taking you home

You watch shows over and over and you don't know exactly why. You watch The Sopranos, about a mob boss in therapy because his mother controls his every thought, even after trying to get him killed then dying herself. He tries to be American and laugh and fight and screw and drink and make money like it's the only thing to do in life but he knows all that is just him fighting the darkness and when it eventually covers him completely his therapist's husband says "is it omerta?" and she says "no, this is something else." Nothing is ever as simple as a sentence, but when I think of white people I think of people who might be lonely and alone and see their families occasionally, might never see them at all, their brothers might be strangers to them. But to my mind that's how they took over the world, that individuality. While the rest of us in the rest of the world live inside our family universe, there is nothing else, even if we can get away from it physically. We have something we love so much. They didn't. We have something we love so much and we have to watch it disintegrate. And nothing is more important to us than making our parents happy and almost none of us can do it. And that's what they used to say about third world people in the history books. We got took over because we were lazy and happy when times were good and slow and sentimental when times were bad. All we really want is to be sitting around a tablecloth on the floor elbow deep in a saucepan. That's why the right wingers want us out, because they think we're weak. When COVID slaughters old people by the bushel, it's us foreigners' kids frantically plugging every loved one into ventilators. Trump and them will pull the plug on their own parents. When you're in the place you belong it all makes sense. So if you're there, stay there. Love your family and add a few people to it and stay there. And if you find yourself somewhere else and you know there's no way back, just be happy you know what love like that feels like, even if you're pretty sure you're never gonna feel it again.