It's all still in my head right now, ideas swimming around in free-form, but I am beginning to piece to together a connection between my grandparents' escape from Nazi occupation in 1939, the passing down of intergenerational trauma, and my own, reoccurring, descents into victimization and self-punishment.

My mom has a tendency to brush it off and change the subject when I start to talk about my link to my paternal grandparents' escape from Nazi Germany. Maybe she feels it's a part of my identity that has absolutely nothing to do with her, and maybe she doesn't like that. Perhaps it's just a topic that causes her eyes to glaze over, the way mine do when she begins another diatribe about the state of the healthcare system. 

But I don't think I should dismiss this connection I feel, this need to explore this part of my family's history, and how it has contributed to who I am, both genetically and emotionally. I wonder, is progeny responsible for the indefinable guilt I have experienced since early childhood? Do two generations of repressed trauma and secrecy have a noticeable affect on the third generation?

I've always had this bizarre sense, way back in the depths of my consciousness (however, it is a conscious awareness), that when I am out on the streets, dating ex-cons and murderers, taking drugs, and allowing myself to be abused in various ways, that I am some kind of vigilante investigative reporter, tracking down stories for which most journalists would not risk their lives or reputations. The darkness of the world has always compelled me to make sense of it, to understand the inner workings of said darkness on an individual level. Through understanding a few specific people, I am gaining a generalized education in the development of dysfunction, addiction, and learned (as opposed to instinctual) fear.

I wish I knew my grandparents' story better than I do. I know only surface level information, little more than what is available through a Google search, with justifiable reason. My grandparents, Henry and Elly Glass, were miniature-sized couple who walked slow, were perpetually cold due to prescribed blood-thinning medication intended to counteract years of Elly's Viennese cooking. Despite decades in the U.S., their accents were as heavy as they were precious and they, in true European fashion, had complete outfits for every occasion. Neither owned a single garment made from denim, and they considered peanut butter to be proletariat. Charming as they wereCulturally, we have accepted Holocaust survivors' reluctance to unveil the atrocities they have witnessed. My Jewish heritage was not revealed to me until the summer before my junior year of college. Revealed to me so casually, in passing, and as if the information had always been common knowledge, I was stunned. It's funny to me now, looking back, how plainly it had been presented to me throughout my life. Yet, as casually as it was mentioned to me that August day of 2003, the evidence to back it up was the area of contention, the question that could not be asked directly of either of my grandparents. Also, as I had always been aware of this vague family history, I'd been equally aware that it was not appropriate to ask them about it.

So how do my holocaust survivor grandparents fit into the story of my own life, filled with dangerous characters, illegal substances, and willing footsteps towards complete submergence into anomie? My grandparents, from such a completely different time and place that even with what they had to endure during Hitler's regime, I believe they would've been devastated to learn of the places I had gone willingly, the chemicals I ingested, and the men I allowed to invade my aura.

When I think about what they went through, the adversity they had to overcome, how they had to leave their country, lose friends and family, suffer who knows what kinds of personal violations in order to secure their freedom, I am ashamed of myself. What a complete lack of respect I've had for my family's history.

My grandfather always wanted me to pursue the arts. In his opinion, I should have focused on fashion design. Well, I think that would've been ab-fab, but I was too impatient to learn how to sew. I was also too impatient to learn to play the guitar, deeming null my prospect of becoming the next rock god(dess). I considered other options in the arts, such as painting, but found as a teenager unwilling to get a full-time job for any longer than six months, the cost of materials was a major deterrent. Photography offered even more absurd financial woes.It wasn't that I chose writing as a career path because of it's low overhead, I just got lucky. Writing requires no accompaniment, or special ability other than typing (but even that I postponed until my mid-twenties, opting rather for spiral bound notebook and decent quality pen).

Am I reaching here? Am I wanting to make something out of nothing because of the identity it might provide me? Probably. But I won't know what I'm searching for unless I travel down a few dead ends along the way. Too bad life doesn't have a GPS system. I guess some questions have to be important enough to be worth searching for answers, and getting hopelessly lost along the way. 
 
So today I went to visit my grandma at her new retirement home in Kirkland. The place is really nice and it has a parking garage with visitor spaces. Of course some spaces are specifically for compact cars, which I have. But I ended up having to manuever around this giant Suburban, backing up and pulling forward several times until I could get my car into the space. I see this happening in every parking garage/lot. Who do these people think they are in their Suburbans and SUVs parking in a compact space? Don't get me wrong - I'm usually down for breaking parking lot rules, such as "20 minutes only" or "Pregnancy parking", but that's because those things don't carry the same social impact as the "compact car" suggestion. If it didn't matter whether someone had a compact car then there wouldn't be special spaces created for them. The compact car space is designed to reward those who are socially and environmentally responsible enough not to hog the road, blind people with their raised headlights, contribute to U.S. dependence on foreign oil, or provide fallible proof of having a large penis. When someone with a giant vehicle takes a spot designed for my VW, it annoys me, to say the least. It's on my list of annoying things. (I'll work on that list and post it in the future.) So anyway, I found a notecard and pen in my glovebox and left the owner of the Suburban a note tucked under the windshield wiper. It read, "You do not have a compact car. Please have respect for those who do." Of course, my first instinct was to write a number of explatives, but I've come to understand that you really do attract more flies with honey than "FUCK YOU, YOU COCKSUCKING DOUCHEMACHINE!" I figure the note might have pissed off the owner at first, but like boiled cabbage seeps through the ceiling of the apartment below until the smell is so overwhelming that you can no longer deny it's presence, so too will my words. Next time Suburban owner goes to park in an undeserved compact car space, my words will drift through their mind. They may not heed my advice just yet, they will remember. And every time they enter a parking lot or garage and see a sweet little compact care space right near the entrance, they'll remember. They'll remember until eventually my note has permeated their soul and the guilt can no longer be quashed by six packs of Coors Light and episodes of America's Got Talent. You will rue the day Suburban owner...you will rue the day.