I hope you will have a wonderful weekend. Did you have a nice Friday? Mine was rather uneventful for once, and I'm thankful. Discovered a new store that I like, and took my mom there later in the day. We had a nice time just looking at everything and buying a few things. Had a nice lunch with the mom's, saw my chiropractor, and then made a nice dinner (meatloaf), and washed laundry all evening. That's the closest thing to 'relaxing' that I have had in a very long time.
Pete's former coworker called him out of the blue to ask if he could crash here with us tonight, apparently he's having marital problems and can't go home right now. It is one of those beginnings of a nasty divorce, and with Pete's 2 divorces behind him, (and lots of 20/20 hindsight), he offered to give him some advice and just be there to listen. So, rather than fume alone in a hotel room all upset, we told him to come here. He's a really nice guy, and Pete said, "Yeah, he's too nice, like I was about 10 years ago..." (he got royally screwed by his 2nd ex-wife).
I sat down with them to listen for a bit, interjecting here and there, but honestly I have no experience in this subject matter at all, (other than my parents' divorce when I was 22), so I let the two men sit and chat while I finished folding laundry in Florence's sitting room, watching Cheers with her on t.v. (She has some trouble comprehending some shows, or intense drama's, and has a hard time following some movies---so we watch sit-coms, and she loves Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons). Sigh.
It's a weird feeling, though, to have some guy I've met only once, many months ago, now staying with us on such short notice, talking all about the difficulties of his failing marriage, his daughter, custody issues, etc., and I have to say, it makes me feel rather uncomfortable........it's one of those irrational, societal thoughts, "Divorce may be CONTAGIOUS! AAAUGHHH!" But, I know logically, that's not the case. We just had our first year anniversary. Neither one of us want to go through that shit.
Now, I could sit and listen to Pete talk to him all about his two divorces, to learn more details for my own knowledge...but here's the thing....I really don't want to know all the details. What's in the past, is in the past. It didn't involve me. It's none of my business.
Is that wrong? I mean, is that wrong of me, to distance myself from their discussion, (and from wanting to know more about Pete's past than I care to), or should I be presenting a united front with Pete, to be there as a support person? I know Pete's divorces were not pretty, and were very hurtful and upsetting for him. I haven't asked him for every detail, because I honestly don't care what happened with those other women before me, there's nothing I can do about it, there's nothing I can contribute to it, and frankly, I'm sure HE wasn't exactly a picnic through the whole divorce process either. In fact, I'm sure he had his moments of being a total jerk...like my dad did. So, I don't really want to know that part of Pete. He's a package-deal, sure, with all the good, bad and ugly parts of who he is, and I accept that. He's not perfect, and I never will be either. But, I can live without knowing those sordid details.
He's providing a sort of "common therapy" conversation with this guy, they are both getting something out of it....so I kinda feel like I'm the third wheel, and don't really have much to contribute to the conversation. Should I just sit there silently, nodding here and there, muttering "Yeah," or, "No way..." now and then? Or should I just bow out gracefully and let them chat?
Ah well. That's really what I have done, in essence, (to come upstairs and write to you), but for me to sit here and NOT make a decision about it, is actually still making a choice. So, I'd rather make a decision, and feel relieved and move on, than to just let it lie and not say or do anything at all. (To be a bystander in the face of adversity is just as bad as being a perpetrator). That is the biggest lesson that the Holocaust Survivors I knew all those years taught me. Doing nothing does not make you neutral, it is still a choice.
"Evil thrives when good people do nothing." (I had that bumper sticker on my car for years).
I tested this theory out last week, on Facebook. Several of my friends were complaining that there were too many kids on the school buses, where they are 4 to a seat and 20 on the floor. (The school district cut their busing budget in half). They were all upset and angry, so I thought, "Hmmm, I'll start a petition at Change.org, and see if they really want to DO anything about it, or just wallow in complacency."
So I started a petition, and posted it on Facebook, telling everyone on my friends list who complained about it, that if they sign the petition, we can change the situation. Well, true to form of most people in my stupid hometown, they all preferred to just wallow. I am not at all surprised by this. That is exactly what I expected would happen. They can all sit around and bitch and moan louder than any other people on the planet about something, but when it comes down to actually taking a stand and DOING something about it, oh nooooo, they don't want to take a risk, stick out their necks, get involved....let somebody ELSE do it.
Passive-aggressive chicken-shit behavior annoys the hell out of me. GROW SOME BALLS people, and get off your dead asses, and BE THE CHANGE you want to see in this world. Lead by example. It is a civic DUTY as a responsible ADULT CITIZEN to be involved in your community, and make changes to things you feel are not being handled properly.
Ah well, who the hell am I, to sit here and lecture people? I will take the petition down tomorrow. I have no kids, so what the hell do I care if they are all sitting on the school bus floor? Why is it, when you hear friends who are upset about a subject, and you try to face it head on in a proactive way to solve the problem, they suddenly become silent, and ignore the proactivity that COULD make the change they are wanting to happen?
Well, another powerful lesson I learned was on the day of 9/11---that lesson is, NOBODY WANTS TO BE SAVED. Nobody WANTS their problems solved. Nobody WANTS to make the world a better place. Nobody WANTS to get busy finding the answers. They are all complacent, lazy bums and mindless drone lemmings. Not like the Greatest Generation at all. Now THOSE PEOPLE during the 1930's and 40's could---and DID----get up and DO things that needed to be done (women worked in factories to cover for their men who went off to fight war), and they risked things, (gave away their last loaf of bread to a single mom with six kids who needed it worse), and they knew how to fight for what they believed was right.
What the hell HAPPENED to that kind of people? I really wish this world had more of them.
Let me tell you Stephen, that lesson I learned on 9/11 hit me like a ton of bricks, right upside my head, and knocked the wind right out of me. Doubled me over in physical pain. Why was I flappin' my jaws about being proactive, about not just being a bystander, about helping others, and not unfairly judging others, not giving in to irrational racist fears, not allowing prejudice to cloud one's ability to trust others... and above everything else, taking responsibility for your own actions in order to leave the world a better place than it was when you first found it? Why the hell did I waste my damned time doing all that??
What the hell was I thinking? Was I really thinking that people were actually LISTENING to those things?? I spent 6 years of my life doing that, trying to save the world, warning people of the dangers of hate, prejudice, stereotypes, violence.....showing them the end result of all that, in the Holocaust.....and yet 9/11 only proved to me that nobody gave a rat's ass about anything I was saying. I was totally ignored. Nobody cared.
This is a lesson I carry around in my heart every day of my life now.
Why is it, when you see your very close friend (Neal, in this case), dealing with self-destructive behavior, (maybe he's a sex addict?)---because he seems to never really have matured past the age of 20---why is it that he won't LISTEN to your advice, or let you try to HELP HIM in some way? Is it really as easy as labeling it "the fragile male ego," or is it really based upon his own personal fears that he cannot seem to face? Maybe it's some of both things. Maybe there's even more to it than that. I really don't understand it.
My best friend Laurie is a perfect example...(and this also rings true with Pete's first wife who is always asking him for money too)....she worked for 18 years as a nurses' assistant in a cardiac unit of a hospital in my hometown. She lifted very heavy people (Michigan has the most overweight people in the whole country you know), and she eventually blew out her knees and her back, got a hernia, and was just a total mess...her spine had some disk issues too. Now she's getting disability benefits, and no longer works at all. Even though NOW she has two good knees again, she has fixed her back and spine issues, and she COULD get back there to do light-duty work. But, (though she would never admit it), my feeling is, she just doesn't WANT to work anymore.
She---for some INSANE reason I do not understand---would rather wallow in the hopeless SQUALOR of financial poverty, with one crisis after another---her car died, she can't afford to fix it, she has no money to buy groceries, she can't pay the bills, they shut off her phone, they turned off the electricity....etc.....these are actual things she's deal with for over 20 years. Her husband is also on disability, because he had a nervous breakdown...a mental meltdown is more like it....and he just decided he didn't want to work anymore. He's never really "been there" to provide for her and their 3 kids, he's been laying on a couch watching t.v., doing absolutely NOTHING around the house at all. He doesn't even go outside very often. Why she didn't divorce him years ago, I'll never figure out. So, they barely scrape by, even though she COULD go back to work, and COULD get a free ride with financial aid at college, if she just went back to school to earn her RN license, so that she COULD make more money!!
Somewhere, by the time most people hit their mid-30's I think....somewhere inside people's heads, there's some kind of weird disconnect that happens, and all that "I can rule the world" stuff in their 20's just goes right out the window, and they suddenly just don't WANT to do anything good for themselves or the world around them anymore. Maybe that's what happened to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, James Dean, Jim Morrison, and Amy Winehouse? Their own self-destructiveness ended their short lives.
Maybe the only real solution for Neal would be if he got herpes, gonorrhea or AIDS. Maybe THAT would snap him out of his self-destructive sex-addiction? Doesn't he CARE about how many people he's hurting? If that's the case, it really means he doesn't care about HIMSELF. You can only project outwardly how you're truly feeling inwardly, and that seems to be his demise.
I don't know why I give a shit about Neal Schon. I really don't. Sure, he can play the guitar. He has a passionate soul. That's great. But he'll never make a Journeyopoly game, like I think he should, he'll "never stop believin'" that he's God's gift to women, and all you can do is just stand back and watch the destruction happen little by little, until it's too late. That's what Amy Winehouse's family did. They tried to help her, tried to get her to "go to rehab, but no...no...no."
So at some point, you sadly realize that the person just doesn't WANT to be saved. Is that what was going on when you left Journey? Sure, you hurt yourself, yeah yeah yeah, but come on, there's much more to it than that, and everybody knows it. That crazy world, that roller coaster ride you were on, the "noise that makes you crazy" prompted you to write and sing the song,"Be Good To Yourself," and I'm just asking you-----NOT for an answer, I really don't care one way or the other because it's done and over with---- but I'm asking you, because YOU have probably already asked yourself these things, and if you haven't, then you should. The answer only matters to you. The answer is within, and only you can find it.
What can a person actually do with that knowledge about people, though?? It's like somebody tosses you this hot potato, this horrible human flaw that you see all around you---maybe inside yourself too--- but you have nowhere to go with it, because nobody else will let you toss it to them. They don't want the responsibility, they can't face it, they can't deal with it, they just want YOU to fix it. But, when you TRY to fix it, they won't LET YOU. (example: working for the federal government. "Here are your job requirements, now go do your job, but wait, we won't LET YOU do your job because we'll complicate things as much as we can, and change your job requirements every few days...but go do your job.")
Pete's first wife would continue to take every dime Pete gave her, without bothering to pay any of it back because she feels "entitled" to it. My best friend Laurie would take every dime I send her, (and I've sent her money on many occasions in the past, never to be repaid), because she knows Pete can afford it, but she'll never even TRY to repay it, nor will she ever break out of her rut, even though she HAS the ability to do so.
It's almost like they LIKE being in their own prisons that they create inside themselves, and it has become comfortable for them to just sit and wallow and be locked behind those bars inside of them, and they are now too "institutionalized" to want to break out of that jail anytime soon. I just don't get it. I don't understand it. Do we ALL have this problem? Is EVERY human being flawed like this??
Am I???? ARE YOU????
Is that the problem with Neal too? I want to understand why somebody would do so many awful and cruel things to so many women all his life? Does he have mommy issues or what? He would be an interesting brain to pick, if I were so inclined. Unfortunately, I'm really not so inclined. I'm just perplexed by it, and all I can do is sit back and watch him self-destruct. Is that part of the situation you were dealing with too? His implosion creates helplessness, and it's very stressful for everyone involved. Those "interventions" never seem to go over very well for anybody who's doing them, do they? All they get is "shot" because they are the messenger.
Why are people like this? And how come I don't see that behavior in myself? Is that the flaw? We can see it clear as day in others around us, but we are completely oblivious to our own inner workings and self-destructive tendencies?
Shit, I just realized that that last paragraph I typed sounds like a damed episode of "Dr. Who." (Pete & I love that show). We are all really just a bunch of mindless DALEKS, riding around on our wheels, oblivious to our own inability to do good in the world, or to others....all we want to do is destroy everything, and ourselves too.
Profound.
Well. These are just a few of my thoughts for the day.
Does your brain hurt as much as mine does???!
Have a nice weekend Stephen. I love you. You're a good man. Please stay that way.
Love, Rebecca
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