Friday Love/Hate

I hate nothing. It's a cliche to say "hate is a strong word" but it's true. There are some people who we have dealt with on a familial level in the past two years who are judgmental wealthy condescending assholes. And at the times of interaction, I could tell they were judging it, feeling it to my core, catching those uncaught glances of disgust. And of course these people reveal themselves, although they continue the charade of care, though I am sure every moment I spent in their home was uncomfortable for them, because of what I looked to be, and what I came from. And I thought about how I hated these people, but really I don't. I feel bad for them, insulating yourself so deeply from the rest of the world, to the point you are alone with your small circle of confidants and your stuff... it's sad. And I am not saying that as some sort of reverse affirmation self-help bullshit. I'm for real. I come from shit, probably should be shit, but somehow am not. And I wouldn't change a single fucked up thing about who I was, where I was at, none of it, because hey, that's the path I was supposed to take. And the path is usually hard enough at times that I don't need to scrub brush it up with hatred.

I love Winter's Bone. It's funny because my healing process had not been healing, and I will probably get more into that at a later point in the next day or two regarding what has transpired with me in the past week, but for some reason we've had this movie for like two weeks, and sat on it until last night. And it was a highly moving movie for me, because there were a lot of little things that were reminiscent of my childhood. Not all of it, I didn't grow up with people getting killed and stuffed under trees in ponds or anything. But there's a ton of that movie that was real as fuck, and there were a lot of people in that movie that I have known. Like for real. They obviously went the authentic route, filming on actual hardscrabble properties in the Ozarks, and you could tell, as you could tell many of the actors were locals brought on for small parts. My wife just took a weekend class with a lady named Margie Flint (spelling?) who specializes in facial lines and what it tells. The reason so many movies about rural white underclass looks so fake is you don't have those hard lines all through the face, which come from years and even generations of hard things, whether that be drugs or go-nowhere jobs or alcohol or car wrecks or junkyard funerals or whatever the fuck it is. I saw people I knew in this movie, and actually saw my dad quite a bit in it as well. Honestly, the movie made me get emotional and shed tears, because there's a lot of sadness I've buried from my childhood. It's funny, for a long time I took a strange pride in coming from white trash, as if being a complete dysfunctional fuck-up was somehow making me better than everybody else. And I would prefer to be from where I came than from suburban sheltered sprawl, but hey, none of us choose what we are born into, as far as we know. I've moved on from that bizarre pride in self-destruction, but am still very thankful for what I've seen, and proud of where I am. It's weird, because there were similarities that I didn't even realize until this morning to my life and the main character chick from Winter's Bone, albeit the movie is a far more extreme version of my life. But I had a crazy family, problems galore, weekends at places with poker tables and small bill money piles, people slipping into the back room, methamphetamine not being called ice or crystal or meth or anything but crank because it is called crank and that is that, and learning at a young age to see what was ahead to help kind of protect my younger sisters from how ugly it might be. And I don't pretend my life was fucked up as fuck, like my mom sold me for crank or anything. But I've done crank with my own father, multiple times. Before he died, he was a 40-something man who would be awake all weekend long, and I am sure to this day that that, combined with other ill health activities, was a large part in why he had a massive stroke at 46 or 47 or whatever it was. He has a chainsaw graphic on his grave marker. If that ain't country... well, you know the rest.
Anyways, this movie was really well done, and I think did a better job of truly portraying broke ass white country white people in their beautiful hopelessness filled with fight than anything I've ever seen before. Like I said, my life was not like this movie all the way, but the line between how it went for me and how it could've gone that way is pretty damn thin, enough that it kinda freaked me out to think about after watching the movie. Shit, I know people I came up with who went to the other side of that line. I know a Lil Arthur. I know a Thump. I definitely know about 9 or 10 of Thump's ol' ladies. They were all friends with my mom. I had some email interactions with a friend (who will probably read this) a few weeks back about the suicidal thoughts that go through you when you are from that world, fighting to be a better person, sometimes against a deep riptide of blood relations and personal history. She said, in reference to someone from that same world, that they wanted to die, but was too strong to do it. That was the truth. I've been there, many many times, and probably might not be too strong to do it if it had not been for my uncle Ricky who went ahead and did it and stuck a pistol to his head behind the pop-up camper my dad was living in behind my grandmother's trailer back when I was 19. Ricky has visited me in dreams, and I know that it doesn't end the pain. Hell, my dad has visited me since his death, and his pain is the same and he's still self-medicating it away.
Healing is a hard fucking thing to do when you feel like you are covered in scars. It is very strange how that relates to this movie as well as my entire life as well as the past six months of my life since I quit drinking as well as the past two months as a poisonous organ had to be removed from me but the post-surgical infections just don't seem to want to finish healing. You cannot believe how difficult it is to break away from that riptide of blood relations and personal history. But I'm still thankful for every bad tattoo, scrape, scar, and scuffed line on my body.