Alone, for real

I truly am alone now.

I have felt  isolated  for most of my life.

Yesterday, my father called and asked for my help. He asked me to leave work early, and come help with the kids. My mother already had been at the hospital with Mothra for 24 hours when he had called. He couldn't be with her; there is no way to safely bring a near 3 year old with bronchitis into a hospital room with a 6 month old with pneumonia.

Hell, most of the time,  I  isolated myself.

I have always despised social situations.

I haven't been writing this blog for you to know the gravity of this request. My parents, as a rule, don't ask me for help. They certainly don't ask me to leave work early to profer my help. Yet that's what happened yesterday.

At parties,  I  am all too happy to stand on the side and watch others have fun.

I, up until now, have had only the perception of alone.

My parents have been the only two people in my life in whom I trust enough to share my emotional troubles. My friends are emotionally stunted, and have problems of their own. I am their rock, not the other way 'round. I fear breaking them if add my issues to theirs.

I have never actually been alone.

My penchant for  vicariously living  may be why I take to the parenting thing so easily.

My parents are getting old. They are less capable, both physically and mentally of taking care of two kids than they think, and than I thought. I will soon, be unable to unburden my demons onto my parents, lest they break. That day may be sooner than I think, and is likely sooner than I hope.

I will be alone soon.

Godzilla & Mothra are both sick. Godzilla has bronchitis, and Mothra is in the hospital with pneumonia. This is God's way of saying, "D-Rock, you thought you were powerless before... wait 'til you see this." Kids shouldn't be allowed to be sick. It's just wrong.

For those of you without kids: imagine you just got as a gift: a top of the line BluRay player, complete with Bose surround sound system and 40" plasma screen. Now after, using the best of your new system's capabilities for a few months, suddenly the only thing will play is BioDome. In mono. And the disc has scratches on it. And you think the person who gave you all this cool stuff is going to take it away because you took lousy care of it, but you know you took great care of it, including using fiber optics instead of regular cable, cleaning the dust off everyday, and turning it off at night at a decent hour. Okay, so you didn't clean the dust of every day, but that wouldn't make it break, would it? It's not like you took a hammer to it or dropped it in a swimming pool. But this is a precision instrument. Maybe a little dust could hamper performance. So you call up that techie friend of yours, Doc. Doc looks at your setup and says, "looks like you've got a little Pauly Shore infection." He pulls out a screwdriver. Well, you're pretty sure it's a screwdriver, but you've never seen one like this before. He turns one of the screws on the sound system a half a turn clockwise, and the stereo sound returns. He hands you the screwdriver and tells you to turn one screw a quarter turn clockwise twice a day for the next ten days, and everything will be fine. After that, what's left of the screwdriver will be useless, so don't try to use it anymore, but don't use it any less than that either.

Doc never asked if your stuff got dusted every day, if you used cable, or what time you shut it off each day. This all seemed very normal to him, like Pauly Shore is on every new TV in world once in a while.

Godzilla

Godzilla is my nephew, and as is the case with all the other names on my blog, Godzilla is not his real name. Simply, I am extremely paranoid that someone will find out who I am and start stalking me and my family. This assumes that anyone will ever read what I write, and that assumption seems ludicrous to me.

Eventually, I will break down, and faithful readers of this blog may one day know my address. I know one of the keys to good writing is being specific, and my being paranoid to the point of not be able to talk about anything I care about is definitely at odds with that. I may even post a picture or two of someone I've actually met one day. So, to help the confused reader, I start with this post a series of cast biographies.


Godzilla's pretty amazing, and I want to be him when I grow up. I want to live with the knowledge that if I jump from the seventh step of the stairs, someone will catch me, and if no one catches me, someone will come make me feel better. (Both regular occurrences, except we're lucky if it's only the seventh step.) I want to have heroes again. He thinks I can scare away monsters, and because he thinks it, it's true. He thinks his grandmother knows the lyrics to every song ever written, and his grandfather is the funniest person on the planet.

I fear his sometimes excessive television watching has stunted his imagination, and its use as a babysitting tool started at way too early an age for him. As I have stated previously, I am not home as often as I would like to be, and I have very little control over this. Also, Sunday is for football. This is a tradition he will understand soon enough. Most of his television watching comes under Lost Sheep's (his mother) watch, but those are issues that I'd rather not discuss right now (For Lost Sheep's sake, not for mine).

He lives in a house with Mothra (his sister), Pollyanna (his grandmother), Cuddly Porcupine (his grandfather), and myself. His grandparents are currently his legal guardians. I gave him the moniker Godzilla because he's two, and he's good at it.

Captain Godzilla

Godzilla is dressed as a pirate right now and will soon wander the streets with Lost Sheep and Pollyanna begging for candy. He will probably be done begging before I get home. This disappoints me. His costume came with a long hair (a la Jack Sparrow) attached to the hat. This is unfortunate, because Godzilla is 2, and can't grow facial hair worth a damn-- the poor lad looks like a girl.

Oh, the happy poo

Hours after lamenting my perceived failure on the subject, Godzilla just sat down on the potty and made a big poo last night. No asking, no cajoling, no reminding, no anything. Just wandered on over to his little potty chair and did his business. We made the required big fuss. It was fantastic. I know it's been said thousands of times, but I am continually amazed at the experiences considered joyful when small children are involved.

High brow stories of poo

Godzilla's having some trouble potty training. The little guy will urinate in his potty regularly, with glee even. But the poo, getting him to poo in the potty is very difficult. When I ask him if he has to go he gets this fearful look in his face that makes me want to cry every time I see it. I somehow think this is my fault, and wish I could make it better for him. Pollyanna tells me this not so, setbacks are common, there is no possible way this could be my fault. She is right, of course, but I just worry about damaging him permanently.

Absence makes the heart wither

Since I started my current job, I have had plenty of time to contemplate my existence. Between the 9 hours a day at work, and the 3-4 hours commuting, the voices in my head have a captive audience with little distraction more than 12 hours a day (with the exception of when Cuddly Porcupine drives us both to work- then the voices only get 6 or 7 hours). What I usually end up focusing on is how alone I feel. After working 6 hour days a half hour from home, with my days off usually being weekdays, and being unemployed after that, I miss my time with Godzilla. I used to be able to take him to the playground, walk around the neighborhood, or just sit and read with him for hours at a time. And when other people that he loved came around, he still wanted to spend time with me. I did not fall to the side like I have the past few nights. Godzilla and Mothra are the only things worth anything to me. To be ignored by him, like I have, hurts.

I know he is two. He can't possibly know how much this hurts. I put on a brave face and be happy when he is near me, partly because of my perceived responsibility of eliminating sadness from small children's lives, but partly because if I don't, he'll want to be around me even less. I know he loves me, but I am humanly selfish and want him to love me most.

Mothra arrives

Mothra has arrived. She's cute, but other than that, she doesn't do much. Well, she does eat, sleep and crap, but cute is really the only thing going for her right now. Mothra is an unfortunate nom de guerre for a cute little girl., but I wanted to stick with the Japanese monster movie theme, and Godzilla's name definitely fits his personality. Maybe when Mothra develops her own personality, she can get a new one.

Half a ton, here I come

I eat when I am hungry, when I'm depressed, when I'm angry, when I'm bored. I have no self control when it comes to eating. Being in a state of fullness does not stop my eating. This was not an issue when I worked in a stockroom of a major retail chain, on my feet all day, lifting 25 50 pound bags of dog food in a few minutes, or climbing on top of those giant warehouse shelves because a single package of toilet paper fell and no one can reach it through normal methods.

 

But now, I sit. I answer phones, type occasionally, and stare at a computer monitor. I only have to type after the phone rings, and the phone doesn't ring that often. So mostly it's the staring. Occasionally, I get to switch off to watching my plant grow. To the fill the gaps, I eat. I eat banana chips and pretend they're healthy. I eat Peanut Butter M&Ms, cookies, crackers, and Jolly Ranchers. I bring my lunch back to my desk so I don't have to talk to anyone. Maybe I can keep how miserable I am a secret a little bit longer.

 

But I am grateful to have a job. I am. I got fired from the last one. But I got this job because of who I know, not because of who I am. The position I fill did not exist before I got here, and probably will not after I leave. The sitting would not be so bad if I had something to do. But I don't. So I post moronic things on a blog that no one will ever read. And I eat. And read other people's blogs.

 

Today and yesterday I have been reading Sweet Juniper!, by two parents who go by Dutch (the dad), and Wood (the mom). Its literary style (the parts I have read, anyway) is a mixture of the New Yorker, The Simpsons, Fawning Parent Magazine, and Let's Forget That We Are Adults Once in a While Quarterly. It is well written and self-depreciating without making the authors sound self-loathing. They speak of their child with great frequency (that is what the blog is about) without turning into those parents who won't shut up about their child. In short, I hate them. One gave up on being a lawyer to stay home with their kid-- and there's another on the way; both finished law school in less time it took me to get my bachelor's degree-- oh fuck, I forgot-- that's still on my to do list. Did I forget to mention that they love each other very much and continue to express their undying affection for each other?

 

So here I remain, in a job I hate because I have no other prospects, having no other prospects because I haven't finished my degree, wishing that at the very least my job could be a little closer to home so I could see the frickin' awesome two year old that lives there for more than hour a day while he's awake, reading about other people's lives that I wish I had. And eating.