Some of the short stories/memoirs I had to read with the Partial Hospitalization group are popping up in my memory right now--bits and pieces of them, anyways. A lot of it, the context etc., I can't remember. This...disturbs me. A while ago I saw that one of these creepy program gurus wrote short stories of allegorical crap, I'm not sure if they were his, or whose they were, but I don't know what they were called and google search turns up nothing useful.
One of them was obviously a metaphor for drug addiction, using a family of bears where the father bear has been eating poisoned food from a toxic waste dump and he's abusing his mate and cub. I don't remember the ending, only that the conclusion seemed rather manipulative and broken-Aesop for its particular genre.
Another was from the perspective of a tree--a tree that looked healthy outside but was rotting from the inside and eventually died, fell over, and re-grew into...something, the details of the end are another blank spot. The phrases I remember were something about the dead husk of the tree "open to the sun and rain and sky," "from that wetness and rot and moisture being reborn" I dunno.
We also read from Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, Tough Stuff Edition. I found it on Amazon. (I called it "Chicken Soup for the Completely Fucked-Up Tortured Soul," needing comic relief, but I digress.) I'm not sure which of the "real life" stories were from that book, but the one about the girl whose mother throws a pot of boiling water at her and the skin on her face falls off might have been from there. The one where I started giggling while the group was reading it, got ripped a new one for laughing, felt like a horrible person because I was laughing at how over-the-top luridly hideous it was and...yeah, I don't know what that is.
There was another one, I don't think it was even from that book, about this one boy who was a runaway and a gay man took him in and then proceeded to use him as a rape receptacle and other degrading homersekshul acts--that was a small part of the whole story, but for some reason it sticks out, maybe my insecurity at having homophobic crap hurled at me, maybe they did emphasize it in a homophobic way, maybe one of my peers said something bigoted, I don't know--and at the end of the story, this kid is going to be sent to jail if he can't reach his mother on the phone, so he calls about five times and she doesn't pick up because she's too drunk to answer. Oh hello manufactured fear of abandonment!
But yeah what the crud was that all, especially the first two, and why would I have this weird mindblank and gross violated feeling about this stuff? This wasn't just "the story disturbed me due to its content," there was something else going on. I had read lots of stuff back then that disturbed other people and I was just fine. The WAY it was discussed tweaked me out, and something is not right here. I have to stop typing.
