Also, I have apparently been completely out to lunch for the last couple of weeks: the Writing Goddess over at OCPD - Scattered Thoughts from the Front Lines has an interview with me up over there. I mean it's not like I didn't know I'd been interviewed, I just hadn't realized she'd posted it. I have been totally out to lunch.
Warning: there is rather a lot of honesty involved.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Showing posts with label OCPD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OCPD. Show all posts
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
Demand Resistance
For some reason I keep coming across a concept called 'demand resistance' these days. I don't know quite why I'm seeing it everywhere lately, but I figured I'd take it as a sign or lesson from the Universe. Heaven knows you don't want to ignore those kinds of lessons; after all the Universe has ways of making you pay attention.
I suppose I should explain it first. Demand resistance is when someone asks something of you and your inner two-year old automatically screams NO!! Or, in more sciency terms: demand resistance is an unconscious chronic negative response to obligations or expectations.
I was horrified, absolutely horrified, to read about it. Because when someone asks or expects something of me, yes, it's true, my first thought is always, No, don't! It's a trap! Or something like that. At any rate it's something bad, and means that somebody wants something from me, which is never good. And then I thought, Oh no that makes me a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad person!
But then an adult level of reason and common sense kicked in, and some kindness for the self, manifesting, as usual lately, in anger.
So I went and looked it up, via Google, to get the official definition and maybe some of the why of it. And lo and behold when I started typing it into Google look what it prompted me to complete:
Why look at that. Second one down. That's right; it just so happens that demand-resistance is characteristic of OCPD, or obsessive compulsive personality disorder. Further research tells me that the term comes from a book called Too Perfect: When Being In Control Gets Out of Control, by Dr. Allan Mallinger and Jeannette DeWyze, about 'obsessive' personalities.
Gosh, guess who had obsessive compulsive personality disorder? As I've been fond of repeating round these parts, my hoarding father had OCPD in fucking spades. He was severe, and absolutely textbook, by which textbook I mean of course the DSM-IV. Oh not that he was ever officially diagnosed; that would have required him to be in some kind of therapy, and there was nothing wrong with him, oh no of course not. It was everyone else in the world who was wrong.
It's all so circular, you know? Oh I don't suppose it's much better with other personality disorders; part of the problem is that it's all perfectly good and normal to the person with the disorder. But part of OCPD, specifically, is the need for control, and the stubborn pathological insistence that one is absolutely perfectly right all the time.
Although the term 'demand resistance' seems rather inadequate when describing my father. If asked to do something, even something he said he'd do, his 'resistance' was out of all proportion. He'd start yelling pretty much first thing, and go off on how everyone (okay, usually my mom) was always nagging him, or why he couldn't do it right now, or how didn't he have any rights too in this house and it was SO UNFAIR! And then he wouldn't do it. Ever. You could, if you were insanely patient, and, as someone who attempted to practice this approach, let me tell you 'insanely' is the correct word, you could maybe, if you were lucky, if the stars aligned, if he was in an inexplicably and completely unpredictably decent mood, get him talking, a little, about what you wanted, no, usually, to be honest, what you desperately needed him to do and which he adamantly would not let anyone else do, like, say, fix the faucet so it didn't drip so he could turn the water on to it again, or, say, install the water heater that's been sitting there for years, or, fix the car so there was less possibility of it quitting so that Mom could go somewhere in it by herself and didn't have to take him along, which, let's face it, he didn't want to do either, or... well, I'm sure you get the picture. Pretty much anything and everything regarding basic household maintenance. Or, for that matter, getting him to clean up the damned yard with the several score junk cars in it. Ha. Ha, ha. Hoo boy. There was a useless conversation.
So anyway, any request, no matter how politely framed, no matter how much generous lead-up and sympathy with the Hard Job of Being Him you gave him, was refused, resisted, denied, dismissed, said to be absolutely impossible, and spoken of with pretty much contempt. So yes, I think the term 'demand-resistance' doesn't quite cover it, does it.
But anyway there I was recognizing those traits in me.
Now. There is this other idea I've heard floated about when dealing with healing and coming to terms with childhood, well, abuse: fleas.
What 'fleas' are are bad habits picked up from the abuser or dysfunctional family member(s). They are not ingrained traits of the person who has picked them up. I mean it makes sense: if you are brought up within dysfunction, you learn that that is normal. If your mother, for example, is a narcissist, you may find yourself in horror acting like a narcissist sometimes. Of course, the fact that you are horrified should clue you in; a real narcissist can't conceive of being horrified at such behavior. But the important thing to remember is that it's learned. And so it can be unlearned.
So there is probably some of that. I've simply learned that when someone asks you something, the normal and usual response is to say no. Though strictly speaking that's just mimicking my father's behavior. There were also the constant negative reasons he gave, the things he said about the people or things making demands: taxes were always too much and unfair, the probate court always takes your money so never have anything to do with them ever!!! people had taken advantage of him in the past and so no one ever could be trusted, mom was just a nagging unreasonable bitch (though he didn't use that word as swearing was one of the things that set him off, hoo boy he sure didn't like it when Tara, who has a much shorter temper than I, occasionally used the f-word). That gives the reasons, the why behind automatically refusing, which reasons of course I took into myself as simply How The World Works. It's what you're taught, you know?
But then there's this.
What he expected of us, the rules and the conditions that he subjected us to, that he demanded that we abide by, were completely unreasonable. No, not just unreasonable; sometimes harmful, even dangerous, though of course he saw it as nothing, no big deal, nothing to complain about. Stuff like keeping the thermostat low in the winter; sometimes you could see your breath in here. I can't imagine that did my health much good as a kid, and I remember I was prone to colds. Or, come to think of it, the fact that he (and mom, too) didn't think having a horrible raging head cold ever warranted staying home from school, or that there was even such stuff as medicine that could alleviate the symptoms. I remember being howlingly angry when I discovered, in my twenties, that there were such things as cold pills, that, though they couldn't actually cure colds, at least lessened the misery of the things. Or having no hot water for years, really, from the time I was about six to sometime in my thirties, I think, though I'd moved out by then if I'm remembering aright, because he couldn't get around to installing a water heater that someone gave him for free. Somehow I don't think carrying pans of boiling water up a flight of stairs and through several rooms was exactly the safest thing to be doing as a teen, now was it?
So, in other words, I grew up with someone who made unreasonable, even dangerous demands of the rest of us. And when that is the case, resisting those demands is a sign of health and self-preservation. It is a sign of sanity, to say, no, I will not do that. And because those demands are constant, and nearly to a one, flat out crazy, of course the response of NO!! becomes automatic.
That is a good thing.
And now I find that, surprisingly, I am not ashamed of that automatic response: instead, I am grateful.
I suppose I should explain it first. Demand resistance is when someone asks something of you and your inner two-year old automatically screams NO!! Or, in more sciency terms: demand resistance is an unconscious chronic negative response to obligations or expectations.
I was horrified, absolutely horrified, to read about it. Because when someone asks or expects something of me, yes, it's true, my first thought is always, No, don't! It's a trap! Or something like that. At any rate it's something bad, and means that somebody wants something from me, which is never good. And then I thought, Oh no that makes me a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad person!
But then an adult level of reason and common sense kicked in, and some kindness for the self, manifesting, as usual lately, in anger.
So I went and looked it up, via Google, to get the official definition and maybe some of the why of it. And lo and behold when I started typing it into Google look what it prompted me to complete:
Why look at that. Second one down. That's right; it just so happens that demand-resistance is characteristic of OCPD, or obsessive compulsive personality disorder. Further research tells me that the term comes from a book called Too Perfect: When Being In Control Gets Out of Control, by Dr. Allan Mallinger and Jeannette DeWyze, about 'obsessive' personalities.
Gosh, guess who had obsessive compulsive personality disorder? As I've been fond of repeating round these parts, my hoarding father had OCPD in fucking spades. He was severe, and absolutely textbook, by which textbook I mean of course the DSM-IV. Oh not that he was ever officially diagnosed; that would have required him to be in some kind of therapy, and there was nothing wrong with him, oh no of course not. It was everyone else in the world who was wrong.
It's all so circular, you know? Oh I don't suppose it's much better with other personality disorders; part of the problem is that it's all perfectly good and normal to the person with the disorder. But part of OCPD, specifically, is the need for control, and the stubborn pathological insistence that one is absolutely perfectly right all the time.
Although the term 'demand resistance' seems rather inadequate when describing my father. If asked to do something, even something he said he'd do, his 'resistance' was out of all proportion. He'd start yelling pretty much first thing, and go off on how everyone (okay, usually my mom) was always nagging him, or why he couldn't do it right now, or how didn't he have any rights too in this house and it was SO UNFAIR! And then he wouldn't do it. Ever. You could, if you were insanely patient, and, as someone who attempted to practice this approach, let me tell you 'insanely' is the correct word, you could maybe, if you were lucky, if the stars aligned, if he was in an inexplicably and completely unpredictably decent mood, get him talking, a little, about what you wanted, no, usually, to be honest, what you desperately needed him to do and which he adamantly would not let anyone else do, like, say, fix the faucet so it didn't drip so he could turn the water on to it again, or, say, install the water heater that's been sitting there for years, or, fix the car so there was less possibility of it quitting so that Mom could go somewhere in it by herself and didn't have to take him along, which, let's face it, he didn't want to do either, or... well, I'm sure you get the picture. Pretty much anything and everything regarding basic household maintenance. Or, for that matter, getting him to clean up the damned yard with the several score junk cars in it. Ha. Ha, ha. Hoo boy. There was a useless conversation.
So anyway, any request, no matter how politely framed, no matter how much generous lead-up and sympathy with the Hard Job of Being Him you gave him, was refused, resisted, denied, dismissed, said to be absolutely impossible, and spoken of with pretty much contempt. So yes, I think the term 'demand-resistance' doesn't quite cover it, does it.
But anyway there I was recognizing those traits in me.
Now. There is this other idea I've heard floated about when dealing with healing and coming to terms with childhood, well, abuse: fleas.
What 'fleas' are are bad habits picked up from the abuser or dysfunctional family member(s). They are not ingrained traits of the person who has picked them up. I mean it makes sense: if you are brought up within dysfunction, you learn that that is normal. If your mother, for example, is a narcissist, you may find yourself in horror acting like a narcissist sometimes. Of course, the fact that you are horrified should clue you in; a real narcissist can't conceive of being horrified at such behavior. But the important thing to remember is that it's learned. And so it can be unlearned.
So there is probably some of that. I've simply learned that when someone asks you something, the normal and usual response is to say no. Though strictly speaking that's just mimicking my father's behavior. There were also the constant negative reasons he gave, the things he said about the people or things making demands: taxes were always too much and unfair, the probate court always takes your money so never have anything to do with them ever!!! people had taken advantage of him in the past and so no one ever could be trusted, mom was just a nagging unreasonable bitch (though he didn't use that word as swearing was one of the things that set him off, hoo boy he sure didn't like it when Tara, who has a much shorter temper than I, occasionally used the f-word). That gives the reasons, the why behind automatically refusing, which reasons of course I took into myself as simply How The World Works. It's what you're taught, you know?
But then there's this.
What he expected of us, the rules and the conditions that he subjected us to, that he demanded that we abide by, were completely unreasonable. No, not just unreasonable; sometimes harmful, even dangerous, though of course he saw it as nothing, no big deal, nothing to complain about. Stuff like keeping the thermostat low in the winter; sometimes you could see your breath in here. I can't imagine that did my health much good as a kid, and I remember I was prone to colds. Or, come to think of it, the fact that he (and mom, too) didn't think having a horrible raging head cold ever warranted staying home from school, or that there was even such stuff as medicine that could alleviate the symptoms. I remember being howlingly angry when I discovered, in my twenties, that there were such things as cold pills, that, though they couldn't actually cure colds, at least lessened the misery of the things. Or having no hot water for years, really, from the time I was about six to sometime in my thirties, I think, though I'd moved out by then if I'm remembering aright, because he couldn't get around to installing a water heater that someone gave him for free. Somehow I don't think carrying pans of boiling water up a flight of stairs and through several rooms was exactly the safest thing to be doing as a teen, now was it?
So, in other words, I grew up with someone who made unreasonable, even dangerous demands of the rest of us. And when that is the case, resisting those demands is a sign of health and self-preservation. It is a sign of sanity, to say, no, I will not do that. And because those demands are constant, and nearly to a one, flat out crazy, of course the response of NO!! becomes automatic.
That is a good thing.
And now I find that, surprisingly, I am not ashamed of that automatic response: instead, I am grateful.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Crappy Holidays
This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now, about my father and what his miserly bastard ways meant for the holidays. Any of you from dysfunctional families will I'm quite sure recognize just how not fun the holidays can be. Especially given the prevailing attitude of how the holidays are expected to be about family and closeness and happy puppy rainbow harmony et cetera ad nauseum and all that, and isn't it all lovely and ho ho ho light a candle blah blah. Which also of course means that if yours isn't, meaning, if your family is, well, kind of fucked-up, you're also pretty much expected to shut up and swallow it so you're not harshing anyone else's happy family holiday buzz.
Yeah, well fuck that noise. Crap but I hate denial. Sunshine, truth, and openness are the way to healing, I have found over and over and over again. So.
My father was a miser; I believe I may have mentioned this a time or two. His OCPD need for control, as well as his OCPD focus on his own self meant that he had little concept that people other than himself (like his own children, say) had needs. And if he did occasionally have a little concept that they might in fact have needs (usually yelled into him by my mother), he could only assume that those needs were just like his own. This is a little tricky to navigate, you understand; because although I know that this inability was due to something he could not at all help, his personality disorder, I also know that it made things, well, hellish and impossible for the rest of us. So on the one hand there is: he couldn't help it. And on the other: it did incalculable damage to the people around him.
Perhaps I simply need to put it in a little bit of perspective. Perhaps, also, there is the sort of general opinion of hoarding as a harmless personality quirk. Hoarders are simply eccentric, right? Luckily I think that is finally changing, with the advent of TV shows like Hoarders, which, I reiterate, I have never seen, and it's just as well. I can't promise I wouldn't fire a bullet into the TV screen, Elvis-style.
But that perspective: I need to, I think, keep in mind that other personality disorders include Narcissistic Personality Disorder (though strict Freudian spelling says it ought to be 'Narcisstic', I mean, not that I'm a fan of Freud; the best description I've ever found for the man is simply 'dickhead,' as in, that was entirely what his brain was preoccupied with) and Antisocial Personality Disorder. And no one argues that these things can not be extremely harmful to the people around them, especially when one considers that Antisocial Personality Disordered people can include, say, serial killers.
Anyhow. So he was a miser. This affected plenty of things, of course, like keeping the house at a toasty 55 degrees in the winter, not wanting to spring for supplies for installing the water heater (which water heater someone actually gave him), the state of the yard, as he regularly brought stuff home from the dump (hey it was FREE!), and, and this is a big one, the food of the house.
Now, it doesn't help that my mother is, truly, the worst cook in the world; but even Mrs. Lovett would have been hard pressed to make a decent meal out of what my father thought adequate. It wasn't so much that he'd always buy the same cheap things, one green pepper, a pack of anemic-looking winter tomatoes, canned peas, a pack of chicken thighs, but that I swear they'd go food shopping and somehow come home with no food. I don't understand how this can be possible, even now.
I'm a freelance artist myself, which, alas, true to stereotype, is not exactly the most lucrative business in this society; and so I certainly know how to be frugal, and what it's like to not have the money to spend on much food in the first place. Still, though, I know how to shop for groceries, and to make the most of what I can afford. And so I've come to look rather askance at my parents' protests of But we can't afford it! from my childhood. I'm not sure I believe it, frankly. Like I've mentioned before, we were never on, say, food stamps or free lunches at school when I was a kid, and if we were that desperate that we couldn't afford heat, hot water, a decent amount of food, you know, the basics, don't you think we would have qualified? And so I suspect that simply no one could be bothered. That is damning, I know, and implicates my mother as well; but I don't see any other conclusion.
Of course I didn't know any of this at the time. But looking back on my childhood I see now that I really was an extremely thin kid; also, I recall that I had been treated for anemia several times over the years. This is undernourishment, no? Very probably.
So we didn't really have enough food. And so we certainly never had any fun food. We had ice cream once in a while, it's true; but that was because my father really loves the stuff and so in a way that was all about him. True, we did benefit from that a bit, which is good. But otherwise we only rarely had cookies, or fun stuff like that, and never candy, though my mother would always talk about how it was a bad thing to forbid children from having candy, because then when they grew up they would buy all the candy they never had and so get fat. Rank bullshit, that, by the way.
Somewhere in there, though, my father got in the habit of buying a weekly box of generic gingersnaps from the discount grocery store.
Okay. You have to understand a couple of things here. We didn't like gingersnaps, we kids; my father did. I believe part of his decision in buying them (beside the cheapness of the things) was that he figured no one would want them but him, and so he could have them all to himself. Well, he was mostly right. Truth be told, those gingersnaps were just awful. I can guess the recipe:
They were break-your-teeth horrible.
They were also the only sweet thing in the goddamned house.
So my sister and I would eat them. Not out of any kind of joy, mind you, but because they were the only vaguely treatish thing there ever was, and we were desperate for something with some sugar in it. Because we were kids, you know?
And my father would complain, of course. He would say 'the mice' had been into his cookies; I assume at the time he thought he was being funny, but, you know, it's kind of nasty. First, that's saying that those are intended for him and him alone and we kids didn't deserve anything fun; also it compared us to vermin. So fuck you, dad, as usual.
But we ate them. It was all there was.
But back to the holidays. Guess what we got for Christmas that year?
That's right. One box each of those atrocious cheap gingersnaps from my dad, all wrapped up with a bow. I wanted to scream and rage and cry, and then kill him. But I didn't. Because there was no point. He obviously thought he was so clever. I'd say smug, almost, except I don't think he was really capable of that; that would require some inkling, some acknowledgment that what he was doing was really rotten, and he just couldn't see it. But I still hated him for it.
You know what we really would have liked? A package of fucking Ring Dings.
I know. How immeasurably sad.
Yeah, well fuck that noise. Crap but I hate denial. Sunshine, truth, and openness are the way to healing, I have found over and over and over again. So.
My father was a miser; I believe I may have mentioned this a time or two. His OCPD need for control, as well as his OCPD focus on his own self meant that he had little concept that people other than himself (like his own children, say) had needs. And if he did occasionally have a little concept that they might in fact have needs (usually yelled into him by my mother), he could only assume that those needs were just like his own. This is a little tricky to navigate, you understand; because although I know that this inability was due to something he could not at all help, his personality disorder, I also know that it made things, well, hellish and impossible for the rest of us. So on the one hand there is: he couldn't help it. And on the other: it did incalculable damage to the people around him.
Perhaps I simply need to put it in a little bit of perspective. Perhaps, also, there is the sort of general opinion of hoarding as a harmless personality quirk. Hoarders are simply eccentric, right? Luckily I think that is finally changing, with the advent of TV shows like Hoarders, which, I reiterate, I have never seen, and it's just as well. I can't promise I wouldn't fire a bullet into the TV screen, Elvis-style.
But that perspective: I need to, I think, keep in mind that other personality disorders include Narcissistic Personality Disorder (though strict Freudian spelling says it ought to be 'Narcisstic', I mean, not that I'm a fan of Freud; the best description I've ever found for the man is simply 'dickhead,' as in, that was entirely what his brain was preoccupied with) and Antisocial Personality Disorder. And no one argues that these things can not be extremely harmful to the people around them, especially when one considers that Antisocial Personality Disordered people can include, say, serial killers.
Anyhow. So he was a miser. This affected plenty of things, of course, like keeping the house at a toasty 55 degrees in the winter, not wanting to spring for supplies for installing the water heater (which water heater someone actually gave him), the state of the yard, as he regularly brought stuff home from the dump (hey it was FREE!), and, and this is a big one, the food of the house.
Now, it doesn't help that my mother is, truly, the worst cook in the world; but even Mrs. Lovett would have been hard pressed to make a decent meal out of what my father thought adequate. It wasn't so much that he'd always buy the same cheap things, one green pepper, a pack of anemic-looking winter tomatoes, canned peas, a pack of chicken thighs, but that I swear they'd go food shopping and somehow come home with no food. I don't understand how this can be possible, even now.
I'm a freelance artist myself, which, alas, true to stereotype, is not exactly the most lucrative business in this society; and so I certainly know how to be frugal, and what it's like to not have the money to spend on much food in the first place. Still, though, I know how to shop for groceries, and to make the most of what I can afford. And so I've come to look rather askance at my parents' protests of But we can't afford it! from my childhood. I'm not sure I believe it, frankly. Like I've mentioned before, we were never on, say, food stamps or free lunches at school when I was a kid, and if we were that desperate that we couldn't afford heat, hot water, a decent amount of food, you know, the basics, don't you think we would have qualified? And so I suspect that simply no one could be bothered. That is damning, I know, and implicates my mother as well; but I don't see any other conclusion.
Of course I didn't know any of this at the time. But looking back on my childhood I see now that I really was an extremely thin kid; also, I recall that I had been treated for anemia several times over the years. This is undernourishment, no? Very probably.
So we didn't really have enough food. And so we certainly never had any fun food. We had ice cream once in a while, it's true; but that was because my father really loves the stuff and so in a way that was all about him. True, we did benefit from that a bit, which is good. But otherwise we only rarely had cookies, or fun stuff like that, and never candy, though my mother would always talk about how it was a bad thing to forbid children from having candy, because then when they grew up they would buy all the candy they never had and so get fat. Rank bullshit, that, by the way.
Somewhere in there, though, my father got in the habit of buying a weekly box of generic gingersnaps from the discount grocery store.
Okay. You have to understand a couple of things here. We didn't like gingersnaps, we kids; my father did. I believe part of his decision in buying them (beside the cheapness of the things) was that he figured no one would want them but him, and so he could have them all to himself. Well, he was mostly right. Truth be told, those gingersnaps were just awful. I can guess the recipe:
2 cups fine sawdust
1/2 cup molasses
Pinch ginger
Lay out a sheet of waxed paper on a cookie sheet.
Mix all ingredients together, then drop by spoonfuls on the cookie sheet. Press flat with the bottom of a greased jar; then bake in a 200˚ oven for a couple of weeks to harden up. Store indefinitely.
They were break-your-teeth horrible.
They were also the only sweet thing in the goddamned house.
So my sister and I would eat them. Not out of any kind of joy, mind you, but because they were the only vaguely treatish thing there ever was, and we were desperate for something with some sugar in it. Because we were kids, you know?
And my father would complain, of course. He would say 'the mice' had been into his cookies; I assume at the time he thought he was being funny, but, you know, it's kind of nasty. First, that's saying that those are intended for him and him alone and we kids didn't deserve anything fun; also it compared us to vermin. So fuck you, dad, as usual.
But we ate them. It was all there was.
But back to the holidays. Guess what we got for Christmas that year?
That's right. One box each of those atrocious cheap gingersnaps from my dad, all wrapped up with a bow. I wanted to scream and rage and cry, and then kill him. But I didn't. Because there was no point. He obviously thought he was so clever. I'd say smug, almost, except I don't think he was really capable of that; that would require some inkling, some acknowledgment that what he was doing was really rotten, and he just couldn't see it. But I still hated him for it.
You know what we really would have liked? A package of fucking Ring Dings.
I know. How immeasurably sad.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Brrrrrr!
Yes, we're alive, for those of you who were wondering. There's been a bit of a hiatus as far as the de-hoarding goes, for several reasons. One, all that Thanksgiving stuff (which translates into a lot of cooking for me, as my mother is The Worst Cook In The World, and, really, for the health and safety of all it's best that I do it), two, Tara's had a bunch of other commitments, and three, it got really freakin' cold here all of a sudden, and it's just no fun working in the unheated garage and shop in New England winter temperatures. I mean, not that it's technically even winter yet, but yikes; Tara said it went down to six degrees (Fahrenheit!) last night.
Which makes today's iron run nothing short of heroic (or unbelievably stupid, more like). The next batch of things, as in, the easiest to get to, since we're at a point where to continue in the garage and shop we have to shuffle some things around first, was a load of old Volkswagen doors that had been sitting out in back of the shed. But the thing about those is that though they're pretty bulky, they're also comparatively light. So putting them in Larry the Volvo station waggon wasn't going to get us very far very fast; what we needed was something larger and emptier to fill up. So, Tara's been futzing around with that old VW bus of hers, with an eye to not only fixing the grindy bearings in the back but also to see if she might get a smidgen of heat going in the thing.
Now, I know, believe you me, oh ho, I know, I just used 'old VW' and 'heat' in the same sentence. I know it because I've fucking lived it for years, as the only cars we had growing up were old Volkswagens, and, my father, of course, being not just OCPD and so never interested in fixing something more than half-assed jerry-rigged to begin with (that is, if he actually deemed it a 'necessity', and, trust me, his threshold for such was bizarre—having a working car, yes, he did consider that a necessity; having a working water heater in the house, not so much), was as far as I've ever heard, also a crappy mechanic to boot. So heat in a car was something completely unheard-of when I was a kid. I think I just sort of assumed it wasn't really possible to heat a car. Getting into a friend's mother's car, where it was actually warm inside, was a revelation. As was the fact that windshields actually have these things called defrosters, and that scraping ice off the inside of the windshield is not actually common, normal, practice.
And so of course I simply cannot in good conscience recommend an old VW to anyone. However, if that's what people love, I do try to reserve judgement, or at least not voice my disgust out loud to the freaks out there who completely irrationally and against all that is good and decent seem to like the things.
But, these people exist. And because they are irrational and I don't know, naïvely trusting or something (or because they live in southern California, dude, and heat that kinda-sorta works is plenty), they have come up with various, er, aftermarket techniques, ones that can supposedly actually get the interior of those things up to lukewarm. Though it remains to be seen if it can handle New England temperatures. (Tara's friend J, the one who rebuilds old VW engines, told us a story the last time he was here of driving back from Vermont in his bus one winter night. He said that about half-way home he started to consider lighting the passenger seat on fire. He was completely serious.)
So Tara's been messing around with the heat on the thing, putting in a couple of newish boxes, buying insulation to run around the pipe which goes from all the way in the back (where the engine is, kids), under the floor (i.e., pretty much outside) then to somewhere, I'm not quite sure where, to the frontish part of the thing. She even told me that she had some success.
So, we loaded up the thing with doors off other Volkswagens, to be crunched up and melted down for scrap. See:
There was also a giant cast-iron cement mixer in there, behind those doors, that even actually worked; but, too bad. There is simply not enough need to keep the thing. And no, potential need does not count.
We did feel kind of bad for the bus. It was being used for the gruesome task of hauling severed and rotting body parts from other, fellow, old Volkswagens. That's got to be traumatic.
But it had its revenge. While Tara proudly went on and on (for a while, anyway) about the lukewarm bit of air blowing out behind the seats towards the back of the thing (yes, that's how it works), we were coming to really feel another part of the equation: the permanent air-conditioning the thing has built in, of a type that is always on.
By which I mean stuff like this:
Yes, that's Tara's leg sticking out through a hole in the side big enough to lose a small child through; there are also plenty of other holes in say the nose of the thing, right where your legs usually are. And the faster we went, the more the outside air came in. It was not just a draft; it was a proper breeze, wind, even; we very likely would have been warmer if we'd just rolled the windows down.
IT WAS FUCKING FREEZING.
But we got there to the scrapyard, dammit, even though it took longer than usual as the thing just doesn't go all that fast, and unloaded it in back, all the while wondering (well I wondered, anyway) if we shouldn't just leave the bus too and hitchhike back; though I didn't say this out loud as Tara might be one of the above-mentioned freaks. Bless her heart, as they say in the south.
So that's another 720 pounds of iron, to make the total iron removed from this property (since we've been keeping track, anyway) 23,940 pounds, or 11.97 tons. And yes, there's still more, though, dammit next time we're taking the Volvo, because, even though that thing is astoundingly inadequate in the snow, at least the Swedes know how to do heat.
Which makes today's iron run nothing short of heroic (or unbelievably stupid, more like). The next batch of things, as in, the easiest to get to, since we're at a point where to continue in the garage and shop we have to shuffle some things around first, was a load of old Volkswagen doors that had been sitting out in back of the shed. But the thing about those is that though they're pretty bulky, they're also comparatively light. So putting them in Larry the Volvo station waggon wasn't going to get us very far very fast; what we needed was something larger and emptier to fill up. So, Tara's been futzing around with that old VW bus of hers, with an eye to not only fixing the grindy bearings in the back but also to see if she might get a smidgen of heat going in the thing.
Now, I know, believe you me, oh ho, I know, I just used 'old VW' and 'heat' in the same sentence. I know it because I've fucking lived it for years, as the only cars we had growing up were old Volkswagens, and, my father, of course, being not just OCPD and so never interested in fixing something more than half-assed jerry-rigged to begin with (that is, if he actually deemed it a 'necessity', and, trust me, his threshold for such was bizarre—having a working car, yes, he did consider that a necessity; having a working water heater in the house, not so much), was as far as I've ever heard, also a crappy mechanic to boot. So heat in a car was something completely unheard-of when I was a kid. I think I just sort of assumed it wasn't really possible to heat a car. Getting into a friend's mother's car, where it was actually warm inside, was a revelation. As was the fact that windshields actually have these things called defrosters, and that scraping ice off the inside of the windshield is not actually common, normal, practice.
And so of course I simply cannot in good conscience recommend an old VW to anyone. However, if that's what people love, I do try to reserve judgement, or at least not voice my disgust out loud to the freaks out there who completely irrationally and against all that is good and decent seem to like the things.
But, these people exist. And because they are irrational and I don't know, naïvely trusting or something (or because they live in southern California, dude, and heat that kinda-sorta works is plenty), they have come up with various, er, aftermarket techniques, ones that can supposedly actually get the interior of those things up to lukewarm. Though it remains to be seen if it can handle New England temperatures. (Tara's friend J, the one who rebuilds old VW engines, told us a story the last time he was here of driving back from Vermont in his bus one winter night. He said that about half-way home he started to consider lighting the passenger seat on fire. He was completely serious.)
So Tara's been messing around with the heat on the thing, putting in a couple of newish boxes, buying insulation to run around the pipe which goes from all the way in the back (where the engine is, kids), under the floor (i.e., pretty much outside) then to somewhere, I'm not quite sure where, to the frontish part of the thing. She even told me that she had some success.
So, we loaded up the thing with doors off other Volkswagens, to be crunched up and melted down for scrap. See:
There was also a giant cast-iron cement mixer in there, behind those doors, that even actually worked; but, too bad. There is simply not enough need to keep the thing. And no, potential need does not count.
We did feel kind of bad for the bus. It was being used for the gruesome task of hauling severed and rotting body parts from other, fellow, old Volkswagens. That's got to be traumatic.
But it had its revenge. While Tara proudly went on and on (for a while, anyway) about the lukewarm bit of air blowing out behind the seats towards the back of the thing (yes, that's how it works), we were coming to really feel another part of the equation: the permanent air-conditioning the thing has built in, of a type that is always on.
By which I mean stuff like this:
Yes, that's Tara's leg sticking out through a hole in the side big enough to lose a small child through; there are also plenty of other holes in say the nose of the thing, right where your legs usually are. And the faster we went, the more the outside air came in. It was not just a draft; it was a proper breeze, wind, even; we very likely would have been warmer if we'd just rolled the windows down.
IT WAS FUCKING FREEZING.
But we got there to the scrapyard, dammit, even though it took longer than usual as the thing just doesn't go all that fast, and unloaded it in back, all the while wondering (well I wondered, anyway) if we shouldn't just leave the bus too and hitchhike back; though I didn't say this out loud as Tara might be one of the above-mentioned freaks. Bless her heart, as they say in the south.
So that's another 720 pounds of iron, to make the total iron removed from this property (since we've been keeping track, anyway) 23,940 pounds, or 11.97 tons. And yes, there's still more, though, dammit next time we're taking the Volvo, because, even though that thing is astoundingly inadequate in the snow, at least the Swedes know how to do heat.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Disorders
Let's talk about OCPD a bit, shall we? It stands for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. It is a personality disorder, a fundamental mis-wiring or brokenness in the brain; other personality disorders include narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, and, oh yes, antisocial personality disorder. So, hey, these are not minor things. While it's true, people can have them to varying degrees, still, they are invariably disruptive. Especially to the people around the person with the personality disorder.
Now some people may say, Oh but they can't help it! Have some compassion! You disablist bitch! To which I say, guess what? I've had to live with my father's personality disorder, and the effects of that personality disorder, which hey, actually constituted neglect, which is bona fide abuse, for decades. I get to judge. I mean, really, what kind of asshole makes excuses for, say, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist? (And yes, I have actually had this conversation.)
Now, all right. I'm going to quote Wikipedia here, which I am normally loathe to do, as I am rightly suspect of its truthiness at times, but. This seemed like a decent introduction to the concept. Wikipedia says:
In other words, a fundamental brokenness in the brain, which is taken as normal, since that is all that particular brain knows. And then everything else, all the other parts of what would be a normal psyche, are set to work around, and for, that brokenness. I suspect, and this is only just a hunch, it is something based fairly heavily in the organic structure of things rather than in a more strictly psychological sense. Or at least that's the way it looks to me, from my experience, which is considerable, after all, and which does make me some kind of an expert. I am not, however, a psychiatrist, or a research scientist; just a daughter.
But that means that all the usual tools the brain uses are then in service to the disorder: reason, rationalization, defense, logic, creativity, even I swear perception itself. Back when my father was still here, and we were trying to clean up the place, with him still in it (not something I would ever recommend, though I know a lot of times there simply is no other way), we came across yet another milk crate full of cedar shingles, which, judging by the number of them he saved, must have been one of his all time favorite things ever (up there with refrigerator drawers, empty bureau drawers, old coffee cans of bolts, and baby food jars). When I pulled it out it was crawling with carpenter ants. There were also numerous holes in the shingles, chewed out by said ants. They were really quite infested, and it was really very obvious. I tried to get him to throw them away; he resisted, as always. But this time I thought I had logic, and stark reality on my side—they were obviously infested, literally crawling with ants that eat wood. You can't put them on a house.
Do you know what he said? "BUGS DON'T EAT CEDAR!" When I pointed out, well, actually, they do, and in fact they are eating said cedar right now in front of your very eyes, he just said, again, "BUGS DON'T EAT CEDAR!" And kept repeating it, and repeating it, louder and louder, as he looked at the bugs eating the cedar.
The brokenness in my father's brain was so fundamental, so powerful, so impossible, that it trumped reality.
You cannot argue with that. There is no point to even trying.
Here's Wikipedia again, quoting the good old DSM-IV, for the diagnostic criteria of OCPD.
Let's take those one at a time, in regards to my father.
One of the reasons he couldn't get around to fixing the water heater when I was growing up was that he absolutely had to do the pipes first. And he had to do them completely, and thoroughly, and in his way. It had to be done in a certain order, and in a certain way, and could not be done any other way.
So yes, I'd say, #1, check!
If he ever did get up the energy to try to do something, he'd stop in the middle (that is, if he could even get started in the first place). He would wander around the cellar, garage, shop, &c for hours because he couldn't find the tool that he needed. Mind you, this wasn't (just) because the place was so full of crap it was difficult to find anything there; there were plenty of other things he could have made do with. It was because he had to have that one perfect tool.
So #2, check as well!
This I would have to say no to. He was, as far as I could tell, perfectly happily lazy. He didn't want to do anything, ever, especially something that looked like work. Though, he was always out in the shop, fixing VWs, or, really, taking his time while fixing VWs. I suppose one could say he was devoted to not working or being productive. That would have been, almost, a sign of failure. Because someone else would have had some control, or have gotten their way, over him. My intuition tells me that the underlying reasoning for why someone else with OCPD would be preoccupied with work, and why my father was so adamantly opposed to work are actually the same, though I can't quite articulate it; still, we'll call #3 a miss.
This one is a little odd, too. My father was not religious. Thank the Gods he wasn't, too. I can only imagine how much more miserable it would have been for us if he had been say a strict fundamentalist Christian. And he was reasonably open-minded, I always thought; we kids didn't get punished much (well, besides within the day-to-day reality of living amid junk and a lack of heat). But he was, actually, very honest. To a fault. His morality was pretty open-minded, yes, or at least he seemed to be; but he could get judgemental, too, of others, and though he was really quite liberal in all his views on the issues (I asked him once, bewildered), he always always voted Republican. I think it was a side effect of the miserliness; he'd freak out at the mention of taxes, you know, something the Republicans have always claimed they are against. So, he was, in a way, really quite rigidly inflexible as far as his beliefs and values went, just not in the usual way.
So with some qualifications I'm going to call #4 a yes.
Ha! Do I even need to explain this one? If you need some examples, see the rest of this entire blog.
#5, oh Hell yes.
I wouldn't call it reluctance, actually; more a complete inability to let anyone else do anything that he thought should be done his way. And that was just about everything, even things he had no interest in actually doing himself.
So, #6, check.
That's also a yes, though I don't think I can give any more than the most general examples, as I can already feel myself becoming enraged. Have I mentioned that the house was commonly kept at 55 degrees in the winter? It was not unusual that I could see my breath, indoors; and my fingernails used to turn this shade of bluey-purple from the chill. Now, we were poor, I know; but we were not that poor, I don't think, since we were never on Food Stamps or anything that I recall; and anyway this is an old colonial, and if there's one thing this house has, it's fireplaces. Six of them, to be exact. But we weren't allowed to use them, except for the one in the kitchen. I don't know what the logic was now. If it was fear of a chimney fire, I'd think they'd all have been off-limits, right?
There are other examples, but I'm starting to get worked up here, what with the memory of how every fucking time he came in from working out in the shop the first thing he did was pause by the thermostat and scowl, then turn it down. While we were already freezing. What a bastard.
By the way, when the house is now set at 65 degrees, it still reminds me of Christmas, the only day it was warm in here in the winter.
So, anyway, #7 yes in fucking spades.
Oh ha, again. Yes I think he had this one covered. I have never known a more ridiculously, absurd, to the point of insanity (literally) stubborn person in my life.
So, hey, that's a yes on #8, too.
Which makes how many yesses?
Why that's seven out of eight possible, six of them being oh Hell yes yesses, with one being a sorta mostly yes.
Now, how many are required to qualify for having obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, according to the DSM-IV?
Four.
We got lucky, didn't we.
Now some people may say, Oh but they can't help it! Have some compassion! You disablist bitch! To which I say, guess what? I've had to live with my father's personality disorder, and the effects of that personality disorder, which hey, actually constituted neglect, which is bona fide abuse, for decades. I get to judge. I mean, really, what kind of asshole makes excuses for, say, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist? (And yes, I have actually had this conversation.)
Now, all right. I'm going to quote Wikipedia here, which I am normally loathe to do, as I am rightly suspect of its truthiness at times, but. This seemed like a decent introduction to the concept. Wikipedia says:
These behavioral patterns in personality disorders are typically associated with severe disturbances in the behavioral tendencies of an individual, usually involving several areas of the personality, and are nearly always associated with considerable personal and social disruption. Additionally, personality disorders are inflexible and pervasive across many situations, due in large part to the fact that such behavior is ego-syntonic (i.e. the patterns are consistent with the ego integrity of the individual) and are, therefore, perceived to be appropriate by that individual.
In other words, a fundamental brokenness in the brain, which is taken as normal, since that is all that particular brain knows. And then everything else, all the other parts of what would be a normal psyche, are set to work around, and for, that brokenness. I suspect, and this is only just a hunch, it is something based fairly heavily in the organic structure of things rather than in a more strictly psychological sense. Or at least that's the way it looks to me, from my experience, which is considerable, after all, and which does make me some kind of an expert. I am not, however, a psychiatrist, or a research scientist; just a daughter.
But that means that all the usual tools the brain uses are then in service to the disorder: reason, rationalization, defense, logic, creativity, even I swear perception itself. Back when my father was still here, and we were trying to clean up the place, with him still in it (not something I would ever recommend, though I know a lot of times there simply is no other way), we came across yet another milk crate full of cedar shingles, which, judging by the number of them he saved, must have been one of his all time favorite things ever (up there with refrigerator drawers, empty bureau drawers, old coffee cans of bolts, and baby food jars). When I pulled it out it was crawling with carpenter ants. There were also numerous holes in the shingles, chewed out by said ants. They were really quite infested, and it was really very obvious. I tried to get him to throw them away; he resisted, as always. But this time I thought I had logic, and stark reality on my side—they were obviously infested, literally crawling with ants that eat wood. You can't put them on a house.
Do you know what he said? "BUGS DON'T EAT CEDAR!" When I pointed out, well, actually, they do, and in fact they are eating said cedar right now in front of your very eyes, he just said, again, "BUGS DON'T EAT CEDAR!" And kept repeating it, and repeating it, louder and louder, as he looked at the bugs eating the cedar.
The brokenness in my father's brain was so fundamental, so powerful, so impossible, that it trumped reality.
You cannot argue with that. There is no point to even trying.
Here's Wikipedia again, quoting the good old DSM-IV, for the diagnostic criteria of OCPD.
A pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts:
1. Is preoccupied with details, rules, lists, order, organization, or schedules to the extent that the major point of the activity is lost
2. Shows perfectionism that interferes with task completion (e.g., is unable to complete a project because his or her own overly strict standards are not met)
3. Is excessively devoted to work and productivity to the exclusion of leisure activities and friendships (not accounted for by obvious economic necessity)
4. Is overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values (not accounted for by cultural or religious identification)
5. Is unable to discard worn-out or worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value
6. Is reluctant to delegate tasks or to work with others unless they submit to exactly his or her way of doing things
7. Adopts a miserly spending style toward both self and others; money is viewed as something to be hoarded for future catastrophes
8. Shows rigidity and stubbornness
Let's take those one at a time, in regards to my father.
1. Is preoccupied with details, rules, lists, order, organization, or schedules to the extent that the major point of the activity is lost
One of the reasons he couldn't get around to fixing the water heater when I was growing up was that he absolutely had to do the pipes first. And he had to do them completely, and thoroughly, and in his way. It had to be done in a certain order, and in a certain way, and could not be done any other way.
So yes, I'd say, #1, check!
2. Shows perfectionism that interferes with task completion (e.g., is unable to complete a project because his or her own overly strict standards are not met)
If he ever did get up the energy to try to do something, he'd stop in the middle (that is, if he could even get started in the first place). He would wander around the cellar, garage, shop, &c for hours because he couldn't find the tool that he needed. Mind you, this wasn't (just) because the place was so full of crap it was difficult to find anything there; there were plenty of other things he could have made do with. It was because he had to have that one perfect tool.
So #2, check as well!
3. Is excessively devoted to work and productivity to the exclusion of leisure activities and friendships (not accounted for by obvious economic necessity)
This I would have to say no to. He was, as far as I could tell, perfectly happily lazy. He didn't want to do anything, ever, especially something that looked like work. Though, he was always out in the shop, fixing VWs, or, really, taking his time while fixing VWs. I suppose one could say he was devoted to not working or being productive. That would have been, almost, a sign of failure. Because someone else would have had some control, or have gotten their way, over him. My intuition tells me that the underlying reasoning for why someone else with OCPD would be preoccupied with work, and why my father was so adamantly opposed to work are actually the same, though I can't quite articulate it; still, we'll call #3 a miss.
4. Is overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values (not accounted for by cultural or religious identification)
This one is a little odd, too. My father was not religious. Thank the Gods he wasn't, too. I can only imagine how much more miserable it would have been for us if he had been say a strict fundamentalist Christian. And he was reasonably open-minded, I always thought; we kids didn't get punished much (well, besides within the day-to-day reality of living amid junk and a lack of heat). But he was, actually, very honest. To a fault. His morality was pretty open-minded, yes, or at least he seemed to be; but he could get judgemental, too, of others, and though he was really quite liberal in all his views on the issues (I asked him once, bewildered), he always always voted Republican. I think it was a side effect of the miserliness; he'd freak out at the mention of taxes, you know, something the Republicans have always claimed they are against. So, he was, in a way, really quite rigidly inflexible as far as his beliefs and values went, just not in the usual way.
So with some qualifications I'm going to call #4 a yes.
5. Is unable to discard worn-out or worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value
Ha! Do I even need to explain this one? If you need some examples, see the rest of this entire blog.
#5, oh Hell yes.
6. Is reluctant to delegate tasks or to work with others unless they submit to exactly his or her way of doing things
I wouldn't call it reluctance, actually; more a complete inability to let anyone else do anything that he thought should be done his way. And that was just about everything, even things he had no interest in actually doing himself.
So, #6, check.
7. Adopts a miserly spending style toward both self and others; money is viewed as something to be hoarded for future catastrophes
That's also a yes, though I don't think I can give any more than the most general examples, as I can already feel myself becoming enraged. Have I mentioned that the house was commonly kept at 55 degrees in the winter? It was not unusual that I could see my breath, indoors; and my fingernails used to turn this shade of bluey-purple from the chill. Now, we were poor, I know; but we were not that poor, I don't think, since we were never on Food Stamps or anything that I recall; and anyway this is an old colonial, and if there's one thing this house has, it's fireplaces. Six of them, to be exact. But we weren't allowed to use them, except for the one in the kitchen. I don't know what the logic was now. If it was fear of a chimney fire, I'd think they'd all have been off-limits, right?
There are other examples, but I'm starting to get worked up here, what with the memory of how every fucking time he came in from working out in the shop the first thing he did was pause by the thermostat and scowl, then turn it down. While we were already freezing. What a bastard.
By the way, when the house is now set at 65 degrees, it still reminds me of Christmas, the only day it was warm in here in the winter.
So, anyway, #7 yes in fucking spades.
8. Shows rigidity and stubbornness
Oh ha, again. Yes I think he had this one covered. I have never known a more ridiculously, absurd, to the point of insanity (literally) stubborn person in my life.
So, hey, that's a yes on #8, too.
Which makes how many yesses?
Why that's seven out of eight possible, six of them being oh Hell yes yesses, with one being a sorta mostly yes.
Now, how many are required to qualify for having obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, according to the DSM-IV?
Four.
We got lucky, didn't we.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Cleaning Up
We went to a local Volkswagen event today, with Tara taking her newly-running bus and me following in a real car in case anything went amiss; now, I make no excuses and can give no reasons for my sister's inexplicable like (perhaps even love) of the goddamned things. Because for my part, I hate them.
I just have too many memories of my father driving them. He would never let my mother drive if they were together, of course. She could take the car alone, usually, though he did almost always have some excuse why it wasn't a good idea, and it generally took a bit of haranguing to get him to shut up; which was just another manifestation of that OCPD need for control, I think.
He always drove about ten miles an hour under the speed limit; I have vivid memories of the other cars swooshing by us on the highway. Now, granted, an old VW wouldn't go sixty if you dropped it off a cliff, as its terminal velocity is rather lower; but this was in large part him, too. He always took his own sweet time, because that way, he got to have control over the rest of us, and we all got to freak out, nag, and get frustrated. It sounds malicious, and maybe it was in part; but it could have been simple obliviousness, too. I don't know.
I still have dreams in which I am in a very bad way, say, bleeding to death, and absolutely desperately need to get to the ER; well, nightmares, I should say, because the only person who can drive me there in my dream is my father. But of course he takes the scenic route, drives well under the speed limit, and keeps up a constant chatter about the houses, buildings, cars, and the other absolutely desperately unfascinating crap he can see out the window. And no amount of pleading (or bleeding, for fuck's sake) gets him to understand or even see that this just might be a good time to, oh I don't know, shut the fuck up and get to the goddamned hospital! O my God I hate those dreams. They are so spot-on accurate.
Anyhow. This is supposed to be a nice story from today. Because we did pretty well, really.
So I almost thought I could like old Volkswagens today. They are actually proving to be somewhat useful.
Oh not in the way that a normal car is 'useful' because it runs and can get you somewhere; I mean Tara was taking back roads all the way since she didn't feel comfortable pushing the bus past forty-five mph as it was making a bit of a grindy noise in the back bearings. Also, it was a chilly morning when we set out and I for one was damned glad to have heat in the car I was driving.
See, what Tara did was load up the thing (well, okay, not properly a Thing, that's another kind of Volkswagen) with parts. You know, the stuff we've got a garage, shop, cellar, downstairs garage, garage attic, shop attic, shed, shed attic, and yard full of. You know. That stuff.
And then when we arrived at said Volkswagen event, she unloaded it onto the lawn in front of it. And then people, all lovers of old Volkswagens (and so, in my book, flat out of their skulls insane, though maybe perhaps we can all just agree to disagree), swarmed over and started rummaging through tubs and picking up bits of chrome and steering wheels and those VW medallion things that the Beastie Boys made fashionable, all excited; and then, and then, they started throwing $20 bills at her.
For several hours.
Here's a picture of all the crap, er, lovely vintage Volkswagen parts. Original high-quality German parts, some still 'new' in the boxes they came in, &c.:
Tara soon ran out of room in her rather inadequate pockets, and so actually had to start stashing cash in the glove compartment. Holy fuck, check this out:
We got kicked out eventually by a wedding party, who needed the space, though, honestly, who chooses to get married in front of a car museum, then pitches a fit when there is a car event there, especially one that has been an annual event for years and can hardly be a surprise? Groomzilla was especially charming. We were scheduled to be there until 3:30; around 2 he started talking about how he knew it was our event, too, BUT we had to get out NOW because OMG he had to start setting up chairs and holy fuck, dude, if that's how well you can handle stress and compromise and interacting schedules maybe you're better off single, you know? Or at least your bride might be.
Anyway we cleared out of there in plenty of time.
But not before we fished that cash out of the glove compartment and started stacking bills on top of each other. And stacking, and stacking. The twenties I swear just went on forever.
Would you like to guess how much it came to?
Eight-hundred and forty-seven dollars.
So, yeah, not a bad day's work, is it?
I could almost like them.
I just have too many memories of my father driving them. He would never let my mother drive if they were together, of course. She could take the car alone, usually, though he did almost always have some excuse why it wasn't a good idea, and it generally took a bit of haranguing to get him to shut up; which was just another manifestation of that OCPD need for control, I think.
He always drove about ten miles an hour under the speed limit; I have vivid memories of the other cars swooshing by us on the highway. Now, granted, an old VW wouldn't go sixty if you dropped it off a cliff, as its terminal velocity is rather lower; but this was in large part him, too. He always took his own sweet time, because that way, he got to have control over the rest of us, and we all got to freak out, nag, and get frustrated. It sounds malicious, and maybe it was in part; but it could have been simple obliviousness, too. I don't know.
I still have dreams in which I am in a very bad way, say, bleeding to death, and absolutely desperately need to get to the ER; well, nightmares, I should say, because the only person who can drive me there in my dream is my father. But of course he takes the scenic route, drives well under the speed limit, and keeps up a constant chatter about the houses, buildings, cars, and the other absolutely desperately unfascinating crap he can see out the window. And no amount of pleading (or bleeding, for fuck's sake) gets him to understand or even see that this just might be a good time to, oh I don't know, shut the fuck up and get to the goddamned hospital! O my God I hate those dreams. They are so spot-on accurate.
Anyhow. This is supposed to be a nice story from today. Because we did pretty well, really.
So I almost thought I could like old Volkswagens today. They are actually proving to be somewhat useful.
Oh not in the way that a normal car is 'useful' because it runs and can get you somewhere; I mean Tara was taking back roads all the way since she didn't feel comfortable pushing the bus past forty-five mph as it was making a bit of a grindy noise in the back bearings. Also, it was a chilly morning when we set out and I for one was damned glad to have heat in the car I was driving.
See, what Tara did was load up the thing (well, okay, not properly a Thing, that's another kind of Volkswagen) with parts. You know, the stuff we've got a garage, shop, cellar, downstairs garage, garage attic, shop attic, shed, shed attic, and yard full of. You know. That stuff.
And then when we arrived at said Volkswagen event, she unloaded it onto the lawn in front of it. And then people, all lovers of old Volkswagens (and so, in my book, flat out of their skulls insane, though maybe perhaps we can all just agree to disagree), swarmed over and started rummaging through tubs and picking up bits of chrome and steering wheels and those VW medallion things that the Beastie Boys made fashionable, all excited; and then, and then, they started throwing $20 bills at her.
For several hours.
Here's a picture of all the crap, er, lovely vintage Volkswagen parts. Original high-quality German parts, some still 'new' in the boxes they came in, &c.:
Tara soon ran out of room in her rather inadequate pockets, and so actually had to start stashing cash in the glove compartment. Holy fuck, check this out:
We got kicked out eventually by a wedding party, who needed the space, though, honestly, who chooses to get married in front of a car museum, then pitches a fit when there is a car event there, especially one that has been an annual event for years and can hardly be a surprise? Groomzilla was especially charming. We were scheduled to be there until 3:30; around 2 he started talking about how he knew it was our event, too, BUT we had to get out NOW because OMG he had to start setting up chairs and holy fuck, dude, if that's how well you can handle stress and compromise and interacting schedules maybe you're better off single, you know? Or at least your bride might be.
Anyway we cleared out of there in plenty of time.
But not before we fished that cash out of the glove compartment and started stacking bills on top of each other. And stacking, and stacking. The twenties I swear just went on forever.
Would you like to guess how much it came to?
Eight-hundred and forty-seven dollars.
So, yeah, not a bad day's work, is it?
I could almost like them.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Gone Gone Gone
Well yesterday and today I started attacking some of my father's books that were still sitting in various bookshelves about the house. Now, I like books, quite a lot, but they have to be good books: ones that actually have some value to them. I mean, I know that is subjective, but they have to have either good pictures, up-to-date information, or good scholarship. The books my dad hoarded? Popular accounts of heroes from the 1930s, semi-sensational war tales, guides to mills of the Hudson River with just a scattering of small black and white pictures inside them, how-to books on taking good photos with few pictures in them (right, don't ask me how that works)—all this popular superficial stuff that was trash when it was new.So last night I gathered them all up, from the remaining shelves in the piano room, and from the bookcase in the front hall over the phone. I threw them into the back of Larry the Volvo, where they sat a couple layers deep, and today I took them to the dump (sorry, recycling center). So much crap. As I was piling them in the swap shed I noticed that more than one of the books on Admiral Byrd (the famous Antarctic explorer) had Art Deco penguins on the covers; also, it came to me that 'Admiral Byrd and the Penguins' would be a fantastic name for a girl-band from the mid-60s. Or maybe a modern grrl-band, with a punk attitude and raucous sense of humor, preferably with a lead singer named Evelyn (Byrd's middle name, according to Wikipedia).
Anyhow they are now gone, though I am sniffling a bit again having handled them. And again, I apologize for the lack of before-and-after pictures, as I am still camera-less; I know how helpful they are, and, honestly, would love to see some myself. But they are gone now, and there are even more empty bookshelves.
I don't know what we are going to do with those empty bookshelves, though my mother has already claimed the one over the phone ('Go for it,' I told her). The ones by the piano were added in fairly recently, in response to his overflowing 'collection' of books; but they make it a tight fit around the piano. Now, the piano is in a bit of disrepair and isn't actually playable now, as one of the tuning pins sheared off and the dislocated string is affecting others; but I don't, actually, think it is a very difficult repair. And the thing is a Steinway grand, and otherwise a solid piece of work. I would love to be able to play it. Perhaps those bookshelves can just go themselves, and free up some space, since one does need a bit of room to play a piano.
All those crap books, though, got me thinking.
When my father was here he would sit and read those books on a regular basis. I don't for a moment think he read all of them, of course; I doubt there is enough time in a human lifetime. He had a lot of books.
I can't see that it ever made a difference, though. Let me explain.
When I read a book I am changed. I learn something. I acquire knowledge, or wisdom, or a new way of looking at the world; even if I disagree with what is said inside it, it makes me think. Even novels of a fluffy sort (though I tend not to read too many of those) alter me at least a little. But with my dad? As far as I could ever tell it just didn't. He read all the time, yet he learned nothing. He had all these books on, say, Charles Lindbergh, yet I never once heard him talk about him with any kind of expertise. You would think something would get in there. Well, if it did, it certainly never came out again.
Which isn't to say he wouldn't talk about these things. Oh he'd talk your ear off if given the chance—just it was always the same things, either the same stories of experiences you'd heard a hundred times already, or something very general about something he was interested in. If you asked him about, say, the Nazis, about whom he had many many books, on them and on WWII in general, he would just shake his head and say, 'They were very bad people.' I used to think it was because they were just so horrible he didn't want to go into detail, but now I don't know. I am realizing this makes him sound very, I don't know, slow, or something; but I wouldn't say he was. At least I always thought him fairly intelligent.
But he just couldn't change.
Nowadays, he is in a nursing home up the street. My mother brings him his Aviation magazine, and he sits there with his reading glasses on, and she flips the pages for him. From the outside it certainly looks like he is reading. But he isn't, and I know he cannot be, since after the stroke there is little left of his brain, and even before the stroke he was beginning to suffer some dementia.
Strange how so much of him was just a pattern. I don't think he has changed all that much.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Issues
My father's hoarding was not of course merely confined to the yard. Sure, the yard is probably the worst (as hoarded junk cars sure do take up a lot of space); but that doesn't mean the house itself escaped, oh ho no. It was all his to fill up, by rights, after all. The rest of us didn't have any right to the space at all, in his personality-disordered brain. Any room we claimed we had to fight for.He's not here now, and hasn't been here for more than four years; still, though we've made plenty of progress cleaning up inside the house, there are still things that either slip under the radar (because we are just so used to looking at them) or things we just haven't had the energy (emotional, mental, or physical) to deal with. This is one of those things.
Now, I am not myself a hoarder, though neither am I a neat freak (oh no not by any stretch of the imagination! Honestly, my tastes run to detail, color, and richness of a Victorian sort); but here's a problem I'm not sure how to solve. Or not sure, anyway, which to choose among the many options available.
This is the problem:
As you can see, it's that favorite magazine of hoarders, the one so seductively laid out with articles of genuine value and unique information, usually with stunning pictures to go along with it, the magazine so worthy of saving that even non-hoarders hoard the damned things: the infamous National Geographic.
I think part of its allure is that it didn't used to be available on the newsstand; back in the day you could only get it through subscription. This, I think, has added to its mystique, or its exclusivity, or the feeling that these magazines (and by extension, you, the subscriber) are special. And, I guess, part of my confusion over what to do with them is in large part due to this special mystique. They aren't just any magazines.
But. That's a lot of them, pretty pictures or no (the cases alone hold a good nine years worth!); but I don't know what to do with them, and this worries me a bit. Has my natural, Gods-given, inborn, birthright ability to throw things away been so crippled by living with a hoarder for several decades that I can't even face it? Can I be fixed? I don't know. Because when I look at them, my mouth hangs open and my eyes glaze over.
Pull yourself together, woman! (Insert movie slap-across-the-face to snap me out of it here!)
All right. Let's try to define down some options. I could:
1. Keep them all and leave them just where they are (that's three separate stashes, two in the living room, and one the piano room); this is the option of denial. Easy, and seductive, and oh-so-familiar.
2. I could sort through them and figure out which ones are duplicates, then just keep one set (rather a long process that I'm not sure I have the patience for), after which I could:
- 2a. Throw the extras out (satisfying, but guilt-inducing)
- 2b. Donate the things to Goodwill (nice, but kind of a pain in the ass, and all it does is enable some other hoarder)
- 2c. Let Tara pick through them and see if she's got any gaps in her collection she'd like to fill (sounds nice but it'll take her a while to get to it and I want a solution NOW)
- 2d. Keep the extras and use for collage (which sounds like finding a use for them; however, do I really want them? And, isn't it sacrilege to cut them up?)
- 2b. Donate the things to Goodwill (nice, but kind of a pain in the ass, and all it does is enable some other hoarder)
3. Or I could burn them burn burn burn!! them all! ALL!!! Mwwahahahahaha!!!
(You will note I have never claimed I wasn't crazy myself.)
I just don't know what to do. What is reasonable, and what is hoarding? I don't honestly know what that looks like. Any ideas?
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Purge
Okay, I'm going to dive right in to what is arguably some of the nastiest stuff about growing up in a hoarder's house: the plumbing problems when I was growing up. Having bummed around with other children of hoarders recently I was shocked to find that plumbing problems were distressingly common. Because when something breaks in a hoarder's house, it does not get fixed. Either there is no money (an excuse, by the way, not necessarily a reality), or the hoarder can do it himself so won't let anyone else (but then never gets around to it, natch), or it's about some sort of mean-spirited control. All of the above, I think, in my father's case. At any rate it is rooted in the perverse perfectionism of the hoarder, or the person with OCPD; nothing can ever be done quite to the hoarder's standards, therefore nothing ever gets done.
First, let's make this clear, to myself, at least: it was not my fault. I was a child. The situation here was not, is not, and never will be a reflection on me or my character or worth as a person. It was humiliating, and embarrassing, and even sometimes physically dangerous, as well as something that was just not talked about. That kind of thing is so hard to bear, as a child, and as the adult who was that child (still is, in a lot of ways, unsurprisingly). But the bottom line is: it was not me. The responsibility lies entirely with my father. There was nothing, absolutely nothing I could have done to affect the situation. And trust me, I tried, even though I was a child.
Ugh. So. I will write as much of it as I can remember, here. As a purge, for my own health. Here goes:
When I was very young, young enough that the memory is a little hazy, the toilet didn't quite flush. At least I remembered that flushing the toilet was something the grown-ups did. I don't know quite what was wrong with the thing, but I'm pretty sure the grown-ups would periodically dump a pail of water in it to flush it. Which now of course makes me think it was something ridiculously simple—like a broken chain or the handle simply having come unattached. I wouldn't be surprised, you know.
There was supposed to be a toilet downstairs, too, in the crazy tiny little half-bath in the cellar; but that didn't get installed/working until I was out of college.
The faucets were spotty at best; I don't remember getting them all in working order till, honestly, I was in my thirties. The kitchen faucet, pretty much, did always work; but the bathtub, the upstairs bathroom sink, and the downstairs bathroom sink didn't, or only did so sporadically. If something leaked, my father just shut off the water to it. And then didn't fix it, and then, and this is key, wouldn't allow anyone else to fix it. On a couple of occasions when we got up the nerve to go against what he wanted, he would actually undo someone else's work.
There was no hot water here most of the time. (This automatically means that half the faucets didn't work, doesn't it?) There might have been when I was very young, but for pretty much all my school years there wasn't. Which meant:
That to get hot water for a bath it had to be heated on the stove and then brought upstairs (through several rooms) to the bathtub. When I was young I suppose my mother did it; but when I got to be a teenager I did it. Which means I was carrying pans of near to boiling water up a flight of stairs, through the piano room, through the living room, and through a hallway to the bathtub. And somehow (fear for my life, probably) I never spilled a drop. Even though the biggest (and so most useful one, as far as volume went) pan we had was some dump-picked thing with a broken handle, meaning on one side all I had to hold onto (with potholders) was the screw sticking out.
Someone somewhere along the line actually gave my father a water heater, a nice stainless steel number, which the original owner had had to get rid of since it was intended for a restaurant but didn't get the water quite hot enough to meet the board of health's standards for restaurant dish-washing. It was okay for a residential house, though, and so we got it. And then, of course, it sat there for years. There was always some reason for not installing it—the elements (it's an electric one) weren't quite the right size (and don't ask me how that worked, since as far as I know it was given him in working condition), or the entire house had to be re-plumbed before the thing could be installed. I remember great and incredibly frustrating arguments with my father where he absolutely insisted the pipes had to be done his way. They were copper, with brass fittings. But that was expensive and we didn't have the money. Or they had to be fitted together with the old-fashioned flare fittings, and they tended to leak, so he was the only one who could do it. Of course by that time the rest of the world had moved on to sweat-soldering copper pipes together, but my dad adamantly would not do that—what if he had to get into the pipe? Of course it's supposed to be a closed system and who the fuck needs to get into the pipes once it's all sealed off anyway?
The well tended to go dry in the summer, too. This is an old house—a 250-year old New England colonial, to be exact, and while it is itself a perfectly fine house, and quite excellently restored by, to give him credit, my father with the help from my grandfather, his father-in-law—the well is probably nearly as old as the house. If you look down it you can see it is not very deep, and is made of layers of stones set on top of each other, like the foundation of the house, and like the walls in the neighborhood. So it's quaint, I suppose. But often it was quite non-functional. We would go to the state forest up the street, where they had an artesian well, and fill milk bottles every few days in the summer.
And then there was the septic system. I am, frankly, embarrassed to talk about it because it was just so horrible. Like, puddle of horrible squishy stuff that no one wanted to acknowledge or deal with. Just mow around it. The grass around it was always really lush, of course, what with feeding on the raw sewage. And of course it smelled lovely, too. Only a very few select friends ever came over. Only one, for me.
I suppose this is a bit rambly, but it is what it is. Mainly it's about the absolute adamantine impossibility of my father, the amount of control he had over us, and the utter illogic of it all. There was no understanding it. He has always seemed to me to be completely opaque, and that one friend of mine, who was quite familiar with him, would get the same look of confusion and speechlessness I would when someone who didn't know him would ask us to describe him. Or it made no sense, at least, until I found out about OCPD, Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. I spent so much time as a kid and young adult trying to talk to him. I learned all his patterns, and all the ways of getting him to open up just a little, and somehow I had the patience of a saint; but in the end it did little good. Really, I could probably qualify as a diplomat with all that practice. I mean, if I actually had any patience left for it, which I don't.
As for the state of the house now: I still live here, with Mom, who, though she will deny it, is 83 and could use a hand; and it's now all in good working order. Well, the faucet in the kitchen is a bit drippy but that just needs a washer or something, and it's a refreshingly ordinary problem, all told. Otherwise, all the faucets are hooked up, both toilets work, there is a lovely (courtesy of Tara one Christmas) new faucet with one of those old-fashioned looking hand-held shower head attachments in the tub, we have city water so the well is no longer an issue, and several years back we actually qualified for a grant to get a whole new septic system installed. When they put it in the guy with the bucket loader just matter-of-factly filled in the old horrible wet spot, then drove over it. In about a minute in a half, with heavy equipment. Bless him.
And bless us, myself and my sister and my mother, for enduring all of this. It was not our fault.
First, let's make this clear, to myself, at least: it was not my fault. I was a child. The situation here was not, is not, and never will be a reflection on me or my character or worth as a person. It was humiliating, and embarrassing, and even sometimes physically dangerous, as well as something that was just not talked about. That kind of thing is so hard to bear, as a child, and as the adult who was that child (still is, in a lot of ways, unsurprisingly). But the bottom line is: it was not me. The responsibility lies entirely with my father. There was nothing, absolutely nothing I could have done to affect the situation. And trust me, I tried, even though I was a child.
Ugh. So. I will write as much of it as I can remember, here. As a purge, for my own health. Here goes:
When I was very young, young enough that the memory is a little hazy, the toilet didn't quite flush. At least I remembered that flushing the toilet was something the grown-ups did. I don't know quite what was wrong with the thing, but I'm pretty sure the grown-ups would periodically dump a pail of water in it to flush it. Which now of course makes me think it was something ridiculously simple—like a broken chain or the handle simply having come unattached. I wouldn't be surprised, you know.
There was supposed to be a toilet downstairs, too, in the crazy tiny little half-bath in the cellar; but that didn't get installed/working until I was out of college.
The faucets were spotty at best; I don't remember getting them all in working order till, honestly, I was in my thirties. The kitchen faucet, pretty much, did always work; but the bathtub, the upstairs bathroom sink, and the downstairs bathroom sink didn't, or only did so sporadically. If something leaked, my father just shut off the water to it. And then didn't fix it, and then, and this is key, wouldn't allow anyone else to fix it. On a couple of occasions when we got up the nerve to go against what he wanted, he would actually undo someone else's work.
There was no hot water here most of the time. (This automatically means that half the faucets didn't work, doesn't it?) There might have been when I was very young, but for pretty much all my school years there wasn't. Which meant:
That to get hot water for a bath it had to be heated on the stove and then brought upstairs (through several rooms) to the bathtub. When I was young I suppose my mother did it; but when I got to be a teenager I did it. Which means I was carrying pans of near to boiling water up a flight of stairs, through the piano room, through the living room, and through a hallway to the bathtub. And somehow (fear for my life, probably) I never spilled a drop. Even though the biggest (and so most useful one, as far as volume went) pan we had was some dump-picked thing with a broken handle, meaning on one side all I had to hold onto (with potholders) was the screw sticking out.
Someone somewhere along the line actually gave my father a water heater, a nice stainless steel number, which the original owner had had to get rid of since it was intended for a restaurant but didn't get the water quite hot enough to meet the board of health's standards for restaurant dish-washing. It was okay for a residential house, though, and so we got it. And then, of course, it sat there for years. There was always some reason for not installing it—the elements (it's an electric one) weren't quite the right size (and don't ask me how that worked, since as far as I know it was given him in working condition), or the entire house had to be re-plumbed before the thing could be installed. I remember great and incredibly frustrating arguments with my father where he absolutely insisted the pipes had to be done his way. They were copper, with brass fittings. But that was expensive and we didn't have the money. Or they had to be fitted together with the old-fashioned flare fittings, and they tended to leak, so he was the only one who could do it. Of course by that time the rest of the world had moved on to sweat-soldering copper pipes together, but my dad adamantly would not do that—what if he had to get into the pipe? Of course it's supposed to be a closed system and who the fuck needs to get into the pipes once it's all sealed off anyway?
The well tended to go dry in the summer, too. This is an old house—a 250-year old New England colonial, to be exact, and while it is itself a perfectly fine house, and quite excellently restored by, to give him credit, my father with the help from my grandfather, his father-in-law—the well is probably nearly as old as the house. If you look down it you can see it is not very deep, and is made of layers of stones set on top of each other, like the foundation of the house, and like the walls in the neighborhood. So it's quaint, I suppose. But often it was quite non-functional. We would go to the state forest up the street, where they had an artesian well, and fill milk bottles every few days in the summer.
And then there was the septic system. I am, frankly, embarrassed to talk about it because it was just so horrible. Like, puddle of horrible squishy stuff that no one wanted to acknowledge or deal with. Just mow around it. The grass around it was always really lush, of course, what with feeding on the raw sewage. And of course it smelled lovely, too. Only a very few select friends ever came over. Only one, for me.
I suppose this is a bit rambly, but it is what it is. Mainly it's about the absolute adamantine impossibility of my father, the amount of control he had over us, and the utter illogic of it all. There was no understanding it. He has always seemed to me to be completely opaque, and that one friend of mine, who was quite familiar with him, would get the same look of confusion and speechlessness I would when someone who didn't know him would ask us to describe him. Or it made no sense, at least, until I found out about OCPD, Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. I spent so much time as a kid and young adult trying to talk to him. I learned all his patterns, and all the ways of getting him to open up just a little, and somehow I had the patience of a saint; but in the end it did little good. Really, I could probably qualify as a diplomat with all that practice. I mean, if I actually had any patience left for it, which I don't.
As for the state of the house now: I still live here, with Mom, who, though she will deny it, is 83 and could use a hand; and it's now all in good working order. Well, the faucet in the kitchen is a bit drippy but that just needs a washer or something, and it's a refreshingly ordinary problem, all told. Otherwise, all the faucets are hooked up, both toilets work, there is a lovely (courtesy of Tara one Christmas) new faucet with one of those old-fashioned looking hand-held shower head attachments in the tub, we have city water so the well is no longer an issue, and several years back we actually qualified for a grant to get a whole new septic system installed. When they put it in the guy with the bucket loader just matter-of-factly filled in the old horrible wet spot, then drove over it. In about a minute in a half, with heavy equipment. Bless him.
And bless us, myself and my sister and my mother, for enduring all of this. It was not our fault.
Monday, June 14, 2010
So Let's See
I suppose I should start off with some kind of overview of things, here. My father was a compulsive hoarder, born in 1923 and a child for the Great Depression. I say 'was', because, even though he is still alive, several years ago he had a stroke and now lives in a nursing home. He doesn't remember much. Perhaps that is just as well; he'd kill us if he could understand what we're doing to his 'stuff.'
My sister and I were born to either side of 1970; my father had, I think, already begun the hoarding before we were born. Although I, at least, am only just beginning to call it that, and recognize it as such: we just thought he was weird, or impossible, or hyper-controlling, or inscrutable or something. Nothing he did made any sense to me at all until I read about OCPD, Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder.
Unlike many hoarders' houses the inside of ours was mostly okay. I mean, sure, he piled newspapers and magazines everywhere, took over all the closets and stuffed them full to bursting with new shirts with the tags still on them bought for 19¢ at Building #19, and kept talking about building more bookcases to put his ever-growing collection of cheapo books in (some of which were ones libraries had thrown away); but, for the most part, the house was livable. Well, perhaps I should put that in quotes, 'livable'. Since plumbing, um, irregularities were de rigueur growing up. But that's a whole 'nother post.
I really think the inside of the house only stayed somewhat okay because our mother fought him tooth and nail to keep it 'livable'. There was a lot of screaming going on in here growing up. I shudder to think how bad he would have let it get if left to his own.
But the yard. Yikes.
He was a mechanic, you see, who worked on the type of car I of course hate most in the world now: air-cooled Volkswagens. Once upon a time he had been employed by a dealership, but somewhere in there (and I'm not sure what led to it; there are stories of him being fired from the dealership on Christmas Eve) he decided he was going to do it from his own garage.
And that is why he began, or that is all the excuse he needed to begin, to collect cars. Volkswagens mainly, of course, but sometimes that didn't matter; if cousin so-and-so was done with his crappy Datsun pickup truck, why that might be useful, right? And not just cars, either, but car parts--engines, transmissions, tires, hoods, doors, seats, axles, anything and everything car related he saved. And when he ran out of space in the garage, he built a shop. When he ran out of space in the shop and it was getting difficult to work, he started another outbuilding. And so then of course he also saved building materials--scraps of plywood, boards salvaged from other buildings, moulding, doors, windows, rolls of linoleum, cedar shingles, tin cans full of nails.
There was more, of course. But Rage is tapping on my shoulder, so I'll stop there.
He's been in that nursing home for four years now; and though we've been cleaning it all up, it's still slow going. For one thing, one does not clean up forty years worth of crap overnight. For another, it is very heavy emotional work which brings up all kinds of nasty memories and sets all kinds of negative 'tape loops' playing in the head.
We have done quite a lot already, understand. At one point I believe (and Tara would know better than I) there were eighty-eight cars on the property. It is down to twenty-five now. We have cleared out space and reclaimed land, had innumerable tires taken away, brought carload after carload of iron to the scrap yard, filled bags and bags and bags of the fifty-five gallon heavy-duty trash bags, and even rented (and filled) a dumpster once: and there is still more. Just the other day Tara moved a pile of hoods aside and discovered several more stacks of tires. We brought another twenty-four of the things to a tire place last week and by today's count there are still at least sixty left.
So then, this blog. I have made it a goal to get the yard clean by the end of the year, before 2011 rolls in. And this blog will be a way to keep track of it all and to help us see the progress we have, and will, make. Expect lots of before and after shots.
Also it will serve as a place to vent our homicidal impulses, if for instance we uncover yet another fucking milk crate full of cedar shingles and carpenter ants. Consider it a service to society.
My sister and I were born to either side of 1970; my father had, I think, already begun the hoarding before we were born. Although I, at least, am only just beginning to call it that, and recognize it as such: we just thought he was weird, or impossible, or hyper-controlling, or inscrutable or something. Nothing he did made any sense to me at all until I read about OCPD, Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder.
Unlike many hoarders' houses the inside of ours was mostly okay. I mean, sure, he piled newspapers and magazines everywhere, took over all the closets and stuffed them full to bursting with new shirts with the tags still on them bought for 19¢ at Building #19, and kept talking about building more bookcases to put his ever-growing collection of cheapo books in (some of which were ones libraries had thrown away); but, for the most part, the house was livable. Well, perhaps I should put that in quotes, 'livable'. Since plumbing, um, irregularities were de rigueur growing up. But that's a whole 'nother post.
I really think the inside of the house only stayed somewhat okay because our mother fought him tooth and nail to keep it 'livable'. There was a lot of screaming going on in here growing up. I shudder to think how bad he would have let it get if left to his own.
But the yard. Yikes.
He was a mechanic, you see, who worked on the type of car I of course hate most in the world now: air-cooled Volkswagens. Once upon a time he had been employed by a dealership, but somewhere in there (and I'm not sure what led to it; there are stories of him being fired from the dealership on Christmas Eve) he decided he was going to do it from his own garage.
And that is why he began, or that is all the excuse he needed to begin, to collect cars. Volkswagens mainly, of course, but sometimes that didn't matter; if cousin so-and-so was done with his crappy Datsun pickup truck, why that might be useful, right? And not just cars, either, but car parts--engines, transmissions, tires, hoods, doors, seats, axles, anything and everything car related he saved. And when he ran out of space in the garage, he built a shop. When he ran out of space in the shop and it was getting difficult to work, he started another outbuilding. And so then of course he also saved building materials--scraps of plywood, boards salvaged from other buildings, moulding, doors, windows, rolls of linoleum, cedar shingles, tin cans full of nails.
There was more, of course. But Rage is tapping on my shoulder, so I'll stop there.
He's been in that nursing home for four years now; and though we've been cleaning it all up, it's still slow going. For one thing, one does not clean up forty years worth of crap overnight. For another, it is very heavy emotional work which brings up all kinds of nasty memories and sets all kinds of negative 'tape loops' playing in the head.
We have done quite a lot already, understand. At one point I believe (and Tara would know better than I) there were eighty-eight cars on the property. It is down to twenty-five now. We have cleared out space and reclaimed land, had innumerable tires taken away, brought carload after carload of iron to the scrap yard, filled bags and bags and bags of the fifty-five gallon heavy-duty trash bags, and even rented (and filled) a dumpster once: and there is still more. Just the other day Tara moved a pile of hoods aside and discovered several more stacks of tires. We brought another twenty-four of the things to a tire place last week and by today's count there are still at least sixty left.
So then, this blog. I have made it a goal to get the yard clean by the end of the year, before 2011 rolls in. And this blog will be a way to keep track of it all and to help us see the progress we have, and will, make. Expect lots of before and after shots.
Also it will serve as a place to vent our homicidal impulses, if for instance we uncover yet another fucking milk crate full of cedar shingles and carpenter ants. Consider it a service to society.
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