2.20 Paranoid Android, Radiohead
When i am King, you will be first against the wall
I may not have much experience with couples ennui, but i have been trapped by loved ones in a frozen tomb lo these many years, so i know how to seethe.
i never liked my parents. they never did me no wrong, never did me much right, arent nice people, i got out as soon as i could and didnt look back. for almost fifty years, i was dutiful - called at least monthly, visited semi-yearly, never let em in on my life, never allowed drama to take the day.
for some reason i still dont understand, about ten years ago i took a job op back east just to be closer to fam. folks were well into their 80s - just seemed right. had a heart attack, lost the job, headed back west.
then me Ma started to fail. almost 90, asking for me. hell, they'd raised me, respected the distance i imposed and were human beings. i can spend her last months with my mother, i knew how much keeping my wife out of hospice as long as possible had meant to her.
that was more than seven years ago. i made the mistake of promising Ma she'd never see the inside of a home and that revived her to almost full health. i stayed and kept my promise, just for drill. she's been gone a year, but now me Da is too old to take care of himself and, so far, i havent the heart...
i wish eldercare was noble, rewarding work. at a point, it's almost the opposite. the 80s arent good, but the 90s are the 80s drunk & underwater. and, whether you care about em not, parents have ALL your buttons, cuz they installed them. for the first few years, the rage over their cottage pathologies was nigh on unbearable. it reduced me to a child, ruined 50 years of self-reform. the first management technique i discovered was playing
Paranoid Android and exhaling all my GreenMileCreepieCrawlies to the drone of it, and the above line of spoiled brat imagined revenge. eventually, i found out that Ativan interrupts the rage cycle quite nicely and that turned dread into mere drudgery. simple, actually, but i do indeed know how to seethe now. have a nice day.
@higgins