My parents (my biological progenitors), as far as I could tell, were "clueless". And much whatever they did ideate they were embarrassed about. Among their bogeymen was erotophobia.

My mother made me feel embarrassed about just about everything. was supposed to be careful playing with other children in the neighborhood in 6th grade because "their mothers might pump me to find out what my father's job was"; they didn't want the neighbors to know he was a housepaint salesman. The neighbors were upper middle class; what did my parents fear would happen if they found they were not?

My father said that in World War II in the Army Air Corps, after a mission, the crewmen were given a ration of whisky to relax and he gave his away.

My parents kept searching in the food store for artificial vanilla becse real vanilla had alcohol in it. When my mother said "Now let me think" did that mean that the rest of the time her "inner life" was like a higher animal that lacks discursivve language? They must have copulated somehow because I existed. What went on in these people's heads? My father was apparently highly successful in his work but that doesn't imply he had an emotional life.

What had life done to these people? Unfortunately I was not aware of anything whereas now I would interrogate them to try to figure out what the story. I had been so ignoranced that I didn't even know [ end of sentence ]. I hypothesize my mother would have done better with a baby doll than a baby. Her intrusiveness and monomaniacal obsession to make me do whatever she whimmed were urelenting and conprehensive. My earliest memory is sitting on my potty and not being allowed to get off it to play with my toys until I produced fecal matter for her, or she told me: I had to "con-cen-trate", which which may have been the only 3 syllable word in this 5.5th grade education level woman's vocabulary and it did not mean to think deeply but to produce fecal matter. When I did not produce, in later years, she would delegate my father to squirt soapy water up my little anus while she watched. She offered an alternative: she expended effort to cook prunes which I refused to eat. I would drink prune juice or maybe even eat prunes mushed into a puree but the thought of trying a different way apparently never occurred to her. It was her way or her way. What were the underlying social conditions which made such phenomena possible in my experiential field?

These two life forms were incompetent and unable to raise me as opposed to maintining my metabolic persistence and doing things to me. The child is supposed to be haircutted; take the child to a barber (2nd earliest memory^[1]) to get it done. Somehow my mother got the idea in her head that I should be dressed in "blouses" that were so tight around the neck that he had to make effort to succeed in buttoning it up: her fingernails struggling to get the button through the buttonhole and she did not give up until she succeeded and I had to stand still to let her do it. What was the point of this? Did she menstruate? I now suspect yes because there were "pads" in the bathroom closet that I didn't know what they were for. My parents seemed to avoid people although obviously in his sales work my father was highly and successfully social: I got the impression he consistently exceeded sales quotas.

My father seems to have wanted nothing to do with his family of origin. They were apprently white trash and he bought into "The American Dream" and by much hard work he made continuous progress. Analogy: A stamp collector has an album with pictures of many differnet stamps. The collector tries to acquire an example of each stamp and pastes it over its matching image in the book. The goal is to find and paste an instance of each stamp shown in the book. That's all there is.

Over time, things changed. From having searched for artificial vanilla extract in the food store because it did not have alcohol in it, my mother became alcoholic. Least worst plausible outcome: she died in her sleep (+1964.07.28) just before I went to college. Had she lived longer she would suffered more herself and have been serious trouble for my father and me.

Maybe my father's business activity became his whole life and I think he liked it until his origin as white trash caught up with him: He had worked as a teenager as an unskilled laborer in the lead paint factory and at age 63 years he got liver cancer which killed him after much sufferning in about 6 months (Contrast: One of the owners of the business was born in the same year but lived to be 92.) But if that had not happened I think he felt proud to have filled the stamp album and he would have had a retirement of "golden years" with his third wife who looked like and seemed to be like Nancy Reagan.

She ("Melva") and I disliked each other but as far as I could tell she was a savvy money manager who was an asset not a debit entry on my father's financial balance sheet and as far as living went, she wrapped a cocoon around him. If the bitch was a witch and cast a spell on him, it was from heaven not hell like some other women of her SES. Not that it did me any good but my father had paid my Yale tuition and occasionally gave me a little spending money. He was good to me to the best of his abilities. But his ability to deal with a gifted and emotionally and physically fragile son fell far short of minimum requirements. In my last couple years of prep school, I think he was one of the rare persons who looked forward to Monday morning to get away from his wife and secondarily his surely disappointment of a male offspring.

These people probably were poster children for the old saw that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, or at least it probably was for my father. My mother was somewhere on the clinically insane spectrum. Then came St. Paul's Illiberal Day Carcel for pubsecent male virgins except-for-omerta-sanitary-services-for-jocks.

Pathetic "The The American Dream" of a suburb mortgage and lawn to mow full wheel hubcaps and then even tailfins United States of America (here) produced my lumpen parents and St. Paul's Illiberal Day Carcel for pubsecent male virgins except-for-omerta-sanitary-services-for-jocks. Here ends this page and I don't think I ever had a chance, Rrose Selavy.

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