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I desperately hope there is an afterlife, but I have a strong natural resistance to believing something to be true because I WANT it to be true.  Rather, the more I want something to be true, the more I tend to believe it probably isn't.

Especially when it comes to any form of religion or spirituality or magic.

On the other hand, my mom was older and much wiser than me.  She's turned out to be 110% correct about so many things that I was absolutely certain she was wrong about, that I can't/won't dismiss something she was that convinced was true, especially when I don't have any evidence either way.

Group grief counseling sounds like a good idea, actually.  I might look into that.  Less generic TV-therapy bullshit and more actual pain sharing with other hurting people might really help.

As for the pop music, our version of that would probably be our shared interest in certain shows (old doctor who was a big one) and books, but every time I try that it brings me down instead of up and I get into the spiral of crying and apologizing to the empty air.

My mom was a big believer in ghosts/spirits/etc, while I never was.  She once promised me that after she passed, she'd do her damnedest to give me some sort of sign or signal that she's around in some form, so I could know that she was right and there is something beyond death instead of nothingness.

I've been watching for it, for anything like that, but so far I've been disappointed.

Thanks.

It's been tough.  It happened in late February and most people (especially at work) kind of assume I'm somehow mostly over it by now, which I suppose makes sense because I'm good at pretending, but I'm not.  Not even a little.

I'm staying with my brother (a Milwaukee Police officer and really really good dude) and his wife (the head nurse at a major hospital and also a really really good person) while I prep the house for sale because I couldnt go back to the house I got for my mom after all that, but I don't really sleep much anymore so work has been a real struggle.

Distraction helps, sometimes, but I still often spiral and get into bad mind states, completely at random.

I fired the grief counselor I was given because she just kept offering generic platitudes and it got really annoying and pointless.  I think this was simply out of her league.

Jesus, what happened?  A murder?

Yeah.  Ok, well, hold on to your butt, this is a lot.  I've had to tell it so so many times by now that it's easy, but it's a lot.  And of course, there's way more context than I can type here, but I'll try my best.

My mom, who was one of the absolute most thoroughly kind and generous and compassionate people on earth, lost her job and income during COVID (she was a live-in nanny, awesome with kids).  Because her declining health, she was mostly disabled and probably shouldn't have been taking care of kids anyway, but she is a person that cannot say no to such.

When that happened, I took her in, because I am lucky and have a good job and easily can.  I lived in a one-bedroom shithole though, which was not comfortable for two adults, so I decided to repay my mom for a lifetime of kindness and taking care of me and my brother and most of our friends (we had ELEVEN foster siblings growing up, because she couldn't see a kid in a hard place without taking them in).

So in 2020 I bought a big fancy suburban palace on a golf course next to the country club, the kind of fancy nice place she always dreamed of while always living in ghetto apartments, and I gave her the master bedroom so she'd have her own bathroom and could really enjoy it, and let her do all the decorating (her favorite hobby) and make it hers, since I worked all the time anyway and was pretty neutral as far as decor.  It was a really nice time, after her health issues and lack of income and struggles this change really turned her mood and demeanor around, and her health suddenly got significantly better too.

A year later we took in my friend Joe.  My oldest and best friend, who we've known for most of my life and was one of the foster siblings my mom took in when I was young.  I've taken him in several times over the years, "loaned" him thousands upon thousands of dollars with no payback ever (not even once), and was always his safety net.

Since it was a 4 bedroom house with two living rooms and a massive finished basement with a theater and everything, we had the room for him and his 3 sons (who came every other weekend) easily.  The ghetto apartment he lived in before was in a dangerous area where his kids weren't allowed to go outside to play and there was constant drug and alcohol drama in his building, so this was a major upgrade for them all.

He lost his job almost immediately, never paid any rent or brought in any food, and kept trashing my house.  At first it wasn't too bad, but it got worse and worse until even my mom was wondering what his deal was.  That plus a weird sound we kept hearing regularly, that at first we suspected was him hiding in his room maybe blowing up a blow-up doll or something weird but kind of understandable for a single guy I guess, but later discovered was him filling balloons with NOS and huffing them.

After his behavior got more and more strange and erratic, I did some research on the Internet into NOS and we sat him down and delivered an ultimatum.  Showed him that constant NOS use causes brain damage and psychosis, and told him he had to stop or we would have to ask him to leave.  He agreed and threw out a bunch of NOS tanks. Which to my surprise were MASSIVE, like the size of my mom's oxygen tanks, and he had a crazy amount of them.

So things got better for a bit, and I even got him a job where I work (had to argue with HR, they didn't like him, but I have an awesome reputation at work and they took my advice in the end and hired him).

After about a year, things got bad again.  He didn't have a vehicle so I had been driving him to work every day (he was on a different shift, so I'd wake up at 5am, drive him in, come home, nap, wake up at 11am, get ready and leave by 1:30pm for my shift, let him take my expensive car home even after he dinged it a couple of times, and then I'd catch a ride home at 11pm from a coworker because he couldn't be relied on to pick me up).

The last couple months (January and February of this year) it got really bad.  He quit the job and his behavior got more and more unstable and erratic, spouting weird crazy nonsense that made us really think he needed serious psychiatric help.  Unfortunately, I opted to wait and wait and see if it would just magically get better, because I'm stupid.

Found out later the NOS huffing had come back in a big way, massive stashes of tanks in his room, apparantly huffing it directly from the tanks to avoid the sound effect of the balloons so we wouldn't notice.

Anyway, I came home from an overtime shift on a Saturday near the end of February and things seemed ok, Joe greeting me and told me that my mom was asleep and he had made her food as usual, so I decided to hop in the shower before checking on her. 

As I was on my knees in the bathroom scrubbing the filth from the bottom of the tub before showering because Joe is a nasty fucker, Joe came into the bathroom behind me with a thick metal bar (about an inch thick and five feet long - no idea where he got it) and without even a word he started whaling on me with it.  He got me about 6 times full power swings before I even realized I was under attack, fracturing my spine and ribs and splitting my head open.

I stood up and shoved him out of the bathroom (so hard that there was a huge Joe-sized hole in the wall across from the bathroom door after) and slammed the door shut while screaming "holy shit what the fuck what the fuck dude" in utter shock.  He hit the handle with the bar so hard it snapped and I had to hold the door shut while he full throttle tried to shove his way inside.  Given his super strange and delusional behavior recently, I figured he had some kind of serious mental break so luckily I had my phone with me and called 911 while trying to hold the door shut.

As I was giving them my address he managed to get the door open enough to wedge the bar in there and hit me with it and then snatch my phone before I got him back out and the door shut again.

He stopped banging on the door and was silent a minute. At first I thought he was baiting me to come out, but then I heard his voice from the living room saying "No cancel, cancel, it's a false alarm" rather calmly, and realized he was trying to cancel the 911, because he is stupid.

I opened the door a bit and peeked out and saw he had left the bar on the floor outside the door. So I opened the door and grabbed it and went into the living room, holding it ready to swing if he came at me again.  He saw me and put his hands up and got really suddenly calm and cooperative, so I told him to leave and wait outside for the cops. He agreed and as we walked towards the door he suddenly turned and charged me.  I got him with the bar on the head a couple good times before he closed the distance and it became a wrestling match.

We wrestled for a while and it occurred to me that I hadn't heard anything from my mom this whole time and we were making a LOT of noise, so as we were wrestling I asked him if he had hurt my mom, not really believing he would be crazy enough to actually hurt a sweet old disabled woman that helped raise him, but worried that she hadn't started yelling and asking what was going on.  She wasn't exactly a heavy sleeper.

The look of unhinged rage on his face mixed with shame as I asked him that scared the living hell out of me, and for some stupid reason I just completely lost all strength and fight.  He took advantage and got on top of me and put the bar across my neck and knelt on it, screaming and drooling into my face with the effort as I struggled to lift it enough to catch a breath.  I was nearly unconscious when I heard a loud pounding at the door, and Joe instantly let up and backed off at the sound, allowing me to gasp "COME IN!" at the police knocking.

They came in, Joe instantly went limp and silent with his head down, and said nothing at all as the police sat me aside and helped me catch my breath and asked me to explain what was going on.

I asked them to check on my mom, they sent someone to do that and then had me go through what happened.  Joe never moved or said a word the entire time.  They put me in an ambulance as I continued telling it, but would not tell me anything about my mom.

It wasn't until the next day that the medical examiner finally came to tell me that she was dead.  They found her on the floor of her room, covered in a blanket, with several items including her flat screen TV on top of her, and the electrical cord that was used to strangle her to death still wrapped around her neck.  They said she had died a couple hours before I got off of work, and there's nothing I could have done.

From the criminal complaint I got ahold of later, it seems more may have been done to her before or after death, but we won't know for sure until the forensics comes back and apparently that takes a ridiculously long time.

Joe didn't make any attempt whatsoever to cover anything up.  He pled not guilty to the charges so far, but that's not likely to matter given the mountain of evidence.  The detective said that he believes Joe waited for me to get home because he had no car or money, and his plan was likely to murder me too and take my car and wallet and go on the run.

Joe, my best friend.

Though the death penalty isn't enough.  I want to do it myself.  I want him to see my face and know I am the one hurting and killing him.  I want him to know that it is me, who considered him a brother, who protected and carried him for 30 fucking years through his endless stupidity and irresponsibility, who always had his back no matter what it cost me and what I had to sacrifice for him.  I want him to fully understand that the only person in this life that was always on his side, that did more for him than I've ever even HEARD of one person doing for another, is the person ending him.

I have learned that nobody, literally fucking nobody, can truly be trusted.  That the person you are the most absolutely sure of can, for no fucking reason at all, do the most utterly evil fucked up heinous shit to the ones you love.  I have learned that karma is a bullshit concept invented by idealistic fuckwits that lack perspective.  I have learned a lot from that fucking worm, and I desperately want to show him what I've learned.

It's just, maximum fucked.

And everyone tells me they can see the despair and grief on my face every day but they're wrong.

There's probably a huge pile of emotions underneath but on top of all of them, overriding them all, drowning everything else out, is heavy powerful rage.

The calm, slow, considered, depressed appearance is not sadness, it's control.  Because what is inside of here is murderous.

I've never ever considered revenge justified.  I've never believed in it, and viewed it as petty.

I have changed my mind.  If a certain scumbag murderer were not already locked away and safe from me, I absolutely would kill him and I would take my time doing it.

I know it's not healthy to fantasize about torturing another human being as often as I do, and it kills me that I have let him change me so completely, and I recognize that my thoughts these days would have horrified the innocent fucking moron I was before, but there is nothing else in life I want more than for that one specific piece of shit to suffer horribly and then die.

Unfortunately, Wisconsin does not have the death penalty.  Which is something I used to be proud of, and now really regret.

Fuck you.

"It's not your fault."

Were you there?  Do you read minds?  Fuck you.

"You can't blame yourself."

Do you make the rules?  Of course I can.  Fuck you.

"You couldn't have known."

But I suspected.  I thought about it, considered it, and did nothing until it was too late.  I couldn't have known, but I could have acted.  Fuck you.

"She wouldn't want you to blame yourself."

You know that for a fact, do you?  Maybe you're right.  Unfortunately, she's dead, and therefore can't forgive me for failing her.  Fuck you.

"You have to move on."

Yeah?  Please give me the instructions to accomplish this.  Where is the fucking map?  Move on to what, anyway?  Fuck you.

"Time heals all wounds."

No, it doesn't.  The one-armed man isn't going to grow that arm back.  Some wounds are too big to heal, time can only teach us to live with them.  Also, I don't want to heal.   I'll pick that scab right off every damn time I catch one forming. Fuck you.

"You're lucky to be alive."

Maybe.  Maybe not.  Yeah, he only succeeded in killing her, and I was "saved" at the last minute, gasping for breath.  Lucky though?  That depends on how I feel about surviving it.  Right now, I don't feel lucky.  My life has become a nightmare.  "Could have been worse" is always true in all cases and not sufficient to feel Lucky.  Fuck you.

"You are a good person."

I know what I am better than you do.  I know everything I've done, as well as my mindset while doing them, and you do not.  You are not qualified to overrule me on this.  Fuck you.

"Life goes on."

Not for her.  Fuck you.

"She loved you."

...and I loved her.  That's the fucking problem.  Fuck you.

"I am here for you / anything you need."

Your obligatory execution of what you think you are supposed to say offends me.  Enrages me.  Makes me hate you.  What I need is a Do Over, but murder and death don't work that way.  In fact, you didn't even *like me* before this, so Fuck you.

"How are you doing?"

I fucking hate this question.  It drips with insincerity and banal pointless ritual.  It forces me to lie to make you comfortable, because the truth is not what you want to know.  Fuck you.

Fuck everyone.

  

I got Holy Nonsensed!!

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

I love it!

Non-bots whose account I'm not approving, #1

PunchWmen

Maybe it's meant as "Punch White Men"

That said, I am also giving a lot of thought to what Cram said.

I don't have a proper response to it yet though.  I am trying to process it in the context of my particulars.  I think you are right though.

Ah, weak-willed.

Yeah, I can't argue with that.

However, in the process of... processing Cram's advice and reading what I dumped here, I came to a very familiar realization:  I'm an idiot.

It occurred to me that this post is the forum equivalent of pulling a stool up to a bar I'm only seen visiting once a year or so, full of people with only the most vague idea who I am (if that) and proceeding to whine and cry about how comfortable my nice little life is.  While masturbating sadly.

For those of you with much bigger and heavier problems, IE most of you, I truly apologize for this stupid-ass post.

Also, Cram and LMNO, thank you for having the patience to respond far better than the OP deserved.

I hope this thread gets nuked or more likely just sinks to the abyss it belongs in.

[ordering your life to create these conditions]

The state only appears in certain conditions.
Discovering what the conditions are, and ordering your life to create these conditions

is holy work

(emphasis mine)

So... basically I need to create my own penis-showing game?

Eh, google "Amanda Palmer giving a flower GIF".   It's just her looking goofy at her TED talk.

Thank you for this.  It was unintentional, but I had never heard of Amanda Palmer, and now I watched her TED talk and heard some of her music and she is wonderful.

I'd like to grab this for Holy Nonsense, but I'd want to clean up the bit about the dress and wig wearer if that's alright.

Crap I don't know how I missed this, but yes!  I would be honored to be included in your Holy Nonsense, and you can absolutely clean it up.   

I realize now that that bit about the dress wearer was badly put and could easily be taken wrongly, or offensively, by people that have a hard enough time trying to be who they are without catching shit about it.

The worst part is my memory.  I remember the feeling of fighting.  I remember throwing wrenches into the gears.  I remember PosterGASM campaigns and my old cabal and the other shit we got up to, trying to knock people out of their comfortable routine for a surreal moment of WTF.

Now I'm one of those people stuck in the routine.  No cabal, no GASMs, nothing.  I've become a well-oiled cog, doing what I am supposed to do day after day so that I can live my very comfortable life while feeling bad for all the people who cannot have what I have because society has gotten so fucked.

The most subversive thing I do these days is to subtly ship the homophobes I work with together make them uncomfortable.   Secretly leaving little notes on their machine that appear to be love letters or secret admirer notes from one homophobe to another.  Even that I have to be very careful about to make sure I don't cross any lines that could lead to trouble.  And it doesn't really do anything except make me giggle in secret.

I have become, comfortably numb.