August 10, 2012

• Ten Points for Something That Looks Like Moonshine

  I have been partaking in the recession-era family past time: collecting scrap metal from old dumps. If we find stainless steel, aluminum, or something heavy, it’s a “bonus”. I guess that’s about the only upside to pollution: the ungodly amount of time it takes for trash to break down means that glass and metal are up for grabs sixty years later to whomever has the stomach to dig around in rusty cans for fun and profit (mostly for profit). It’s an investment in the future, for all the wrong reasons.
  I had a strange thought about cognitive growth when I was hanging out with my nephew. People keep asking him where his nose is, and where his eye is, and what color this is, and where is the stuffed cow. These are things that we can ask a fifteen-month-old, because he’s new, and he never gets tired of it. But, when someone says that they don’t like something, be it some type of music, or literature, or an activity, because they find it boring, we call them a snob, and get offended that they don’t share our interests. But, to that person, listening to nothing but bad country music, or watching some newest campy dumb comedy, it’s like asking that person to point to their eye or their nose over and over. They’ve grown beyond it, and should be left alone. Sophistication is not a negative trait, although that thought seems to be gaining in popularity. Kind of like syphilis.
  Tomorrow begins the part of my visit to my family that I’ve been dreading: the potluck with extended family. I had two short phone conversations with the only cool aunts I have (I come from a big family, and only about half of them are the bad kind of crazy, the other half are the good kind), telling me that they weren’t going to be there, to save me from the bad kind of crazy. As much as I love my immediate family, I cannot stand most of the rest of my family, and would probably avoid it, if my mother hadn’t come up with some hairbrained scheme to get my boyfriend to meet the people he’s been avoiding (which didn’t work, it’s just a hairbrained gathering that has no scheme), so now it’s some impromptu going away party for me, so that means that I have to be there with people I don’t care for. By myself. Micah’s not going, my sister’s not going, and Eunice and Mellisa are not going to be there. So it’s down to me, my dad, my nephew, my crazy mother, my crazy aunt, the random distant cousin who now lives with her, my alcoholic uncle, maybe a cousin or two, and my racist grandmother who likes to loom creepily behind people. Maybe I can just take my dad and puddinhead and just go look at some trees for a while. Ugh. On the bright side, maybe I’ll have contracted poison ivy by tomorrow and no one will want to touch me.

  • 10:06 pm
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