Before I Returned to Prison

I don’t know what time I got up this morning. That’s unusual, because I always happen to notice the clock display on the cable box that my brother forces me to keep in my room, but, today, I just happened not to see it.

 After going to the bathroom and cleaning up, I made my way out into the kitchen. The coffeemaker had just been turned on, but it’s even slower than the one we’d had before it had stopped working and my brother had bought a replacement. I knew I’d have to wait 15 minutes for the coffeemaker to keep making noises to itself while it finished brewing the pot. It’s a house rule imposed on me not to pour the first mug of coffee until an entire pot has finished brewing because my brother feels it “ruins the taste.” There are, in fact, times when I wait an hour and a half for coffee, because my father sometimes insists on making the coffee, and he still lollygags at everything he does like he’s getting paid by the hour the way he was from age 15 to age 65. He wasn’t a lazy worker, just ridiculously methodical. He’s also always had an unconscious sly streak, so that, if someone is waiting for him to finish doing something, he’ll unconsciously take an extra-long time about it for the unwitting purpose of aggravating them. He drove my late mother crazy a number of times that way, and it was the cause of a significant number of fights in which my mother wrongfully looked like the bad guy for raising a fuss because it wasn’t evident that my father had unconsciously, deliberately provoked her. But I’ve trained myself not to be affected by that and am just patient when my father drags things out. This morning, however, it was the coffeemaker itself dragging things out, and not much could be done about it.

 I weighed myself and was 185.4 lbs. My weight has been up and down over the course of my existence. It reached its peak in the spring of 1986, when I was 230 lbs. Over that summer, my mother assisted me in getting my weight down, so that, when I returned to Ottawa for college in September, I bottomed out at 158 lbs. Then I got in the habit of devouring multiple pizzas for dinner and went back up to about 200. I was between 190 and 205 for most of the time since then, but my mother died in November 2011, and by December 2012 I was back down to 170. Then I went back up to about 200, and since then have managed to get myself down to 185. The doctor says he wants me at 160, so that is my goal weight, but it’s a goal I don’t pursue with too much enthusiasm, as I know that the powers that be would thwart any goal I did actively pursue, simply because they are spitefully perverse toward me.

 Then there was what I call a Question Period moment. It’s named after a silly charade that occurs in the House of Commons for the benefit of the TV news cameras, when the elected politicians (who are, by training, lawyers) make silly, pretentious, and false speeches for the sake of putting on a performance. My Question Period moments occur when the powers that be are clearly falsifying the appearance of what happens in this household for the sake of deceiving other people about those things. My father materialized behind me and asked whether I had “nicely washed my face” after getting up. I told him to stop parenting me. He replied meekly that he had addressed me in a nice way. I pointed out that I am nearly 50 years old. He buried his face in his hands and went away for a bit, then came back and repeated to me that he had spoken to me nicely. I told him that it was inappropriate for him to keep parenting me. So he went away again, crestfallen, clearly obsessed with the fact that I had supposedly been rude to him after he had been polite to me, because he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. No doubt the powers that be want to make that look like elder abuse. I content myself with the fact that, even if they fool everyone else on earth, they cannot fool ME, because I’ll always know the truth, and it will have to be enough for me to know the truth even if no one else does.

 So the coffee was finally ready, and I decided to stay away from my prison of a desk for a while, and just sat on the edge of my bed with the coffee on the radiator beside it, gazing out the window at nothing in particular. Eventually, however, I had to return to the prison cell that is this desk and this computer, and decided to tell you a bit about my adventures before I returned to prison.