Angry

Last night I dreamt that I was watching TV and lo and behold and wonder of wonders there was a special just on Mike Nesmith. Needless to say I was surprised and happy and excited to see it. It was some MTV show that was only fifteen minutes long or something, and may have even been titled that, Fifteen Minutes, in reference to that Andy Warhol quote about how in the future everyone will have their fifteen minutes of fame, oh my clever clever unconscious. But anyway, there I was surprised and happy to see a special on one of my very favorites.

Except--

My father was there. Not like he is now, since he's had the stroke, but how he was before, meaning, very talkative and very oblivious. Really, he was the kind of guy a young relative would dread getting stuck with at the family reunion--he would corner people and just talk and talk and talk at them. I grew up hearing the same stories over and over and over again. And they were never good conversations, or at least not "good" as I, an introvert, would define it. It was all pointless stupid stuff about nothing at all, coupled with his obsessive and narcisstic tendencies and an inability to actually hear what anyone else was saying. (In this respect, he's barely changed at all since the stroke.) Car rides with him were absolute hell. He just wouldn't shut up.

So there I was with a short and highly desirable show on, and there of course is my dad, who has decided that right now is the ideal time to start talking at me and to demand my undivided attention. And you could never just tell him to piss off; he was so self-absorbed that he couldn't even hear stuff like that. Really truly. Pretty much all you could do was walk away.

But in the dream of course I couldn't, since the TV was there and not somewhere else. And I didn't even have a videotape, either, or it was too late to try to find one because I'd miss half the show as it was and there I was, stuck and aggravated to the point of tears that this beautiful opportunity was going to be lost because my stupid, stupid father was being his usual clueless narcisstic self. I was so very angry and didn't know what to do.

Over the years I learned several methods for untangling myself from him when he insisted on cornering me to talk at me. Funny, I guess I got good at it--when I was working up in the city one of my co-workers was a guy with Down's syndrome (high-functioning, I guess you'd call it--he could drive and everything), who worked in a back corridor by the kitchen. He also was of the type who would talk at you and was completely unable to take a hint; and I remember talking to another co-worker about how he dreaded going to heat up his lunch or, God forbid, head off to the bathroom (since that was beyond the same corridor) because he didn't want to get shanghai'ed by Seth. And I thought it so strange, because compared to my Dad Seth was nothing and it hadn't even registered as an issue.

But anyway in the dream I knew that detaching myself from my father, though I had gotten it down to a science, was going to take more than Fifteen Minutes; and so I was shit out of luck, as they say.

When I woke, I thought that yep, that was about right. That I was not able to live my life, do what I wanted, be myself in my parents' house. And I was angry, very angry about it.

What I remember of the show is that the interviews were all of Mike Nesmith when he was young; and he seemed so angry to me, like his life was all some bitterly ironic joke. He was so angry.

Yeah.