Saturday, August 28, 2010

Mother's Companion

Mother began her torturous palaver, unpleasant, aggressive, but monotonous syllables of barely repressed rage, she bludgeoned her son with words forbidding sexuality, alcohol or any form of pleasure and encouraged him to pursue an ideal.
  
Of course, this is fiction, forgive me mother. I witnessed this archetypal scenario a few days ago and have seen it several times. It's  become a myth, like in Hitchock's Psycho. So what's the point mentioning it? What's the point of any story?

Lohbado is just another character from an ongoing narrative. Mother had intended for Lohbado to be her companion in old age. She encouraged him to pursue an ideal, which she knew no mortal could attain. He was simply unworthy to participate in the way of the world. Plus, she forbade it. Unable to find a place in the world, he would stay home and be her companion. He would never have to work. She would provide for his needs. All he had to do was go to the cafe with her in the morning, sometimes to restaurants, join her for a walk every day and to listen whenever she needed to talk to somebody.

Lohbado might have gone with the plan, if he hadn't met Reverend Red Gunn. One midnight, while mother slept, Lohbado hopped into Red Gunn's van and they drove west. Four months later, mother Rosemary died in a car crash. She lost control and slid into a cast iron beam of a trestle bridge over Moon River on her way home from a meeting of the Busy Bee Bridge Club.

His last conversation with Rosemary was when she  phoned him, long distance, to ask if he was a homosexual. No, he wasn't. Why wasn't he dating a woman? Of course, she knew the answer. He would never have a woman as long as she was alive. She blocked his way like a huge glacier in the mountains. The only open path was to go higher, to give up all hope of ever entering the fertile valleys of worldly delight and instead, to ascend to the icy heights of sublimation, abstraction, or the consolation of philosophy. A branch of philosophy exists for those who couldn't get laid due to personality problems or various levels of uptightness or inhibition.

When the outer world of joy proved inaccessible, Lohbado took up the cross, his father's walking stick, the same twelve inch ruler the blind preacher used to spank the boy. Reverend Stonehenge Stumps used the stick, a crutch of dogma, or vomit from a dog's mouth. Lohbado followed the way of the cross, drank the ice water of philosophy and found friends among spirits and tormented souls and in this way, the wheel of Lohbado began to turn.

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