The Breadbin

It's not my fault that I'm positive, I just stuck a needle in my arm
And nobody told me that sixty a day would do me any harm
My liver's shrivellin' like a leaf, but it's not the whiskey that do's it
Call me irresponsible and I'm really gonna lose it

--The Proclaimers, Everybody's a Victim

Surely I'm not the only one offended by everybody's offence.

I wrote a post about trigger warnings last year in which I was sharply dismissive of what The Atlantic  has called "The Coddling of the American Mind". Since I wrote that piece, the trend has broadened and deepened, and the word "microaggression" has entered the language.

Microaggressions are "everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership." Put into plain English, they are "…

...wasn't.

My first  and so far only, stab at a real honest to self and everyone else polyamorous relationship was an unmitigated disaster.

It was twenty years ago. My idealism was completely untempered back then, and it mixed not at all with a nasty streak of self-centredness.  Polyamory made emotional and logical sense, therefore it would work, damn the real world feelings, full speed ahead.

Looking back at it now, I find it hard to believe I could be so stupid. Or, actually, in the context of the lost decade that was my twenties, all too easy to believe I could be so stupid.

The ONLY thing I can say in my defence is that in 1995, we were all pretty much flying by the seat of our pants. There were few local poly groups unless you happened to live somewhere near Hippieville, U.S.A. The first book to even take an end run at polyamory, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy's The Ethical Slut, had yet to be published. The Usenet news group alt.polyamory was only four years old and still…

Diets don't work.

Eating healthy, tasteless foods in minuscule quantities while sweating, panting and pulling muscles WILL make you lose weight, of course. But many of us decide fairly quickly that the cure is worse than the disease. Whether it's because we actually enjoy eating food that tastes like, you know, food...or because we dislike pain and shortness of breath (or both)...we choose to remain corpulent. "I have the body of a God...the Buddha." "I'm in shape...round is a shape." "A waist is a terrible thing to mind." And so on and so forth.
The only way a diet will work is if you make it a permanent lifestyle change...stop calling it a diet and start referring to it, if you have to at all, as "the way I eat."
I've never managed to do this, simply because I've never managed to convince my brain that "food" is actually medicine. Contrary to every commercial for food you ever saw, nourishment is not supposed to …

The Breadbin has gone cold these last two weeks out of respect for my mother, and also because grieving is hard work that doesn't leave much room for extraneous feelings. What feelings do break through are strong enough to overpower rational thought, and pervasive enough that sometimes it's hard to tell what's grief and what really is a reaction to the situation at hand. Pile on the kind of unthinking, unfeeling hatred that has infected our media, especially the social variety of late...and it's just too much.



It has led me to unfollow almost all the media I'd subscribed to on Facebook, and it's also led to a few unfriendings of family members, on the grounds that I don't need that kind of poison in my world, just now especially.

It's been shifting into (what I fervently hope is) high gear for about a month now, and at the risk of invoking Godwin...it reminds me of nothing so much as the period leading up to Kristillnacht. The sentiment is there in spad…

Dear Mom,
Just checking in. I figure you must be getting used to your new digs by now. I bet it feels wonderful to be so free, after so long trapped in a body that was trapped in a chair that was trapped in a  house that was trapped in a world with limits in it. So many layers discarded, like peeling an onion. Maybe that's why I'm crying right now. Yes, that's it, onions. 
I miss you. I have missed you for a long time; I REALLY miss you now. I hope you’re not offended when I say I hope it’s a long time yet (by my measure of time) before I do get to see you again. I feel like I have a lot of unfinished business over here just yet. You were the first one to teach me about reminding People Who They Are and Mom, I gotta tell you, there are so many People over here Who have forgotten. 
As you’ve probably discovered by now, time, just like space, is a relative thing, and since you’re no longer in the realm of the relative, it doesn’t have any meaning for you any more. What a relief…

I’m just glad I got a chance to talk to her before she died.

 The obituary will probably read “after a long illness”. There’s so much left unsaid in those four words, so much pain only hinted at. And you’d never know, reading such an obituary, that my mother actually died in a fire.

I don’t know how to feel. The overwhelming emotion is a species of relief: Mom had been battling an array of diseases for years, and I know for a fact she wanted to go. I know this because Eva and I have had at least four conversations with her in which she begged for permission to die. The first time was nearly three years ago. I wrote her a short letter, using a first-grader’s vocabulary, telling her everything was okay and I loved her, signing it ‘Kenny’.

I hope she kept that letter.

I feel so much guilt, too. Not for feeling relief: as far as I’m concerned, death was a great relief to Mom and so it should be to me as well. I feel guilty because I wasn’t as close to her as a son should be. That the di…