Catalyst To My Condition.

"Step on a steam train. Step out of the driving rain, maybe. Run from the darkness in the night...." - Bono



I love my mother dearly. In May of 2009, she convinced me to go along with her, my grandparents, and my great-grandmother to my cousin's college graduation in Maryland. I didn't want to go, at first, but I eventually did.... and I've come to see that I was correct in my initial instinct of not wanting to go in the first place. That one weekend trip snowballed from us staying with my grandparents for four days, to staying with them for a week, to staying with them for the entire summer of '09, to staying with them for an entire year.

And then my great-grandmother died in May of 2010; Because my mother earned her living by taking care of my great-grandmother all day long for seven days out of the week, she obviously lost her job. And that event, in effect, caused us to lose our apartment. So, logically, with no place left in the world to go: We moved into my grandparents' home. You'd think that my mother's very own parents would be more understanding and hospitable, given our circumstance, but quite to the contrary they've especially shown their natural asses towards my mother and I ever since then.

Here I am today: Two years after my great-grandmother died in front of my eyes, writing this post at 6:33 AM on a dry and hot July day in an era of my life where my grandmother has once and for all definitively revealed herself to be the heartless piece of shit that I've always thought of her to be and where my grandfather has shown himself to be a fickle and spineless coward. This timeline of mine is a harsh one. But, of course, I'm getting ahead of myself. And, of course, you want details, I'm sure.

I suppose I should begin ten days ago on the day that I completed the "X-Men" montage series here on my blog. That night, as I fell asleep, there was a ring at the door. Unexpectedly, it turned out to be my aunt; My mother's older sister who I hadn't seen in two years and who I didn't particularly wish to see - possibly ever again, if I had my way. But there she was: Standing in front of me through the front door with her smug persona and ugly disposition oozing off of herself as I opened the door and simultaneously cursed the very notion of luck in my mind.

Lucky enough, though, my aunt's visit hadn't lasted an entire day past the night she first rung the doorbell. I even helped her and my cousin (who arrived at the house early that morning) back to their truck with their luggage. But that night is when the real trouble began. That evening, my mom had went out to the store for something or another and when she got back, she called up the stairwell to me in my room. There was a toughness in the tone of her voice and I knew that she was pissed - or atleast annoyed - about something.

Knowing, from experience, not to prolong my arrival away from my mom while she was calling for me in anger, I fled downstairs to see what the matter was. Someone had went through her personal boxes that were temporarily left in the living room. As anyone who knows my mom well enough could tell you: She's a very sentimental person and she takes her privacy seriously. She respects people's space on the condition that they respect her's, and this consistent trait of her's is something that I can personally attest to.

The conversation between myself and her was a short one: She asked me if I had went through her boxes, I told her that I didn't. Naturally, the next suspect was my aunt (who'd already went back home to Maryland at this point) since she has a history of stealing and commandeering things that don't belong to her. The very idea of my aunt snooping through my mother's stuff really set her off. It gets a bit blurry after that, but the next thing I knew was that my grandfather had came downstairs and the two of them were going at it in a war of blistering words. It got so bad that my grandfather snatched the box of photos out of my mother's hands and shook it to the point that one of my mother's glass picture frames, which showcased a very young photo of my great-grandmother in the 1940s, was smashed to pieces in the box.

Of course, after I stepped in and cooled down that situation as much as I could: The nosey, massively intrusive and forceful woman that I'm biologically-inclined to call my grandmother found herself downstairs with the rest of us, just re-igniting the fire that I'd hosed down a few moments ago with merely her masculine presence and incredibly loud mouth. It turned out to be her who was the one who'd gone through my mother's boxes and took it upon herself to scan my mother's photos without permission. The argument escalated until my grandmother eventually pulled her infamous ownership card, being the asshole that she is, and argued that she owned the house that we were staying in and that she wanted us and our "shit" (belongings) gone.

As one may imagine, the arrogance and condescending tone that my grandmother found herself using when she told us to leave didn't sit well with me. The nerve of her. Especially when considering that rumor has it that the money which supposedly paid for her house was swindled from my late great-grandmother and many other older family members, decades ago. And, as a matter of fact, it was my mother who paved the way for my grandparents to pay off their mortgage about twelve or thirteen years ago, not to mention that it was also my mother who bought my grandmother's previous van for her back in 2003. But none of that mattered in our time of need, it seemed, and for the millionth time over: My grandmother had once again thought that she was so high and mighty and arrogant that she felt that she had the right to hold her position over our heads once more just because she owned a few pieces of wood in the form of a house.

So, me being who I am, I did exactly what my grandmother had charged me to do a few moments before: I started packing all of my stuff. My comics, my DVDs, my books, and my clothes: All of it. And in plastic garbage bags, no less. In the process of doing that, ironically, a thunderstorm erupted overhead and it began to pour once the sky cracked a few times over. But none of that mattered to me. I'd had enough. It had been 1,158 days of the same belittlement and I didn't want to deal with any of it anymore. My grandfather's tears and pleads for me not to leave wouldn't work this time, either, as they did in late '09 in a similar incident with my grandmother.

This time, a message had to be sent, so I packed and I packed and I packed some more and the whole time while doing so, my grandmother's loud mouth continued on about how she refused to be disrespected in her own house and how she had the right to go into any box that she pleased in her house - so on and so forth. The longer that she went on speaking not only for herself, mind you, but also for my grandfather (as if he were a five-year-old who was incapable of speaking for himself), he did absolutely nothing to correct her about her disgusting behavior or the things that she continued to say in his unchallenged favor.

No, instead, all he did was cower in timidity and allow her to go on with her tirade because he was too scared to say anything back to her; An act that would, by process of elimination, lead me to believe that he agreed with the things coming out of her mouth. Even in the court of law, there's something called 'silent acquiescence,' and that term represented my grandfather perfectly in that moment. Afterall, he had the power to set all of this straight but his cowardice and unwillingness to put his own wife in her place made him an accomplice to her actions, and thereby guilty - from my point of view - by his devotion to her when she was clearly in the wrong.

I sat up that entire night pacing back and forth, sweating, reconstructing my room with my belongings, and doing my best to breathe as much as I could in this heavily humid and sweltering old house. Eventually, I fell asleep in exhaustion. I woke up the next morning to my mother's screams for help. I shot up out of the bed and raced downstairs where I was met with the sight of my mother laid out across the floor. For those who remember, my mother had a stroke in the summer of 2007, so for me to see her laid out on the floor the way she was, I'm sure it's not too hard to imagine the anxiety that I felt in that moment. And in that moment, I felt like I was sixteen again.... back in the days of Hell once more.

I called the EMTs and they were there no time soon afterwards, but they came at some point. Then again, that's typically about the level of service you can expect from this city, but that's an entirely whole other story, I suppose. My mother and I got into the ambulance when it arrived and we took off to Einstein Hospital - the very place where I was born. We were there the entire day that day. My grandfather came to visit for a few minutes, but no one else came. Most noticeably, not even my grandmother - which was ironic, considering that when she was in the hospital on extended stays twice this year for kidney issues, my mother was adamant about her and I visiting her as much as we could. The source of my mother's hospital visit was found to be the immense stress that my mother was under the night before, the doctor's said. Evidently, it was my grandmother who did that to her.

I can attest to the stress brought on by my grandparents. Between their constant nagging, intrusiveness, and overbearing nature, I'd imagine that they could drive practically anyone on this planet to the thin brink of a conniption. My now-deceased cousin Carmelo, who lived with them for an extended era of his life, even used to complain about how horrible it was to live with them. The best way that I can put it into words, so that you can understand where I'm coming from, would be like living in a prison with two unreasonable guards who could never be pleased, even if you did your best to follow their orders through to perfection.

My grandparents are experts at frequently making small remarks and judgments just to fuck with a person, but upon confronting them about their insincerity, they routinely (without failure) always play dumb as if they're innocent elderly folks who mean no harm with the judgmental things they say and do. Nothing could be further from the truth though. I recall a time once in 2006 or 2007 where my grandmother had the gall to make a remark about my clothes by calling them "baby clothes," simply because she didn't approve of my dress style. With my grandfather, his weapon of choice is his constant nagging - usually about the most insignifcant of things; He does this as a subtle reminder that he's in charge and expects to be obeyed like a slavedriver.

I honestly cannot remember one time where my grandfather has walked past me or my room without a complaint or a demand to be carried out over practically nothing at all. On any given day, his constant (and I mean absolutley never-ending) complaints will range daily from anything like my bedroom door being closed, to my air conditioner being too loud, to my clothes not being perfectly folded, to my TV being too loud, to me making the water too hot when I shower, to me shaving over the sink, to me leaving the light on in my room if I go downstairs for merely a moment, to me using a high flame when I'm cooking. The list goes on, believe me. It's like nothing I can ever do isn't seen as a world-ending problem in his eyes.

So, my point is that if such small things can easily wear a person down, then just imagine how worn down I must be after being reminded of - and scolded for - the same exact petty everyday issues of life every couple of minutes for years on end with no let-up?

It's things like these which were the reasons behind why my brother left about two years ago to move in with someone who he barely knew at the time. I could imagine that his rationalization was one that weighed the risks of living with a stranger as the lesser evil to being critiqued all day long about any and every single move he made. Nothing is ever good enough for my grandfather, and what kills me to this very day, is how it wasn't anyone else besides my grandmother who made this house the wreck that it is, yet my grandfather never says anything to her about it. Instead, he just routinely does the easy thing and constantly joins her in attacking me and my mother when we barely have anything in this house to begin with.

The living room....



....the backyard....



....the kitchen....



....all of that crap belongs to my grandmother, and her alone, and the rest of the house is the same way too. Yet, all of the ills of this place are blamed on either my mother or myself, but neither of us had a single hand in putting their house in the wretched state that it's been in for years now. It's, especially, things like this which often make me wonder about the mental health of someone like my grandmother. I can't rationally think of any other reasonable explanation as to why she makes everyone who comes around her instantly miserable. The chaotic environments that she routinely creates on her own and her known manipulative personality would indicate to me that she has a sociopathic nature, but reality is what it is and I'm not a psychologist.

All in all, it's been ten days since all of this started with the argument over privacy between my grandparents, my mother, and I, and the blowback of that has been that I haven't spoken to either one of my grandparents in over a week and neither has my mother. The tension is all still there and I still strongly feel that like a demon from "Supernatural," my aunt's rotten presence was the very thing that infected this place with such animosity.

The old attitude that "there's nothing like independence" is absolutely correct, I'd say. When your own blood tries their best to hold their position of privilege over your head, who can you possibly trust anymore? It's a shame. Just another life-lesson that this era of my life has taught me since 2009. Have my grandparents done good things for me over the years? Yes. Does that justify their constant arrogant and demeaning behavior towards my mother and I simply because we have nowhere else to go? No.

My mission with this post was to balance things out in the universe, I suppose. I've written this post as my rebuttal to the immense stress and mental anguish that I've suffered over the past three-and-a-half years and I feel that I'm entirely in my rights to have done so. I think that over the past six years, I've been the blogging face of honesty and transparency. So, if you want to see the faces of opportunism, false-generousity, and arrogance, then look no further.