I'm waving at you out there, and thanking you for reading this blog. As if anybody really is. Patricia? Is that you? Hi, hope you are good today.Went to work on Chapter 6 yesterday with a vengeance, and then fell apart almost as fast. The trouble wasn't my lack of commitment, or the words wouldn't come, no, my problem was lack of sleep. I've been having a bit of trouble sleeping for years. Kidneys us the culprit. Rather enlarged prostate which pressing against my kidneys and hinders things. I finally got the doctor to prescribe some sleeping pills, but hell, they don't work all that good either . . . I know . . . Quit yer bitchin'! And so I shall.
Chapter 6 deals with my school years. And mother. Always mother. That she was the absolute dominant force as I was growing up, she has become the dominant force in this recount of my life. It can be no other way. In fact I have not given her enough of a role in the preceding chapters, something I shall rectify when I do the rewrite.
Georgia Orean Bolton.
Fiercely independent. A wanna-be society wife, even as she shouted out her allegiance to the humble upbringing she received as a child. She was a paradox. Except in one respect. She, like so many people who believe they have been given the short end of the stick insofar as their station in life, overcompensated, and that in turn, made life miserable for those in close contact with her, i.e., my father and myself. Everybody else either shook their heads at her ways, or steered clear of her when possible. Sam Lee Bolton and myself wasn't that lucky. We were the ones who felt her every blast of insanity that she heaped upon us.
My father. A good man. No, he wasn't. I have written poems about his saying exactly that, but Sam Lee Bolton was not a good man. Oh, everyone said he was a good man, mostly out of respect of the abuse he weathered from his wife. But he wasn't much of a man for the simple fact that he didn't knock my mother on her ass when she began in on him. He took it. And took it. And . . . Well, you know. At some point in my years in that household I came up with the Rule of Jerry. My rule was that I would never allow a woman to ever do to me what my mother did to my father. That, I'm afraid, colored the way I treated the women who found themselves in my sphere of the world. They didn't stand a chance, I'm afraid, of doing what women usually can do with their men, to nurture, or promote the development of them. I was overly aggressive when it came to anything I thought smacked of "nagging," and that, I'm afraid, took many different avenues. Simple statements or observations, , I would in my demented thinking, hear my mother browbeating my father. I responded quite appropriately I thought, but of course it was appropriate at all. The women in my life must have been thoroughly confused by my rants and violence. Not physical. I never was the sort to to do that, but a few things got broken and I was loud. Scary, most probably.
I began this posting about Chapter 6 and it deteriorated into something else. Well, actually it didn't, because Chapter 6 is about my mother also, or will be when I finish it. this whole book will have the spectre of Georgia Orean Bolton hovering over it like a dark and scary thundercloud.
