SABBATICAL NOTES. 14 JAN 2014 N4

SABBATICAL NOTES. 14 JAN 2014 N4 

FAMILY TELEVISION at my home is really family television. 

We are all gathered at that glaring screen and watching that episode on a mother who has two children, now grown up, with the younger raised by other people now a man at 27. 

The state took him out of his mother's home because of that deplorable domestic condition of rubbish everywhere. 

Anyone on that same channel last night must have felt the same way we felt: we were nauseous.

Still, we endured and we watched the show under the guise of family education.

We did not admit, no one did that I remember, that we are all voyeurs for the extraordinary, and this time around, we enjoyed this practice of voyeurism.

The object of our pathology was this mother who had hoarded everything in her home--yes, everything--that when the neighbors and the two children helped her get back oh her feet again, they collected six tons of garbage in her house.

The garbage included the remnants of a dead cat, a bed that had become the bed of molds and fungi, and a latrine that is worse than the latrine at Auschwitz and Dachau.

Six tons of garbage collected for years and years because the mother who has something in her head did not want to throw any of these, and they are there as visible as the holy apparition in all the places of her house.

The show says she is sick with hoarding, a pathological condition caused by many other things including psychological conditions stemming from childhood trauma and domestic relationships gone sour.

I look at my children, and they look at me, and all of a sudden they tell me I hoard books too!

One even showed me the piles of notes and research materials in one corner of the living that since sabbatical time I have turned into a writing and research laboratory.

Jesus the Christ!

WPH, HI/
14 Jan 2014