06.Feb.2003
.....
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blended child to man
My grandfather was blessed with a scathing wit and near-inhuman intelligence. In my formative years, I with my selfish, ennui demeanor, took that for granted with estrogenical, moodswing aplomb.
Six of my family members inhabited one house in Nichols Hills, Oklahoma City. My mother perpetually wrestled with ardent bouts of schizophrenia. Mental-illness-induced drama reigned supreme; she was predominantly inaccessible.
My father succumbed to rampant alcoholism to remedy whatever personal tribulation he experienced daily, and was thus also deemed inaccessible.
My grandparents paid for my education, my brother's education, offered us transportation to and from school, with ice-cream cravings satisfied along the way. My grandfather taught me to adore words, and with his help I slowly surmounted dyslexia, as the days progressed.
He loved T.S. Eliot. He loved Debussy. He loved popcorn and pink lemonade. He immersed himself with history. He serviced, like many, in WWII, although never battling on the front lines. He was more Morse Code Extraordinaire, deciphering code that led straight to the Eagles Nest.
He stomached my Depeche Mode obsession and fancied, of all things, "The Sun and the Rainfall". He bought a word processor to categorize the multitude of books in his bedroom, only I beseeched he install Word Perfect, to which he willingly abided.
It was there that I began to write. Of course, my stories were infected with my never-ending quest for romance, but it was at least a start. He would watch Jeopardy! while I typed out sentences painfully consisting of different variations of the word "resplendent".
I would always spell it incorrectly, transpose a letter or two.
I discovered his hidden lifestyle as a photographer and poet; he later regaled me with tales of how his writing was rejected from publishing houses strategically placed around the globe. He proclaimed his desire to write perished because of said rejections.
We became the strange, literary duo, bouncing Shakespearian philosophies juxtaposed to Stephen King's horror idiosyncrasies. He was somewhat of a recluse. I followed him around. We spent hours together on a nightly basis. He didn't seem to object as often as he could have.
I began to immerse myself with my trivial, teenaged affairs, and drifted from him. I wanted to envelope myself in romantic phantasms, constantly chasing one around for the next. I selfishly thought he or anyone else around me would never be able to comprehend my gothic predilections.
I was a Cure baby, a Depeche Mode girlene, and I wanted to marry Dave Gahan. I wanted to live in Robert Smith's velvet notebook. I longed for the constant, musical escape.
I pushed my grandfather almost completely from my life, which, since he spent an inordinate amount of time in his bedroom and I in mine, it wasn't that trying of a task.
On Sunday morning, 26th May, 1996, he became ill, and on the 28th, 9:02AM, he was gone.
If you think you're lost because Robert Smith says you are, the monumental loss accompanying the death of a paternal mentor will shock your gothic wires straight to a melancholy unmatched by any other experience, musical or otherwise. This I learned.
I enshrouded myself in his maroon bathrobe and sobbed for ten hours. No other experience was as profound, as powerful, as cathartic, even on the opposite end of the spectrum. No level of elation would mirror the level of agony.
Nothing else has ever compared, not these relentless, maudlin-fucked, romance-raped escapades, these songs, these moments.
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They say time minifies the intensity of pain, and this is true for 89% of the time.
With careful thought, I celebrate who you were, although you, my mentor, are missed.
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time & machine