(part 291) Of Time And Space

                         my brother quentin, my mother, me, and bill


Don't get me wrong. I've met some people online I truly like, and respect, in the virtual sense of the word. But at times I find myself so alone at this computer that it makes me numb. The occasional glimpse into the reality of, where I am and why, is devastating to the point of tears and anger. If my health were better I can easily see that life, my life, would not be as constricted as it has been, and continues to be. Only a short while ago I had the daily arrival of my brother Bill, and the 24-hour companionship of my mother. We all had a great deal to share with each other, and we were all artists, so we had that in common too. Bill's drawings, and my mother's writing and painting, fit right in with my work on this blog for the last seven or eight years. The loss of both of them, one after the other, in a matter of months, completely altered my life.

The daily knowledge, that there is, or shortly will be, someone to communicate with is gone. The habit of it is not. The need of it is not gone. Like a pulse, it taps out, clickity click, it's old familiar rhythm as before. As I walk through the house I am confronted with all of their things daily. I am glad I have their things. It gives me a feeling of connection to them, a sense of continuance with them. My brother's art work, and writing, of which there is a great deal, and my mother's work as well. I look through it, read it, handle it, and feel their presence. I talk to them as if they were still here, and remember moments with them and smile. The little things. The human things. They keep me honest, and I proceed on as they would want me to, expect me to do.

So the computer, and my ability to make use of the virtual world, to capture in history, the work of this family, and their collective personalities, I see as a good thing. A thing that would not have been possible without the online connections I have at my disposal. It is that capacity that I am grateful for, and make use of constantly, or whenever the mood strikes me. No one knew of my brother Bill's artwork, outside of a handful of people, until I began posting it on facebook.   Bill Jameson Art       
As well, my mother, and her varied array of interests, and talents, were not known either, until I began posting her work on facebook. Her surprise, as well as my brother Bill's, at the response to their work was heartwarming as hell to be honest. They had never had so much attention and praise as they received from that simple act of letting people see their work.  my mother's art
I am glad I did it while they were here, so I could witness their childlike responses to the acceptance they received from strangers. The work they both did, all of their lives, was for the most part hidden away from the world, and both of them were timid about how it, and how they, were viewed by human beings throughout their lives. Neither of them had ever experienced any kind of real acceptance, as artists, until the work itself was available for people to see.

So for me, the world of online reality, or unreality, is a mixed blessing for sure. It allows for certain things perfectly, while at the same time, disallows, the deep satisfaction of real companionship and personal connection. No matter how hard I try to connect with people there is always that ever present void between us, of time and space. A separation that cannot be denied, or overcome, without real personal contact.

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(part 290) A Post Everybody Can Hate

Trying to write about what happened, and what is happening currently, is difficult as hell. The multilayered past and present run together like a child's finger painting at times, begging the question, "Which is which?" I know the difference, but my job is to convey it in a way that the reader can know as well. That's the trick! Just because it is clear to me, doesn't mean it's clear to someone else. Not only am I up against the difficulty in writing it, I am also up against the differing opinions about the legitimacy of the facts themselves, according to who is reading what I write. There are some who question why I am writing about this at all. They, would be those who are either being written about, or have some connection to those I am writing about, no matter how flimsy that connection happens to be. The facebook connection between those who I write about, and who knows who in that configuration, dominates, by far, the scope of reactions, or non-reactions, to these most recent of posts. Like high school clicks, (clique) the friends, and friend's of friends, now enemies, sit back and ponder the rational of what I am doing, and why. Well let's just say I have a talent for pissing people off by doing what I do. Let's also say, that what is important to me may not be important to them, particularly if what I am doing can be considered sour-grapes.

In my way of thinking it is the sides, and side's of sides, standing in their little areas of supposed collective power, while saying, "don't want to rustle any feathers on faceook, because I have friends, who are friend's of friends of those people," who they themselves are no longer friends with. This convoluted mess of virtual non-friends, and friends alike, hamstrings one and all into a forced noncommittal stance, one way or the other. "I am your friend, but I don't want to get involved!" Great for you! Not so great for the one looking around to see if they have any friends who will stand by there side, come hell or high water. The answer is...a resounding no! There are too many cross references for that to occur. If you take a stand here, you will alienate someone over there, so the best policy is to stay out of it. FUCK YOU! That's my answer. Keep your mouth shut and play it safe. Never commit to anything unless it is something that a large majority of people all accept as acceptable. Short of that, which most everything in life is, stay uncommitted. There are some, very very few, who will actually say something that needs to be said, even if it puts them at odds with others. Bravo! But the rarity of this is disheartening as hell. It feels like the coke and cocktail party set, in L.A., fucking each other over for sport, in a never ending quest for popularity and position. I left L.A. a long time ago because of it, but since I've been on facebook I find myself uncomfortably reminded of what it was like, and why I left.

Facebook, and other so-called social media platforms, have degenerated into non-communication entities, where we can pretend to be talking to one another, while in reality we are not. Like a party, where we say hi to everyone, but to no one. A jack of all trades arrangement that never asks for a master of anything. It's hit and miss dabbling for the most part, without human beings being human, to humans. For those who despise real commitment, it is a paradise of opportunity, but fails utterly for those seeking anything truly real. There are some who say it is better than nothing, and perhaps I agree with that to some extent, but on the other hand the absence of real relationships is dangerous, and cannot be replaced by chatting with fb friends forever. Somehow there has got to be more than virtual make believe to remain a real person.....

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(part 289) Only A Pawn In Their Game

                               artwork by Bill Jameson 1959


Back in 1959, in St. Johns, Arizona, Bill tried to kill himself by taking an overdose of, Dilantin, an anticonvulsant drug used in the treatment of epilepsy, which he had been diagnosed with at an early age. It was days, or maybe a week after the fight he had at a high school dance when he took the overdose. But as I've said before, it was more of a beating than it was a fight, and the damage it did to him went a lot deeper than just abrasions to his face. The injury was to his psyche. To his personal sense of self-worth, something that was already damaged in him, due in part to previous negative family events, and the epilepsy. It got to him on a whole different level. Far more than that just losing a fight, which is always hard to take. This was different. It made him not want to live anymore. Whether or not what he took would have killed him is not the real point here. The fact that he felt that way, and acted on it, is. I had never seen my brother give up in my life, except once, when he had a fist-fight with our step father, Don, in the kitchen at our house in Tucson. But Don was a full grown man, so it wasn't surprising, even to Bill, that he would lose that fight. But after the beating in that piss pour little town in northern Arizona, Bill gave up on the inside. He capitulated somewhere deep down, and fell prey to his own disappointment in himself. Maybe because he caught a glimpse of the damage he feared he always was, or maybe it was just a full blown break from the so-called normal world. I never knew, but I remember my own feelings about it when it happened. My utter confusion, and anger toward it, my fear of it, because I couldn't fathom it, or understand what Bill was feeling, or the intensity and depth of it, and why it would lead him to do what he did. My own remorse that day was something, that at fourteen years old, I had no answer for.

This attempted suicide is what led to my mother's decision to commit Bill to the state hospital for the mentally ill in Phoenix. It was the single act that led to my deep distrust of my mother, and a decades long rejection of her, for doing it. It led me to break away from all that I knew, and to start planning how I would completely extricate myself from a family that seemed hopelessly broken at the core. For the next few years I made various real attempts at healing the wounds between my mother and me, but her ultimate marriage, divorce, and remarrying to a quadriplegic mormon named, Francis Farr, pretty much put an end to my working things out with her for a very long time. I really believed that she didn't know what she was doing anymore, and that most of her decisions put me and Bill in danger. It took from 1960 until 1995 to really begin, in earnest, to understand what kind of hand my mother had been dealt, and how she too, had been...only a pawn in their game. But before that could  happen I had a lot of mistakes of my own to make, and a lot of hard road ahead to travel. I tell you these things for one reason, and that is this. In letting you in on some of the inner workings of my family, and the way they struggled, I in turn try to explain myself. The decisions I made in life were honed out of hard rock from my childhood and adolescence. My need for my brother Bill to be OK was enormously important to me, because I never experienced having a real father. Bill was the only male figure on earth I trusted and looked up to, so when he broke I broke with him. It shattered my world and sense of balance altogether. It made me think that I was broken too. I walked through my teenage years in a blur, hoping no one would notice who I really was, or from where I came. I was ashamed of my family, and ashamed of myself. I used every trick I could learn to hide the real me from the world. It was show business that I turned to, because there I could act like someone else, be someone else, and feel like someone else. I didn't have to be that weird kid Bobby Jameson who came from that broken family. I didn't want you to know that my brother tried to kill himself. I didn't want you to know that he went to the state mental hospital, and I didn't want you to know that my mother had four failed marriages. I didn't want you to know any of that, so I built another me, another person who pretended not to have any connection to those things.....


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(part 288) The Doctor And His Patient And The Death Of A Family

Somewhere down the line, with the passing of time, what I write here now will have become part of the larger context of this story. These latest posts will have become markers of one of the saddest periods in my life. A time when losing so much stood out as almost unbelievable in it's scope. The loss of my brother, Bill, who was basically sentenced to death by a healthcare system that treats the mentally-ill like disposable trash, and the loss of my mother, soon after, who for all intents and purposes died from a second stroke brought on by her overwhelming sense of remorse over Bill's preventable death.

After reading some of the medical reports about what was done to, Bill, by various doctors, my mother could not rectify in her own mind the inexcusable actions of those whose care he had been in. She felt, that if she had not been sick herself, and had been able to, that she could have saved him as she had done so many times before, during the previous half century of both of their lives. Preventing idiots from doing Bill harm, decade after decade, had become part of my mother's life work, even though it had never been planned that way.

Living with a schizophrenic teaches you something about the system and the disease itself. The hardship on both the schizophrenic, and the family, is something only those who have done it can understand. So in my mother's mind, at the end, it was her belief that Bill's death was strictly brought about by the fact that he had been left alone in the hands of people who had no idea, experience, or qualifications, in how to treat him successfully. She could not get the image of Bill's unnecessary suffering out of her mind, and it killed her. We spoke at length about this prior her second stroke, so this is not speculation on my part, it was the way she felt and what she believed.

The things I write here today are driven by the facts. My feelings about what happened, and my anger at those who I thought I could rely on in a time of extreme vulnerability, left me to question who my friends really are. In the same way Bill was left on his own in his time of need, I too, was hung out to dry by the very people I looked to for solace. Time after time I sought their support, and time after time was disappointed by them. Their unavailability and justifications for it, their dismissiveness, and callous remarks, left me in turmoil during those many days. I was like a bewildered child reaching out to the only persons I had to reach out to. I found myself emotionally spent and completely isolated. It led me to conclude that my trust in them had been sorely misplaced...a mistake I have regrettably made too many times in my life.

The drawing above, done some years ago by my brother Bill, captures the essence of what my mother spent fifty years protecting him from. "The Doctor...And His Patient" In the end it is almost prophetic. Bill's own fear of being schizophrenic, in a world where those expected to help may be the greatest threat of all...

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(part 287) Each Time I Questioned

As I look back through the posts from 2010, I noticed how few there were in comparison to the preceding years. I surmised that it may have been because my mind was busy trying to sort through other things rather than the business of continuing to tell this story. Obviously, or maybe not so obviously, I had become consumed, to some degree, with the distraction of Paula and Sharon instead of dedicating myself, and my time, to writing as much. I suppose, trying to keep the peace on fb with Paula, had become so important that it tended to make all else less important. My need for emotional balance, and the belief that I now had something worth protecting, with regards to my new commitment to her, had become the more critical point. The need for a human connection to someone was now at the forefront. It had superseded my original intent of, "Write Bobby! Tell the story, and don't let anything get in the way of it!"

In a way it was serving a deep need in me. The need to feel loved by a woman, and to love her back. My entire life had lacked that, so it is not hard to see why this happened. It was the child in me who had always felt abandoned, and uncared for, and certainly unloved. But it was also the man in me who desired to have a relationship with a woman based on caring. I had never been able to do that in the past, so the seeming opportunity to rectify it, with Paula, became of primary importance to me, and for her as well, or so I believed. The blind ability, to superimpose one's own need to love, and be loved, onto another person, hoping it will be reciprocal, was a critical misstep, and I made it.

Each time I questioned what I was doing I pushed it aside and continued on, telling myself it was OK. That it was safe to do. I felt, or believed, that any doubts I had were simply old fears that I had to get rid of to make this work. I didn't want a make believe relationship, I had had too many of those in the past. I wanted the real thing. I wanted to trust someone, and wanted them to trust me. I tried to keep the fb world at bay, because I believed it would destroy what we were building if we let it, and in the long run, it did. The virtual world of friends today, enemies tomorrow, was full of gossip and misrepresentation. There were those who liked nothing better than to cause trouble by whispering in the ears of the gullible. I watched relationships and friendships go down hard, too many times, to believe there wasn't someone watching from the sidelines with a desire to get in closer, and pretend to be a friend.

The choice I made between Paula and Sharon was nothing I ever planned on. It came from the experience I had with having them both in my life at the same time. It came from real feelings I had for Paula when push came to shove. Sharon became the victim of that choice, a choice I didn't want to make, and foolishly had not perceived as a possibility. It wasn't fair, but either was what caused it.


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(part 286) You Better Be Careful Bob

                                   by paulo-zerbato

Sometimes the obvious is not so obvious, until you're standing in the wake of it's destruction. For me, it was another one of the mistakes I hadn't seen coming until it was too late.

It was sometime in 2010, I think, when problems began to erupt between Sharon and Paula on facebook. I was constantly fighting headaches, working on this blog, and repairing the roof at home. I had a full plate, and needed the mess between the two of them like I needed a gunshot wound. It was bad timing, but this kind of trouble always is. I got a message from Paula that said she could not stand anymore of Sharon's overt love comments on my page, that her fawning all over me made Paula extremely uncomfortable. She said she had no intentions of publicly competing with Sharon on facebook, because it embarrassed her. I asked her what I was supposed to do about it, because Sharon was an old friend of mine too. She had no answer, but made it clear that this was an ultimatum. All of a sudden I was caught in the middle of a feud between two women I had known in the 60's, who had both shown up on the internet and become online friends. I wasn't left with any wiggle room at all, and it felt as if I'd been hit in the face with a problem I had foolishly not thought about at all. It was exactly the kind of bullshit I didn't need. It pissed me off, because both of them had agreed in the beginning not to let this happen. I did not want to be in a fight with old girlfriends, I wanted to work. It's why I came to the internet in the first place. I felt as though my need to accomplish something important to me had been pushed aside, and replaced, by a bullshit battle between them. My initial response to Paula was, "Well fuck this shit, I know how to handle this, I'll just get rid of both of you," and that's exactly what I did.

After it happened I didn't hear anything except how unfair it was of me to delete them from fb. I responded by saying I didn't want to get stuck in a pool of quicksand. I told both of them I had better things to do with my time, and that they'd put me in a no-win situation with their bullshit. I stood my ground for awhile, but after a week or two I began noticing I really missed talking with Paula on the phone and in messages on fb. I'd grown accustomed to meeting her every night, online, and enjoyed the back and forth between us....It had been fun, but more importantly it had meant something to me. Meant something to my heart, and to my sense of connection, something I had lost long ago. I thought seriously about it, and decided I'd been forced into the position of having to make a choice between the two. Not anything I wanted or expected, but a choice nonetheless.

I reached out to Paula and told her I really missed her, and that she had nothing to fear from Sharon, because I didn't feel the same about Sharon as I did about her. Paula basically didn't believe me and was reluctant to hear anything I said. I told her I would keep Sharon off facebook and she wouldn't have to deal with her anymore. It took a lot of work to get her to believe me, but in the end she did, or so she said. But in doing this I put my foot in it again. Without meaning to, I gave Paula a shit load of power over me. I'd unwittingly put her in a position of control. She had complained and I had capitulated. From then on my emotional state was highly dependent on making sure she was satisfied, and for a long time it seemed to work. We continued, and even expanded, our nightly meetings on fb. I became far more open about my feelings for her and did not hold back in expressing them. I told her I loved her and that she had become the most important person in my life. I said these things, and meant them when I said them. She was the first woman in my life who I ever told over and over, "I love you!" But thinking back to that time, I can still recall that little voice in the back of my head saying to me, "You better be careful Bob, because you are getting in deeper and deeper," a voice that I pushed aside as nonsense, and an old familiar fear of commitment.

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