Oy

The phrase "when the other shoe drops" has held an unhealthy amount of weight in my life lately.

Last night, I appear to have gleaned its meaning. Not only is my relationship teetering on the brink of nothingness, I've given notice at my horrible job, and when I checked my email I found that my father (biological) has contacted me to let me know he was getting divorced from his second wife, "G".

I liked G. I loved her. I remember telling my dad to marry her...round about Tacoma on an Oly-Seattle moving trip. I was a witness at their wedding. I painted them an anniversary present of the two of them embracing. ...but it seems that the reasons I chose to discontinue my relationship with my father have been some of the reasons G and he have decided to end their marriage. Dad's email hinted at mutual decision-making, but I'm fairly sure it was her idea. My father isn't enlightened enough to realize when he's f*cked something up. ...Although I can almost believe he's starting to figure it out. Forty years later.

...

I'm begining to realize I'm constitutionally incapable of working for other people. It's high school band all over again. I quit that mid-way through sophomore year--not because of freezing-cold marching band practice at 6am, not because of the consistently flat trumpet section or the nose-up first-chair flutes, but because our band director was such a phenomenal A-hole (and I'm sure continues to be). He bullied students who weren't like him (thick-necked conservative football-types who only cry when thinking about their long-dead huntin' dogs), was known to have had "relations" with students and god-forbid he find out your parents had recently divorced--he would call up your mother and hit on her. Creep show, right? But he liked me, and I just had to quit.
This is the pattern that continues in my life. Bullies make it in to power, they need competent help like me because they don't understand why their power isn't enough to make the business run smoothly, and because we live in a "civilized society" I have to quit when I get tired of their dull-eyed machinations. I have to quit...instead of challenging them to a death-match and hauling the tiger-skin from their still-warm corpse as my new consort hands me the tribal sceptre. "Let's reorganzie the accounting division!" I would scream above the awed cries of the masses, my muscles still glistening with sweat, my face streaked with blood.

No, I haven't watched Conan the Barbarian recently. But I plan to.