Welcome"Reality should go find somebody else to pick on who would like it better. I do not like it at all." (BMcC[18-11-46-503])
Why did I have to wait until I was getting near to dying before I could really start living? Why did the schooling of my youth not place me in a life situation where laborare est orare? where I would have earned my daily bread by activity that enriched my soul? Both my mind and my body were terrible things to be wasted. I presume most if not all of you are now already dead as of 06 November 2021 (good riddance!); you went to your graves unenlightened of your ignoranced banality and the harm you caused to me and I would imagine to other young persons (but maybe they liked and even lusted for it?), self-satisfied in your false belief that you were good because your varsity lacrosse team beat Gilman. Or am I giving you too good a grade? Be that as it may, all of you are hereby dismissed.
How was it possible that I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) became who I became and not a lumpen dolt, when I came from "nothing" or rather: the most banal of post-World War II lower middle class American banality? The most banal? Of course that is an exaggeration: things can always be worse.
And it was not the most pathetic thing: The Elementary school I attended in Richmond Virginia was really a school mostly for privileged kids, since there were no private schools (there was one: St. Christopher's, but I don't know anything about it) and professional class parents sent their children to this public school, which was named after a litttle girl who much have been much beloved and died young and sadly for the people who loved her, probably from some disease more modern medicine would easily have cured: Mary Munford.
No! I looked "Mary" up in Wikipedia and she turns out to have been an educational reformer who lived to age 72 years. Now: Isn't it interesting that I attended that school for 5 years and learned nothing about her. I seem to recall that the large painting of her outside the cafeteria in the school was of a maybe 12 year of child, but, who knows, maybe that's a false memory or even it wa sa false perception? Why was I not taught abut Mary Munford in Mary Munford School? It's not like St. Paul's School, the "prep" school I attended, where they never taught us about the big sex scandal of the Brooklandwood estate in the 19th century, of which, if the adolts (sic) knew about it, they would probably have not spoken of such a thing. Mary was apparently something to be proud, not ashamed of.
![Americans moved into Levittowns! Levels were split! Lawns were mowed! Mary Hartman saw the waxy yellow buidup on her kitschen floor! Big Macs were eaten! SUVs flourished! Americans got in their cars, and commuted (not death sentences)! We were: "Runnin' on empty, runnin' around!" (ref.: Jackson Browne song) ~ America's greatest contribution to the history of world architecture: The single family split level [or raised ranch...] suburban tract development house on 1/4 acre or more of grass lawn so why not just make it astroturf?](w/images/a/ab/SplitLevel.jpg)
From as early as I an recall, I did not fit into the social surround in which I was put. My earliest toddlerhood memory, at maybe 3 or 4 years of age is of having been traumatized by being haircutted. From the first time my parents "went to the beach" I did not want to be in the sun and I did not want sand between my toes. I did not want to be build sand castles. I have written on another page here about receiving the stigmata (small time!) in the 2nd grade. I remember in the summer after 3rd or at latest 4th grade walking along the side of my parents' house's lot one morning, along the street and thinking some kind of philosophical thought. I don't remember exactly but it may have been about that we die. I was a helpless little child whom I think an adult could have engaged in intelligent discourse about the meaning of life. Instead I was doing homogenized schoolwork assignments.
School. i never skipped any grades. In the New York City Public Schools, my wife's father skipped 2 grades and I don't think he was as intelligent as me. I thought the reason I was not allowed to skip grades was because in each year of school the child learned certain specific facts that were taught only in that grade, and therefore to skip a grade would mean having to know all those facts from the skipped year without having been to school to learn them, which obviously is not likely. Math was my model: you can't learn multiplication if you have not been through learning addition. But suppose this was not true? Suppose a child only went through the years because that was how the child production assembly line ran for no other reason than that normal kids had to work each step of the line to socially condition them? Then why did I not skip any years of school? Obviously because the Slavemaster ("Headmaster") of St. Paul's Illiberal Day Carcel for Pubescent Male Virgins except-for-omerta-sanitary-services-for-jocks was a dolt.
When I was a small child, my mother publicly acted mostly functional (she was "an ambulatory schizophrenic"). She apparently did well when I was a newborn and she could take care of me as if I was part of herself, but when I started to "separate" (around age 1 year?) she apparently did not. She should have had a baby doll. Since I was extremely intelligent I probably came up with ways of not being entirely stifled by not getting my Maypo, lack of which would have left a normal child with nothing to hold onto in life since he would have been dpendent on external stimulation. Obviously being the sole 24/7/325.25 object of this lunatic's intentionality likely had negative implications for her little toy: me, which I cannot remember. But maybe there was good in it too: Since she was partly detached from reality she didn't fully connect me to reality either because she couldn't, and consequently I may have escaped some of the worst (or from its perspective best) of a fully normalizing realisticizing toddlerhood. She was chronically hovering over me. Baths were traumatic for me because she was determined to scrub me clean, by any means necessary. I almost never played with any other child (not that I would have wanted to play with boys-who-will-be-boys, but I would have liked to play with other gifted children). Not a recipe for fitting into "the world".
Not fitting into the world meant I did not receive the normal life-death sentence to become a head-butting pubescent male who would be destined for bigger and better things like mindlessly becoming a good soldier who might end up in body bag and a good employee would unthinkingly obey his manager: The particular psychotic state which is called "being normal". And with her idiot savant artistic ability, my mother may from time to time have come up with things that were more creative than normal housewives the limit of whose imaginative horizon was to see the waxy yellow buildup on their kitchen floor (or was that really a symbol for something more interesting?). Mondo pazzo but at least not just being assimilated to become a split-level even when we lived in one.
Therefore! I may not just "come from nothing" in a pecuniary sense, but also in an ontological sense. As an adult I would remain an unbound variable.
