2024-03-05

2024-03-05-1709696988i

Thinking about how the closer I feel with a friend the more I insult them. I don’t mean it literally, but I think it’s just the kind of informality culture/sarcasm that I grew up with. As a wildly tangential thought: I also started thinking about how withholding love could be a part of the appeal of that type of interaction (since you express affection by doing the opposite, but with a hopefully understood subtext).

That was kind of the norm in my family, and I wonder where it started. Was it caused by grief? Is this tied back to the dramatic nature of comedy and tragedy? The Greeks invented tragedy first, then comedy. It’s not hard ot see how that would be the case. If that’s the case, what does that say about that kind of cultural/familial dark humor?

I don’t think informality culture is a good term for it, since it differs considerably from it in that I think our version is rooted in a difficulty in expressing affection? My granddad lost his dad when he was teenager, and then went and accidentally had kids and married a lady who came from a very hardscrabble/Welsh?/rural family. So both of them, at a tender age, and loaded with unresolved/treated/addressed trauma, built a family that inherited all of these things, How deep do the cracks go?

My dad’s side is largely shadowed by the difficult relationship he had with his dad, and his efforts to avoid that happening between us at any cost since he never got to find closure with granddad. The fact that he died shortly after I was born I’m sure had an hugely imprinting effect on that belief. I wonder what Pedro Achinelli’s dad was like, I’m sure that’s a whole other stream of generational damage.