A Failed Life and a Half: A Satire?

Cathy Lucile

With so much going on lately, there hasn't been time to really get into the spirit of being a happy, glowy person. It is quite simple really. The stress, the delusion, the self-loathing, the high blood pressure. I've got so many things to worry about that just the simple need to have some sort of fun or calm has just become uncompromisable. I am very much at the point where I don't even recognize that I'm even alive. Everything is moving too fast, with the kids, the cramped house, the degrading job, and the foul perfect stranger that is living in my house, and sleeping in my bed. Can anything be anymore fucked up right now. Oh! And the cursing. I haven't used the F word since 1991. I'm becoming a foul mouthed bandit of some sort..and I feel that it's okay. With no resentment, I let the perfect stranger that lies in my bed, and makes those 'oh so sexy' twisted facial expressions grace me with the rather small appendage, that I'm not quite sure can be called an actual penis. And I let it happen. I'm glad it's happening. And, it is hard to know that something as this less than mediocre plight become the highlight of my day. Of my week. Of my month. It's depressing. But I'm not depressed. Though I do find myself hovering in doorways 65 percent of the time these days. My award winning mother always laid into about hovering in doorways. "Those how hover in doorways are coming from nowhere, and are often going nowhere." As fate would tell it, this is true. I haven't gone anywhere in my life. And, for the life of me, I cannot remember whether or not I came from anywhere significant in the first place. Speaking of the significant, the feeling of freedom seems to have it's consequences, no? You let that linger in your head too long and you'll have to pay the dirty little price for having too much freedom. At the point when you can no longer prance around, nude in your own home is taken from you because of the wonderful two accidents you reluctantly name Steven and Mika, you have to have some type of resentment. Though I find keeping a closed, and tightly sealed bearer behind my actual feelings is better. And to actively go about your day with the weight of wanting to give your own children the finger can be a disturbing way to relax and make it through the office of those who think so little of you, but smile as you walk by. It's funny how a simple little smile can convey so much. Behind those clenched teeth there is passionate hate that is exploding to come out. Otherwise, it's jealousy, envy, or one of the other Seven Deadly sins, in which so many of us indulge in. I myself, find that a good two minutes of blazing envy can consume whatever feelings of violence one may have. And this one has many.


So I sit and wonder at times. Am I the only one who lives like this. A life of mediocrity. A life of stress, annoying children, high blood pressure, and sleeping with someone who you have deemed to be the perfect stranger, living in your far from perfect house. A house which you are not sure if you should call home? I feel like I am. But I will continue to tell myself that Miss Perfect Patty is also hiding behind a facade. And Daniel Bateman, and Terry Thurman, and Randall Gatsby, too. I like to think that us all, collectively, have preliminary struggles that occasionally fuck us up. Yet, I am hiding behind a facade, of hoping and thinking that my neighbors and co-workers, have more multiple facades than myself, when in reality, I take to cake as the most fallible person on earth. Even now I am hovering in a doorway frame, waiting for the wind to sway me one way or the other. Hoping my dead and gone mother will come out of nowhere and tell me to drop everything and find out where the hell I went wrong. She'd probably say when I came sliding out of her womb. Either way I need some advice, and the only way to get it is to turn to someone who knows what is happening with me right now. The perfect stranger wants to poke me with his appendage again, and try for a baby. Who am I to say no? I let him grace me with those two disgusting children that we both love oh so much, why not? He wants a third bastard in his life, then he'll get it. Who am I to worry if I'm forty-one years old and I have a glandular problem? It makes no difference to me. I feel that taking a quick anti-depressant before sex with anyone helps stave of crying like ,a young stripper paying her way through college, during coitus. And then a nice Valium leaves everyone happy. I would divorce, but I have no really reason to, and my father is always yelling about how so many Americans are getting divorce all of the time, and god forbid I let him down anymore than I already have. "Better to have a failing life, than a failing marriage." And you know that so many people are willing to do what ever it takes to make it look as though they are significantly happy with their significant other. Who am I to break the chain of the Happy Marriage Facade? I'll follow along. I am not a person to make a change, which is why I was thoroughly unwilling to support the election of Sir Barack Obama. I have to advertise my failure into what other want to see, and it's all very worth it. I feel that others think I'm great. Except those who are close to me. Those who know the truth about me and my failed life. Even my sister, crack-addicted Betty is doing better than me. I guess giving sloppy blowjobs in the back of an old 70's style van pays the bills. Or the girl must have some skills. My the loss of the two front teeth gives you an advantage when giving oral stimulation. Yep. This is what I've come to, wondering if my true calling is to be a prostitute slash drug dealer slash short-order cook. Am I meant to dump my family and go out onto the streets of Chicago and sell myself. I'm thinking maybe. I often have thought how it would be to have a real "Pretty Woman" experience. But I digress. I have nothing to really be too pissed or unhappy about, because I'm not. I'm not unhappy, just...bored. And if traveling to Italy, India, and Bali could help me find myself I would have done so already. This is my life. The life of a forty-one year old woman with two children she loves, a perfect stranger with possibly the smallest penis in the world, a dead, award winning mother, a pope-like father, a typical two-faced office job that cannot be deemed as a career, a couple of facade wearing neighbors, a crackhead sister, and high blood pressure. A failed life and a half. Should I be happy? Or happier? Should I be bored? Or am I just an ungrateful white woman with a Benetton Rainbow complex? I think so. And maybe we all are.