This could be a bit of a weird one. Tomorrow is the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. I might have already thrown my vote away by voting for a third party or whatever, but in case you need a reminder, the two major candidates are Donald Trump and Joe Biden. I don't like either of them, but that's not a particularly unique or interesting position for me to espouse. And I'm not here to complain about them. Both men have drawn their share of criticism and will doubtless continue to do so. But I thought it might make for a decent blog post to use these two assholes as a springboard to suddenly tell two stories about growing up with my dad.
I suspect it's a common curse to be drawn to some endeavor one is unsuited for. In my case, I have always been fixated on skills to make things, to build something, to create. It's a happy coincidence that I am introspective enough to realize that I have zero talent for such things. My one conceit is my insistence on maintaining my own delusion that I am a writer. But I'll always have a kind of quiet, background envy for all artists, engineers, and artisans. I think being able to make stuff is just about the coolest thing ever. It's also something I'm downright bad at. Well, in my dad's case, he's drawn to salesmanship and business. When I was a kid, he dreamed of running his own business. Later in life, he bounced around in several sales jobs, but could never make it work. Either he lacks my faculty for introspection or I lack his faculty for boldness, but he's chased his futile sales dream numerous times. It's never worked out for him. He's not a good salesman. He wants to be, but that's not how these things work. People who don't know him well sometimes think that he'd be a good salesman because he's boisterous, assertive, and persistent. But those character traits aren't actually what makes someone a good salesman. I forget when I first realized the nature of my dad's plight, but I've have some understanding of this for a long, long time.
In my dad's failed forays into the business world, he latched on to Donald Trump's Art of the Deal. My dad's enthusiasm for Donald Trump was a point of annoyance for me growing up. I mean, it was probably a pretty minor point of annoyance and I think most sons find things about their fathers to gripe about. My dad's weird, misplaced admiration for Donald Trump's shady real estate dealings was a pretty minor source of conflict between us, compared to some other things. But it did leave me hating Donald Trump and his stupid face since around the time I was 11 years old. So in 2016 when Donald Trump's presidential campaign was in the news cycles, I just kept waiting for this all to blow over. So yeah. If you're reading this and you're critical of Donald Trump and his actions as president, just understand that I'll never empathize. Whatever it says about me, I'll never be able to bring myself to care more about Trump's role in governance and the consequences thereof than I'll care about how baffled I was that the personification of my dad's delusions of a life in the business world had somehow come to life and gotten elected president. It was surreal. It still is. It's like working at a job where your boss is literally the villain out of your favorite cartoon as a kid. Even if it turns out to be a miserable job, the weirdness just overrides all that.
I've told some form of that first story to a couple of people. But here's one I've never told anyone. In the mid-90's, two of my mom's close relatives died: her half-sister at the age of 17 of bone cancer and her grandfather at the age of 79 (I think) from Alzheimer's disease. I'm don't really have close relationships with most of my mom's family and I generally have positive impressions of most of them, but they did something here that I don't approve of: they tried to keep me and my younger siblings insulated from the matters surrounding these illnesses and impending deaths. This pissed my dad off and he wasn't having any of it. Since I don't remember (if I did know) and haven't inquired, I can't really be sure what role my mom took in this, whether she sided with my dad right away or whether it took some convincing. But I have to give credit to my dad here. At least in part it was because of him that I got to be there and have some memories of those family members before they died. I can't remember the exact timing too well. I think that I was somewhere in the age range between 8 and 11 throughout both of those cases. Although my younger sister remembers being frustrated at how our family initially hid our aunt's cancer from us, and that frustration influenced her later, I don't think she really remembers that it was our dad who fought against that, nor that he did the same thing in the case of our great-grandfather's Alzheimer's disease.
Watching my great-grandfather's decline was unpleasant, but I remain grateful that I got to see what I did. If you've heard people talk about dementia patients in their families before, all I've got for this one is more of the same. Or rather, I suppose I have less of the same, since we were living about a thousand miles away at the time and I only got a handful of visits with my great-grandfather during this time. I guess one thing I'll note that stuck with me was how even though all the adults tried to explain the memory loss aspect to me, they didn't explain (probably because they didn't know how) the various quirky side effects of advanced dementia. I remember when my great-grandfather was in the nursing home and was being pushed in a wheelchair, that he saw a rug on the floor and remarked on it without understanding that it was a rug on the floor. I gathered from the conversation that he knew he was in a wheelchair and he knew that someone was pushing him in that wheelchair. He seemed to, at that time, recognize the people around him. But in his mind, this rug on the floor was some kind of impassable obstacle, and he believed that the nurse pushing his wheelchair would not be able to traverse it. I scrutinized that rug looking for clues as to why it would seem so different to him. Whenever I see dementia patients, I inevitably compare them to those childhood memories of my great-grandfather. I have a mild fascination with the subject. That probably sounds morbid. Oh well. Anyway, my observation of dementia patients as an adult has been different, albeit not as formative for me, I suppose. My biggest takeaway, since I was in high school really, has been that a big difference between my great-grandfather's case and most other cases I've seen is how rapid his decline was. In every way, from his memory to his motor skills, my great-grandfather's nervous system took a plunge. In most cases, it isn't over so quickly.
I am convinced that Joe Biden is suffering from some form of dementia. I can't prove it, and I'm not a medical professional. This isn't a diagnosis. But I've seen enough of his televised behavior to convince me of this. And I find it alarming that he's being fielded as a presidential candidate. That's separate from other things about him, or it should be. Whatever anyone thinks of him as a person, of his conduct as vice president, of his lengthy career as a senator, of his accomplishments, or of his controversies, pushing someone whose brain is falling apart on him to take a role as top executive in the country is disgusting. He's projected to win. And if that happens, Joe Biden in his current condition becoming president in 2020 surprises me even more than Donald Trump becoming president in 2016.
Either way, all of this crap reminds me of my dad.
