I am embarrassed that I am related to my family—embarrassed to have come from them and to be associated with them, which is perhaps why this book includes so little about them.
They are a family of no accomplishments, a family of secrets and talking about each other behind their backs. They have no skills or interests. They watch Fox News and think they are informed. They do not read. They think War Horse is a great film.
I mostly never see them but occasionally they have a reunion on a cruise ship and after enough years have passed since I saw them last I forget how much I hate their company and I go, and it's miserable, and when I get home I swear I'll never see them again and then in five or six years I forget, and I try again, and it always results in failure.
My father is the only one I liked.
My mom and I don't speak. I don't know why. Well, I know why I don't speak to her: it's because every time I do she makes me feel like shit. But I don't know why she won't speak to me.
It may be as simple as she is fragile and I am robust. She wasn't made to survive—her ego wasn't. She can't deal with the past so of course she can't grow. She will never acknowledge what went wrong between us and I'm not willing to engage with someone who is in denial about the roots of our situation. To try to build a relationship on that is like building a house on the sand—you know, like they say in the fucking Bible—poor foundation and you're going to have trouble building something stable, something tall. I'm angry at her, if you haven't figured that out, since you only get one mother in this lifetime. And maybe by this age I should be over it, but I'm not. But I'm getting over it piece by piece, day by day.
It's like Madonna says, Nothing cures the past like the future. The more I built my future, or my present really, the less I thought about my mom and every other fucking person I'm related to. And now I'm at a point where there's not much future left, and when that happens to you, it's really time to shed your baggage because there's so little time left to waste.
I had a guru once. His name was Singh Modi. Something Singh taught me was the lesson of non-rent-paying tenants, which basically says that when people are taking up space in your mind, but not giving you value in return, that there's only one thing to do: evict them. My mom used to take up a lot of space in my mind. I felt spurned, disrespected, ignored, unloved. And she wasn't giving me anything in return. So I did what Singh said: I evicted her. More and more, she's a neutral force for me because she has become irrelevant. My entire family has.
There are only so many Thanksgiving dinners I can spend asking my uncle about his life while he self-centeredly boasts about his bullshit career destroying the Earth via the oil industry wherein I listen to his life and he never asks me about mine. How can a middle-aged man become so self-centered that when you listen to his life, he never listens to yours. He thinks he's a master of the universe, when his job involves nothing more than reading government regulations and finding ways for Exxon and BP to bend the rules so they can kill the planet faster.
And the worst thing is these people have kids.
And they pass along their ignorance to their kids.
And their kids grow up to be oil industry consultants who hate their lives because they would have rather been in theatre.
It's a sin.
It's a mortal sin to coerce your children to your career path just because you want them to live stress-free lives, never have to struggle, etc. But life is struggle, and the best of us follow our own path—forge it—listening to our own voice, not that of our parents or the government. To a person, I lament my cousins and their parents. I lament my own mom. I reject her and her judgment about being a barista, working as a server for so long—till almost the end of my life. And maybe those jobs didn't utilize my full potential, or nurse it, or whatever..but at least I wasn't doing something evil. Those jobs fit with my morals, and I got lucky: not everyone gets to make a movie. I lucked out with Dad's inheritance—even though of course I would have rather had my dad. But because of him, I got to do something extraordinary (even if the movie turned out bad). I got to self-actualize. And no one self-actualizes taking a big-money job as an oil consultant.
Maybe it's ego, maybe it's the entertainer in me, but I feel I deserve to be looked at—not more than others, but not less, either. It's just that once I wasn't a kid, me and my family had nothing to talk about. And yeah, I still have resentments. Because I could have had a family in this life, and instead I have none. Not a real one anyway. Just a photograph from a cruise ship, of all of us on a spiral staircase, my uncle holding a beer in his hand, and the memory of how stressful it was every single time I saw them as an adult..and how I hated myself when I saw their patterns of anger and alcoholism surfacing within me as I grew.