Let me give it one more try to try to go back

"Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law...." (Franz Kafka)

The hair washing from hell

☠ I start where I am. My daughter had some rubber swimming goggles hanging on a hook in the small hall outside the laundry room which is where I have my computer and books. They had been there probably for years. I have to pass them going in and out of the laundry room / scriptorium. i never liked them hanging there. I decided to remove them today. I did. I have the same kind of squeamish feelings about them as about baby dolls and buttons. I viscerally want nothing to do with any of them: once burned twice shy. Sometimes the buttons on my "dress" shirts are OK, but I don't like extra buttons sewn into the bottom of the front of the shirt, either. Something is going on here. Could it be that "Bradford Robert Hubert McCormick's"^[1] intrusive mother was determined to wash his genitals as a baby, back beyond my "memory horizon"?

When "Bradford Robert Hubert McCormick's"^[1] mother got burr up her ass to wash him, she was relentlessly [probably: psychotically] aggressive about it. As elsewhere noted, one time when my father returned me to her after having had me barbered (ca. age 9 years), she jammed my head backwards into the kitchen sink to wash my hair so hard that I feared she would break my neck and I would be paralyzed for life on life support. I struggled against it; she would not relent – me struggling just made her more determined to force it. Obviously, had these people not had me haircutted in the barberian shop there would not have been all the little snippets of excised hair all over my head, so that washing them off would not have been needed. My ordeal finally ended and my neck had not been broken. Could better parents have told the school (1956) that their child was traumatized by getting his hair cut, so they would just have to live with his natural hair, or would such parents have been put in a hospital for the criminally insane and their brains fried with electric shocks, and me put into foster care, had they tried to protect me from haircutting in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? Even after the butchery, my father could have directed the woman: "Don't hurt the child, bitch!" I remember that kitchen(sic) sink.

I was "given" baths (I did not ask for them). I was always afraid of my mother washing my hair. I would hold a wash cloth tightly over my forehand, eyes and face to try to protect myself while she did it in the bathtub. I do not know why I was so afraid. I may have been afraid of being suffocated from the water coming out of the faucet with which she rinsed her soap out of my almost nonexistent hair (but I was not going bald).

How was this hairwashing from hell possible?

I should have been strong snough to push the woman off of me and send her body across the kitchen 10 feet into the wall opposite the sink. If she hit her head on something at the terminus of the trajectory path, and was paralyzed for life, that should have been her problem not mine. She asked for it. But what would make a human being do what she did to me? Mothers do not generally go to the extreme of not caring if they break their child's neck and paralyze him for life in pursuit of the objective of getting the kid's hair washed, do they? I do not think that is innate instinctual behavior of the human female animal. Schizophrenia? But can a person engage in behavior they do not have any idea might exist? What must my mother's social surround have done to her for her to do this to me? Isn't the responsible party "The invisible hand", "The American Dream", what (POTUS №45) President Trump called "our beautiful and successful suburbs"? It was the social madness deemed normal and right of: "Keep America beautiful, get a haircut!" I got the godddamned haircut. America turned a woman into a monster, and the monster was making America beautiful as best she could from her social conditioning. As Dinah Shore sang: Life is completer in a 1953 Chevrolet.

You reap what you sow

☠ Something must have gone wrong in my very early childrearing somewhere that I cannot discover, although generally I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) attribute to having had an invasive intrusive mother (viz: supra).

The result is that today I have to watch myself to not destroy things that do not deserve it and even my cherished possessions. (Do I really know and feel how to cherish anything, having been childreared in a social surround where I was taught to not value myself?) If "we" (aka: the nuclear☢) family of Bradford Robert Hubert McCormick's origin) had had a pet dog or cat when I was a child, would I have hurt the animal: Kick the cat? (We did have a pet cat for a very short while but I have no memory of it except that my father told me he took it to Arthur Godfrey's farm where he must have sold some house paint for the place.) I did once throw an uncle Henry and aunt Elaine's small Pomeranian dog down a flight of stairs, fortunately for both of us with no ill effect: the dog was not hurt and the adults did not find out about it. Kick the cat. My childrearing must have filled me with blocked rage, like a steam engine without a safety valve. [fill in the blank]

I doubt there is any such thing as "self-harm": There can be and often are enemy agents hiding in persons' heads ("toxic introjects") doing their dirty work on the persons, even long after their real life avatars have died: circumcised foreskins don't heal back to their status quo ante, neither do parental intrusions cease to have been. (Scheißestückwelt.) Some "self" harm may be the self attacking the enemy in the form of the person's own alienated (kidnapped by sociological aliens) physical body. Sometimes intrusions and impingements upon a person are necessary: "Sorry, little one, but the house is on fire and I am a fireman and I need get you out of the building before you burn to death. I apologize, but we must go now. [fireman picks up angry child in his (her or other) arms and carries child out of the burning building]." Any wonder I hate cellphones?

I could not put my parents in their proper place. I could not get them to lay off. There was nothing I could do about it or about them. I had no place to go where I would have ben safe from them and wanted to be. So to this day I am full of rage at "these people" ("the Them"), and I still cannot do anything about them. If I was ever in line with them and above them I would fire them. If they fell off the top of One World Trade Center I might watch their Galilean trajectory to the surface or maybe not. Better to take an elevator to ground level and get visual confirmation of the result. ("All clear!")

When, in high school, I read Italo Svevo's novel, "The Confessions of Zeno", which I entirely forget except for the ending: A man tunnels to the center of the earth, plants a big bomb, the bomb goes off, and the universe i cleansed of what people were doing on the surface of a planet that has consequently ceased to harm anything (right).... I thought and still think that was great. Why not? My takeaway from Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" was/is that the people who push a given ideology eventually all die and their ideology with them when they are no longer able to motivate members of the next generation to keep on pushing their ideology. One day all my St. Paul's School Day Carcel for Boys Brooklandville Maryland teaches would be: dead. Good riddance! Probably most of them are dead by now, but they lived far too long and should never have been the misfortunes to be born in the first place.

People in power in a class society should take a lesson from King Herod the Great's playbook and either: (1) murder every gifted child among the lower classes, or (2) co-opt them all, relocate them in the privileged class, and give them sinecures oppressing the rest of the people where they came from. Nobody ever offered me a fair deal. All I got was each day to fear they would give me the test I would fail. And, as elsewhere noted, sex was only for jocks: neither did I get any tea and sympathy from a St. Paul's School faculty member's sexy wife (I was repulsed by the flesh of my female biological progenitor and I do not think this was a defense formation to protect myself from incestuous desires: no way did I want to be touched by that woman's body, although if the public health department had asked me for a cell scraping I might have been able to get it; if my mother had been Monica Vitti → but Monica Vitti would probably have seen to it that I met girls my own age who were attractive to me like herself, yes? But if we truly lived in a world that for me was without other women, why not? Taboos are for boobs [not the mammary kind]). Je me souviens.

A living fossil

Trying to penetrate the barrier back to my earliest post-natal time continues to prove refractory. The river of time has apparently washed away almost all the evidence. But I have recently thought about something that is hiding in plain sight (other than my circumcision scar). I often say to myself:

"[Now] let's think."

And then I do think.

I doubt that most persons, when they prepare to think about something, customarily start off by saying to themself: "Now let's think". My guess is that my mother would emit those words from time to time when I was a small child, when she would prepare to think about something. By this I am hypothesizing something particular: Probably thinking was not something she did very often, so it was something exceptional, to be declared and prepared for before initiating the unnatural activity about to be embarked upon (i.e.: to think about something). Thinking was something exceptional, analogous to putting on your boots to go out in the snow, not something integrated into my mother's daily existence, like, say, housecleaning. I propose this is diagnostic of my social surround of early childhood. Good thing my mother did not categorize thinking in the same broad category as farting, for then she would have had to suppress it because to fart is impolite and being impolite was something that to her was very bad.

Also note the: "let's", not: "let me". Maybe my mother sometimes said it this other way too? Does this plural, almost passive voice mean that my mother generally did not initiate her own thinking but expected somebody else to come an help her to think? Or that as a child someone else had always initiated her thinking about anything? Was my mother somehow cognitively impaired? Mentally retarded persons do sometimes take excessively seriously what they are told to do, which could explain my mother's obsessive determination in such things as washing my hair, to the point that I was afraid of choking, which she did not take into consideration in her monomania. She remains a black hole to me.

Another possible earliest memory or memory of same?

I seem to racall that in the house in Bloomfield (pre-1st grade!) where I had to sit on the potty in the living room and "concentrate" and produce a bowel movement before my mother would let me play with my toys, the house had an only partly finished second floor. I seem to recall there was my "nursery" room up there which had a bright window, and outside it the space was not finished and my parents slept together (What did that mean to me? Speculation not supported by any evidence I have: Freud's "primal scene"?) on a mattress on the floor in that part?

Another childhood trauma

I hope I have made clear that I did not like getting haircutted. Now I remember something else that was in the same league, which was entirely unnecessary: buying pants – you know, trousers. Other kids' parents probably jus tbought something off the shelf and the boy wore it. Not me. Buying pants meant a trip to the fitting room where I would put the new pants on and the tailor would pin them up with straight pins, like an adult man buying avery expensive tailored suit. I was always afraid of the pins and I did not ike it. finally it would be over. So we have me being subjected to (1) haircuts, (2) pants fitting and

(3) blouses that were so tight around my neck that I almost ckoked but my mother goddamn it would succeed in getting that neck buttoned on me! When I got older there was a little spring-loaded contraption (see crude diagram below) that pressed the ends of the shirt collar down on each side and pressed up into my neck in the middle. Why couldn't I have had pants off the rack and shirts with button down collars or Who gives a shit? Another gagger. Ha! Ha!

I hypothesize my father was just a passive bystander except for getting me haircutted. What in the world went on in my mother's head? My mother should have had a baby doll instead of a real child to dress up and down. My mother was a genuine lunatic.

St. Paul's Scoool again

It was a perfect storm: I was a child with exceptional needs: brilliant and fragile. My parents were hopeless victims of The American Dream gone wrong. And St. Paul's school was disciplinarian rote-learning pedagogy in its death throes: Mr. S. Atherton Middleton, a dialtone☏. Everything was wrong and I was what was wronged. Things can always be worse, however, but, on the other hand, it ain't over yet.

The sorrow and the pity

Once again looking over the infant + toddler + small child pictures I have of Bradford Robert Hubert McCormick – I am appalled at what American society in 1950 was like for a sensitive child borm into.... My mother does not look exactly human. Bradford Robert Hubert McCormick looks more pathetic than most any scarecrow. The child's sartorial splendor would make Louis XIV jealous, including blouses with collar buttons so tight mommy dearest had to struggle to get the damned button fastened around the poor child's neck ("Please let me go!"), and things like humiliating "short pants" and "sunsuits" that made the kid look like a freak of nature with leg openings that, if scaled up for hot young chicks, would qualify as "hot pants" – but I was far less sexual than Alan Turing on the British government mandated patrioticing hormones which caused him to kill himself since I did not know what I was missing. Hovering mother bitch. ET child plopped down on the alien planet of the hubcaps. I was helping keep America beautiful and the taxi meter of my life was running down running around for nothing but more of the same. Ad nihil per aspera.

+2024.02.16 v065
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Invenit et fecit