Member-only story
Inheritance From The Father
— Give me a couple more — I said — if that makes you feel better.
— Don’t you dare talk to me like that! — he replied.
I looked at him and saw folds of flesh under his chin and around his neck. I saw sad wrinkles and grooves. His face was the color of pink from the gifted buttermilk.
He was dressed in his underwear and his belly was bulging creating wrinkles on his shirt. His eyes no longer possessed fierceness, but seemed empty and avoided mine. Something had happened. The bath towels knew it. The shower curtain knew, the mirror knew, the bathtub and toilet knew. My dad turned and walked out the door. He knew it. It was my last beating…
— Charles Bukowski
*
But when I talk to my clients, and people who, they strike me as having some kind of life wisdom that’s really benefited them, and I’m like, ‘well where did that come from, where did you get that?’, and I’ll tell you, it’s always -and I’ll use the word ‘initiation’, even though I feel it’s sort of like a quarter jar word like, at this point, but they had an initiation of some kind, and the initiation could have been through pain, or trauma, or some kind of altered state of consciousness or an incredible series of synchronicities.
— Adam Elenbaas
