matrix experience is just not working for me in any way with meaning. I know you know what I mean but I had to write this... I've been sick with food poisoning for three days cooped up in the house with the shits - at one point the toilet had been ripped out and I was using a hole in the floor or a bucket for the endless shits - can you imagine...? My Gawd my travels in the third world were never this primitive!
Well I got through it and the toilet got reinstated - and I got a job - and faked it, though sick as a dog, in that corporate nonsense intimidating interview - that thank God I was just too sick to care about and that probably got me through the intimidation part - lol - Well - jobs these days in reality if you can find one are just a stepping stone - no company wants lifers despite what they might say about any of that - I just wish I could bicycle to work - because the commute is insane - Central Ohio should be a bicycle city given how generally flat it is like the whole of bicycling Holland or like Copenhagen.... who knows - maybe it will happen sooner rather than later... I don't know but this house is finally looking like it will get finished... Which is one big psychic relief to have a clean space to live my life in and out of.
The Mexican guys who work here though despite the difficulties of communicating are really great and actually put up with me and fix the things I complain about without loosing their sense of humor - which is actually nice to have around. But my gawdh that crazy Mexican radio they listen to loudly when they work drives me batty if I'm on the phone... I do use Spanish around these guys so maybe they appreciate that - I have learned a lot of Spanish with them just being around and I'm not afraid to try to use it. When I do they laugh at me - not with me - but I don't care - it's the laughter that I appreciate so much. Plus they work fast and cheap without being stressed about it all so who cares if they leave the beer bottles everywhere in the yard like they had a party - it kind of goes with the neighborhood...
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