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D'relic'd
No role models.
I am becoming unusually calm, perhaps due to lack of sleep, in the breaking of the case around Jeffrey Epstein, and the many people and organizations in association.
There are so many angles from which to approach this scheme, and I am sure I could spend a career digging through the mess.
Seems to be, I've been under immense pressure for many years to describe my predicament, the emotion that I've experienced since my memories began, the same emotion I recognize in innumerable people from any background, that helps me make immediate connection to all, aside from the most socially secured.
Those socially secured are usually paper dragons, cardboard clones of a dogma they had no choice in, conditioned through years by the prize of unearned recognition. They are usually the church choir children, who ask you if you'd like to go to church, who are so fragile that they depend for their security on being able to impose their fragility as someone elses' burden.
These people I recognize, and I'd been unusually scared by, largely because I'd been raised by a couple of them.
My dad probably had the worse end, because his dad is the churchiest deacon I know, who hardly bothers to speak aside from practicing his bible readings, or an occasional outburst towards a football game on screen. Perhaps the mercy he seeks may also apply to those he shall say goodbye to soon enough.
His name is Gary, and he scolded and became more or less enraged, using a belt on the boys and causing deep issues among the six children.
My mom's childhood seemed looser and more relaxed, and so I aligned more to that group during summer holidays. We'd have the splendid chance to hear of how those siblings raised a bunch of animals, my mom bringing home ducks and racoons, and when they adopted a couple retired horses, once bringing the equine inside the foyer of their home.
Her dad, Henry (Skip) passed more than six years ago already, and though her mom Martha had a stroke I had been pleased to see her pick up the knitting needles when I saw her this year, even if only to show me the basics to begin a (since abandoned) scarf.
That couple also raised six children, oddly enough. I guess that becomes possible, on so much land as western Michigan has to spare.
If you cross Lake Michigan to go see Chicago, as in the common first hop from or final hop to the Grand Rapids airport, you see the incredible change in housing density.
Of course there are some farms, though in many places those fields have become changed into long large yards, and the only relation the occupants keep to their once-fields is to pass a mower across it each week of the growing seasons.
If you do use a car, and manage to ignore the lingering odor of the campaign signs, normally from the prior seasons, you'll round the southern edge of Lake Michigan and poke for a few miles through Indiana, near a place called Gerry.
Gerry, Indiana - somehow became recognized enough to land a place in a popular musical number. The only thing you see now is the industrial remains, an open quarry that the highway passing through, implying sharp cliffs on either edge of the roadside. The smog is there somehow, and I'm unclear of the modern lurking processes behind this phenomenon.
From there, you're in the suburbs of Chicago, an endless mesh of municipal zones called "______ Park". Your commute is accompanied by the L, or perhaps the "el"? - the elevated rail leading into the city, double-decker train cars that are your final likely chance to relax for the day.
Such is the course around Lake Michigan's southern edge, marked so clearly by polar opposing conditions, on one side or the other of the tracks.
I began keeping a sharp eye open for the places I've been, and my geographic memory is as good as anyone's, you can be sure.
I had to begin recognizing my place, and other places, and the places in the middle, while most other people were learning the nuance of their close companion's facial expressions.
Eh, enough comparison to my peers - my skill lies in places. And you can learn a bunch of people, by passing through the places they recognize as a home.
Each home is a place made by people, in the end. Or perhaps this is simply a piece of the problem.
Each year, both during the end-of-year holiday season, and for a couple summer weeks, my older sib and younger sib and older mom and one-year junior dad had to make a migration, more or less, from our home near Philadelphia, PA to the places in Michigan that our kin resided.
In our much younger years, this had begun as a legal requirement; a condition of our residential Japanese visas, which perhaps applied only nine or ten months of the year.
Each summer then, we headed to a condominium in Michigan, close to my mom's childhood home, and such maps have been lodged into my mind, as surely as they are recorded on the GPS logs, which I could dig up from my memory cards and display, if a chance so happens.
After August, we'd be on a plane and then back in our Tokyo apartment, and I'm amazed that this logistical theater had been possible to manage, for three years on end.
My dad, in his role for corporate finance, and my mom, who focused on baking specialty Americanized cakes for birthdays, both began learning colloquial Japanese, and had to manage two large moves each year. They needed some help to manage the logic of dual-residency, plus their three early-school-age children. I remember, more or less as an ambiguous, reassuring sensation, our nana, a Philipino lady named Bing.
Being such a globehopper at such a young age should have occurred to me as unusual, and an exhilirating experience, although I had bigger problems to endure - I began to embrace the sensation that each place I passed through is impermanent, a brief experience.
Many years later, as I came upon my first sporadic experiences of homelessness in 2019, I began to recognize and label these immense childhood challenges as an abnormal sense of displacement.
This reassured me for years, although I missed the mark to be precise.
Seems to be, I've been under immense pressure for many years to describe my predicament, the emotion that I've experienced since my memories began, the same emotion I recognize in innumerable people from any background, that helps me make immediate connection to all, aside from the most socially secured.
My mom and my dad are each deeply conditioned by their childhoods in Michigan, surrounded by endless sibling bonds and the norms and schedules of their church circles. Religion is the refuge, in their experience, for any challenges beyond the daily norm.
Religion, then, had been their ironclad approach to deny me any means of expressing my gender.
To be sure, I had been up against numerous real problems as I learned to express my ideas; religion simply became the point of inflamation in our familiar relationship.
By means of explanation, consider that second grade had been my first year in an American public school. I had already been going in Japan, for three years by then, and each year I had been enrolled in a different school.
In essence, my earliest education had been that friends come and go - relationships are only durable enough for one year.
I am amazed that my pals from middle and high school kept putting up with me for so long, because I am sure I never managed to open up to any of them.
Because friends come and go, sooner than you'd like, and the only reliable ones around are going to be arguing religious dogma, or staging gross humiliations, whenever a chance comes for you to express your mind.
This model of upbringing, I am learning to recognize today at 33 years old, is simple enough to be called dereliction.
I am unsure when the first signs began appearing, because my parents recognized long before I could that I had been as gay as a bluebird who wanders into a food fight between Andy Warhol and Kieth Haring, during the AIDS crisis in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood.
They recognized this though, and so began the grueling schedule of humiliations on one hand, religious programming and masculine bonding exercises on the other. Our childhood rooms were assigned chromizonally; my first roommate and I were enrolled in Aikido classes, while my elder sib missed the chance.
When we moved to Pennsylvania the dynamic continued, her room at the end of the hall, sharing a wall beside my parent's bedroom, and the male-bodied at the far end of the upper floor, down a hall near the bathroom.
Precarious memories, for sure.
By middle school, the humiliation began peaking again, and I was largely too obsessed with my problems to recognize the pains expressed by my siblings.
I've since spoken to my younger sib about his challenges, picked on by a close friend.
I imagine my older sib has much to say that so far remains unspoken; she is already raising more small children and is probably glad that I no longer am around to bother too much.
Again, humiliation on the one hand and religion on the other.
The religious arc had been to enroll us in the church programs, the youth group, altar hands, lectors; younger sib dug into choir singing.
The humiliation began as an image from Japan resurfaced. There had been a day, during my early bathroom conditioning, when I had used the toilet and left the door open behind me; likely my dad had been the one to snap the image of my bare ass as I took a piss, and now in middle school I found this image on display in our home, regardless of whether we had company around or no.
I sank into despair, really. Here I am, long since learned that these familial people are the only ones who are going to be around for me. Friends come and go; and only your abusers remain.
And so I am lucky to now recognize my childhood as derelict.
There is much to say, if we are going to really examine the years from then to now. I am only one mind among many, who can speak and share my memories.
I'm sure you'll see more along these lines if you choose to pull up the page again, and so I'll pause here to express a concern that preoccupies me on this theme.
Seems to be, I've been under immense pressure for many years to describe my predicament, the emotion that I've experienced since my memories began, the same emotion I recognize in innumerable people from any background, that helps me make immediate connection to all, aside from the most socially secured.
I see derelict people all around; most clearly in the urban core, where no one can be bothered to help source or share a meal, and where the passers-by claim a pass, rather than any form of neighborhood responsibility. Also in our elders, including my grandma Martha who has no one to knit with, or for, any more. I do hope I see her again to keep building our scarf.
In searching for this phrase, a label to apply to my experiences, I also caused more pain than anyone should; and I derelicted more relationships than I can recall. I consider my search irresponsible because I carried through this inquiry in isolation, hoping to grasp the one label capable of holding all my moods.
In San Francisco, I did so much along this course that I derelicted a real, physical sailboat in the bay. The Army Corps of Engineers had been on hand to clean up and scrap the ship, only my mind keeps imagining the squalls of weather that the ship had been exposed to, abandoned on anchor and relying on chance and the decaying anchor lines to hold firm.
This mood, the experience of dereliction, is an education alone. My mind is plagued by loose ends, by recognizing that I played a serious, consequential role in many poor conclusions, simply because absence is a poor role to choose.