It's Always Some Old White Guy.

thus concludes the goodbye tour for this site. you can find me here mostly https://www.deviantart.com/evilhappy and sometimes https://hellopoetry.com/Evilhappy/ i'll come back when i feel like it.

I am very tired. 

This is for all intents and purposes the first, and only, if I can help it, autobiographical address I'll be giving you. If you have any issue, I'm not taking reviews. Not that I don't care what you think. Not that my ego is too fragile for your opinion. It is that I seek to derive disruptive fools of the satisfaction of having their say. Even at the cost of everyone else. I would rather be left alone. I've heard it all. 

Validation seeking. I have my own life. I don't need your energy projected onto mine to give me a reason to know why anything I do is worthwhile. Pity seeking. From the pitiless, narcissistic, myopic and narrow-minded, I know far better. They say this and that, and in the end are like my grandmother. My step-grandmother, the last remaining of six grandparents I have had. A woman with Borderline Personality Disorder so textbook it should be blatant and abundantly apparent to everyone to let her wither away in a vacuum, for only in that complete void of all interaction with anyone can she cause any harm. If there is no presence for her influence to be felt on, she would have to face her own joyless, evil, loveless, and very small world where she is God and Empress of less than nothing in endless division. Yet, here we all are, me and you. Where anyone can say anything. 

I've always liked that anyone can say anything. I've embraced it, nurtured it when I could and tried to encourage it. Why then, would I not want to hear what you have to say? Simple. I don't want anything from you. During a run of poems I titled the Goodbye Tour I was writing, whose namesake were derived from actions I was taking in real life leading towards a suicide attempt, I had the misfortune of encountering a member of a tribe I have met before twice. Now knowing this man for a third time, I recognized him. He was a different person with the same problems, the same illness. He is the type of man who takes being called omnipotent in sarcasm as a compliment, who is so needy that he will say and believe whatever he has to of himself to fill that void inside to convince himself of his great self-importance. Ego-maniacal, ego-centric, whatever you call it. I know a narcissist when I am being talked down to by one. 

I spent two very long years of my life in a game group with one, we met up every week on Wednesday night. I had an intimate knowledge of his behavior from observing him. He was always in charge of everything. He could never be a listener. If there was a story to be told, everything had to halt for him to tell a better one of his own, or he would take it quietly on the chin as an insult and carry out passive-aggressive actions against you for having had an experience he couldn't top. Quite frankly there was a disconnect between this man, and his ability to be happy for other people by simple being. He was apathetic, not that one should expect anything, but there is apathy for the sake of your own privilege and not knowing someone, and there is the apathy you generate because you know want to hurt others. He generated apathy from privilege to be cruel often enough. Still, no man I know, young, or old, nobody in my life is as evil as my grandmother. I find all of these men derisive. 

He was my second narcissist. I was in college at the time, and studying psychology. He destroyed my self-esteem so wholly with his image of being greater than me that I never even brought it up. A community college student. This man was an accomplished English Professor at Baylor University. He had a wife and kids, and, sadly and strangely he played D&D (our game) 4 nights a week. I think he had a lot of problems that were related to control. My first is not one man. It's a series of people whose faces are a blur and more the concept of the issue of someone believing they are so important they can dismiss and treat others as if they are less than human. A football coach who I remember beat his son, drank beer from the back of a truck until he was incoherent, he was in charge of my favorite extracurricular activity in 4th grade. No one cared, we all let him treat us like trash and when I had a problem with my teammates walking on my legs in cleats, I was a whiny little brat from out of town making trouble. I don't dwell on these juvenile injustices of the past, they are so great and unanswerable what would be the point. I lament some of the obvious answers to them at times. I liked being outside and involved in sports, it was good for my health and because I didn't know to tolerate being bullied because it wouldn't have mattered if I just started fighting back and hurting the people bullying me, I fell behind. I was regarded as weak and treated like a target. This was a recurring theme in my childhood, I quickly grew up taller and fatter than all of my peers in a very poor town. To lay hands on anyone would mean that no matter who started it, they say the bigger kid was at fault. 

I capped at 6' 1'' 350 with a fatty kidney in 9th or 10th grade due to extensive and unrelated medical issues I won't go into for the sake of this passage, let's just say it all has to do with my long-term anxiety. My mom was told by teachers in the 1st grade because I couldn't sit still I needed to be on something. Zoloft, or Abilify. I spent every year from 3rd grade to 9th or 10th on Abilify, and when I finally saw a psychiatrist the consensus was: you are on way too high of a dose and it's caused you to poison yourself by overeating. Between 9th grade and 11th grade I must have gone down from around 350 and the worst shape of my life, to 280 and even worse shape emotionally, mentally, and psychologically than I was ever in physically. Now, at this point, a man like the one's this is about, would feast. He would already have dissected every statement, declared disbelief and said nothing can be proven. I don't care what you believe. In America, for all our faults as a country we have one thing right. In court, where we seem to live our daily lives every time we do or say anything towards anyone, it is still on the prosecution to provide evidence against the accused. 

I expended a lot of energy in my teenage years feeling nothing but raw rage and paranoia. I hurt people I love with all my heart. I will die with those regrets, knowing there's no repairing or asking for forgiveness, only a nihilistic sort of pain at the remorse for the what-could-have-been and what-ifs and if-onlys. In that same vein, as briefly as I can possibly mention it, I was an army brat. As a child, before I turned 8 I lived in more than 10 places, none of them for more than 2 years. Most of them in Texas. So when we drove down the street in the town I would call home for 12 years, past what would be our house, and I was told "this is going to be where you grow up" I cannot describe in words what I felt. Home. It's a word I've associated with people, places, a website where I share my writing, in essence an online journal. It was a concept that didn't exist to me. I'd lived in Maryland, for 4 months from the time I was born until we moved to, in no specific order, Alabama, Heidelberg, Germany, San Angelo, Texas, Denton, Texas, and I can't recall all the other places as they left no impression. Even Alabama, I was too little, I only know I was there because I have seen pictures of the antithetical grandmother to this step-one who still breathes, with me as a fat, little baby. Her life's story would be far more interesting to read even 200 words from than my own. I loved her far more dearly than I ever managed to express, and I cherished her company. One of my many regrets will always be that I was too stupid when I was young to appreciate her more. 

Now, why does it matter? All these places, the amount of time spent? For 12 years, 3rd grade to graduation. 8 to 19, the year I turned 20, 2001 to 2013, we had something that was ours. I am the youngest of 3. I can't remember what year it was, or even if I was 15 or 16, but it was around the time I was coming down or off Abilify, and there was an incident with my sister. She disowned me. Left home for a week. Came back when she knew no one else was there but me. Took her things and I wouldn't see her again for years; in my mind I never saw her again. I almost envy her for she avoided something terrible and was completely unattached to it. A fertilizer plant, approximately 500 yards behind my house, behind a gravel road and a park exploded. It effectively destroyed half the town. Burned my home down. Melted cars in our driveway, a camper too. It maimed and nearly killed both of my parents and the roof collapsed knocking me out. I'm told, in some state, I pulled them both out and to safety. I don't truly recall anything until we were at triage on a football field. My dad's eye was put out, laying on his face in a smear. A man came by, a beloved preacher in the community from somewhere in Africa, I don't recall. He motioned and prayed, while my dad laid on a sheet on the grass, and I thought he was performing last rites. In my ignorance and fear, with adrenaline, I felt outrage. My dad is blind. My mother was nearly killed instantly. I didn't know anything about their own faith they raised me with until I was 13, because I grew bored and disinterested, and discouraged to interact with others in it, so I made an assumption that led me to think foul of someone for years to come. 

The lawyers I met and would meet for years after that are the rest of the first narcissists. In my home, between me, my brother and sister, we knew not to trust adults outside our parents. It was an unspoken sort of thing that developed as we each individually experienced what the world, the Independent School District of our small, poor, town had to offer. I am not an outspoken critic of this ISD. I'm probably the only person who has anything to say about it, to my knowledge, no one cares at all. The suffering that I witnessed is something that I have carried with me to a traumatic extent. It was a fibrous moral outrage that opened me up and ate at me every minute. I have long considered where the line needs to be drawn. I've thought about the teachers, they ignored and often contributed to the abuse or were conducive to an atmosphere of neglect at the least. They didn't care if we went on with jobs or college preparation skills. Like animals in a slaughterhouse turned to meat piles, eventually ground into the same sausage and churned into a plastic tube they just did whatever the bare minimum was to get us out of their sight. Some endeavored in creative ways to use the labels of the day to get rid of us altogether. For example, I recall a math teacher who tried to brand my brother as autistic. He is not. He solved a math problem in his head, refused to show her his work on paper, with no calculator or smart phone (back then there were none) he insulted her because he was a prick and that's his personality, but he has ADHD. This woman raised such fuss, she went to social workers and everyone to try and have him diagnosed. He proved her wrong and actually showed he was smarter than her at every turn and verbally humiliated her several times over. To me, it always seemed it would have just been easier to try and explain myself nicely. I suck at math, so what do I know, all I ever wanted was to keep my head down and avoid these types of things. By the time I got out of high school, it was a complete nervous breakdown, panic attacks, collapsing in the hallway during lunch and between classes and during class, clutching at my chest and all of it. I thought I was going to die the first time it happened, I thought, this is it, heart attacks run in the family, this is the massive coronary that kills me. I sat down and I was hot, cold, wearing a coat, shivering and crying and shaking uncontrollably and I couldn't focus my mind on a single thought. Teachers stepped over my legs that were stretched out across the hall, and I drew my knees to my chest. A janitor, whose closet was nearby, he came out and took me to the office. He genuinely cared. I think he might have been one of less than a handful of people who did. 

When I speak of that school system, everything I say sounds exaggerated and dramatic. They called the high school Pole Dancer High. It was a term of endearment. So, where do I draw the line? I decided a long time ago, list making and name committal is unhealthy. It's like a gateway to bad thinking. I don't owe these people any more than the time of day I have already had to give them, and I got into a lot of trouble with the truancy police and social workers in my day- to the extent my mom shares the trauma of my nervous breakdown- that I don't want anymore trouble. I don't draw the line with the students, I saw into their lives. They were poor. Hungry. We gave these people clothes, sometimes fed them and when they didn't see any social benefit in being a friend, they were quick to turn. They would do anything for advancement. They thought my family had more money than we did, and I did too for a long time. This bred an ego of my own, but I couldn't feel an attachment to what social status and what was or wasn't important as far as some of these things as the higher the dosage of Abilify got, the deeper underwater it started to feel. Middle school is entirely one numb fog of autonomous inaction in which I must have been either a very efficient student, boring friend, or just below average and uninteresting in every way. All I really remember is breaking a bone in my foot one summer playing with a soccer ball in the back yard, and that a friend of mine convinced me to try writing fanfiction online. I had already been since I was even younger. I had already filled notebooks, and I had taught myself all I knew about poems, storytelling, and all elements therein. Nothing in school that I can remember was above the minimum and barebones, most basic, smallest thing. I think among the rare handful there were three English teachers who were not awful. One passed away, and favorably can be remembered forever as someone who died in a system where there was no reward for being as good as she was. One was encouraging and warm when I was very young, before middle school, after 3rd grade, I don't really remember. The other was just sharper than other teachers. I can appreciate that I had smart and deserving teachers, who earned their position, a biology teacher who was also a coach and a history teacher. That doesn't necessitate praise for their morals or make them above the standard. A browbeaten Spanish teacher who ultimately gave up under the pressure of students constantly harassing her and bullying her, which I was guilty of because I wanted to fit in, and altogether... I think 7 people in that entire system were okay at best. A teacher who was a mother of someone I used to be friends with among them. 

Among the dozens of the rest, to no exaggeration or lie. Based on fact, my own personal experience and true events: A man who was unqualified, as in he didn't even have a degree to be a teacher. He was uncertified. No less than 3 sex offenders who were hired with the prior knowledge. 2 more sex offenders who committed offenses in their positions as teachers, the Principal of the high school himself I was told, adding to the count, sabotaged his own marriage and ran off with a student so make that 3. Pedophiles in charge of classrooms full of kids and they were expected to teach us. Drunks who slept through whatever they were told to do. I mean they came in smelling of it, but so did the students as early as 12, 13, 14 and so on. A kid used to carry a dip ring in his pocket, he'd spit tobacco on the carpet in the middle of class and laugh about it loudly. He bragged about shooting the back of his truck with a .22 because he didn't think the bullet stickers looked cool while standing behind it, admiring it, with office staff and coaches. He was on the football team, we were even on the same team when I was in 4th grade, but now that he played for the school, it was exonerating. Cheerleaders bragged about explicit sexual exploits and one in particular was a violent, hormonal psychopath for lack of a better term. I remember doing all I could to avoid her, just to stay off her radar. I cried very often because, I didn't know any other way to handle the stress. In writing, I told myself stories I thought were interesting. No one could read my handwriting, I have a learning disability that makes it as if a doctor and first grader hybrid spit-up on the paper, and I have never heard the end of it to this day. I still recall the disgust and self-awareness I felt, pretending to take notes, writing about something stupid while nothing was happening as it usually was in any class, when this gum-smacking, provocateur started talking about pornographic escapades with this boy behind me. She was directly behind me, and he was behind her, I think. It wasn't that she was my age, 14 or 13, and describing her ponytails as handlebars that I found disturbing, I would later realize. I had blocked out, that the teacher seemed too interested in listening in, while I stared at them expectantly, they didn't do anything. That happened a lot. Commonplace hate speech and slurs that will ruin your livelihood if uttered nowadays were so regular in any room or hallway, that I must have heard them 1,000 times a day and no less, not accounting for all the variations. 

I remember when Obama was elected president. Before that, in 2007 and 2008. The things that were said. People were placing bets on how long before someone killed him for racially motivated reasons. They said it in far less kind, far less polite, far more offensive and what is deemed "cancelable" ways today. It wasn't that they said it, that I noticed, you'd have to be blind and deaf not to know that the guy on the football team who shoots up the back of his own truck with a .22 is a bigot. It's that they chose to go into such violent and explicit detail each day in the same class, where their discussions were never discouraged, only encouraged to be kept to a minimum volume amongst themselves. With quiet nods of affirmation from the teacher like he was a lookout for this Klan meeting. They would have been passing out collection plates in white hoods with torches and shotguns if they could have, the air of bigotry was thick. In the same sense, predominantly white, so-called Baptists and Christians, never neighborly or kind. They hated my family for being Catholic on the pretense it gave them a reason to hate us for not being from around there, and then of course, people have so many notions about Catholics. I lose the rhetoric of racism so fast, if you're staging a race war, why not loosen up on the purity and separate into two classes. Hitler had the SS and the Lutwaffe. His most devout followers and his grunts in his infantry. You want to be divided and unified, while preaching hatred against everyone, the doctrine seems that you can't truly be anyone, even a white man of any religion and "worthy" of whatever it is you're supposed to be worthy of. I know this because I was alarmingly close to neo-nazis in school. I knew at least 2 people who were skinheads. I know of one boy, who, unsurprisingly is in prison now. Another who was older than me, last I heard was on the run from child payments and other debts, he had all sorts of issues. 

All of this to say, there was a pervasive system of racism and homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, anything under the bigoted umbrella. It was like a social experiment to see what identity you could have if hatred for everything at all times pulled you in all directions, and because I was lethargic to investing my hatred into all of these things, seeing what a fervor people would get whipped up into over them, I was gaslit and targeted. I felt persecuted. I can't say that it's true or not. I know people tried to get me to say I'd shoot up my school, and they had said they'd do it, but if I did, I'd be sent off to the then DePaul Center. There was always a rotation of a half a dozen people at it, trying to get me to admit I wanted to do something, kill myself, kill someone else, start a fire or hurt someone or anything they could sink their teeth into to have social workers sent crawling into my house. They wanted me to say my parents were abusive. I never felt abused at home, sometimes my dad hit me. He yelled, and I had been yelled at so much I had tinnitus, I felt like, if I never heard another noise I'd be able to recall vividly some of the screaming matches I'd been apart of or a witness to. Like I could sit in darkness and recreate them as one might do a chess problem, but always only to the same result, that being, Christ. I am so tired of people yelling at me. I figured out the motives, the very day after my sister left. She had tackled me to the ground and scratched my face, and I was a petulant brat, so I sobbed my eyes out while burying my head in the couch. It relieved the pressure on my head that created the constant migraine I felt back then, I would piece together later, which is why I always put my head down and would squeeze the back of my neck so much. Anyway, the very next day, as if a sign was around my neck announcing it, I had to confront that with everyone who even looked at me. No one let me breathe about what had happened the night before, not for a minute. I didn't tell anyone. I cried myself to sleep the night before, I think. I barely slept so often, it was during a period of intense, chronic insomnia, at the height of which I slept 2-4 hours in 10 days and microsleeps, passing out, and the feeling I was dead but walking among the living were common. I felt like a ghost haunting a person over his shoulder, and making him live by puppeteering him. So, I was very paranoid and subject to being abusive and cruel on my own. 

I opened the door enough at some point. They put me in an accelerated program 30 minutes outside of town. I went from being able to walk a few blocks to school, to my dad dropping me off on his way to work, and having to wake up extra early to make it. In this program it was not abusive. They didn't care as long as you didn't cause trouble, in my frail mental state, I am sorry to say I caused more than my share. Fortunately, it was like a year or 16 months I don't remember. On my certificate it says January 1st, 2011. That's a year earlier than I was supposed to graduate, if I believe that at the low point of that time, people were conspiring to keep me from even being free to live, then I far exceeded them in every way imaginable. I draw the line here.

The school was in a town of less than 3,000 people. There was no money. Everybody who lived in the city limits was poor, they're all broke. We were perceived as wealthy, and we were just lower middle class at best, maybe for 6 months at a time. 6 months at another time we'd be poor. Bobbing and weaving with the poverty line based on the work of my parents who gave their lives to us to have everything. I criticize this ISD heavily, and outspokenly in that I am the only voice I know of who does it. I'm certain there are other moral, good, smarter people than myself who have plenty to say. They do other things. I write. This might seem like a lot, to me it's just a new thing to try in writing. Good or bad, I don't care. If you, reader, like it or don't that's your opinion and is unimpeachable. I don't invite you to share any of your baggage with me or go through mine for any reason if you don't feel inclined. In truth, I am so tired of unwelcome strangers with hostility, nitpicking and rousing my frustration only to miss the point entirely while getting their satisfaction on proving something to themselves that, unless you can conduct yourself without that trait that I know so well, so bitterly, egotism, I am making strides in my own behavior to dismiss and disregard you. Without any intention other than to acknowledge you speak to hear your own voice, and say nothing constructive, deconstructive, nor that contributes in any way. If all you do is speak your mind to destroy, then what are you really saying? I would deconstruct the ISD. Not destroy it. Even for all the pain, every bad thing and all of the worst feelings I associate with it. It was the fruit of a larger, poisoned tree. Standardized testing, low incentives for teachers, not enough pay, background checks, failures from the top to the bottom and all over in crucial areas to secure the vital nature of education. Safety in the environment of your students. Equality in the environment. Stability in the classroom, routine, structure, consistency, continuity, following a lesson plan, these were all absent. I have committed to forgetting all the names of everyone involved for my own sake. It does me good not to know, to have the disillusion that I don't care, and under that I have grown not to care over the years. Letting them get to you can be a choice. I chose not to. I didn't choose to be entirely numb and take nothing away, I chose to think about it, and draw and redraw my own conclusions. I am satisfied, for now, with this one. I will not be and will, as with everything I dedicate time and thought to, come to a new, more complete conclusion on it as I think more about it in the back of my mind later in my life. 

With complete humility, I submit this under the impression and opinion it is true to my knowledge. If any issue should arise from it, I do not seek recompense or retribution. I do not call to action or seek to besmirch, libel, or slander the names or institutions of anyone or anything mentioned. I only speak on what I know. I only write because I taught myself how. Nobody else can take credit for teaching me how to write. Not even how to hold a pencil in a way that I have to given my learning disability, a sort of motor function trick that works with my hands. I've seen the therapists, lived the years and done the work myself. It's not up to you to believe me, it is your right to question me, I'm not going to answer you because I am exhausted do not, frankly, give a single damn what you think. I have seen people die. I have seen dead bodies and I have lost everything that ever mattered, survived two earnest attempts to kill myself only to be condescended to and belittled by the same man in different forms over my entire life. As I look to turn 29 years old, I have outlived my plans for myself, and I have spent all of my respect on the educated and high-social standards set by those who look down their nose. Show me one who is different and then break down his character, challenge him and his approach is always the same. He treats you as Babel and himself as God, translating his small vocabulary has been the greatest waste of time I have ever been unwillingly subjected to. I have done it regardless. The same idea goes for him as does for my grandmother, for neither can you project your opinion of self onto others in a harmful manner in a vacuum, nor can evil exist. They can only wither and kill the host like a cancer. The host, unfortunately is all too often as the title implies.