This is a story about burying your head in the sand...
The gravy train has left the station. The party's over. The song has stopped. If you haven't got a place to sit you're out of the game of musical chairs.
The middle classes have been very busy playing musical chairs with their make-work jobs in bloated service industries that contribute nothing to the real economy. Meanwhile, in the real world, climate change and poverty have been largely ignored.
Sadly, a large swathe of older middle class people are very lazy. They sit at home in their big houses, watching TV, reading newspapers and criticising everything, but never lifting a finger to do anything. Many don't even vote or destroy their ballot paper.
Today, at the climate change march held in London, I saw many grandparents who are very concerned about the world that is going to be left for their grandkids. Sadly, my parents have no concern for their children or grandkids. You can't make a difference to the world by sitting around taking drugs, sorry Mum & Dad... the world doesn't work like that.
My parents have sucked a great deal of money out of the state to pay for illnesses relating to their abuse of alcohol, drugs and smoking, but they give so little back. It's really embarrassing. When they were contacted because I was in hospital with a 30% chance of surviving, they decided to wait for the call from the coroner... they decided it wasn't worth the 45 minutes or so to travel from Oxford to London Paddington.
Okay, so I'm not doing a great job of changing the direction of my writing yet. I'm trying to move it from the angry rants into some more positive stuff, and finishing my own story. However, I had to deal with my parents earlier in the week, and I just found it incredible that they would sit there and tell me that London is too far for them to visit a gravely ill son or daughter in hospital. Today I saw many thousands of pensioners who are far older and in much worse health than them, out in the wind & rain, protesting against man made climate change.
My parents live not far from David Cameron's constituency home, and I think that they epitomise the Conservative mindset of out of sight, out of mind. Because these ridiculously selfish people never actually see suffering and pain first hand, they can smugly sit there in their multi-million pound Cotswold houses and do nothing except criticise the victims of the world's cruelty.
That's an injury that was inflicted on me by my own father. He seemed to think that treating his own son like a human was somehow optional, and it was OK to perpetrate an act of savagery against me. I really don't think there could ever be any justification or reasonable explanation for somebody of sound body and mind doing something like that to a person, so I'm not even going to go into the circumstances surrounding it. I'm totally appalled by the way that my parents speak to me and treat me, and the things that they have done to me. I'm over it. They're pretty much dead to me.
There's a simple formula for looking after a human life: be kind. That's it. It's not hard. If you're hitting humans, abusing them, telling them they're bad, calling them names, criticising and undermining them, humiliating them and generally robbing them of self esteem, disrespecting them and treating them like utter shit... yeah, that's not good. That's probably going to fuck them up.
The National Health Service (NHS) was kind to me. After I bandaged up my leg with sanitary towels and a dressing gown cord, I came back to London. The Royal Free Hospital repaired 4 tendons and 2 nerves in my leg, so I could move it and have feeling again. God bless the NHS.
I've always looked after myself and it's ironic that the first time I needed an operation is because my own parent attacked me. My dad has actually had to have a few operations because of his poor lifestyle choices. Drinking and smoking and taking drugs f**ks up your body and it's the NHS who have to pick up the pieces.
It's better to build happy healthy children than to try and fix f**ked up adults. Surely it seems to make more sense to hug your kids and make them feel loved and cherished, to look after them, rather than just dump them on the state? I don't believe in this difficult child horse-shit. Kids respond to their upbringing. Be nice, and your kids will be nice too. It's that simple.
I've been trying to get all of my travelling and entrepreneurial ambitions out of my system, and I know that drug-taking in front of children is a complete no-go. I have even delayed fatherhood while I figure out what's going on with my mental health. I take the responsibility of parenthood very seriously. If you don't alter your lifestyle at all for your children, you're a terrible person.
So my friend Klaus keeps reminding me that "your wound is your gift" and I think he's right. I look at the huge scar on my leg, and I'm reminded just how toxic even my own parents could be, and that I need to be kind and compassionate and work hard for the benefit of humanity. I'm reminded just how irrelevant such terrible people are in my life, in the lives of the ordinary people of the world and in the future of the planet.
Such horrible selfish people need to be outed from their positions as moral authorities, and stopped from gaining any kind of political influence. If you don't have empathy, kindness, compassion... what the hell are you doing having any influence over children and grandchildren? You don't deserve anything more than to sit and rot in your home in lonely misery.
So where is my own empathy, compassion? Well, I'm very beaten down, but when my parents are eventually as weakened and old as the oldest and weakest member of the climate change march that I saw today, then perhaps I will approach them again with the olive branch of peace. Until then, they are far too vicious and cruel and ignorant and horrible to be approached. Let them stew in isolation for fear that their toxic ideas might permeate.
I'm very jealous of friends who have good relationships with their parents. I would like to have a loving, caring family with close ties between us all, but my parents are so toxic that they have poisoned many of the relationships between our family members. They spend a lot of time cultivating their woe betide me tales of their own suffering. Yes, it's called karma. If you drink and smoke and take drugs and treat your kids like shit, then you'll be sick and miserable and you'll deserve it.
Weirdly, I do still love my parents. I guess this recurrent feeling of feeling unconditional love for somebody who treats you like shit could be the basis for a mood disorder. Always trying hard to please a parent, and receiving an unpredictable response dependent on their state of intoxication with drugs or alcohol can create a lot of uncertainty in a child's life. It can shape a personality into one that has issues with boundaries and healthy forms of self-expression.
Communicating my distress via a blog looks like really strange behaviour, but believe me, I've tried all the other ways, and the above scar is my reminder that the result is never good. I had successfully managed to keep my parents at arms length for many years, much to the benefit of my health and happiness, but sadly my ex-wife managed to screw that up with some kind of bullshit story that brought my dad and his heavy-handed aggression, violence and woeful ignorance into play, with disastrous results for me.
When your back is against the wall, when you're cornered, when there is a lynching mob out for your blood, whipped into a frenzy with lies and ignorance... you have to resort to unusual tactics if you want to survive. I'm not really sure if I want to survive. I'm very exhausted by death by a thousand cuts, and everybody wants to put the boot in. However, unfortunately the survival instinct seems to prevail even though I'd love to just curl up and die.
So, I'm lashing out again. Sorry about that. Maybe you shouldn't corner and cruelly torture somebody who has been so badly beaten and bruised. They say that an injured animal is the most dangerous.
I'm trying to redirect my energy into more positive things though. I'm trying to be heard again, not in the hope of saving myself, but in the hope that somebody else who's in a similarly dark place can see that they're not alone. I'm hoping that somebody else who's going through hell might read my story and feel a little bit less alone in the world. I'm hoping that anybody who can relate, feels a little bit less like an unwanted freak.
I'm going to continue on my path of brutal honesty. I'm not out to name & shame anybody. This is my unedited story. There's a lot more to come, and a lot of it is going to be shameful and embarrassing for me, but I'm going to tell it anyway. I'm going to tell it because it needs to be told. People need to know what happens when you bully and abuse somebody. People need to know what happens when you repress and oppress and humiliate and exclude and destroy self-esteem and take away somebody's hope and reason for living.
I also want to try and keep going on a positive path of recovery, and discover if there's a path back to happiness and light. If the story has a message of hope in it that is emerging, that's a good thing. It might help somebody else who's going through hell, and then it was worthwhile me sharing and facing my fears of ridicule and shame.
I'm trying to do good deeds.
You can take the boy out of Oxford, but you can't take the Oxford out of the boy (November 2015)