In my new tye dye hat making merry and thinking, thinking

Yesterday Doc and I had a lot of laughs making a series of videos based on my last companion, now deceased, visiting me in a dream. Pierre was an alcoholic, too, so Doc says he enjoys hearing about someone in my life worse than he is. Pierre was also practically a chain smoker which resulted in the lung cancer that killed him. Doc does not have that vice that raises havoc in the later years. Pierre was also addicted to prescription drugs due to a lot of pain caused from his bad back. He had no bone density hardly at all.
But this visit from the other world was so strong. He looked good. He had improved himself he said with kind of an afterlife AA which of course Doc scorns. He would rather die than go there as it smacks too much of religion to him. But he's not adverse to having a big discussion about it on camera. So I thought these videos were very productive in getting into the difficult area of addiction.
We have also been having quite a discussion about weight gain and loss on the family site. Three of us sisters are overweight, while my nurse sister Margie has been able to maintain her weight pretty much for years. Because of this she has a tendency to want to lecture us, calling our reasons for not losing weight mere excuses, etc, but I maintain forcing yourself only works for a short time and then your body's defenses against being 'cussed' will overcome any determination to do better. The reasons for weight gain and loss go deeper than that. Oddly I think that my nurse sister not having to contend with molestation and all the horrible problems that entailed was able to avoid a whole let of difficulties I dealt with for years. She has asthma so was confined to the house rather than doing boys work with my dad. Thinking about my dad's problems in the homosexual area made my head ache for years. I could not even tell her my suspcions because she would have told my mother and I did not think it would be wise for us to tell her I thought my dad was being unfaithful to her, how, and who with. Anybody who tells a wife something like that who is already having violent fights with the husband might be some responsible if murder results.
As a result from having been shielded from my experiences, she has a tendency to resist thinking about this family problem with my dad to this day. She will say there is not enough evidence. She used to tell me for years she did not believe I had anything serious wrong with me and just did not want to work! In other words when I insisted I was having a terrible bout of chronic fatigue, she would not be sympathetic because not seeing things from my perspective she could not imagine how my life had so mysteriously disabled me. That was so frustrating! I came home from the mental hospital in terrible shape from what happened in there, but I could not talk much about it, because nobody understood or believed. It was surreal!
She became more or less the breadwinner as a graduate nurse in her marriage to my ex husband's first cousin, while I was too disabled to work for years, so I came in for more abuse from my husband, especially when he did not have a good paying job. He treated his second wife a lot better because she was a go getter who always made a lot of money. Disability will cause some to abuse you, because you are regarded as a liability.
I have been striving for years to make myself useful to my society in other ways. I hate seeing the disabled warehoused with nothing useful to do, but it apparently takes more to help the disabled contribute than it does just to keep them alive. As a society, I do not believe we can afford to keep large numbers of disabled people living comfortably without finding a way for them to be useful. I see disturbing things happen in here every day because this complex houses a lot of younger disabled people now. Mainly substance abuse. People living on the edge all the time beause of spending all their money on alcohol, tobacco, drugs, or food. So the obese get fatter, the alcoholics more alcoholic and so on.
I think we are going to have to delve deeper into this problem in the years to come. I managed to stay off the disabled list who ask for help from welfare and eventually the government until I was in my fifties. By then I had slipped and slid into an incapacity to hold down even a part time job.
Well, what would I have done without the government at the ready with money, housing, and food stamps? I could not adjust to this for a long time, because I wanted my family to deal with my disability since it was caused within the family. My nurse sister I thought could have done a lot more to be supportive and to help me stay a contributing member of society. I do think when the government takes over and absolves family members from all responsibility for the family's disabled, you are going to get warehoused and forgotten. The government cannot do everything! The family disengages. So nobody is helping you to find a way to still be useful and to be recognized as such.
I could write and I wanted my family to help me more with that by reading my work and helping me to make a living that way, disabled or not. I have a hard time getting my nurse sister even to read my blog. She never did take an interest in how I could be more useful to my society. So I resented the fact that I was the oldest and took a lot of responsbility for the younger ones, but when I got down they did not return the favor. Instead they rejected me. The government would take care of all my needs, but the government could not it.
My son Raymond has slowly become some disabled with his bad hip, which helped cause him to be unable to keep on with a demanding job teaching school. He is in Los Angeles now seeking outlets for the plays he has written. That is exactly why I went to Los Angeles years ago, because I knew I was partially disabled and needed to try to make money with my writing. I also went there to help my youngest sister who had had a nervous breakdown which might partially disable her in the years to come. She was writing, too, and she has desperately tried to sell her work to help supplement her income. She is on social security now which is not enough to pay her mortgage, but she is having a hard time finding work and being able to do what jobs she can find. She is 68, so she managed to stay off the disability at a younger age. My other sister Ann had to retire from teaching on disability in her fifties due to losing her pancreas and the ensuing problems with that. She has made herself very useful to her family ever since by baby sitting. She also took charge of my mother in her aging years, setting her up to live in her town. Despite being disabled, she is a very valuable contributer to the family's welfare and always has been.
I think it takes a lot of support from family, generally, to make money writing. Those who do make money that way usually have family connections who are in the business, and who help them to get established in the difficult competitive world of writing. I have been trying to show my family for years how they could help the would be writers in the family to make money. Show interest. Read their stuff Encourage. I dont even know if my nurse sister is reading my son Raymond's blog let alone mine. But she is not commenting. And we tend to bicker on the family site. Why in the world do we still have to bicker at our age, but I think it is because my nurse sister is not involved enough. She keeps wanting to get away from family problems. There are people who are always wishing they had a different family, different friends.
I felt I sacrificed my health to try to bring out the shadow man problem in a public way, the problem of there being homosexuality which if not accepted goes underground. The men may marry as I think my dad and grandfather did, and women are encouraged not to see what is going on. I tried to surface my thoughts about this problem because I ran into it at the U. I thought the head of my department was a shadow man, as well as my favorite teacher in the English department. These men were crippled by the secret lives they were leading. Why? To earn a living. To have good jobs. Society would not allow them to do this and come out gay.
I thought my aunt in high school, my father's sister, likely had the problem which she was forced to hide so completely that it sent her a little mad. I sympathized with my dad for having a problem with his homosexuality that was far worse than mine. It sent him a little crazy, too, because of how he felt he had to lie, deny, and hide.
I have never not wanted my dad to be my dad because I feel he needed my help with a bad problem. These people still need help with being accepted in society as good standing members despite being predominately homosexual in their feelings. We are seeing how upset a lot of gays are for being denied gay marriage. Well, I don't think we should be denying them anything unless we are prepared to go deeper into the problem and see it from their point of view. My dad and granddad so desperately wanted to be accepted in society that they both married late. As though they could not bear to be lonely bachelors a moment longer. So I think gay marriage is being sought by gays who have come out as what they feel they should have if they are going to go through all the trauma of being honest. It is very hard to be that honest.
I have spent hours and hours for years and years analyzing all the problems connected to my family and my past. So I feel other members of the family should be willing to do more work on the problems, too, without complaint. Should be willing to read the analysis that has come out of this work. I do not want a lot of money. I only want enough to feel like the government has not had to take care of me indefinitely, that I gave something back. To date, analysis like mine is not valued enough by my society, let alone my family, to pay a penny for it. My plays are not valued.
My son is in Los Angeles with two plays that deal with his mother and father and family dynamics. The second play, Blue Baby, deals with child molestation and homosexual rape in a city jail setting. He was not rewarded in Phoenix for the strength it took to write these plays. Maybe he will find a more appreciative audience in Los Angeles. It is certainly worth taking the chance.
His Blackout Blues he is trying to sell now is about a single mother who brings home a violent drifter she met in a bar and puts her her son, a pre teen, at risk. He is suicidal and eventually shoots himself in the leg, but it is feared for a while he might kill them all. We see stories like this in the headlines every day, but why does the theater reject such subject matter? Too few plays and movies that are that realistic are made. Too few risks are taken to bring new writers into the fold. Both Raymond and I are tapped out in Phoenix. We know opportunity to do our plays is not going to come here.
Hence he is in Los Angeles where I moved 5 times, seeking an outlet for mine. He is carrying on the work, the trying to make the important vital connections that will keep him a contributing member of society instead of a disabled one warehoused like I am and not expected to contribute anything. I say if you save me, then also give me something to do that is useful!