Boundaries are not something well respected in a toxic family. One of the coping styles is placating. Children of addicts will sometimes try to appease the addict by apologize or do whatever is demanded. Boundaries are not a thing for children who choose to cope by appeasement.
Charlie’s kin drink. That’s not a thing. People drink. Our national experience with demonizing alcohol didn’t go well. Banning liquor made Al Capone wealthy. Prohibition may not have created moonshine. But it did create a black market for illegal liquor. We got really creative with ways to defy Prohibition.
Charlie drinks. Nobody cares. Well . . . sort of. Drinking isn’t his major malfunction. Boundaries are his issue. You know that quote attributed to mothers? The one that goes, “if your friends dared you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?” To which most of us would stare at our toes while replying, “no.”
Charlie Lept
Dares are bad news for Charlie. One rather drunken night at a frat party someone pissed in a bourbon bottle and dared Charlie to taste the contents. He drank all of it. Then there is his failed effort to bail his aunt out. That went well.
Charlie grew up with, “if you would just come correct I’d be fine.” Oof. If you know, you know. So he tried to be the perfect son and please his drunken kin. He did well until he didn’t.
Toxic family gift us with bitter stories. Once we are of age the opportunity to address it is always there. We can do that or we can let it leak into our health in the form of illness. My literary lane is the edge cases who take their toxic family legacy and behave badly from it. Charlie, Neesha, Ophie and Inger are interesting to me because of the ways they are broken.
Triggered Again
Social media and legacy media travel roads similar to my lane. They are addicted to angst and outrage. For over a century clicks, subscriptions and news stand sales are highest when there is an emotive news story. Bleeding leads made them rich. No, not news. Oedipus Rex anybody?
Then this question, “what do you mean toxic?” It is self-evident to you what is and isn’t toxic. There is a consensus among your social circles. We are 336 million people. Likely your idea of toxic isn’t universally shared by all of us.
In parts of the country drunken fun is normal. Other places it’s cause for an intervention. Spanking is money for therapists in places and the right way to discipline children in others. Setting police stations on fire is a valid expression of outrage in some places. In the Humboldt County of Inger’s Finger it’s just cause for a beat down.
Blackwood VA Toxic Family isn’t SFO Toxic
San Francisco is a foreign country to the coal country of Blackwood, VA. The more puritan disciples of Woke True Folk could not last more than a few minutes in a bar on a weekend night in Wise County. Everything about those hill people is toxic to the Woke True Folk. Charlie is a reason for a full-on TikTok meltdown. So . . . which one of these cultures are the good guys?
Who shoud win? The topless “FREE THE NIPPLE!” Gay Pride Parade women or the Kenons of Appalachia? Who is correct here?
To a person, Charlie, Neesha, Inger and Ophie side with Blackwood, VA. The problem for San Francisco is that their addiction to outrage took them into deeper and darker depravity. Progressives chased the money in outrage until it became an addiction. Marxism became their own Maoist Cultural Revolution. Now SFO is a shelled out opiate addict unconscious in the gutter, “hey baby, wanna party?”
Free Titties
We just had an election. The Free Titty crowd lost. They lost because their utopia was freedom from the stuffy and oppressive boundaries of those evil, MAGAMAGGOT racist, sexist, misogynist, transphobic, bougie deplorables from the hill country. Also the presumption that outsiders who were not WTF caused the miseries of the Free Titties.
Addiction has a lifecycle. There are only two outcomes, recovery or death. On the way to both is a cycle of escalating negative consequences. We won because a majority got tired of being sick and tired. Yah, another Step Work aphorism. 😉
All this because lately I realize we need a little more egalitarianism. Social Justice became a drunken slurred Zoshul Just Us. Our universities became temples to Bacchus. Their lesson plan the way of Eras. The Executive Branch grew into the Imperial Court of Caligula.
Tantrums
Intervention. That’s what this election was. We are in a post victory bliss. The hero won and we are celebrating as he begins his journey home. This is not sunshine and rainbows forever. It is a milestone in our national hero’s tale. Recovery hurts.
The WTF are throwing tantrums. Evil, as it loses another battle with good, does not surrender quietly. Let’s not make alive the outcome in the hero’s tale—death. Some things are better left in the realm of fiction. Defeat can either come by destroying the enemy’s will to fight or by destroying their capacity to fight. I doubt the WTF will give up their will to fight. So that leaves us with destroying their capacity to fight. Trump’s victory is a major step toward that.
The first thing that happens in an intervention is surrender. Where life departs from fiction is what happens next. In fiction the credits roll and we look toward the exits to head home. In life the next things are painful and hard. Odds of failure by relapse are good. This isn’t the post victory journey home. This is the beginning when we are called to the quest.
Death Before Victory
For three days the followers of the dissident rabbi from Nazareth mourned. This deplorable carpenter who performed miracles and taught a scandalous exegesis of the law was dead at the hands of the Romans. Yet one more promising voice of change made into a bloody corpse. Rome and the church vanquished another threat.
There were others before Jesus. All ultimately failed. The hope of independence from Rome once again crushed by the death of another discredited prophet. But then one day Mary went to his tomb and it was empty. Seriously? Who stole the rabbi’s body?
Of al the absurd, impossible endings to a hero’s tale. Jesus died. He is alive? Incredible. Yes, Jesus lives. He lives.
Daddy’s Home
No, our President elect isn’t the AntiChrist or the Second Coming of Christ. Those that depict him as such are fools. He is a father come home to a house that needs him. If you want a story to put him in, choose Homer’s Odyssey. Just when all seems lost and Penelope will marry as a widower; a stranger does the impossible. He strings Odysseus’ bow.
Roll credits? No. War broke out. The stranger is Odysseus coming home. His house a place of brooding calm, with an ill wind blown by Penelope’s suitors. He cleaned house. Odysseus won after leaving a trail of blood where royal pretenders once stood.
This is that point in the story when everyone in the room who witnessed the stranger stringing the bow and shooting an arrow through axe heads realizes who did that. Odysseus arrived. A penultimate battle is nigh.
Why Charlie? Why?
Charlie and I are not Odysseus. I’m a WASP from Washington Township, NJ. Charlie is Scotts Irish from the coal hills of Wise County, VA. We are both college educated. Charlie’s Dad has a Chevy C10 with NRA bumper stickers. My paternal grandmother was socialist leaning communist. I spent some time as a member of the Taxi Unlimited Collective. My Progressive creds are legit.
Charlie crashed and burned in the effort to save his Aunt Betty. Something broke in him as the storms of codependency raged within his life. He isn’t the same today. The hard times of Blackwood didn’t make him a good man. Instead, it wounded him.
Blackwood taught him to placate. So a whiskey bottle filled with piss was another insult he had to endure. Then this happened. He got a call a couple days after getting out of jail. Nothing worrisome. Just drinks in Scott’s Addition and some barbeque. As far as Charlie knew his door key would get him to Richmond with ease. The friend could pick him up.
Regrets
Charlie is on unsupervised probation. He’s not supposed to leave Humboldt County, NV. No leg monitor, yet. So in his mind a few hours of fun before starting his next shift should be no problem. It started out ok. It always does.
By bar close Charlie was back in custody. Drunk in public and misdemeanor assault. He got into a shoving match outside Star Hill. Liquid courage and trash talk about Hill Billy women. Fellow Star Hill patrons broke it up and restrained Charlie until RPD showed up.
Predictable consequences ensued. Humboldt County requested extradition. Richmond is a cash bail city. Drunk in public is a citation and some time in the drunk tank to sober up. The other guy in the fight lost his taste for battle after he slept it off in a nearby cell. So he’s back in Winnemucca awaiting a hearing.
Wandering to an End
Trump, Odysseus, addiction, Jesus and Charlie in one post. My ADHD in full effect. If I have any prediction about our near future it is more like a Wise County recovery group than Odysseus’ return home. We don’t need to vanquish all of the suitors. Just enough that the Woke True Folk return to their proper place as TikTok amuse bouche.
A finish line is a boundary. Kind of. Boundaries are “do not cross”. Don’t do what is prohibited. A finish line is an achievement. I’m one post away from a decade old finish line—365 posts. This is both good and bad. It is a victory for me to accomplish this. Also a bit of a wound to my self image as the no-account loser who is shunned. Losing that self-image is a fair price to pay.
So that’s the news from my desk. Next post is #365, the victory.