I'm tired enough that I shouldn't operate heavy equipment. This is problematic in that five hours a day are spent operating 3-phase machine tools. I'm also tired enough that it has made me sick. Probably. But I'm not sure I have time to be sick.

My father is an asshole.

I talked to him on Saturday. It was an entirely polite conversation (on my side) and an entirely jovial one (on his side) and it pretty much shook me to my core. Without getting too deep in the mud my ACE score is six, which is something I only learned about recently. Growing up everyone's family is dysfunctional, right? And then about 22 I built a narrative about how it was because my mother is/was mentally ill, my parents were/are alcoholics and if only my dad weren't so busy being codependent things would have been much better, the intent to be decent humans was there for half my parents at least, and she'd drive me to drink too so it's not like they were both intentionally evil, right?

Right?

So my dad asks how "his granddaughter" is and I mention she's learning to read and somehow this led to my dad reminiscing about how he told me at four and a half that if I didn't learn to tie my shoes by five I wouldn't get a fifth birthday and about three days shy of my fifth birthday I finally tied my shoes and said 'where's my goddamn birthday' which is funny ha ha except my aunt likes to tell the story about how I walked into her house at age 18 months, late for babysitting, and said "that goddamn Volkswagen broke down again" which is funny ha ha until you start to wonder what sort of conflict a four year old marinates in to add "goddamn" to their vocabulary so young and then you go "oh yeah, better parenting through threats."

Over the course of twenty minutes he disparages my career, my hobbies, my intelligence and my morals, twice doubling down when I ask him if he really means that. And I realized that I only hear from my father when he thinks I'm doing badly.

I mean, I mention enameling. He says "I bought an enameling kit for you kids once. It's still in the house somewhere." I ask why we never did anything with it. He says "Frankly it's a wonder we survived. I wanted to murder you all most of the time."

And that's funny ha ha too until you wonder why you segue into murder talk so easily and then you realize that it's always been that way but you've been pretending otherwise. From "what are you learning in school" to "you fuckers are lucky to be alive" in a breath.

There's a fable that kept me alive. It was that time my parents were fighting non-stop for three days and my dad told me and my sister that they were getting divorced and we'd have to decide where to live and my sister cried and I told her that no this was going to be for the best and then the bitch came back and they fought for another twelve hours but come morning the divorce was off and it's always been the case that things would have been much better had they actually split up, better luck next life. But now I look back at that artifice and know that it would have been hell on earth either way and that's not liberating. It means the abyss also gazes into thee and no, mutherfucker, it wasn't better than you remember, it was worse and you've been fabricating fables out of whole cloth to feel normal and you can't anymore.

And Gary Numan lipsynched the entire goddamn show. He didn't do that last time. Pissed.