so, the way this is going to work until i can catch back up is that i'll need to sort through all of these files, organize them properly, and then post them all at once. this first batch of files is going to be fairly quick, as i'm just sorting through some email; i didn't start posting to youtube until around christmas, and i've already posted most of the facebook posts.

something's bugging me, though.

a few days before my father died, he gave me a coat. now, i didn't really think much of this coat, but his side of the family - his mother, his brother and his sister - all thought it was important that i take the coat. so, i took the damned coat. if there was some traditional reasoning behind this, it slipped beyond me both then and now - but if this is my family, and they're carrying through with some tradition, is it not their own responsibility to explain it to me? so, i accepted the gift, but did not attach any meaning to it, and was not told i should have done so, either.

a few days after he died, my sister and my stepmother became frantic about recovering this coat. i have the email record of this, and in hindsight it's fairly curious. why was it so important to get this coat back? it was just a coat...

at the time, my concern was about the use-value of the commodity. i had been spending a lot of time with anarchists and i was really just concerning myself with who would best utilize the coat, as a coat. i figured i might have a use for it as a fall jacket (in hindsight, i think that i would not have and don't at all regret losing the coat, as a commodity), and reasoned that they had the financial ability to purchase another coat, if they so insisted. yet, they continued to demand the return of this coat. i eventually wrote up a kind of sardonic response, asking them to weigh the importance of this coat with other concerns, and they still insisted on the return of the coat. further, some of the language they used produces some further questions.

he was trying to get something across to me, near the end. he even told me that he thought my step-mother was trying to kill him, but.....he was terminal at that point, and on a large amount of drugs (including opiates). even if he was right, he may have been better off.

i didn't have a lot of options at the time. i was on disability, and trying to find a way to get thousands of dollars worth of gear out of my dead father's garage before my step-mother lit it on fire - and i knew from experience that my time window was very short. i am neither exaggerating nor fibbing when i tell you she would have just discarded it without a second thought. when i was young, i was told she was bipolar, but i believe her diagnosis was eventually changed to asperger's; the woman seemed chemically incapable of empathy, and simply did not give a fuck. she seems to have already removed most of his personal belongings from the house within days of his death. that is what we're dealing with - after fifteen years of marriage, his stuff was in the trash within hours, and it's not malicious, it's pathological. i was aware that i was getting ripped off, but it seemed a secondary concern, and i decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

to be clear: i realized this wasn't happening properly, i just decided it wasn't worth it. there would have been some insurance money, but the estate would have been joint and there would have been a lot of debt. after splitting it up a few ways, i don't think i would have ended up with much.

my status as an odsp recipient also drastically restricted my legal rights, and will continue to so long as i remain on it. in the end, i'd rather a steady disability check than a small chunk of cash - and that's the choice i really made.

but, i wonder. was there something in the pocket of that jacket?

i'll never know, really. but, i'll need to call the court house about that probate, eventually.