Pills and jazz, jazz and pills

My Mother's birthday could not pass without fireworks, for she is a powder keg of rage and pain and endless need. It turns out that her daughters were right, something is terribly wrong, and each of her siblings knows exactly what that is, and it looks to be something very similar to what each thinks is wrong with themselves and everyone else. It is time, again, for a Downey Intervention! A parade of phone calls and missed steps and the hand-wringing and name-calling that accompanies my family in any activity: weddings, trips to the store, breathing.

The terminology of addiction and salvation, as it is spoken in my family, is how I imagine twinspeak feels, if you love your twin completely and she is always poking you in the gut with a stick. The whole drama of my mother's Pill Problem and Drinking Problem is comforting and painful and fundamentally familiar, which is why I am shocked/elated at how easy it was to remove myself from the festivities entirely. My thing is: she has a Self Loathing and Self Obsession Problem like poison in the bloodstream and it's messy and desperately sad, and it lurks in all of us. All of us don't float illegal prescriptions around town and act like a Midwestern Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, so I understand the drive to fix the substance abuse first, but: I have seen what is under the pills and the rapes and the alcohol, and it is sadder than anything ever, and made me change my life. So: I am not going to the Intervention, and everyone else is, and I am alone in Chicago with my new bangs and unicorn vibe. If someone calls and asks me to go see some jazz, I'm gonna fucking do it. I'm gonna do everything, ever.

I saw some jazz and there was the horrible shrill noodling that makes me angry but there was also some funkdified get-down that made me think of my Pops and imagine him at the Empty Bottle with me, grimacing with funkiness as he does, and I felt deeply that everything would be fine. A man and a woman did what they did, and I'll do it too, and that goes on and on, forever.