Laugh at it or it will kill you

.
I floated back to my desk, “I’ve got to get out from behind this computer. I have to find a way to get out, meet people, stop sitting here at the monitor screen for hours and hours, this can't be good for me.” Floated around the chair, full circle, back to the desk.

“I know, I’ll go to Craigs List and see what I can find under Activities.” Three hours later was still at the computer.

***********
My daughter emerged from her room to get ready to go to work and mumbled something to me like, "Are you still angry?"

“Hmmph, it has nothing to do with the Illinois Supreme Court decision last month.” With that the room got silent from both ends.

But not for long on my side. “I have to live in one state and have a lawsuit in another state. Bad enough. Since people in California had cases going back at least as far as mine, some even to the 1940s.

Geez, I'm already dealing with getting old, now my child molestation case is denied because I'm old...

In every state where they ARE changing the laws, it’s still only going to be for people whose claims go back to like the 1970s.

Why isn't the AARP jumping on top of this?

And plus do you know how much money my dad donated to the L.A. Archdiocese since we moved here in the 1950s, yet I have to go to the Chicago Archdiocese for help, I mean what the f--, I mean what the- what the what the-!!!!!!!"

“Mom. Mom. Mom.”

“Oh, come on, you going to tell me I don't have a good reason to be mad? I'm mad? I mean I'm mad. “

“It doesn't matter mom, yeah you have a damn good reason to be angry. You don't think I have a lot of reasons to be angty too? You think I wouldn't rather be in college than working at Walmart?

It’s just it doesn't do any good, mom. No matter how real your reasons are for being angry, all anybody else sees is a little old lady going nuts.

Don't get mad, mom, let me just tell you this because it's true. Nobody wants to listen to you because all they see is this little old lady who’s so angry that she's shaking and sputtering all the time and mom, you're not- they don’t- nobody wants to hear it.”

Stunned, I stared at the computer. The screen went dark and my face reflected back, so scarred from scowls the impression is more evil than righteous. She’s right. I'm too angry, even if I do have a lot of real good reasons to be angry, at this point, it’s not hurting anyone else but me - but us.

And god knows how much it's already hurt the female who is trying to grow up in my home with me.

“You're right,” I said. “The only way this isn’t going to destroy us, is to use it, turn it around. I mean when you have so much stuff falling apart and everything is going wrong, what else can you do but laugh at it. It becomes so bad it’s funny. I have to find a way to make this all into comedy.”

LIKE this:

I was molested by a Catholic priest when I was five years old and as a result I grew up with these weird compulsions. All I wanted was to do was be around men in high places, especially after puberty kicked in, you know what I mean?

You ever wonder why there used to be so many dirty jokes about girls from Catholic schools?

You have a guy in clergy collar towering over you when you're this high, and he’s got his fingers in that place that sends you to new heights, I mean for the rest of my life I confused sexual arousal with airplanes and space travel. I'm serious.

For a while in the 1970s I lived on a commune down in what used to be Laguna Canyon, where Timothy Leary dropped in out of a tree now and then to visit and we took LSD almost every day, honest. Or this other group would sit around the Buddha statue behind the hidden door at the Mystic Arts Bookstore and chant Om while we were peaking on not acid, but mescaline as acid was not organic...

But that wasn’t the weirdest psycho-sexual-religious thing I did due to compulsions placed in me by the fingers of Father Horne. See he used to get to me in the woods, with the daylight behind him, his body frame a silhouette even in his clerical robe. For the next 30 years or so I thought St. Michael the Archangel had come to me in the woods and placed this special thing between my legs-

When I was five.

So I went through life looking and looking for that connection between my unfinished orgasm and the sky.

So when I found myself in the late 1970s, in Texas -

Don’t even ask how I ended up in Texas -

I discovered NASA. Men uniforms sky.

At UT Austin you had to take five science courses to graduate, and the astronomy courses were often taught by professors who had research grants with NASA in Houston nearby. In one course I took, the professor got all excited talking about how man would someday to expand into space and what they were doing at NASA to make it happen and I went Ka-jjjjcccoing -

Men, uniforms, sky, exciting!!!!

I HAD TO GET TO NASA!!!!!

So by the end of my senior year there in Austin, I’d gotten references from all the astronomy professors who had contracts with NASA (No not using sex, I never traded sex for money or favors, that's not what this was about, it was more a mission from God).

I’d written 12 or 15 stories about the space program for Austin and surrounding papers, I’d inundated the Public Affairs office at NASA Houston with letters and work samples, begging for a job saying-

Boy would I be an asset.

NASA believed me. I can be so good at this.

I did such a good lobbying job, NASA actually created a job for me. In Public Affairs, I mean did they know in advance what I was going to do?

Public Affairs?

It all ended up being so public too. I ended up being a scandal. I left NASA three years later as a real live genuine scandal.

See the priest started this motor in me, and now I was 30 years old and I still needed to make that connection with men in the sky, I knew that had something to do with my screwy destiny.

That motor was running so hard and fast, that when I got to NASA I started trying to make it with every man who wore a skinny tie and looked like he might work in mission control, trying to make my way up to the Astronaut Office, but most of the astronauts were too classy to mess around with that slut in public affairs.

Most of them were.

Public Affairs, I had to end up at NASA Public Affairs.

It’s not funny yet.

******************
I'm trying to write it funny, but it’s not funny yet.

However, other stuff in this story could be funny.

Think of Catholic priests getting blow jobs from altar boys, then unruffling themselves to go out and perform Mass, with the same altar boy now holding Communion wafers for him.

No, that's not funny either.

Let me focus more on Charlie Sheen. . .

His dad Martin changed the family name to Sheen in honor of the glorious and wonderful Bishop Fulton Sheen, can't you just hear the Irish brogues around the family table as they discussed the name change? Can't you feel the smothering of Catholicism forced on kids whose parents are really busy elsewhere?

Charlie Sheen ended up a notorious sex addict.

Charlie Sheen would probably find a way to make these stories about pedophile priest crimes funny.

Or better yet, Sarah Silverman:


"It’s bad enough having to watch people around you get settlements for the same crimes you lived through because they lived in L.A. and you lived in Chicago, so now they get to move out of L.A., and here we still end up living in East Hollywood, I mean is that fair!!!!!?

Nobody talked about sex crimes in the 1950s, that's why it takes older people longer to come forward. But NO. I have to live with Illinois laws when I'm in California. Was our family the only one that moved to California in the 1950s? What the f---?"

"Mom! Mom! Stop!"

kay ebeling October 16, 2009