Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys

There is a song that has some meaning behind this wonderful family of mine.  The song is called, "Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys", written by Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi.  One of the verses is:

If I gave you everything that I owned and asked for nothing in return
Would you do the same for me as I would for you?
Or would you take me for a ride and strip me of everything, including my pride
But spirit is something that no one destroys
And the sound that I'm hearing is only the sound
The low spark of high heeled boys.

Well.  I have been taken for a ride by my brother.  He wasn't able to have children of his own so he "stole" mine.  He interfered with my relationship with my children by providing the things of which I could not provide, so now my selfish, simple, weak minded children will no longer have anything to do with me.  As I explained to them before, I don't pay people to stay away.  If they want to come and visit with me, then we can talk about their needs.  But if they don't want to bother with me, then they needn't bother with asking me for money.  So, the big ol' bro has stripped me of everything that meant a great deal to me and even my pride, but the one thing he can't strip me of is my spirit.  My spirit beckons me to step over the mine field and keep on moving through this war.  Those that drop along the way in battle, I don't even look back and worry about, just like a mercenary soldier.   I can't worry about them.  If I do, then it only brings me down.  The ol' bro and my ex-wife may have crushed my pride, but they have yet to crush my spirit.  His hatred of me has become such that he kept my mother's funeral services from me and I was never allowed to attend.  I was never allowed to say goodbye.  I will continue to rub that in too.  I wouldn't be surprised one day that I be out on the street one day and his only way to shut me up is to shoot me.

But I have digressed quite a bit from the point of this blog.  The point of this blog is for children whom feel they walk in my shoes, or parents who find their children walk in my shoes is to look at the situations that have transpired and try to correct the paths that lie before them and smooth them out.  You have to allow your children to get hurt sometime.  They need to experience disappointment.  You can't protect them all the time.  But, you cannot allow for their self esteem to be crushed like a spider underfoot.  Mine has been at times.  I have been able to recover, but probably not in the manner I should have.  I am not proud of some of the things I describe in The Train Runs No More.  They were a release for me at the time, that provided me satisfaction.  I have been driven to the point of suicide, but to the dismay of others, I managed to pull myself out of that mud.  You cannot allow your children to be so harassed by others that they are simply crushed and find no way to discover satisfaction even if it is only within themselves.  I am appalled by those that feel compelled to humiliate others so much that their victim can only find relief through suicide.  I am appalled by a mother of a boy who cannot bring herself to confront the mother of a girl that likes her son and just make a simple request of the mother to change her daughters mind.  Even closer to home, a teacher that has moved into the neighborhood tries very hard to control the other neighbors around her whom have been in the hood for years.  But because she is a teacher at a local elementary school and I will not succumb to her wishes, she tries to set me up for a malicious crime which she was unsuccessful at pulling off.  The bullying never stops at any age and for of all people, a school teacher to do what she has done, she should know better.  So, after I turned up the fire a little and drew attention to her actions, she had a choice.  Lose her job as a teacher or back the hell off.  It has been approximately three years now since she pulled her little stunt.  She doesn't even look my way anymore.  Even the local police know who I am and they even know I wouldn't attempt what she was trying her damnedest to assert.  So you see?  It never stops.  Some people never grow up, and bullying is at all levels, and in all facets of life.  It all depends on how much energy one wants to give it to keep the action going.  The best approach is just to tell these people to shove it up their ass and keep on moving.  The sound that you hear is only the low spark of high heeled boys.

Bullying Can Take On All Forms

Have you realized that bullying can take on all forms?  No?  Maybe you're fat and there's some skinny people picking on you because your fat.  Maybe you're skinny and people of average weight are picking on you because your skinny.  Maybe you have red hair and people "pick on a ginger"or you speak with some form of accent foreign to the geographical region.  Maybe there is some physical appearance that you have, handicapped or otherwise, that is not the norm of the immediate "community".  Maybe you act differently, or think differently, or maybe you're not the same religious faith as someone else.  Bullying can take many different forms and it spans many different walks of life.  Even into your own family.  One of your children has a problem with the other and they pester the crap out of them until they get what they want.  Maybe a husband isn't getting some form of satisfaction that he needs and it isn't always about sex, so he beats the crap out of his wife on a regular basis.  Or it could be the other way around.  It's been known that the wife will do the same thing.  Maybe, after your children grow up and you don't do what they ask you to do, therefore you don't get to see your grandchildren.  Really?  Seriously?  Bullying can span all walks of life even into religion.  Yes, my faithful, Christian followers!  Even into religion.

Take my particular case for instance.  In school, I didn't think like others and I didn't act like others, so I only had a few friends.  I didn't play sports like others, therefore, I was deemed uncoordinated.  Because I was uncoordinated, Guitar Playing Man proceeded to attack me one day while playing basketball.  And we were supposed to be friends.  After that, we were still friends, but the "feeling" just wasn't the same.  The many years difference between me and my brother made life difficult for me as well.  He was older.  His physique was larger, therefore, he was "smarter".  Really?  In what way?  So far, he has been able to destroy the relationship I used to have with my daughter.  He wasn't too compliant at my father's funeral either.  And my mother's funeral services?  He did have the courtesy to tell me she passed, but he never told me she was so ill that she had to be hospitalized.  I never got to speak with my mother before she died, to his satisfaction.  He told me there would be funeral services for her after her body had been cremated.  That was a year ago.  I'm still waiting for those funeral services to happen.  Just how long does it take to cremate a body anyway?  I know with my mother-in-law, it only took about three months.  If I were stopped on the side of the road somewhere and I was on fire, and if my brother were just happening to be driving by, he would only stop long enough to throw gasoline on me just to watch me burn faster. 

I didn't have the same religious faith as others I had gone to school with.  The more I looked at my own faith and began to realize how hypocritical it was, then I began to ask questions.  When I asked questions, I received a brow beating and if it wasn't that, then I was preached to by those of other faiths until I couldn't be preached to anymore, and then they preached to me some more.  When I didn't succumb to believing , then I was ostracized.

I had friend that would treat me a certain way that I felt was against the grain of the way I wanted to be treated or spoken to.  When I confronted them with what they were doing or saying, then they felt as though I were bullying them because I was expressing my feelings to them.  Because most of them were no longer allowed to treat me this way or that, they then became no longer my friends.  As the old saying goes, "if it doesn't feel good, don't do it".  Well, the treatment of me didn't feel good and I didn't like it, so I would no longer allow it to happen.  Since I would not allow it to happen anymore, the friends I do have are few, but at least we care about each other and we care for each other, and we are "there" for each other.

Bullying can take on many different faces, many different places.  Some white people feel that the blacks have to be beat until the color of their skin becomes white.  Jews don't believe that Jesus Christ is the savior that other faiths believe in and other races therefore feel their very existence must be destroyed.  Gay people must be beat until they become straight again.  If you are not a Christian, you are either beat with prayer sessions until you do become a Christian or you're ostracized.  Christians don't believe Catholics are of a christian, believing faith.  Does it really matter so long as they believe?   And if I choose not to believe but still use the bible as a moral guide, which I find some Christians not even doing, all I find is them reciting verses at the appropriate time as a useful, defensive weapon as a demonstration of their faith in God, then that is my choice as long as I treat others as I want to be treated.  But because of my feelings, I must be ostracized.

Seriously?  Is that all you have?  I come home and I close the front door and lock it.  Once I am home, I don't worry about another freaking thing unless I choose a subject that I want to be worried about.  So, ostracize away.  Keep my grandchildren away from me because if you believe that your Christian practicing mother is doing the right thing by inciting you to hate your father so much that you can't even bear to mention my name, then I don't even want to see your children that have been raised by someone with so much hate in their heart.  You continue on practicing your Christianity and your Missions to the Netherlands.  Go save your hookers of another land instead of trying to help people right here at home.  Hypocrites!

Bullying can take on all forms.

Decide Where You are The Most Comfortable

You grow up with people that no longer get the reaction from you that they used to.  Or maybe you view things even more differently now that you are out of high school than they did.  Your thought patterns have become wiser.  All the while, they have not reached that point yet and they no longer get from you the energy they once received.  You've separated yourself from the pack.  You're wounds begin to heal.  Then you meet that special someone and maybe it didn't turn out like it should have.  All they do is cost you money, whether it be through acquiring things, or going to something that someone that has sold them tickets to because it was simply a fund raiser for this cause or that.  You're spending money all the time and you never see your bank account increasing.  You sit down with that someone to discuss what your goal is as a couple, but they don't want to talk about it.  You're deemed selfish because you don't want to spend any money.  Really?  Why not spend some money on something that will do you the most good, like a house instead of an apartment where you are compartmentalized amongst a bunch of other people that you don't find that desirable to be around?  You may have to start with an apartment, but why end up there?  It may take a while to get that down payment, but all it takes is patience, focus, and fortitude.  But let's say that part didn't happen.  The torment begins in "The Train Runs No More".  Let's say that your field of career choice requires you to move if you want to maintain the same living standard that you have been able to acquire.  You have now earned this vast amount of money in a field that you love, but because of American greed, or poor economy due to cut backs and policies made by the political administration in office, you have to go through a company wide layoff.  You have finally gained the understanding from your spouse that with the restraint of always having to buy something, your bank account is now growing and in order to maintain that, you have to move to another region just to maintain what both of you have acquired so far.  But the field that you have chosen is economically driven and although you are earning money that you have never seen before without having to resort to selling drugs, you now are moving periodically, just to maintain.  Your spouse finally says, "Screw this crap.  I can do better on my own!"  And you split.  After a time, you purchase a house. You buy a new car.  You wear better clothing and you do this by yourself.  Your spouse on the other hand, lives in an apartment, and then move to another because they can't make the rent, and then another.  Resorting to what looks like an opportunity to buy a house on a government program designed to help the poor by paying one dollar a month to pay for this house, and they can't even do that by themselves.  They become embittered.  Where there is children involved and they have won primary custody, their attitude is now being impressed upon the children, but because you are unable to be with your children the way you used to be, they have become weak and embittered just like your spouse.  You have no choice in the matter when they are simply used as a tool of extraction for more money than what is deemed by the court only to find that it is not being used the way it was intended.  You say no more.  Then you become isolated from your children.  Your older sibling, which already hates you because you came into his world and messed things up for him, becomes an opportunity for your now ex-spouse.  Together, they plot, they machinate against you while they think that you can't see the forest for the trees.  What time you do get with your children is only spent with you revealing "secrets" to them because they were sent as "spies".  How do you know this?  Because after they return home, a week or so passes, long enough for the ex-spouse to be "briefed", and suddenly the children need this great sum of money.  Being nice, you give it to them the first time only to find out it didn't go where it was supposed to go.  So the next time you tell them no.  Then the embitterment sets in and eventually you have to make a decision as to whether you want to maintain a relationship no matter how unhappy you are forced to be, somewhat like it was with all of those idiots that you grew up with taking advantage of you, and antagonizing you.  You're still being bullied.  It's just taken on a new form and this time, it has been passed on to another generation.  Or you decide to let go, and go on enjoying the happy, enjoyable life that you are in at the moment.  Only you can decide where you are the most comfortable.