Census statistics tell us that 36 million adults in this country have never married, representing 28 percent of households, up from 7 million in 1960 and 13 percent of households. Me and my half-brother are among those (at least since the last time we communicated), which I will talk about later. There are many different reasons for people choosing to be single, and to perfectly honest, there are also many reasons why people shouldn’t get married, at least not to the wrong person.
“Celebrity” marriages are notoriously short-circuited by the narcissism of one or both partners; the Angelina Jolie-Brad Pitt divorce case continues to drag on because the vindictive Jolie—described by one online “expert” as being a “borderline personality with narcissistic and sociopathic features,” which is how a real expert in the field referred to another person we know—wants it to drag on. Pitt seemed to be reasonably well-adjusted until he was persuaded by his biological children with Jolie to “settle down” and marry her so they could be a “real” family, after which he allegedly became a drug and alcohol-fueled “monster” during the marriage that lasted less than 2 years. Of course, there are those who would have us believe there is no “context” to that story.
And so things don’t look to be going so good for Johnny Depp these last few days; I say that not because of any new “evidence” produced—all of Amber Heard’s witnesses admit never to seeing Depp actually hit her, but are making “assumptions” based on messy rooms, or what they “saw” on her face (usually at odds with Depp’s witnesses and medical and law enforcement reports)—but they keep “pounding” on the same isolated incidents without context, and keep referring to Depp as being generally quiet and occasionally amusing until he drank or used drugs, and then became a “monster.” The TMZ video of Depp of “beating” on kitchen cabinets shows only that Depp tried to stop Heard when he realizes that she is taking a video of this while she repeatedly tries to bait him, and the last thing we see in the video is Heard’s famous smirk.
Not that there no hiccups. One of Heard’s witnesses admitted that the desk clerk at a penthouse Depp and Heard in lived didn’t try to hide her dislike of Heard’s freeloader friends (he was one of them) who stayed there. Another of Heard’s friends who was getting free room and board at Depp’s expense, Raquel Pennington, stated in a 2019 deposition brought into evidence that Depp’s current legal team was not involved in, looked unemotional, didn’t “recall" many things, never saw Depp strike Heard and admitted that Heard sometimes wore hair extensions, which probably explained the “clump of hair” that the previous Heard witness testified to. This was that version of Pennington:
Her testimony continued the following day, but this time instead of looking “business-like,” Pennington looked like she had just got up from sleeping in the rain, feigned tears and although again admitting she never actually saw Depp strike Heard—despite the fact that she had been living in the penthouse for a year—this time she “feared” for her:
Heard’s sister Whitney—another freeloader—who had in the past talked about Heard’s abusive behavior even toward her, now freely admitted she would do anything to “protect” her sister, apparently even to soften her recollections of Heard’s behavior; but she admitted that the only person she actually saw striking the other was when Heard struck Depp in the face. While Depp admitted that marks on Heard’s face could have been caused when they “head-butted”—I mean, come on, all those rings that he “always” wore on every finger would have torn Heard’s flesh if her claims were true—Heard claimed on the stand that she never hit anyone, suggesting that she is a pathological liar who believes her own lies are the “truth.”
Nevertheless, if there was a 50-50 chance that Depp might win his case after Heard's cross examination, I wouldn’t even give a 10 percent chance after Wednesday performances, although Heard’s case on Thursday to prove that Depp “defamed” her sank mostly like a stone, especially when calling former Depp attorney and bogey-man Adam Waldman as a hostile witness, who under direct answered only a handful of questions that were not outside the bounds of attorney-client privilege, and on cross Waldman identified by name the 9 people and two police officers who refuted Heard’s abuse claims in the April 21 incident.
Still, unless the jury is capable of seeing the fraud going on seen in testimony such as Pennington’s, it’s going to be tough unless Depp’s witnesses (1) and audio evidence provided sufficient “context” in respect to Heard’s controlling behavior and emotional abuse of Depp (regardless of how the mainstream media is "shaping" the narrative in Heard's favor), and not believe Heard’s witnesses who are simply accusing Depp of abuse almost solely on their interpretation of a drug and alcohol-fueled “monster”—which of course is what Jolie has accused Pitt of being.
But for those who find it “difficult” to believe that a man’s character can be “shaped” by a woman’s abusive behavior, I want to go back to what I wanted to come back to at the top. My half-brother (meaning unlike me, he’s full-blooded “Caucasian”) and myself have been life-long bachelors, while both of my half-sisters are married. My half-brother and myself couldn’t be any more different in appearance and personality; he’s tall and (before he developed a potbelly) reasonably good-looking, gregarious and successful in an upper-middle class way; I encountered one woman he was with who was pushing him in the direction of marriage, but he wasn’t interested.
As for myself, I am “swarthy,” short, a loner and not particularly “successful,” although I am currently making considerably more money in the “twilight” of my working life than at any time in my life before. In my younger days, I might feel being alone wasn’t all that fun, but that ended when I started my video collection to keep me in human company, and frankly I prefer it that way.
Still, there must be some common reason why neither of us ever married. I won’t speculate further on his reasons, but I want to tell a story about another person I know. There are many things that he did in his youth that he still cringes about when he thinks about them, but then why did he do them? He remembers doing weird things as little kid liking drinking water out of a toilet bowl or being afraid of going to the bathroom at night for fear of someone hearing him. He remembers always doing things on the “sly” from a young age so that his mother didn’t see it. He ran away from home at 14, which lasted all of 12 hours. He rode a bike from Caledonia to South Milwaukee, and shoplifted a can of pop, was caught and his dad had to leave work and pick him up from a police station.
What else. He hid books he didn’t want my mother knowing he was reading. When he was locked outside the house during family outings he was not “invited” to, he waited until the car was out of sight and then picked the hook of a screen door and proceeded to bake his own cookies because he was so hungry; once they came home early, but at least his eldest sister was “impressed” by his baking skills; his backside was less “impressed.” His mother was convinced that he “stole” everything that she discovered on him; she was right in a fashion: his siblings were well-endowed with weekly allowances, but he never received a dime, even though he had to do all the "dirty" chores, like pulling weeds in the garden and shoveling manure. However, when the proceeds from his dad’s paycheck was left on the kitchen table, he “helped” himself to a $20 bill when no one was looking (that bought a lot in those days).
Then things really get interesting: they were friends with the closest neighbors down the road, an older couple, and after they moved up near Eau Claire, his mother convinced them to take him on as a boarder. It was OK for three or four months and he did summer work and started school, but then one day he was switching TV channels with the remote and it stopped working. In all likelihood it wasn’t “broke,” the battery just needed replaced. But this elicited angry scoldings and accusations, and in response he simply crawled back inside his shell and they didn’t know how or want to respond to this.
His parents were called to pick him up; somewhere between Eau Claire and Madison his mother starting rummaging through his things in the car and found a Playboy centerfold; the car was stopped on the side of the highway and he was kicked out. He didn’t recall if he was left with a bicycle to return home or “found” one later on (probably the latter), but instead of trying to cover 150 miles back home on his own, he decided he wasn’t going home at all. During the next two weeks he remembered finding himself in Dubuque, Iowa and then somewhere in the middle of Illinois; he probably wanted to end up somewhere where it was “warm.” Of course he eventually attracted the interest of police since he was “new” in the neighborhood, and he found himself waiting for someone to drive down to pick him up at a police station. Strangely enough, his mother seemed relieved that he was “found” and not dead somewhere to have that on her conscience.
But things didn’t change once he was back home, and after the "mystery of the missing cookie" was "solved" a month or two later, he found himself enlisted in the Army. He didn’t emerge from the service necessarily a more “social” person, but someone who did learn how to act “normal.”
That means there was “context” to this story. What we are looking at here…
…are the remnants of a scar on the bridge of his nose still present over a half-century after it was first formed. He was probably about five at the time; he remembered spilling milk from a cereal bowl onto the floor. There was a physical response to that, and then he was in a medical clinic because the wound wasn’t just an ordinary cut, but serious enough to require stitches. He didn’t remember what he was thinking at the time, but the instinctive response was of self-preservation, to avoid doing anything that would cause that response again--or rather, not being seen doing anything that would elicit such a response. When someone is looking for something that "requires" punishment for, the imagination can see a lot of things, and that seemed an almost daily occurrence.
As time went along the efforts to "fix" the problem went something like this: the inability or desire to understand that “unpredictable” and “contrary” behavior could be relieved by showing a little kindness, as his dad in about the only time he dared try to "cross" his mother on the subject, suggesting that she might follow such as suggested by a psychiatrist; but this was angrily debunked as “he is the one who’s crazy.” The question of “Has your mother ever hit you?” elicited a cold stare of “Don’t you dare say ‘Yes.’”
School was a relief not because he enjoyed learning, but because it was at least a temporary stay from what he knew was going on back home. It was always a “relief” to see mom’s car not in the driveway, because that might mean that she hadn’t had time to roam around the house looking for something to be angry about. But it was always a lose-lose situation. He wasn’t supposed to own anything unless she gave it to him personally; hiding something only delayed the “inevitable.”
Once in a long while there might be a “break” when his mother decided to be “nice” to him, but these respites generally lasted only a week or two. But if he thought he could go about and do things like a “normal” person at these times, he would be soon disabused. If he thought he could actually ask for something instead of doing it on the “sly,” the response was typically an angry accusation that he was trying to “take advantage’ of her, and it would soon be back to the other “normal.”
One day he was walking to class inside the high school he attended when a teacher exclaimed in horror about the welts she saw around his neck. He lied about where they came from, saying that the school bus had an “accident” and the welts were the result of a whiplash. His mother was called and he was sent to a hospital, where he was given a neck brace. He wondered what the doctor actually thought about it, but more “interesting” was that his mother actually “believed” his story too—or pretended that she did; she knew very well where he really got those welts from.
Of course his siblings knew all about his shortcomings, but apparently remained willfully blind to or simply did not “see” the other things—or maybe they didn't hear” him howling in pain from the cold being locked out in subfreezing winter nights. Or maybe they were just glad someone else was getting all mom’s bad side “attention.” Nevertheless, he never “hated” his mother; in fact to him “hate” is not any more a real emotion than “love,” which he didn’t know anything about either, to put it bluntly. He knew there were problems surrounding his conception and birth, and he was sure in her mind he had “ruined” her aspirations in life and he hadn’t done much to “justify” his being allowed to be born. In fact she once told him that “I wish I never let you be born”—not in response to what has been discussed here, but after he told her about the prejudice he encountered because of his “ethnicity.” But there probably was the sense of her being the “victim” of fate there as well.
When he returned “home” from the service to go back to school, he didn’t feel any animosity about the past. The Army hadn’t changed his status as a “loner,” but he no longer felt any fear, he did as he pleased, like any “normal” person. Perhaps his mother was a bit befuddled by this “changed” person who she thought wrote letters home that sounded like something an educated person would write was just him trying to be a “smart aleck” and not his "true self."
Perhaps more discombobulating was the realization that he didn’t really have any “natural” criminal inclinations, when he was once expected to be headed to a bad end. When he enlisted in the Army before he had a chance to finish high school (he obtained a GED in the service), it was that or the prison cell or graveyard; when he came back, he graduated from college in three years with honors. His personality hadn’t really “changed” in any meaningful way; what had changed was he had learned to behave “normal” in an environment free of fear and loathing.
Well, that’s one
“story” explaining why perhaps in a subconscious way someone equated living
with someone of the opposite sex on a long-term basis with trepidation; living
a “normal” life means living alone without being in a constant state of fear of
the actions of another that causes one to act “abnormally.” One thing that is for certain that one can
feel for Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp for believing they were in a loving relationship, and
instead finding themselves in something completely different, which turned them
into people they would not of been otherwise--even in Depp's case as a habitual wine drinker and pot smoker, a combination that never rose to level of being a serious issue until the toxic additive of a narcissistic, abusive individual.
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