Jack's Back: In the Flesh (I/?) (405 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.8 on 5 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by EhyehAsherEhyeh (View user info) at 2006-11-08 12:20:06 EST
**Continuation from previous series----> http://www.ubersite.com/m/64199
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Some fathers teach their sons by leading a life of quiet example. Others may guide their boys by setting firm rules and strict discipline, or by letting the young men discover life and its ways on their own. When I was growing up, my father taught me the most through his library of clichéd sayings.
Sometimes they were funny, and meant nothing. "Boy, a woman ain't a woman 'til she can throw her left titty over her right shoulder and shoot milk down her asscrack."
Other times they were pertinent, as when I was in high school and began getting serious with Monica Tuttle. "Now Jack, you can take that girl outta the trailer park, but you know you'll never never get the trailer park outta that girl."
Cliché. Inflammatory. That one ate me up inside for a week, until I arrived at Monica's trailer one day to find her on the side stoop making out with her step-brother. Score one for Pops and his arsenal of sure-fire one-liners.
His sayings always fit the situation, and they were always mostly right. I could live my life with never a worry if I just sang his colloquial rhetoric in my head.
But there's one that bothered me for a while, and still does a little. I wrestled with it for a long time after all that business with Mr. Harms, and my old neighbor Ed, and falling in love with Mary.
It's that old saying about the leopard never changing his spots. Pops added his own tag to this familiar line, saying, "Now he may WANT to change. An' he may TRY to change. But in the end, all he can do is paint stripes over his old spots, an' hope nobody calls him on it."
If my father had been a more educated man, he might have told me that we learn our behavior as we grow. That we gather information from watching others around us, and how they respond to situations. We apply these same reactions when faced with the same situations, or apply our own technique. What works gets used again and again until it is ingrained into the patterns of a person's behavior. Once there is a pattern, that person will return to this behavior when things get difficult, no matter how much they try to change. A user will use, a liar lies, abusers abuse, and so on.
Me, my pattern is violence. When I'm stuck, I bring on retaliatory violence that surpasses even the extreme. It is controlled, it is methodical, it is absolute. Suffering is its only goal and its only end. And I'm very, very good at it.
I thought that I had put it behind me. I thought that meeting Mary had awakened the "capacity for goodness" that Ed had seen in me. I was a reformed man, a man in love. I had put aside my duplicitous nature, made peace with the world. Mary and I got engaged. We bought a house together. I started a garden and started going to the gym. I learned to rationalize when people made me angry, to try to understand their point of view and to empathize. It helped for a while. Really.
But then they came after my Mary, and things changed.
Or maybe, if you look at it from my father's stance, nothing changed. My spots showed. Violence happened in ways that only an artist of my type could appreciate, and several people suffered very, very badly.
They shouldn't have come after my Mary. Though, in a way, it was somewhat my fault...
User Reviews
Submitted by wookie (user info) at 2006-11-15 13:45:30 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by homer42 (user info) at 2006-11-15 12:53:33 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
This is great - you should publish this stuff.
Submitted by august_sobriquet (user info) at 2006-11-09 08:03:34 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
cool, can't wait for the continuation. The jack series under your other user name is well worth reading.
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2006-11-08 20:03:51 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Submitted by goferforhire (user info) at 2006-11-08 13:50:41 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
welcome back