Insanity and Other Cheap Shots

When I was getting divorced, I ended up moving back home to my parent's house for about a year or a little less. My brother and his kid lived there already.

Me and my two sons were given my nephew's bedroom to stay in and he moved into the den. He and a friend of his would supposedly smoke cigars outside on the porch and then open the door to the den to air the room out.

This is bullshit on the face of it. My mother and brother aren't stupid. They had to know he was doing drugs in the house and this was a cover story.

My father had Alzheimer's and everyone was treating him like shit and justifying it with "He won't remember." Years earlier, I ran a discussion group about neurological stuff called Wired for Science and that's not how that works.

As certain cognitive faculties go, you rely on other forms of memory to cope, including emotion and muscle memory. 

So when you treat a cognitively impaired person like shit, they can't consciously recall the details to accuse you and argue it, but they remember in the form of not trusting you, not liking you and being cranky and uncooperative. 

And when you are dealing with an asshole, rational argument doesn't get you anywhere anyway. They do things like gaslight you, make shit up and use bad faith tactics to pick a fight and reality be damned. Not pertinent because they have no plans to do right by you.

My brother picked a bullshit fight with me the last time I went home to see my dying mother one last time. He and his bitch skank ass ho were just being ugly because they're assholes and nothing he said had any reasonable basis.

Me and my sons knew how to deal with my dad and while we lived there, my dad got less difficult to deal with, a thing I talk some about elsewhere and don't really want to go in depth on in this piece.

One day, my two sons were in the bedroom we were staying in -- again,  this was my nephew's bedroom normally -- and my dad busted in and accused them of doing drugs.

I didn't witness it and it didn't turn into a big problem, but me and my sons were like "Yeah, my nephew is his grandson and my children are his grandsons. My nephew does drugs in the house with a male friend. It's my nephew's bedroom where he accused my two sons of doing drugs which is possibly where they normally do drugs when we aren't here."

So he was not playing with a full deck and my two sons weren't guilty of anything, but he was not just making shit up whole cloth about two young men doing drugs in that bedroom and him not liking it. It's more like mistaken identity. These two young men aren't the two young men in question, but he's not wrong about two young men doing drugs in that room.

But the rest of the family was content to act like "He has Alzheimer's and he's just whackadoodle. Ignore it."

I was in no position to argue with these people. I was job hunting and would have been homeless if they threw me out, so I didn't make a stink about the fact that they all obviously knew about the illicit drug use.

I just messaged a friend online who used to be a dealer and asked questions about needing to take a drug test to get the job at Aflac. I was both assured that secondhand exposure wouldn't show up on the test and told how to pass it "While so high I had trouble peeing into a cup." and got the hell out of there as quickly as I could. 

Later, I spent time homeless with my two sons and one son was accused of messing up the bathroom and we were asked to leave. We didn't mess up the bathroom. Someone else did that.

This stuff shows up in fiction all the time where someone unjustly loses the case, gets fired or otherwise wrongly found guilty for something based on being the wrong gender, wrong skin color, wrong social class, etc.

And while it's frequently useful to use general demographic data to guess at what happened to form a hypothesis to investigate, if you are a judge or other important gatekeeper, using proxies like skin color in place of solid evidence frequently amounts to aiding and abetting people who know how to play the game.