Fat and Thin and Happy and Sad Couples

It’s been a full 48 hours since my last joint and my hands are shaking. A full 32 since my last drink. And even as I write this, realizing how cliché it is to write about my need to be completely blitzed to handle the societal standards of family and their innerworking, again I find myself writing about it like it’s the next big cultural breakthrough. Families around the world, they’re fuckin tough to deal with, and even harder to understand, so raise your glasses in memory, and smoke um if you got em, cuz its another one of those reflections, several paces before the clock strikes twelve and Christmas rages into your plastic covered rumpus room in a fiery shopping cart.

Earlier today, as I laid on the copper colored shag rug of my parent’s family room, I listened to my mother and sister discuss the relationships of my gay uncle as well as the teachers of my former high school and their affairs with various French professors. Mr. Richardson, the track coach and father of this kid I graduated with, Gerald, was sleeping with one of the French teachers at my school, keeping a separate bank account and telling his wife he was going to track meets when he was really running off to Atlantic City to fuck his bilingual cuddy buddy and take the meaning of bonne nuit to new heights. I want to say this is despicable behavior, because, all the women in my life say it is (and i know i'd never want to be treated this way), they hurt because of it, they cry or stay up late nights because men are dogs and they somehow have the misfortune to have fallen in tow with the bad ones. This doesn’t happen to all women, or so I want to believe.

Yet, with each day, I discover that men do cheat and women get cheated on or women cheat and then their men cheat on them in retaliation and that for some this is how it goes; its common place. The adult world is riddled with adulterous behavior. Who knew? I prided myself on being cynical and takings light the idea that romance exists in a web 3.0 world, thinking that the urger to cheat was simplying something we could evolve past- code could be corrected, men & women rebuilt- We have the technology! Sadly, 3 g iphones and lol’s just help these things take places faster- and this realization has been tearing down my perception of the moral world in view of this fact.

My aunt is a beautiful and caring woman. To be fair, all of my relatives are- while crazy, like everyone else’s, they are still good. And they don’t deserve to have men cheat on them, or to internalize their pain until it makes them sick, only for their only release to be at functions where they receive “I told you that nigga’s crazy” as a condolence. My aunts go through it, my best friends’ parents go through it, I may be witnessing my own parents go through it…I’ve been told we are witnessing the end of days, but it seems more like its forever the last day of decency; 12 months of December, years of continuous decay. We’ve always been dying but maybe also have freedom in this fact that people are just bad. And that is why these 48 sober hours have been more intoxicating then any other substance I could ever put into my body.

While romance may be provided as an escape, what is the actual resolve? And how do I keep from walking the same road? If everyone somehow experiences infidelity in some form in their life, how do you minimize its presence in your life, or is our only option to separate ourselves from the reality that such a thing is impossible? Bottoms up.