Another Town and One More Show

It was that time of year again and so off we went to that local Volkswagen show, the one at the race track a few towns over. It's mostly for the newer Volkswagens, but it's so close that it's kind of silly not to go. So once again we got up unnaturally early and drove the Bus over there. No, I will never understand (or really ever quite trust) morning people. It's just not right.

The weather was its usual extreme: in past years it's either been unseasonably hot and bright, or unseasonably frigid and windy. It went with frigid this year, which was really very kind of it; the swap meet part (where we were) is held at the top edge of the racetrack (the track being set into a bit of a hill, like the amphitheater at Pompeii, come to think of it) and the wind just loves to come screaming across it at top speed. But we managed to set up in such a way that the Bus was blocking most of it. Well, in theory, anyway. I suppose it did, kind of; but given the ground clearance on it really it just funneled all the wind underneath it, which meant that it was all focused on our lower legs and feet. And when your feet are cold, the rest of you probably is too, even if you're wearing your winter coat and a scarf, which of course I was, because I'm no fool. I know that April in New England is really still a winter month, daffodils or no.

So we pretty much froze, which was unpleasant but not unexpected; though at least it didn't rain.

But bizarrely enough, freezing weather or no (and there were an awful lot of frankly insane people in of all things, flip-flops) the place was packed. When we looked down at the track, where the show cars were parked, it was completely full, which it certainly had not been the past couple of years. It was even more remarkable because this year it was (unavoidably) scheduled for the same day as another big VW thing in Connecticut, which you would have thought would draw off the crowds.

There were also a lot more old Volkswagens there down in the showfield, and so a lot more old Volkswagen enthusiasts walking around, which was good for us as they of course do need parts. Which meant we were pretty busy. Here's the spread. It's the usual.

We (well, Tara) also talked to quite a few guys looking for other parts; in fact one of them came by the house the next day and bought some more stuff, which is all right in my book. There were also a few guys who stopped by and asked if this was Walter's stuff, which of course it was; two of them were guys who had known my father from way back. I knew who they were, or at least their names; it had probably been thirty years since I'd seen them and would not have recognized them. They asked about my father, naturally, and were not surprised to find he'd died last year. There were other people there who'd known him too, or had bought parts (or cars) from him at one point, or who used to come over every week and learn about Volkswagens from him. It was very strange, the way they talked about it; like he was this Volkswagen guru dispensing precious wisdom, while they sat rapt at his knee as a disciple. It struck me as really very odd. Maybe because it sounded so fatherly. Which is not something I, personally, ever experienced him to be, this person who was my father.

All in all I'd call it a success, though we didn't make as much as we usually do at the other, more specifically old Volkswagen-themed meets; still, it's worth it, and gave me enough pocket change to get some perennials on the way home. Which I planted in the gardens I have dug in this yard that used to be covered with junk cars. I'll call that a victory, one of a distinctly alchemical nature. It is also, I suppose, a kind of revenge. I will take it.

Purging

So. Some of the junk we took last week and today were bits that Tara had originally put aside in the hopes that someone would want to buy them. But she's decided, through experience at various Volkswagen shows, that no one wants those parts, and is getting rid of them.

It's like that. I know, since I have the ability to google the phrase 'tetanus burger', that people have occasionally wondered why we are doing this in such a piecemeal manner, bit by bit, instead of say just renting a dumpster (well, dumpsters, plural) and getting rid of it all at once. To be fair, we have in the past rented a dumpster, but that was before the blog. That got rid of building materials my father had saved, old rotten boards, a bunch of homosote (spell check recognizes that so I guess that's not an entirely archaic word), that sort of thing.

There are a lot of reasons, the main one being that people who aren't familiar with hoards simply cannot conceive of the sheer amount of stuff. It says 78 cars on the side there, and I think that's accurate (it is really actually hard to know for sure), but that's not counting all the other stuff, which was, really, probably the bulk of it. It was so much stuff, actually, that when I try to list what was out there in the yard I sort of can't. My brain just shuts down and goes blank. Piles of lumber, milk crate after milk crate of cedar shingles, iron pipes, car parts, piles and piles of car parts, from doors and hoods to engines and transmissions and I don't even know what else, seriously, it's all too much stuff to remember.

But another is cost; it is more affordable, even with the work involved which of course does count, to do it ourselves and get a bit of money for it than to rent something. Though we have rented other things, too, like the wood chipper we used to get rid of a very large pile of brush (because my father saved that sort of thing, too), which was one of the very first things we did to clean the place up, way back in maybe 2001, as well as the occasional Bobcat to level out piles of dirt (which my father also of course saved, because free dirt homg! No, it makes no sense at all. Trust me, I know.)

Another is time. Though we're both self-employed and so have fairly flexible schedules, still, we can't just up and take a chunk of time and devote it to cleaning things. Also, it's hard, emotionally and mentally, because it brings up all the old patterns, and anyone who's the child of a hoarder will understand that intuitively. The rest of you, well you're a bunch of lucky bastards, now aren't you?

It is also very hard to get out of the mindset that doing things is hard. For me personally (and I can't speak for Tara) it's a bit beyond learned helplessness, which I suppose I should define. Learned helplessness is when a child is taught that effort on their part nets no results; in time, they stop trying, because it's not worth it to bother. With me, though, and I imagine with plenty of other children of hoarders, trying to better things (i.e. cleaning) resulted in getting yelled at, i.e. punishment. So it's not just a sort of apathy about cleaning or bettering things (including, of course, because this is how things work in a child's mind, bettering oneself) but a real fear. I have mentioned before that it took me a long time to realize I was actually terrified of cleaning, though of course it wasn't anything I was conscious of. I've gotten past that (bringing it to consciousness of course helped immensely; if you can't see it you can't work on it), but there is still some of that Leave it alone it's dangerous! mentality, at least in my head.

Then there's the idea, very much drilled into us by my father, that things are hopeless anyway, and that 'progress' is invariably five steps forward and four steps back. Everything, according to my father, was just this huge impossible amount of work. Hooking up the water heater (which, again, someone gave him for free) meant he had to re-do all the pipes in the house. And re-doing the pipes meant replacing all the connectors, which he absolutely insisted had to be done using the old, prone to leaking flare fittings, instead of just soldering them together, because what if he wanted to get into the pipes? This is, incidentally, very characteristic of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, which my father almost certainly had, though he was (of course) never officially diagnosed. (Though from what I understand in the new DSM-V things got shuffled around and there is now 'Hoarding Disorder' that is more or less similar to old OCPD.) I think, with both my father and my mother (and though I don't talk about her much here, trust me, she has her own problems) that if something was going nicely it just couldn't be borne. There was a danger, to them, of things going smoothly, or comfortably, one that could only be averted by something going wrong, or being difficult or hard. Which means there was (and is, because my mother is still here) a good deal of self-sabotage. Which we kids learned, too.

(Just a note on my mother: I came home one day in high school to find she had cut all the towels in half. When I asked, she said they were 'too big'. And this in a household with no hot water, where bath time was this huge impossible literally dangerous big deal, as I was carrying pans of near-boiling water up a flight of stairs. My mother's particular dysfunction/madness has always been completely baffling to me. Bafflement, I've found, is a very difficult one to come to terms with. Outright obvious abuse is one thing, I think; it's probably easier to recognize as wrong. But confusion? You can't get a handle on it, even a little.)

So there's all that. Then there's the more properly hoarder attitude (which I do not have) that Things Must Be Saved. Now, Tara is not a hoarder, as I've been to her house plenty (most recently for a Breaking Bad marathon which did weird things to my head, oy) and it's perfectly neat; but when it comes to car parts, well, you know. She wants to go through everything, in case someone might buy it, or in case she can use it herself on one of her project cars. And, in the interest of family harmony, that's probably about all I should say about that, though there is plenty that doesn't make it onto the blog, mostly involving yelling.

But I think, finally, Tara is seeing that there are plenty of things people don't actually want, even if they are restoring an old Volkswagen; things that are, actually, better or more reliable new. Despite most of the new replacement parts being cheap crap, and even though a lot of the old stuff is far more solid, sometimes old just isn't trustworthy. So she's realizing that there are some things no one wants, and no one can use. Yeah, in a lot of ways that resembles churning, or that old hoarder tactic of going through a pile of papers several times and letting a couple more go in each pass, and trust me I know. Oh, oh, I know.

Leap of Faith

Despite the fact that the two of us are leaving on a road trip tomorrow and still have like a gazillion things to do, Tara felt we could squeeze another iron run in today. I do sometimes wonder just how much her world view is colored by the energy drinks she apparently mainlines; but despite the tight schedule there we were filling up the bus again with rusty hunks of rusty rust, which this time included an actual rusty bucket of bolts. As well as some aluminum, brass, copper and a good old double-biscuited catalytic converter, which was most excellent.

All told it was a smallish load, as far as the iron part of it went anyway. Still, when we add on the 560 pounds of iron, from our thirty-seventh trip to the scrapyard, it brings our total up to 32,380 pounds, or 16.19 tons. And yeah, there's still more.

Back view:



And side view:



To top it all off, by which I mean, literally, piled on all the other stuff in the bus like a cherry on a rust fudge sundae, we also got rid of the dryer.

Now, that may not seem like a big deal. So let me explain.

In the old days under my father's, well, regime, as in, the way things are run by a totalitarian dictator, if the belt broke on the dryer, which is what it did a couple of weeks ago, not only would there be no chance of fixing it, there would also be no chance of throwing it away. Now in the case of this dryer, true, it's pretty much unfixable, or, really, way too much of a pain in the ass to bother with, as the broken belt is in this crazy impossible place. Which Tara knows because she looked.

My father, on the other hand, would have just assumed it could not be fixed. Or, well, not quite: he would have assumed it was a huge impossible deal to fix, but he would also have assumed he was capable of doing it nonetheless. Not, of course, that he would actually fix it, oh no of course not. And not that he would let anyone else fix it either, as that would involve spending money on something that he could do, and as I believe I have said more than a few times already he was a miserly bastard. So it would have sat there.

And because it was 'fixable', even if, realistically, it was never ever going to be fixed, no one would be allowed to get a new one, either, since we had what my father considered a perfectly good dryer. Yes, that's right: in his eyes it was of course still perfectly good. Even though it didn't work. Even though pretty much it was never going to work again. And of course if anyone had the temerity to remind him that he had said he was going to fix the dryer and when do you think you might want to do that? he would freak right out and go straight to ranting about how he didn't have time now, or he had all these other things to do, or he couldn't do it because he had to do this this and that first, and anyway everyone always nags him and didn't he have any rights and you couldn't make him! Yes, seriously. That sounds an awful lot like a badly behaved five year old to me now, though of course we didn't see it then. And yet he had so much power over us.

So in the end we would have been dryerless for years, most likely. And since he didn't do laundry, he didn't exactly care, did he. It would only make our lives miserable, and we didn't count.

But anyway. Back to the way things are now.

So the both of us are going on this road trip, and won't be back for a couple weeks; so the plan is (since we have a lot on our plates already) to find a working one via Craigslist after we get back. My mother has said she can wait and doesn't mind hanging clothes out for a little while. Me, I find it a huge pain, and am frankly sick of towels that feel like sandpaper and underwear that feels like cardboard, but hey, it's her butt, right?

But even though we didn't have a replacement lined up, there we were hauling the old one to the scrapyard. That kind of thinking, the thinking that allows there to be a gap, a space in time between one step and the next, would have been completely impossible for my father. Because what it comes down to is a leap of faith. Faith that the universe moves, and faith that it will, that we will, actually follow through.

Uncomfort

This past weekend my sister and I actually managed to wake up early enough both days to get ourselves to another car event. This time however it was not exclusive to Citroëns, though there were a few there (including my sister's Deux Chevaux), but to little cars and the people nuts enough to like (and own) them.

And when I say little I mean little. Micro, in fact.

Most of them were made in Europe and date from the 50s and 60s; I'm not sure quite what that says about Europe, though I suppose being infested with medieval towns with tiny alleyways is a reasonably plausible excuse.

There were Goggomobils



And old-school Minis



And the type of Messerschmitt that doesn't fly



Little Fiats (which I understand is short for Fix it again, Tony)



Wait, let's get a bit of scale on that:



As well as a few Isettas, which, and I am not making this up, are actually BMWs:



And in other things I am not making up, the Isetta was created by someone who also designed refrigerators, hence the door:



There was even an old Beetle there, though it was one of the bigger cars and looked, like the Deux Chevauxs, comparatively ginormous. Luxurious, even.

And again, though I don't generally care a whole lot about cars, I will admit to being amused by these tiny little micro cars. They're just so damned odd. And the people who own them and repeatedly attempt to get them running, in spite of the obvious and regrettable lack of common sense and sanity, are for the most part very nice, and quite funny, too.

So we had fun this weekend, and saw some friends. But it got me thinking about whether I'd ever want one. I don't know.

Because my main criteria for a car is comfort (well, reliability is good, too). And these, well, they're not exactly comfortable. First of all if you are a full-grown adult human you don't so much sit in one as wear one. Second, there is no such thing as air-conditioning in them, and in fact some of them don't even have windows that open, which, I'm sure you can imagine, is a whole boatload of fun on a sunny weekend in July. And honestly I don't know how anyone can drive a Goggomobil and remain conscious, what with the cloud of two-stroke fumes it doesn't have the power to get ahead of.

Because that is one of my bottom lines now: I will be comfortable. Because being uncomfortable is one of the things I remember most about my childhood. Now that may not sound like much; it's not really a big deal to be uncomfortable, right? It's not like actual physical pain. Except that it wasn't a temporary thing, a little thing. This was permanent, and across the board.

It's one thing to do without running water for a few days if say the water main outside your house bursts, or if you are camping. It's another thing to have no water at all most summers because the well went dry, and no water in most of the faucets anyway because when they dripped, and they all dripped eventually, my father's solution was to shut them off and walk away. Or to go without hot water for decades, because your father can't be arsed to install the water heater, which is sitting right there. Just like it's one thing to go outside and be cold in the winter, but another entirely to spend a long, long ride in a car with no heat at all, and then come home to a house set at 55 degrees. You simply never get warm in the winter.

It becomes the default, this lack of comfort, this profound unease. In winter you exist from that center of cold-in-the-bones, and any moment of warmth is the temporary thing. It always settles back to being cold, being uncomfortable. Worse yet, if I ever complained I was mocked, told it was nothing, not a big deal, what was I a princess expecting a life of luxury? That was the word my mother threw at me, princess.

And the old, shitty, non-heated, falling apart cars were of course a large part of all of that, especially since my father insisted on dragging all of us to all kinds of places like Import Auto Parts that we could not have cared less about. It was about control on his part as usual, I guess, or something to do with that personality disordered profound lack of understanding that people who were not him didn't naturally like everything he liked.

But getting back to the little car meet-thing. It's not exactly a big community, the micro car enthusiasts, especially given it's Massachusetts. And though the old Volkswagens aren't exactly micro cars, there is a fair bit of overlap in the communities. So there were more than a few old VW fans there.

Now my father worked out of a garage (or shop) on the property for something like thirty years, up until the mid 90s or so.

Saturday afternoon some of the little car people got talking about project cars they had (and trust me, little cars are invariably project cars). They were comparing numbers, how many of the things they had at the worst before they sobered up and came to terms with the fact that some of them were just never going to be fixable, and that they were just never going to have the resources to sink into some of the more hopeless cases.

I interrupted right there, and told them I had them all beat. Seventy-eight cars in the yard, I said. Then, when they looked at me in shock, I explained that my father was a hoarder who was also a Volkswagen mechanic, and one of the things he hoarded was old Volkswagens.

Then one guy looked at me and said, Are you Walter's daughter?

I am. And he knew. Despite the fact that my father hasn't been here in five years, and that he'd retired another ten years before that, and even though we were fifty miles from home, still, he knew my father, and he knew the property.

But then there's this part, and I don't know what to do about it.

Now I know that these people love their little cars; I get that and I think it's great that people have hobbies. I have more than a few myself. I can even, if not truly understand I suppose, accept that there are some people who simply love old air-cooled Volkswagens without being bad people, perhaps in the same way that someone can be fascinated with the history of Hitler's rise to power without being a Nazi. I get that, and while I will never understand why on a gut level I can see that it is true.

It's when they start going on about how great my father was that I get lost.

Although I can even sort of understand that part of it, I guess. If you only knew him through the Volkswagen stuff, if you'd only come by to look at parts, or ask him about your Bug (and he was always very happy to talk and talk and talk about VWs) you might think that he was just some nice older guy who was a bit eccentric, maybe.

Well maybe. Because how could you then look around at the yard and still think that? How could you see seventy-eight cars, even if in your eyes they weren't 'junk' cars, which were obviously taking over the yard, which were everywhere, in every space they could possibly fit, along with all the car parts and all the other stuff that was obviously junk, and also, also, know that there were children there, (Are you Walter's daughter?) and not think Wow this is fucked up? I suppose I could see if the person doing the observing was also a hoarder, but so far few of the people I've had this conversation with have given me that vibe (although occasionally someone really really does).

And then what do I say to that? Yes, I'm Walter's daughter. While I'm not expecting that you should have called CPS on my father's ass, how is it that you are standing there smiling at me about all this? I just said my father was a hoarder. I even asked if you'd seen that TV show and you smiled and said yes. Are you just not thinking? I understand this is a fairly shallow conversation, and I even understand that most people are not as ridiculously introverted as I am (and so deep conversations are not the default for you as they are for me), but really? That situation was obviously fucked up, you saw it, and you are standing there telling me about how my father had all this great stuff?

Over and over that is the reaction.

So where does that leave me? The older I get, the more I recognize and acknowledge the truth of the situation here, the less tolerance I have for just smiling and nodding when people start in about how great my father was and Oh wow all those Volkswagens! The hoarding, which included all those marvelous bugs and squarebacks and fastbacks and busses and campers and 411s and 412s and even that white pickup truck and the odd MG or Spitfire or Triumph or Datsun or old Saab 95 or 96, was child neglect and abuse. Making us live in all that, because his needs came first, was child abuse.

No, it's not that his needs came first, and this is the part that is so hard to articulate and make anyone understand, it's not even that; that implies that there was a hierarchy in his mind, that he had some kind of list in his head of people's needs that he had put in order, with his own at the top. The reality is that he was incapable of seeing or imagining that other people had needs at all. I have no idea, really, how my father perceived other people. Were they simply shadows cast on a wall? Things that could be talked at? Something that makes dinner? Noise, things moving, like some TV that you couldn't turn off? Something that's always trying to take his money? I honestly don't know. I really don't. Can someone tell me?

If I try to tell people well no actually you don't understand about him, he was a hoarder, it was hell growing up in that house, he was profoundly mentally ill, and this last one, that he was 'profoundly mentally ill' was an exact quote to this guy I was talking to on Saturday, it just gets glossed over. Like I said I understand a conversation with me sometimes, because I am so stunningly introverted, can be like wading into the shallows and suddenly stepping into the Mariana Trench. I get that. But they just nod and continue the conversation. I don't know what to do.

But that's the thing. I can't not say something. I can't just smile and nod when they go on about my father. I don't, really, I don't think, want to make someone feel bad, to grab them with a gotcha, to imply they are enabling something, glossing over child abuse like that; but at the same time, not saying anything is for me just more invalidation. It's me keeping silent, once again, as I always did.

I was trying to think the other day about what my father said that was so invalidating. And I couldn't really come up with anything. My mother, sure, oh I could think of plenty she said, but my father, no, I was coming up blank. And yet the almost overwhelming feeling I have of him is of invalidation.

He didn't need to say anything, that's the thing. Everything he did was invalidating to the people around him, his family. He didn't need to tell us we didn't deserve hot water; his adamant refusal to install the water heater until he did X, Y, and Z was invalidation enough. Especially since his reasoning was all couched in terms of his rights, not just what he wanted, but his rights; that he didn't have to, we couldn't make him, we didn't have the right to make him. And that is telling us that we didn't have the right to hot water, that we didn't ever have the right to be comfortable, to heat, to running water, to a yard not full of cars, to not be publicly humiliated (because everyone knew the yard was a junkyard), to have friends over, to have enough to eat, to be warm in winter, to have the lights on in a room with the window open in summer because the bugs could get in with the crappy screens we had, to eat in peace, to dislike certain foods, to have a closet to hang our clothes in, to get a gift that was our own; and anything we did get from him (and it was all from him, as he was the one with a job) was always so grudgingly given, couched in terms of how we should be grateful for getting even that and never forget that he was always entitled to a piece of it as he paid for it.

And still, when I mention any of that, these acquaintances who knew my father as the VW guy still stand there and smile and talk about how great my father was, as if they knew him better than I did. When I try to explain most of them just don't want to hear it. I know we have a problem with dealing with child abuse in this society. I do honestly think has its roots in that this society counts on certain kinds of inequality to function, and so not only wants to look the other way but must. I really do believe that. So nobody wants to hear it, to the point where most people out there will make excuse after excuse for abusers, even the really violent ones, oh he was such a nice guy when I saw him at the coffee shop, blah blah blah. But I just want to scream:

Dude. I knew my father. You didn't. You chatted with him about a mutual 'hobby'. You are making a whole lot of assumptions about him probably based in your own motivations, in your own way of doing things, assuming that he thought about things the same way you do and because you believe yourself to be a good person my father must have been one as well. And then when I say Well no he wasn't you don't want to listen. Do you know what you are saying then? You are saying that you who chatted with my father over a hobby knew him better than I did. Can you not see how stupid, how belittling, how arrogant that is? How profoundly invalidating that is of my own miserable experiences?

I don't blame you, I don't. I understand you don't want to hear it. But it is true, and I lived it.

I just don't know what to do with that.

The Swap Meet

Despite the fact that the weather in these parts has been quite lovely, there hasn't been a whole lot to report on the yard clean-up effort the last couple of weeks. Mostly that's because Tara's schedule is ridiculously full this month; as for myself, most of my outdoor efforts have been focussed on the more ordinary yard tasks of edging and weeding gardens, digging new ones (as if there aren't enough already!) and planting new stuff. Which is, it is true, refreshingly normal for yard work, and very satisfying; or well it will be if I can keep up with it. May, you know. If the gardens get ahead of you in May, you're doomed—doomed!—for the rest of the season.

But we did make it to this swap meet thing yesterday.

This gigantic swap meet thing.

Now, understand: when I say gigantic, I mean you can see it from the surface of the Moon.

There were literally acres of vendors, spread out over at least nine lots, though there may have been more. We were stationed at number nine ourselves; we kind of lost count after that.

Acres of vendors selling all kinds of stuff; my understanding was that it likely started out as a car-parts swap, but branched out from there. It was advertised as a flea market/antiques fair, but I didn't see any genuine antiques.

Most of it was frankly junk. Old lawnmowers, beat-up fiberglass dinghies, rusty go-carts, old bikes, entire old rusty cars on trailers, old shelves that had been sitting in someone's barn, giant used Barbie dolls in not very good condition, old crappy books from the 70s on useless subjects, all this junk, this random junk. Some of the vendors did seem to have a theme going, and a few (like the guy across from us selling fancy truck hoods) did seem to be selling actual new stuff, but for the most part, it was filled with pure, and purely random, crap.

I even saw, with my own eyes, one of those lady's leg in a fishnet stocking lamps, holy fuck. Alas, (or hurray) I forgot to bring my camera, so you'll have to take my word for it.

We went to try to sell some old VW car parts, of course. I had never heard of the thing, though it was pretty local; the way it had been described to us I'd thought it was more a car part thing. Still, we did sell a few parts, though how anyone found us among all the pure chaos of it was beyond me.

Now, I grew up poor. I am no longer convinced that this was entirely the hand of fate, as it was drummed into us as children by our parents; I'm quite sure that my parents actually, well, made sure that's how it was. I really think they (yes, both of them) were so in love with the idea that life was hard, impossibly hard, that they did everything in their power to make that come true. Especially my father, with his hoarding and his extreme miserliness; with him anything good that happened was always negated by something bad.

Here is an example. It's more recent, from after I moved back in with them a while back, not from when I was a child; but it's pretty characteristic of how he thought.

One day, out of the blue, he got a check for $200. I don't know why, but it was, as far as I know, a legitimate thing and not some kind of mistake, so to my father it was $200 out of thin air. A good thing, in other words.

The next day he broke his glasses. It cost, guess what, about $200 to fix.

Now, the way I see something like that, is that, Oh wow, I broke my glasses but look! Money out of the sky to fix them! Isn't that amazing, and wonderful? The Universe is looking out for me!

How did he see it? Those glasses, or the fate that made them break, took away that $200. His rightful $200, that good good $200! That's always how it works and it's so unfair! That was my money and it was just taken away like that! Stolen!! UNFAIR!!!!!

He ranted about that for ages, about the unfairness of it all, and how everything everywhere was always trying to take his money from him. His rightful money, that was his. He'd still be ranting about it now, I imagine, except his brain is very damaged after the stroke.

So anyway. I grew up poor. I know what it is like, and I know there are plenty of circumstances that contribute; many, if not most, of which being out of the control of the average poor person. I understand that, and I do not blame poor people for being poor, not one bit. I get it.

But there are unhealthy attitudes about things, too. My father was so wedded to the idea of being poor that I swear he would deliberately sabotage things rather than risk having things change. Because change was bad, always bad, to him. Everything with him was about making sure nothing had any ease to it. Keeping the heat at 55° in the winter? Making sure it is a big production to take a bath? If you make things as near to impossible as you can, then you get to gripe about how hard life is.

I know, that doesn't make sense. But I swear that was part of it. Maybe because then he got his beliefs confirmed, and in some grim way that was comforting to him. Or maybe it was simply about control. That was at the root of just about everything with him, I think. He had to have that control. Hoarders give all kinds of excuses as to why they absolutely must keep things, but I think in my father's case anyway it did come down to that fear, that abject terror, of change, any kind of change.

But back to the swap meet.

I'm sure some reporter who hasn't lived it would probably have found it all quite charming and fascinating, a real human interest story, in its kitschy Americana way. But for us it was a hoarder's paradise, filled with people thrilled to be buying pure useless shit after having probably talked the vendor down to next to nothing. I mean I suppose I shouldn't complain; we did make some money, after all. But it really squicked us out.

We were supposed to go today, Sunday, for another day of it. But late last night Tara decided she just couldn't, and I agreed. I mean, the rain predicted for today was a factor, of course; the idea of sitting out in it all day was decidedly unappealing. But beyond that was the thought that the event was enabling other hoarders. I suppose I shouldn't judge; I don't know that all (or any, for that matter) of them were hoarders. But it had that vibe, of unhealth, of deliberate poverty, of getting something for nothing, of miserliness, of the thrill of accumulating useless, broken, dirty, rusted-out crap; and we just couldn't.

That is probably unfairly judgmental; but I am glad we didn't have to go back.

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.

Reclaiming

Well look what I made. This, my friends, is called reclaiming.



They're from a Martha Stewart recipe, these gingersnaps. I figured if there's anyone out there who knows about making a home comfortable, and comforting, it's going to be her. I mean, ignoring the part about how she's probably been patiently constructing an evil empire and has plans to take over the world someday (though she'll probably have to fight Oprah for it) old Martha does know how to cook. They've got fresh ginger in them, rather a lot; they even have a little bit of freshly ground black pepper, for just the right amount of bite. The molasses in them turns them practically into candy, and they've got a really good crunch. And I'm no slouch myself when it comes to baking. They are neither overcooked nor undercooked; they are just right, as Baby Bear would say. So these are really quite excellent gingersnaps, I'm sure.

And this was going to be all about reclaiming something, and taking a bad old memory and triumphantly turning it inside out and making it mine; except, except.

I took one bite and just went blech. Because it turns out I just don't like gingersnaps.

Ah well. I guess that's good to know.

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:

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.

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:

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.

Hard Enough

Yesterday and today I did a little cleaning of my own. I am in the process of converting my parents' old attic bedroom into an art studio/sewing room for myself, my bedroom being the other attic bedroom (there are two main rooms in the attic, as it's the usual old central-chimney New England colonial layout). Years ago, when I first moved out, my parents took what had been my childhood bedroom for their own. Which was, and is, fine, as it's on the first floor and meant at the time that my father (who was beginning to have some mobility issues) wouldn't have to climb so many stairs.

So in moving stuff into my new studio I've started going through some old stuff of my own in one of the attic closets, stuff that's been there only (and yes, in this house it really is 'only') ten years or so.

But I ran into a problem.

It has gotten more and more difficult to throw things away. I don't mean that in a personal pattern sort of way, either, as if the lessons my father taught me about how it's ALL GOOD and must always always be saved have been gaining some kind of ground in me of late. No, I mean it is actually more difficult to get rid of things these days.

Used to be, you just threw everything in a bag and brought it to the dump. Everything. Not now.

These days everything is recycled. Everything has to be sorted first, per order of the town. My town, in fact, just made it a requirement that everything you are to throw away must be in the official town bags, which cost $1.25 (for a small) or $2.50 (for a large) a pop.

I mean I get it. I consider myself an environmentalist, certainly, and, have, for example, committed to growing my garden organically. (Though I am also of the Derrick Jensen school of thought, and believe the focus on individual recycling is a red herring that lets the corporations—who do upwards of 90% of the polluting and environmental damage—off the hook while simultaneously passing all the blame on to the rest of us.) But they just don't think, sometimes, about the effects things like this have.

You could argue that everyone has to do it, and so that's fair. Right?

Ha. First of all there's this little thing about economic disparity. For poor people, that $1.25 a bag is a significantly larger proportion of their income than it is for non-poor people. That argument, I do believe, is what we in the activist community call coming from a position of privilege. So right off the bat, um no.

Now, for those of us who are poor (hello! I'd like to introduce myself) and who are cleaning up after a hoarder (which action the town has been on our backs about for years), this is actually not insignificant. It makes an already difficult job that much more so.

One might also argue that, well, this will train people to just use less. The less you use, the less you have to throw away, right? If you have to buy a lot of bags it's your own fault.

Which handily bypasses the bit about how the hoarded mess is not my fault. It is, in fact, no one's fault but that of the man in the nursing home down the street, who is now 87 and doesn't remember anyone's name. But it has to be cleaned, and so it falls on myself, and my sister, and my mother to clean up after him. People, incidentally, one could argue are the victims of his hoarding behavior. And remember, this is literally forty years worth of junk, some of it huge, impossible, and bewildering. Remember that giant horrible rubber life raft? How many little town bags would that have taken? At $1.25 a pop? You're telling me it's going to actually cost me money to clean up after the bastard who perpetuated this neglect and abuse on me?

Then there's the recycling itself. What prompted this post was finding a box of my old medications, stuff like cough medicine, aspirin, and supplements as well as some old prescriptions. I must have just shoved everything in a box when I moved, and then not touched it. Yesterday I looked into that box, incidentally filled with the leavings of mice, as it had been in the mousey old attic closet, and nearly despaired. Because the way the town has set up the rules, I cannot just pitch the whole damned thing into a bag. I had to go through it all, and make decisions about each little bottle, each individual thing, and then figure out what was the proper thing to do with it. I had to separate glass bottles from their plastic caps (non-recyclable, since they had no number on them), then empty and in some cases wash the bottles out before I could do anything with them.

Those of you familiar with hoarders may recognize this. It's remarkably similar in practice to any of the million excuses hoarders have for not throwing things away. Because they simply cannot do it, their brains come up with all these impossible conditions that must be fulfilled, like in a fairy tale where Our Heroine must first separate out all the dust from a huge mound of poppy seeds. If you try to throw something away that belongs to a hoarder (and it ALL belongs to the hoarder), they will tell you, NO, you must do this impossible task first. And when you do that? NO, you must also do this impossible task. And if you do that? NO! again, and on, and on and on and on. Because if it's impossible, it can't be done, and then their stuff doesn't get thrown away, which in a hoarder's mind cannot be borne.

So I am not surprised that I looked into that box and felt a paralyzing despair. It's already hard enough. It has always been hard enough. It has always been deliberately designed to be hard for us.

I mean I did it, though I had to put it off until the next day. I am capable of doing it, I know. But it's already hard enough just as it is.

Rules

This is just one of those little things.

I was doing laundry today down in the cellar. As usual, I checked to make sure the drain hose was firmly in place in the little bathroom sink.

Now, I know this is not necessarily unusual in an old house, one that was built before washing machines were common; after all jackhammering up a section of cement to install a proper drain is a lot of work.

But this old house was so old the cellar actually still had a dirt floor when my father started restoring it in the early 60s. And, sure, he did install something for a washer to drain into; but what he thought was adequate for a drain wasn't. Cutting corners is not atypical of hoarders, I hear, especially the miserly types—someday perhaps we'll get into how my father thought one electrical outlet per room was good enough (or more than good enough, as the dining room, with its central hanging lamp, doesn't even have the one). So he left a pipe by the downstairs half-bath toilet which turned out to be not at all big enough for the volume of water a draining washing machine lets out. Which meant a soapy mess every time you did the laundry.

So he ran a hose into the sink.

Which more or less worked, though it would overflow if the sink was a little slow, and sometimes you needed to keep an eye on it. Still, on the scale of annoying plumbing problems in this house, it was always on the low end, far below the lack of oh I don't know, hot fucking water, or any water at all in the upstairs bathroom, since when the faucet dripped my father's solution was to just shut off the water to it. And then leave it.

Even now the washing machine still drains into that little sink, as it has for years, though my father no longer lives here. Since jackhammering the cellar floor up is just not a priority. Sure, it's a pain, but I'm used to it and don't really even think about it.

What got me today was this:

I was doing laundry, loading up the washer, pouring some detergent in there and then closing the lid as I've done countless times. And there it was, this sign.

It's not like I'd never seen it before. But today for some reason it infuriated and enraged me. So much about it was just so exactly, horribly typical of the fucked-up way my father did things. It's a sign my dad put up, probably something like fifteen years ago now. It says: NOTICE BE SURE DRAIN HOSE INSTALLED IN SINK BEFORE OPERATING WASHER

It may not seem, to an outsider, to be all that bad, beyond the somewhat passive-aggressive aspect of it. But it's so typical in so many ways. Even the little things about it point to the larger problems. It's written with a half-dead red marker, one that used to live in a coffee can full of half-dead and completely-dead markers and pens, broken pieces of chalk, and bits of crayon so old you couldn't even tell what color they were anymore, and it's written on the back of an old reused photocopied ad. All the usual miser stuff. But that's just the surface of it.

Because looking at it today I realized I can't recall a single time my father actually did his own goddamned laundry. My mother always did it for him. So really, then, this sign is about control. Control over what mom and we kids might possibly do wrong. Before we even did it.

Because he had his rules, and he was always right, and there was no questioning it. That was just what he assumed, and expected.

And we learned that, or I at least learned that. That sign, after all, was still up there some four years after he'd gone to that nursing home; and in fact that sign held so much power that when my mom repainted the wall she just painted around it.

They say that no one can take away your power unless you let them. But if you can't even see that it has been taken away? If it's all you've ever known and you can't even imagine that it's not simply normal? How can you do anything if you have been trained not to recognize it?

Today for the first time it occurred to me that I was free to rip the fucking thing off the wall.

I did.

Learning

Here's the thing: we learn what we are taught.

I don't really know how to clean. This is not to be wondered at, I suppose, given that I was never really taught it, growing up in this hoarder's house: it's difficult, after all, to get in the habit of hanging your clean clothes in the closet when all the closets are stuffed full of your father's shirts.

But it's not just that. Living here again in my childhood home, even though my hoarding father is no longer here, I find that there are things I won't clean. My own room, and my new studio room (which used to be the guest room), are one thing, and even though I'm truly just not a particularly neat person by nature, they stay reasonably clean—I get my laundry done and change the sheets regularly, I have been known to vacuum, that kind of thing. But when it comes to say, the living room, or the kitchen? I won't touch them.

I think it is because it is shared space. And what I was taught growing up was that shared space, though supposedly 'shared', wasn't. It always belonged to my father. Or, I suppose, my mother, as she vehemently fought for her own space to breathe in this house. But not mine. Never mine.

And so I feel it is just not my place to clean shared spaces. That, on some level, I don't actually have the right. You should see me in other people's, friend's, kitchens: I would never just get up and make myself some food, and I even hesitate to put a dirty dish in the sink or the dishwasher, though I know it is the polite thing to do. Because I don't live there, and the place is not mine.

And then I realized that underneath it all is fear. I am actually afraid to clean someone else's space. As odd as that sounds, it is true.

It makes sense. Hoarders not only tend to take over all the available space, they are famous for freaking out if anyone else touches their stuff. If anyone touched any of my dad's crap while he was there, well, there'd be absolute Hell to pay. You could argue until you were blue in the face, and all you'd get was stubbornness and screaming, with a big helping of invalidation to go with it, for he'd yell that it was HIS STUFF and no one had ANY RIGHT to touch it. It was HIS, and HE PAID FOR IT, so he could do what he wanted with it. Which extended to anything he paid for, by the way, including the food on the table and the clothes we children wore. No one else's needs were valid, never mind important.

Under these conditions, attempting to clean was the equivalent to starting a war.

Is it any wonder I am frightened of cleaning?

We learn what we are taught.