Lemme take another sip of my drink before I continue. Ahh, there.
My joint is rolled and ready to be lit up, my lines of ketamine are ready to be snorted, and several ecstasy pills are lying here on my coffee table, to the immediate left of the ketamine lines.
The machine gun fire and explosions outside have continued, uninterrupted, and slightly louder.
Before I get wasted, I need a moment to think.
As I hear the fighting going on outside, I wonder how many of those weapons were manufactured by Sakia. Even if none of them were (which is unlikely, given that my parents are so preoccupied with maximizing Sakia’s profits that they’re willing to sell to the Chinese on both sides of the current conflict), the principle is still the same. The whole reason for all of these wars is to enrich the coffers of weapons manufacturers like Sakia.
My mom and dad love money so much that they’re willing to sell weapons that could have their own son killed. Even if they aren’t being sold to the East Asian theatre of this new world war, they’re at least being sold to the East European NATO member countries, provoking Russia and bringing us all closer to nuclear annihilation. My parents are doing their part to ensure we’re all killed, including me.
I first started arguing with my father, Sutton Dana Gordimer, and my mother, Maya, about all the evil their profit-making was doing back when I’d learned, from reading a newspaper article, of Iraqi kids in a school bus killed when a drone missile made by Sakia hit it; this was back in the mid-2000s.
Both my parents dismissed the story as “unimportant.”
When I showed how furious I was at their callous attitude to the child victims, my mother tried to guilt-trip me over enjoying the privileged life of a rich kid, rich from Sakia’s success and my parents’ hard work. My father tossed in a little racism, not caring about the fate of “a few smelly, brown-skinned kids.”
As I learned of more and more deaths in Iraq, and later (once I’d moved here to teach English) in Libya and Syria, all the time knowing Sakia had sold billions of dollars in weapons to those who would kill these victims, I felt that I couldn’t accept any of the money Sakia made from these killings. So when my mother, during a long-distance phone call, brought up my future inheritance several years ago (she meant it to guilt-trip me for my having stopped communicating with them several years before that), I told her, in all bluntness, “I don’t want your Sakia money!”
She replied by saying, “That’s not exactly a sage decision to make, Sidney Arthur [the snobbish way she typically addressed me].”
“Oh, it’s very sage!” I retorted. “I’m the sage of Sakia, didn’t you know that? in refusing Sakia money. I won’t benefit materially from your blood money!”
“Oh, you are such an idealistic fool!” she growled, then hung up.
As far as I’m concerned, Maya Gordimer was never a mother to me, in the true sense of the word. I don’t know: maybe when I was a newborn baby, before I can remember, she had some kind of maternal feelings for me. But I’m guessing she, as a real mother, died, say, a week or so after I was born. She’s been a tyrant ever since.
As far back as I can remember, she’s always resented my very existence, and hated me for my sensitivity; I suspect she envies it, since that narcissist has none of her own. She never wanted me to have friends, or normal, healthy relationships of any kind: she always tried to make me feel too different from other people to feel as if I belonged.
She encouraged hostility, however tacitly, in my elder siblings towards me, allowing them to bully me when I was a child. When all three of them died suddenly in a car accident (several years before I moved to East Asia), and I didn’t shed even one tear for any of those who were meant to take over the company when our parents were to retire, Mom just scowled at me as if I was the unfeeling one, rather than her.
I suspect that her making my family enemies with me didn’t end with my late siblings. I suspect that she also sabotaged my friendship with my paternal cousin, David Adam Gordimer. We’d been good friends throughout our childhoods and young adulthoods; then, things turned strange…
I may be getting totally wasted on drugs and alcohol tonight, but I’m normally nowhere near this much of a druggie. David, however, always was, ever since his teens. His regular smoking of marijuana from those days, as well as his experimentation with LSD, opium, and ecstasy over the years, has surely affected his brain functioning.
I don’t know for sure, since I’m not qualified to be giving opinions in the psychiatric field, but I suspect David has developed paranoid schizophrenia. He’s had all kinds of delusional fantasies about me supposedly betraying his trust: gossiping about him with former friends of ours, stealing girlfriends and drugs from him, among other absurdities.
I suspect my mother has whispered all manner of malignant nonsense into his ears, reinforcing his paranoia and prompting him to send me abusive, incoherent word salads of emails loaded with wild, unsubstantiated accusations. It’s an abuse not so far removed from the nastiness I used to hear from my elder brothers and sister back when they were alive, hence my suspicions that the illusions of Maya were behind it all, for I’m sure she’d squirted her poison in their ears, too.
With my three siblings gone, my parents were relying on me, however reluctantly, to take over Sakia; but as I’ve said, I want nothing to do with their murderous business. They’d looked to David as a possible heir, but his increasing mental instability proved how hopeless he would be at running the company. My continuing refusal to take over the company may have been what prompted Mom to turn David against me…to spite me.
David must understand, deep down, that the world he sees and hears around himself is a surreal, hallucinatory one. He medicates himself with his cigarettes and pot to soothe and ease the terror he feels at a world he can no longer understand. He probably also envies me for my more stable mental state, though he’s projected his mental problems onto me, when repeating the nonsense my mom says about how “different” I am from everybody else.
The online abuse David has subjected me to was either through direct emails to me, or in comments on my blog, ironically called The Sage of Sakia, on which I’ve expressed my vehement opposition to my parents’ evil business. David has seen my attacks on Sakia as “treason” against the Gordimer family, rather than the principled antiwar stance that it is.
Again, I believe David envies me for having at least the ability, if not the willingness (which he has), to take over Sakia when my parents want to retire (which is coming soon, if not already upon us). Now, he hasn’t contacted me in years, unless it’s been under a fake name in a more recent abusive comment on my anti-Sakia posts.
Is he in a mental hospital? He should be, though I don’t expect anyone in the family to care enough to get him to see a doctor.
In all of my inter-family fighting over the years, whether between my mom, David, or my elder siblings on one side and me on the other, my father either neglected to say anything or he’s sided with them against me, which has been almost every time.
Some fucking family.
All the more reason for me to loathe life.
All the more reason for me to attempt an escape from it all through drugs and alcohol.
I’m going the David route…to death.
I wonder if I’ll die in a state of lunacy similar to his, only a happy one.
Infinite Ocean 