I will tell you now that I actually consider myself very fortunate for having been born into such a dysfunctional and mean family. You wouldn't always think it judging by the way I talk about them all, especially my sinister Uncle Gino, but it is really the truth: I am grateful for it, and I am beyond elated for all the misery, hate, cruelty, and bad jokes these people have given me over the years. Especially I am grateful for the miserable holidays (like the next Thanksgiving now, much to my serious dismay, already quickly approaching).
But alas why am I grateful, some idiots might wonder? Why? Perche? Well it is simple really, dreadfully simple: By the age of 15, I want to say, I knew that having, one day, a family of my own ,would be a worthless, wretched thing. Having the misery from this one family, my "first" family, was enough to last a full lifetime, I figure. Watching the way each father in my extended family seems to hav completely failed and lost interest in his sons and daughters, the same way that they have lost interest in him, has tuaght me a very important lesson about fatherhood: It is worthless, and I do not want to partake in it.
Well it is not to say it is worthless exactly. There is certainly always something memorable about a father, but usually it seems that whatever is memorable is nothing all that good. I can understand, I suppose, why women feel its necessary to havea big famiy, and why they go on creating them year after year, generation after generation. Women, at least the strange women in my family and the ones I know from "afar" all seem to revel, for the most part, in puttin these terrible holidays together. They really think all the men enjoy coming together on days like Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, Easter, Father's Day, Super Bowl Sunday, Christmas Eve.
Year after year they never seem to fully comprehend how much we men despise those days, oNce you put the food aside. I swear I may very well have accidentally made the mistake of having a family, had those holidays not existed to warn me. Those days taught me everything I needed ot know -- as in the truth-- of family life. You got to see the real feelings of everyone, I suppose, I don't know how to put it. You got to see how miserable they all are, and how little they all care for one anothers company. The entire affair is all dreadfully artificial. There was a great long winding thing I read from Paris once, some sort of big book some anarchists wrote, where they discussed family life in the late 20th and early 21st century. Basically what they said was that it no longer has any use, because capitalism has rendered it useless. "It's just a big dead pile of nothing ..of emptiness..thrown on the table. Everyone sees it. Every year, every holiday, everyone sees it." Maybe everyone in France does; but in the States they still don't quite seem to comprehend how useless the family has become. You have to deeply consider just how little I could do for my son, if he were to exist, in a modern world like this. I think this is what women don't understand. Oh all the women in the modern world are endlessly pondering, it seems ,just why the men that gave them the babies don't care about the babies so much as they should. If the man stays with the woman and lives with the woman, the usual complaint is that "...he hardly pays any attention"...and of course if the man splits with the woman, it often becomes "he doesn't pay enough" .."he never bothers"... on and on it goes.
The truth is that having a son just no longer seems very interesting. Why? Because the days of passing a skill onto your son are, it would seem, all but gone. For example, my grandfather, whom I loved and cherished (believe it or not) was eager to try and pass on , to me, the knowledge of his business, the oil business. He drove a delivery truck through the city and pumped fuel oil. It was a great job and I often had an absolute blast driving through the city wiht him as a child...I think of the old memories all the time...I certainly enjoyed it and I got to see "All the world" that counted. Being in the garage with Pop was a great thing, at times as a boy, and I used to love washing down the truck, climbing up the big ladder, fixing the hose just right, fixing the tires, etcetc. The memories are all very fresh for me.I get a whiff of oil in my nose when I'm walking the city and it's like old time all over again. But it's been 7 years since Pop died and I am not an oil man, nor was I one even when I was 18.
No one in my family thought it would be wise for me to be an oil man. It seemed odd to want to be exactly what Pop had been, it seemed no good to create that as the goal of my life, and in addition to that there was the additional dilemma that oil as an industry is not what it was in Pops time. And my story is just one of a million stories of a son in such a predicament, of a boy who can't really just "comfortably" imbibe whatever his father, or in my case, his grandfather, was. I stress: Most sons in the modern world no longer can hope to pick up the skills of their father. This has been going on since about 1860 I would say. Some year like that. Ever since black smithing and shoe smithing ever went the way of the horse and carriage.
So you have to ask yourelf, women: What's the point of being the father if you can't make your son like you? I know it sounds bad. But really...what is the point? It's just no fun. Everyone gets too different, and then it is hard to have a conversation. Even with Pop,as much as I loved him, it was beginning to get difficult to carry on a proper conversation: we were simply too different.
In the old days it was almost unfathomable to imagine a son that would eventually have wildly different politics than the father. These days, it's fairly commonplace. It's all become useless is the main point. It has lost its economical function. Sad isnt it? To realize that the whole thing that kept fathers and sons together for centuries was relaly just economical at its core, and now it has no true point. The son turns 18 and goes to university and it all just....gets blasted away. And if the father is already educated, like these folks in the higher echelon are, it usually doesn't make much of a difference either, I have noticed.
Educated people, myself arguably included, are very cold , freezing people. For example, though the abject horror of the family holidays and the broken father & son relationships in my extended family helped me to realize how worthless having one of my own would be, the other thing that helped me see it was simply being vaguely "educated" and having my own "interests". I have dreams of being a properly published writer one day, whenever I can actually get the courage (or, more, the patience) to send my stuff out somewhere. A writer really has no business having some huge family, in my opinion. Writers with children... I don't know...something strikes me as strange about it. Educated people are selfish, perhaps. The uneducated are too but it's different.
The problem with the uneducated, you see, and the real reason they always want to have a family, is because they have no idea how to pass the time or entertain themselves, when they're alone. I swear, at the end of the day, this is the real reason the uneducated masses are so obsessed with having a big family, even though it is now completely against their economical interest. They can't do anything, even the simplest things, alone, and enjoy them. They can't watch film, see a ballgame, listen to music, eat dinner, take walks, play video games, write poems...they can't do any of it properly alone. So they think a family will save them from boredom. A lot of folks think it has something to do with economic securtiy I think... i.e. "if I have a big family, I'll have somewhere to fall"..but that's clearly not the case...you can't depend on your own children to protect you until many years have passed and they're grown, and you have to spend basically a million dollars on them as they're growing, so obviously that has nothing to do with it.
What it really is is just plain boredom. Charles Bukowski hit the nail on the head with this at times, if you listen to some of his interviews. I related with Bukowski instantly when I discovered him: He felt, in the 1970s, exactly how I felt, decades later, long before even knowin his name. There is some video of him where he says something like ... "people get married, get the career, they get the white picket fence and the kids, even though they don't even want it, and the reason they do it is because they don't know what da hell else to do". In other words, these family people tend to not be their own individuals, and to some degree, being your own individual has become the calling card of the new centuries now. Again, this is a radical departure from the ways of old....
The passing of the family unit will probably one day be regarded as being similar to the passing away of the tribe. The tribe seems absurd to all of us now, and it has seemed absurd for quite awhile, and yet, once upona long ago, the tribe was the most important, vital, and necessary thing around. In the ages of old, life wouldhave been unfathomable for men and women both, without their tribe to guide them through the darkness of the jungle. Nothing could have possibly been more necessary. Yet then, one day, the centuries passed, and we all woke up to a world where the tribe became just a laughable, comical, and backwards thing. Many areas in Africa and South America, and perhaps Asia, I don't know, are still operating with tribes and tribal law. Not surprisingly, it's a complete mess from a modern perspective. A complete tragic mess. Sure,the tribe seems romantic from some movie-esque perspective, to many of us, but it also is clearly a total disaster in reality. It does not seem to be working to me. Not at all. Just like most of the modern family units also, now, don't seem to be working, like they did, "once upon a long ago".
At any rate, if you're in North America, you most likely don't have to worry about what I am writing for quite some time yet, primarily due to the absolutely horrific way in which the States have been organized. Suburbia, very soon, will some day be recognized as the biggest mistake the Americans ever made, in my opinion. Why? It is simple: Suburbia initially, when it was first being built after the Second World War, seemed like it was going to lead to great freedom, to individiuality, to having your own little "world" with your yard, etcetc. Now, however, we are slowly beginning to see what suburbia really is: It is a sick trap, especially from the perspective of the modern world, and yet we now see that there is really no way to escape it. Going forward, I can assure you that the suburban topic is going to become the biggest topic in this counttry. The best way I can put it is to say that suburbia is now leaving a vast majority of Americans totally unable to connect with the modern world in the way they need to connect with it. Yes, yes, we all know a few overachieving people who have returned to the city and have all gone "vegan", but it isn't enough. The poor and average middle class folks -- who are the ones you really need back in those cities-- are trapped in suburbia with nothing to do, but also no means of escaping. This is especially the case for the young poor who had childen without taking a million things into consideration. A jump back into the city for them is impossible now.
What you have to realize about the catastrophe that is the American suburb is that, when they were initially built, the main idea was that fuel and gasoline would never run out. The suburbs were literally a direct result of how fun, and how easy, it was, to drive back in the original day of the auotmobile becoming ",mainstream". That 20 minute cruise down the highway from the downtown center was considered extremely liberating in the 50s and the 60s. Now it's somethig totally different: It's a nightmare. It's the same story for the mall: everyone loved the drive. Now it is also a nightmare. No one has the gas money to go there. It has become inconvenient. Whats funny about all of this of course is that the Americans, I hate to tell you, were warned , as they went about vuilding all their malls and their suburbs, they were warned by many, many intellectuals of the time that it would all eventually rot and collapse, but as with so many things, the Trump voters of the previous time periods did not listen to the intellectuals. They thought they knew better, and this is what they created.
Oh well. Enough ranting. Time to write a good short story where I get some hot lady in Louboutins to shoot somebody, like a bad husband in her suburban house, with a submachine gun....
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