Life History and Lifestyle (part one)
2:30 PM: the recent posts have become exercises improvisational free-writing , i figured i’d tag it like one of those Grateful Dead shows on archive.org that i’m so fond of. i stopped thinking about what i was writing but i kept typing about it. if you can get through the first set, things start to come together, before they fall apart. The whole concept i’m getting at is kind of meta, and i don’t know if it floats, but that isn’t going to stop me from trying .like anything else i write, its just here while it comes out easily and is up for editing, re-organization, revision and re-purposing. I rehearse on stage, in a way and that’s what this is…
I have no idea what i’m doing, but I might be doing it well.
SET ONE:
For a little while i was writing into google docs, taking my time and crafting things carefully before i transferred them over here to Medium. i was really putting a lot of thought into the whole process. i don’t do that now, i raw dog into this blogging platform with no idea whats going to come out. i don’t know whats better but the improvisational nature of the way i write now feels more freeing, and i don’t really think at all while i’m doing it. I dont remember what i wrote yesterday, and i never read anything i’ve written after i’ve written it. My lists need updating but the whole organizational upkeep thing is way less entertaining than just freestyle keyboard rocking with some hard drums in my headphones. I like writing as fast as i think, which is pretty fast, and i’m fortunate for growing up with typing edutainment software ( Mario teaches typing, Mavis beacon teaches typing) so that my fingers can keep up with my head.
There is a funny byproduct of this approach: longer entries. Medium notes how long an article takes to read, and i think my average was between 3–5 minutes. yesterday my “not thematically cohesive” ranting came up at 6 minutes. I think society at large has developed a very short attention span, and i have way less readers than i used to… i don’t know what the deal is with that, maybe it’s better to tell the stories of what a shit show addiction is, than how rosy things are now that my head is back together a bit more. I hardly ever look at my viewer analytic statistics anymore, when i used to hang on them .
Ok, i’m bored with the mechanical upkeep “writers on writing” type subject matter so i’m going to put my new favorite 2023 thing right here, ladies and gentleman: the three dots.
Tomorrow is my 37th birthday, which i wrote about yesterday, so … ok moving on.
SET TWO:
Now i can really get trucking, but i’m still not going to delete the lead up to the Crux of this thing. every set 2 with a 35 minute “Dark Star” needs a set one with its little 4 minute “Berthas” and johnny cash covers. if you aren’t familiar with grateful dead tapes, this concept will make no sense, and i think you should start checking out some dead tapes on archive.org.
Many of you will remember that i’m currently in long term addiction treatment, and it’s going well. today i was in a group therapy session that i found very interesting and revealing. I try to get really into the inward navel gazing of understanding why my life became such a Chernobyl level disaster, and i really got into it today, with a great young counselor named Andrew, whom i rode a bunch of roller coasters with when we took our druggie feild trip to Six Flags Great Adventure back on Halloween.
The group was about both life history and lifestyle factors that led to the life of destructive and all-consuming addiction, there was a worksheet, and I was armed with one of my favorite pens…now I can look at it as a kind of outline for what today’s post can become if I can keep my focus here….
Life History
“Never had the makings of a varsity athlete”
one of my favorite lines from the sopranos is Uncle Junior talking about his Nephew Tony, and saying “he never had the makings of a varsity athlete”. It must have been thematically important to the whole thing, because the concept is revisited in the prequel film “many saints of newark”.
That’s me (besides the whole becoming a new jersey mafia boss part), I never had the makings of a varsity athlete. I was very skinny and shorter than the other kids. I think my dad signed me up for soccer around age 6 and I do believe I lasted one practice. I have never cared for sports, and I still don’t, the whole thing means absolutely nothing to me. I vaguely remember some little league, but I know I was just spacing out, lost in thought in the outfield.
For whatever reason, in my early school years, physicality was super important to everyone. Gym class, the mile run, physical size, and stature… all of that shit was what people were focused on as far as being popular went. I couldn’t measure up to any of that stuff. I took a lot of childhood cruelty in the form of bullying, and for a while, it got to me.
I wasn’t without my strengths… I remember the adults telling me that I was some kind of genius. it sounds kind of douchy getting at it like this, maybe, but that’s what they told me. The family rumor that I’ve heard over and over is that I started reading at age 2, and I don’t know how true that is. I spent my childhood closely under the wing of my maternal grandfather Dr. Richard Hughes, who was an esteemed professor and some kind of dean of something at Boston College, where my parents went and met each other in the early 80s. To everyone he was the brilliant professor and author Dr. Richard Hughes, to me he was just Opie. The oldest cousin gets the right to name the grandparents of the family, and my cousin Phil (b. 1980), named my grandparents Nonnie (my grandmother) and Opie. Their government names were Richard and Gertrude, but they went by the nicknames Dick and Gay. In retrospect, Nonnie and Opie are preferable to Dick and Gay. All my peers bullied me for my small physical stature and general nerdiness, but all the adults nurtured my intelligence, especially Opie. He read Charles dickens to me, greek mythology, and the poems of John Donne. He taught me a lot of games too: starting with simple card games like Go Fish and War until we graduated to blackjack and 5-card poker. I must’ve been around 5 when he got me into chess, and the cool thing was that he never let me win, even though I was but a toddler. I beat him once. It was no secret to anyone that I was Opie’s favorite, because my family had a lot of fucked up features, like favoritism.
Opie died in 2002, when i was in my 2nd year of high school, and just getting into drugs, alcohol and the whole squandered potential of a gifted child trip. I never really processed his passing, and i’m not sure if i have to this day. I think about how disappointed he would’ve been when i stopped bringing home A+ report cards, and sliding into the high school diploma with the D-’s that were a gift from my teachers.
A lot of things in my life align with the sopranos, and Nonnie was very much the malignant narcissist that Tony’s mother Livia Soprano was. she died in 2012. She might be the most difficult person I’ve ever dealt with and, unfortunately, her death was a relief to most of us, who had known her for our whole lives.
Speaking of family, and moving along on this little worksheet I was scratching on earlier: my family has a profound history of mental illness. my dad’s mother had severe bipolar disorder, maybe the worst I’ve ever seen. I remember her depressive episodes, and not really understanding why she didn’t get off the couch, and why there was unopened mail everywhere. My paternal grandmother went by “nana” and being the oldest grandchild on that side of the family, I was also very close to her, I was like her sidekick in my very young years, we went all over the place whenever I would visit that side of the family on the jersey shore. Being the first grandchild and nephew of very young parents, I was a golden child to all my very young aunts and uncles on my dad’s side. My dad’s youngest brother Uncle Michael might have been still in his last years of high school when I was born. I was like Simba in “The Lion King”
Every family has it’s narratives, hearsay, legends and often the facts are very different than what the adults tell you, i’m ill equipped to provide the actual facts, so ill give the version of the events that i came up believing . Legend has it that my dad’s father Bill Sr. couldnt handle my nana’s insanity and ran off with a younger woman, was born again in the love of christ and moved to misouri. I understand that he was of no help to his mentally ill ex wife, and their 4 children. My dad says that as the oldest a lot of responsibility fell on him. I know his siblings went on to build a relationship with Bill Sr. but, my father never forgave the man. hardly knew my paternal grandfather, and i don’t even know if he’s still alive. i think the whole lifelong resentment really led to my dad being super mentally fucked up in his later life, i don’t know, like i said, i can only write from where i’m standing and see what i’m seeing.
It isn’t just my dad’s side of the family. My mother’s sister, Noel, committed suicide 2 years before I was born, and her other sister Jocelyn did the same thing in 2015. Obviously, I never met Noel, but I was very close with Aunt Josh, and her kids were my closest cousins. It’s pretty rare for someone to lose two aunts on the same side of the family to suicide, and the fact that this happened should illustrate the whole point of life history contributing to what a dysfunctional adult I became.
4:37 PM: oh fuck I accidentally bit off more than I could chew with all of this, and there doesn’t seem to be enough coal to keep the steam train of keyboard tapping moving, so the “writer on writing” commentary re-enters the ring here. I Don’t like to write a bunch of shit, and then not publish it. It dawned on me that this is a big project now. What I am going to do is publish what fell out of me into this Chromebook today…Caveats and all, with another disclaimer, that it’s kind of a draft up for later revision. Paragraphs will go between paragraphs, sentences will go between sentences, words will go between words, apostrophes will go into contractions, and commas and semicolons will go where they should. it’s rather daunting to get into a freewriting thing, and accidentally start telling your life story. That’s the cool thing about blogging, it can be this big work in progress, and people can watch it come together. i really lost focus way into this thing, and that’s ok, i suppose.
I fail to finish a lot of things I start, so if you feel like holding me to this, I can be reached at: ev.penk7@gmail.com. You can tell me its good, you can tell me it sucks, you can tell me a secret, you could tell me anything you want, and ill respond.
I’ve talked about the big plan, and i recently met someone that was pretty down with how i was looking at it getting done. The big plan is to take these hundreds of pages of content from this blog, outline an narrative arc, and weave them together into a larger piece.
It wouldn’t be a blog post without the fundraising advertisements, and the usual link of links….
LINK OF LINKS!
https://linktr.ee/EvR0cK17
PAYPAL
https://www.paypal.me/evr0ck17
Did you know that if you enjoy my writing that you can actually buy me a coffee? yes! https://ko-fi.com/evr0ck17
