If you're not a child of the cold war, you wouldn't understand the real significance. It was more than just a game. It symbolized a fear that many of us lived with all the time.
Cold War Kids: They Don't Write 'Em Like That Any More
OR
Rambling Incoherent Bullshit Self-Absorbed Navel Gazing Self Reflection Interspersed With Cool Music and Cultural References From A Bygone Era That I Never Really Reconciled With The Events Of So It Continues To Haunt Me
by
The Cheesemeister
AKA
The Real Cie
AKA
Creator and Head Buttmunch In Charge (and I use the term loosely) of Team Netherworld
The Breakup Song is the inspiration tune for the
Midweek Blues Buster prompt. It also happens to be the song I was listening to as I approached home base last night and it inspired me to do some navel gazing—er—self-reflecting.
This post will only be very lightly edited, and will probably become rambling and go off the rails, because that’s how I tend to roll. See
this post about “bipolar disorder” and “brain like the web of spiders on drugs” for more detail about why this happens if you care to learn more about the way my brain works, and why I’ll never be able to be one of your cute little published authors who “made the grade.”
I will include the tunes as I listen to them, for your listening pleasure as well as mine, because, hey, I’m a generous soul. You can just listen to the music if you want, or you can read my rambling thoughts too.
Once again, I don’t get to share my work with the Midweek Blues Buster people because, like is so often the case with me, I’m not following the rules. The prompt is for the creation of flash fiction. This isn’t fiction, no matter how improbable it may seem to others, or no matter how much I might wish it was at times. This is my real life and my real, actual, messed-up thoughts.
The mix that I’m sharing here includes the poppier side of the music of my seemingly self-absorbed g-g-g-generation. I was a metalhead, albeit a nerdy one. I’m still a metalhead, albeit an aging one. However, my musical tastes have always been eclectic. I enjoy pop as well as the hard stuff. I also listen to a lot of mellow, ambient tunes.
As I’ve said before, I like everything from African folk music to Zydeco.
Backtracking to The Breakup Song. I’ve never really been able to break up with the demons from the past, even though I changed the locks and took away their keys. I don’t press charges when they stalk me. They generally don’t rip huge wounds in my psyche the way they used to. They just nibble at my already iffy mind day in and day out, and I fear that one day they may consume it, and I’ll wind up a blithering mess not recognizing the fact that I’m sitting in my own piss and shit.
I’ve taken care of people in this sort of condition since 1988. True, it’s prions (myself, I think that Alzheimer’s disease is a prion disease) and dementia caused by strokes, and being medicated into a twilight state to offset the horrific agony caused by certain cancers, and other forms of dementia that cause people to become deteriorated to such a degree that they don’t realize they’ve soiled themselves; not having a troubled past or a major but somewhat manageable mental illness or three.
Still, sometimes I want to run out of this setting screaming.
I (and everyone else who works with this population) hopes we die, not before we get old but before we become like this. Seriously, sometimes death is better. I’m not trying to be morbid, although I’m certainly capable of that. I’m being truthful. Name me one person who wants to live unaware of their own bodily functions and unable to care for themselves in any way. Yeah, I thought so.
This is the Twilight Zone for reals, Bitches
This leads me back to thoughts about getting older. All of my relatives from my grandparents’ generation are dead. My own father died three and a half years ago after a long period of physical and finally cognitive decline. My mother turned 74 on Sunday. I am on my way to becoming the older generation. What the fuck wisdom do I have to impart when I’m still not a finished product by any means?
This is my parting wish as I prepare to step into the Twilight Zone.
Xenophobia does not mean fear of these critters. It means hatred and distrust of foreigners.
Could we please not have another cold war? Could we please stop with the damn xenophobia and desire to appear to be the coolest kid on campus whether we actually are or not? Can’t we all just fucking get along?
I hope against hope.
~The Cheese~
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