Happy Father's Day...

...or as my brother, the man who never misses a chance to play the aggrieved victim calls it, 'Oh yay!  It's another chance for me to pretend to be a victim!' Day.

That was my last try

My older brother Karl never got over the fact that mom gave birth to three more of us kids after she popped him out.  And as a result he's spent the rest of his life being a miserable, greedy, selfish, humorless twat.  Every time there has been any kind of reaching out to have any sort of normal familial relationship, it's been done on my part.  I've had to initiate it.  And every time it happens it ends because he gets his tit in a wringer over some 'slight' on my part.

The latest thing he's pissed off about is a joke I left under a photo of our mother that he had put on Facebook.  He wrote that she had written something unreadable on the back of the photo, so being the clever joker that I've always been, I left a comment saying that what mom had written was something to the effect that I was her favorite child because I was the smartest, the best looking, and clearly the most talented.  I tossed in this bit so he would clearly see it was a joke, "I hope this never gets posted on Facebook, hey wait, what's Facebook?  Oh well, whatever it is I'm sure Steven will be great on it since he is clearly my favorite child."  When I went back to see if he got the joke, I saw that not only did he not get it, he dropped me as a friend.

I've spent most of my life without him in it and I'll gladly spend the rest of it with out him.  As I get older I've discovered that my close friends are my family.  He was just someone who I happened to share a mother and a father with, but at no time, even when we were kids, was he any kind of a brother to me.  I tried to be one to him but it's clear he never wanted it, so to hell with him.

Tiny little bullies

I hate bullies. I hate it that some of these bullies push kids like this to suicide.

Growing up I wore black horn rimmed glasses, wasn't 'tough,' and was smarter than average. All this made me a target for bullies. Yes, I encountered bullies in school, but what's worse was when I went home, the house I lived in was full of bullies.

When my mother got killed on the operating table in 1973 in a Detroit hospital my two brothers, my sister, and I got packed off to live with my crazy aunt and her family. It became pretty clear pretty quickly what the deal was in her house. The deal was she treated us like crap, like we existed to serve her and her kids. She bullied us and treated us like second class citizens, and as a high school friend who I recently reconnected with on Facebook said, "...much like indentured servants; offering you one act of humanity, by allowing you guys to sleep inside the house." If we crossed one of the many boundaries my crazy aunt laid down, she'd think nothing of hitting us with belts, her fists, switches, and once, when I was 12, she threw a stainless steel sauce pan at me. On the day I got out of the hospital after my emergency appendectomy in the mid '70's, I got home and was laying on the couch reading the latest issue of National Geographic that I had gotten out of her purse, it had been sticking up out of her pocket book so it wasn't like I had to dig around in there to find it. She saw me reading it, snatched it out of my hands, and screamed at me for 'stealing it.' She shouted that if I hadn't just gotten out of the hospital she'd have whipped me for stealing her magazine.

And of course all this bad behavior by her towards us didn't go unnoticed by her children. They quickly learned to treat us like we were second class citizens who were there to be bullied. If we had some possession, be it a book, a piece of candy, a record, whatever, and they wanted it, all they had to do was to tell their mother we wouldn't share it with them and she'd force it from us and give it to them. They also copied her violence and psychological abuse towards us. My eldest cousin found out one day that when hit in the nose I would sneeze uncontrollably, so of course for the next few weeks he would chase me down, punch me in the nose to get me to sneeze, and he encouraged others to do the same. His brother not only used physical violence to bully me with, he loved to spread the rumor that I was, as he used to put it, 'a queer.' Both of them encouraged others to treat me and my siblings as badly as they treated me.

I made the decision after my heart attack to cut my crazy aunt and her bullying pack of jackal children out of my life. Being around them, hearing them, hearing from them, all brought my stress levels to rise. So I cut them out of my life. It took awhile for my crazy aunt to get the hint that I didn't want to talk to her when she called me. She finally quit calling and not too soon after that she died. Most of her children got the hint that I didn't want to talk to or hear from them and they quit bugging me.

But one of them has recently tried to establish contact with me through this blog. And because he was raised with such a high sense of entitlement towards me and my family, he can't imagine why I don't like him, won't let him comment on this blog, and don't want him in my life. And like all bullies, he's oblivious to all the bullying he used to inflict on me. When I remind him of some of the shit he and his dead mother used to do to me and my siblings, his only response is to tell me I need 'help.' Actually, I needed help back when I was living in that house with him and his crazy mother. I told him in an email recently to fuck off and I hope it sinks into his drug addled brain. Having a person who used to bully you try to be friends with you is like your rapist wanting to hang out with you right after he finishes raping you.

If you're being bullied, tell someone. And if they don't do anything to help you, keep telling people until someone does help. I couldn't tell anyone for years because the person who was supposed to be looking after me was the ringleader of the people who bullied me the most. And in a strange way, I'm glad others from that era saw what was going on because it shows that I wasn't making shit up and that outsiders could see through the mist of lies and smokescreen of respectability that my crazy aunt tried to project.

Happy Mother's Day to my mom

The late great Norma Kathleen Wells Denton. She was the best.

Grandpa was a union man

That's my maternal grandfather. His name was William Wells. I just found out he worked to bring the union to Ford Motor Company plants in Detroit in the 1930's. I had no idea he did that. I could not be prouder to his blood flowing in my body, to share his genes.

Growing up I was scared of him. He was a cranky old man by the time I hit the scene. He tolerated me and I secretly loved being around him even though he frightened me a little. If he was around today I'd thank him profusely for helping unionize autoworkers. But he'd probably tell me to sit down and be quiet while he was trying to enjoy his TV time. He wasn't big on expressing emotion but I'd give him a hug anyway.

Jealous much?

They finally used a picture of my mother on My Parents Were Awesome. It's a cheesecake shot of my mother. She'd be enormously embarrassed if she was alive to see herself on there, but she'd also get a kick out of it.

And you know what? My mom was awesome so she totally deserves to be there. And my dad was awesome too.

Happy new year everybody!

Another tale from my youth

Click to enlarge and then click the page again.

Stupid shit people said to me (# 2)

One Sunday afternoon in the mid 1970's my crazy aunt forced all us kids into her station wagon and drove us up to Harlan, Kentucky so that we could meet some distant relatives of hers who had the misfortune of living in that hell hole. On the way up there her son, Cousin Psycho, said, "I don't want to go to Harlan." His mother screeched, "Why not honey?" He said in all the seriousness his small violence addled brain could muster, "I don't wanna go there because there's too many black people there."

I started laughing. I said to him, "You're thinking of Harlem. There aren't many, if any, black people in Harlan."

Of course he punched me and said, "Shut up queery. You're not as smart as you think you are." And then he punched me again.

His mother then told me to stop 'causing trouble,' and to leave her son alone.

To this day I have never been back to Harlan.

The end of rage

When my mother died on the operating table in 1973 my mentally ill father, he suffered from acute schizophrenia and clinical depression, had the presence of mind to file a malpractice suit against the doctors and the hospital that killed her. Most every one on both sides of the family said he was stupid to do so but in 1979 it was finally settled and each of us surviving children and my dad got $10,000 each and they admitted that the death of my mom was their fault.

My brother Charlie spent a bunch of his money right away on drugs, a Windjammer cruise, and other things before he went off to the Navy. I'm not sure what my sister Sandy spent hers on but she ran through it pretty quick. I have no idea what my brother Karl spent his on because he didn't live with us. The deal with me was since I was under 18 that money was supposed to be put in a trust fund and go to me in a few months when I finally came of legal age. But my Aunt Rageaholic had other ideas for that cash.

She had opened a restaurant in Lee county called the Wagon Wheel and it lost money from day one. It not only lost money, it sucked money out of the air. If money came around the restaurant gobbled it up like a family values Republican gobbles up hookers and gay sex. She tried everything to make a go of that place, from selling beer and letting people brown bag liquor on the weekends to having live music to wooing the stuck up intolerant religious crowds with an after church Sunday buffet. Nothing worked. And as she lost partner after partner she went deeper into debt and each new partner she found was shadier than the last.

Unlike her kids, I worked my ass off in that restaurant. I 'cooked,' which meant I deep fried shit and manned the grill, I did dishes, waited tables, cleaned, and ran the register when needed. Her kids lived off the glory of having a mother who owned and ran a restaurant, but I was the one who had to actually do the hard work and take the abuse of their nutty mother and her increasingly shady partners.

After I got my money from my mother's malpractice suit I was told to open a checking account in the local bank with it. I had no choice but to obey. I spent maybe $500 of that money on pot, it was only $40 an ounce back then, a new pair of glasses, it was my first pair that weren't el cheap-o black horn rims that my aunt always bought me, some clothes, some magazines, and some record albums. I didn't have much time to spend it because I was going to high school during the day and working at the restaurant at night and on the weekends, for little or no pay I might add.

One day my aunt and her last partner came to me and said they needed to 'borrow' all the cash I had in the bank. They told me they had to pay the light bill, the restaurant supply company, and other bills at the Wagon Wheel. I didn't want to do it but she forced me to. She claimed that they'd pay me back in a week or so and that I was not to worry.

Unfortunately for me I never saw that money again. The restaurant went soon belly up and she declared bankruptcy. Her partner stole everything that wasn't nailed down and I ended up with nothing. The money that I was going to use to pay for my college education was gone and when I asked about it I was told to shut up an be happy that I still had a roof over my head and food on the table.

The reason I tell you this is because the woman who stole the money I got as a result of my mother being killed by incompetent doctors died. Last May. And I just found out about it yesterday.

The reason I wasn't told about her death, she had pancreatic cancer and had refused chemo, was because her children, the cousins I was raised with from the age of 10 who I was told to think of as my brothers and sisters, didn't want me around to remind them of how their mother stole my money and mistreated me and my siblings. They didn't want me around to remind them of how differently their mother treated the two sets of children, hers could do virtually no wrong while me and my siblings could do no right. They didn't want me around when they read the will because it would remind of them of how she stole the money I received because someone killed my mother. They also didn't want me to remind them that all the while growing up the state of Michigan and the commonwealth of Virginia paid their mother cash money to take me and my siblings in and that every pay day that we had from jobs that we worked outside her house or restaurant she made us give her a cut of as well.

After my heart attack my cardiologist told me to reduce the stresses in my life and my crazy Aunt Gerrie and the shit she did to me during those years in Lee county was a major source of stress, and so were her greedy children. So I cut off contact with them. Then I heard that she had cancer and I was hoping that she'd want to clear her conscience and do the right thing before she died and pay me back that money she stole from me, or at least pay it back to me in her will. But it was a false hope. After all, she maintained steadfastly in her final years that she treated all the kids she raised the same, which was out and out bullshit. So, she's dead and I was obviously not in her will and I'm sure she left money to her kids and their kids as well. Which means that those kids of her kids will get a leg up financially, which is something she stole from me. Ironic huh.

Even with all the shit she did to me, the stealing of my money and the verbal and physical abuse she and her kids heaped on me and my brothers and sister, I never hated her. But I did pity her. As she got older all her kids and grandkids moved further and further away from her and they found less and less time to go see her. Most all of her friends deserted her as well because she was such a manipulative controlling woman. She's gone and I'll probably never speak to or see her greedy kids again, maybe it's worth $9500 to have them out of my life for good.

Picky

The fact that I love to cook is a minor miracle, but the fact that I eat as wide a variety of food as I do is an even bigger miracle. I had two strikes against me from the beginning, the first was my mother couldn't cook to save her life and my crazy Aunt Rageaholic used to use threats, intimidation, and physical violence against me to try to make me eat the foods she wanted me to eat when I was a kid.

I'm not sure why my mom was such a lousy cook but back then I didn't care. We didn't go hungry or anything, we just ate a lot of bad foods and convenience foods, it was the dawn of the convenience food era after all. Mom would cook that abomination called 'city chicken,' which was actually veal, as I've written about before, and she'd cook a lot of things like hot dogs, instant mashed potatoes, TV dinners, and lots of things that came out of tin cans. I remember eating lots of canned pudding, I used to love the lemon and butterscotch flavors, tamales in a can, salami and liver loaf sandwiches, sugar sweetened cold cereals, and store brand Twinkies, which were called 'Tiger Tails.' And of course we'd wash all that down with Coke, Kool Aid, and whatever store brand drinks were on sale. I'm guessing that having to look after five rambunctious kids and a mentally ill husband sapped her energy so much that she just took the quickest way possible to fill our always hungry bellies.

About the only fresh thing I remember eating was lettuce. Fruit, not so much. Back then I didn't know any better and I didn't care. I loved eating all that store bought crap and I loved it even more when we got to eat out at McDonald's or A&W.

Don't get me wrong I loved my mom dearly but she really didn't do me any favors in teaching me how and what to eat. She indulged us a bit too much and it was during that period of my life where I began to develop my bad eating habits.

But if my mom indulged us, my crazy aunt went in the other direction, which was just as bad if not worse. Since I went the first ten years of my life eating crap I had no idea what to make of the stuff my aunt made and forced us to eat when we moved in with her and her family after mom died. Suddenly I was confronted with a bevy of weird and strange looking foods. I had seen tomatoes in the grocery store but I had never seen one sliced up and put on my plate. I had had salad a few times at my Aunt Carol's house but when we moved out to the farm in Howell we had it every night and it was drenched in oil and vinegar, two liquids I had never seen or tasted before. Other foods I came into contact with at Aunt Rageaholic's house that I had never eaten before were easy over eggs, fritters, stuffed cabbage, stuffed peppers, fried chicken, parsnips, turnips, stewed greens, fried okra, perogies, beef tongue, liver and onions, and many more. And it was there that I was confronted with the food that made, and still makes me, gag and vomit, the cooked carrot.

What my crazy aunt should have done was let me come to these new foods on my terms and on my time, if I didn't like what she made for lunch or supper then I could have just not eaten it and gone hungry, but that wasn't her way. She lived for and loved to control people, that was her sole purpose in life, to control and dominate others, especially small children. She was one of those people who loved having a big family because having a big family gave her more people to control. And she was not shy about doing it either.

When she ran into a kid, mostly me, who did not like something she cooked she'd shriek, "You don't have to like it, you just have to eat it." My brothers and sister were old enough to appreciate all those new foods, I wasn't. I was a picky eater. I didn't want real mashed potatoes, I wanted those flake potatoes that came from a box. I didn't want fresh tomatoes, I wanted ketchup. And I especially didn't want cooked carrots because as I said before they made me vomit. But that didn't matter to my aunt. What mattered was that I bent to her will and that I did what she told me to do.

The Sunday morning ritual back then, and for many years hence, was before we all left for church, and she made sure we all went to church so everyone could see what a great Christian she was for having taken in me and my siblings, she would sear a pot roast, peel carrots and potatoes, and put all that stuff in a big pot. She'd leave it cooking on low while were in church and by the time we got home it would be done. Then she'd make a salad and we'd have a big meal around one o'clock most every Sunday. I'd eat the meat, the potatoes, and the salad but every week I would not eat the carrots. And every week she'd scream at me for not eating them. Some weeks she'd slap me for not eating them and some weeks she hit me, or get Uncle Adultery to hit me, with a belt to try to make me eat those vile fucking carrots. Some weeks I'd chop them up into tiny pieces and move them around on my plate to make it look like they were gone and some weeks I'd hide them in my napkin and toss it away before she knew what was happening. And most every week one or more of my cousins, her biological kids, would remind her that I had not eaten my carrots. They took perverse pleasure in seeing me get hit, screamed at, and abused for not eating something that made me throw up.

The Sunday meal that made me hate cooked carrots, my cousins, and my crazy aunt.

But all her bullying went for naught. I never ate those cooked carrots. No matter how loudly she screamed, no matter how many times she slapped me, no matter how many times she hit me with a belt, no matter how many times her kids snitched on me, I never ate those fucking slimy things. I still don't eat them to this day.

Back before my heart attack when I still would go around her and her family they would make references to me not eating cooked carrots. They would call those references 'carrot jokes,' as in, "Hey make sure he gets an extra helping of carrots with his meal!" And they'd all laugh uproariously, and point at me. To them it was a joke, to me it was a reminder of how I grew up a third class citizen in what was supposed to be my home. After my cardiologist told me to reduce stress levels in all areas of my life in the wake of my heart attack five years ago I cut my crazy aunt and her kids out of my life because every time I saw or was around them they'd bring up cooked carrots and other stupid stuff from my childhood. My life has been much more peaceful and good without them in it.

But happily I didn't let my bad experiences with food scar me for life. I've grown to love fresh fruit and vegetables, mostly because my girlfriend Sparky was patient with me when we got together and she introduced eating fresh tasty food to my lifeless diet. And I've also grown to love cooking with fresh ingredients.

So if you have kids who are picky eaters now, whatever you do, don't hit them or sceam at them to try to get them to eat whatever foods ghey won't eat right now. Nine time out of ten they'll grow out of being picky and they'll learn to eat and appreciate a wide variety of foods. Being the stirct unyielding parent bent on dominating them to your will will only fuck them up in the long run. Trust me on this one, even though I don't have kids I know what I'm talking about.

This week in swag

My lovely Aunt Gail who lives in the frozen wasteland of Michigan made us this beautiful wall hanging:
She made it for us because she's super nice and because I told her the quilt she made for us that I posted about a few months ago was too nice to use so we planned to hang it on the wall. She said that we were to use the quilt as we would any other quilt and that she'd make us something to hang on a wall.
And as you can see she's as good as her word. We love the birds, some of the bird on the wall hanging flit around our house all year long. And the colors she chose for this piece go well with our red couch and the other stuff we have in our TV room.

Thanks for the art Aunt Gail! We love it!

Happy Mother's Day

Here's some photos of my Mom:

When the noise and stress of having 5 kids and a mentally ill husband got on her nerves, my Mom would go out the front door of our house in the projects in Detroit and she'd sit on the trash cans and watch the neighborhood goings on. I remember running home many a day and seeing her sitting out there.


Here she is before she had me and my late sister Linda. She'd had three kids and a miscarrige by the time this photo was taken.

I was almost 3 when this picture of Mom was taken. When I was hesitant to take naps as a child I'd cry until she came and laid down with me. I was 10 when she passed away and I still miss her to this day. If you still have your mother and you get along with her, then call her and tell her you love her because when she's gone you'll regret not saying it more often when you had the chance.

This week in swag

I've gotten some pretty neat swag in the past few weeks.

My friend Deepti, the fittest chick in the western hemisphere, sent me this postcard from her sojourn to the Galapagos:
It's my first postcard from a South American country! And it's from the island chain that has played a huge part in our understanding of evolution. Yay Darwin! Yay Galapagos Islands! Yay Deepti!


As cool as that postcard is, here's something that is even rarer, it's swag from a member of my extended family:

(close up of the quilt in question)

It's a lap quilt my Aunt Gail in Michigan made for us. It's a very beautiful quilt and Gail is a true fiber artist. She also sent us a Christmas hanging thingy that we love but we only display it during the holidays, so this new quilt she made for us is pretty keen because we can use/display it year around. Thanks again for the great quilt Gail!


And thank all of you folks who have sent me swag in the past, you all rock!

Snow Days

We're actually having a winter this year here in my corner of Tennessee. For the first time in years it's cold for several days at once and we've had a few snow events which were bad enough to have most of the local school systems cancel classes for a few days in a row. Even Sparky's employer has called off classes and closed their offices due to the inclement weather a couple of times this winter.

For the past four or five years we've had no winter to speak of. It's been warmish from December right through to February. Yes, we had a cold day once in awhile but no string of them and we had hardly any snow. But it wasn't always like that around here.

It started snowing on Christmas day in 1976 when I was living at Aunt Rageaholic and Uncle Adultery's farm in Lee County VA and it snowed on and off for the next four weeks. About four inches of snow fell that Christmas day and we were all so excited because we had the next week off to play in it. As the snow fell so did the temperatures, it did not get above freezing for weeks at a time.

Most cities and counties north of the Mason Dixon line know how to do adequate snow removal but in the rural mountainous counties of southwest Virgina/northeast TN the county road crews were not prepared for what hit us that year. The snows fell fast and furious the last week of December and for most of January. And because the road crews could not plow and salt all the roads to a degree that allowed school buses to travel safely on them, when it came time to go back to school after the holidays, school was cancelled.

We lived out in the middle of nowhere there in Lee County on a road that got plowed and salted maybe once a week if we were lucky. I was too young to have my drivers license so I was stuck at home and at the mercy of others when it came to going places. About all I could do was watch the snow fall, watch TV, read, or do chores.

Those were the dark ages back then late 1976/early 1977 entertainment wise. Cable TV was something fancy la dee daa people in big cities had, we had four over the air channels on our TV, NBC out of Bristol, ABC out of Knoxville, CBS out of Johnson City, and PBS out of a phone booth in Sneedville TN. And our TV had no remote, you had to get up and change the channel and if the reception was bad you had to go outside and turn a huge antenna, which we had to have because we lived so far out in the middle of nowhere, until the picture came in decently. VCR's were not big back in 1977 either, they weighed something like 900 pounds and they cost about a million dollars, okay I exaggerate but I'm not too far off. If you wanted to see movies you went to a movie theatre, which meant driving over the mountain to Kingsport, TN, the nearest 'big' town near us at that time. So basically for fun and entertainment we watched shitty 1970's TV, read books, I remember I re-read The Hobbit and the first book and a half of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, read comic books that we had read a million times already, and listen to albums by Yes, Rick Wakeman, Alan Parsons, and other bloated bombastic schlock and roll groups.

At first being off from school was kind of fun. We'd go out and make snowmen, sled down the mountain, go cave exploring, build bonfires, have snowball fights, and hike around the farm. But as the days wore on boredom over took us. I hadn't started smoking cigarettes yet, let alone pot, and I hadn't begun my life long love affair with beer at that point so I couldn't self medicate my way out of the boredom. So we began to pick at one another. You know what I mean, all of us teens would start fights over petty things and soon they would escalate in to shouting matches and then Aunt Rageaholic would step in punish me or my sister, even if her kids were at fault. By the end of the second week of January I felt like I was stuck in a hellish stage play by Jean Paul Sartre.

Outside the snow kept piling up, the cold kept coming, and they kept cancelling school. Then just as things were really bleak, unsettling, and at their worst, something happened that almost drove us all over the edge, Aunt Rageaholic's menopausal rages began. Imagine being trapped in a cage with a mountain lion that is pissed off and hasn't eaten for weeks. Being trapped in that cage would have been a picnic compared with life with my menopausal aunt. She'd fly into a rage if you breathed too loudly, laughed at something she did not find funny, or wore clashing plaids. Anything and everything we did pissed her off more than usual. It was then and there that I learned the meaning of the phrase 'walking on eggshells.'

We got a three day reprieve from her madness when she had to drive my cousin back to college in Berea KY. The snow was falling faster than stock values are falling in today's shitty economy when they set out for Berea College that day. She brushed aside suggestions that she wait a day before driving up there, she was master of the elements she insisted and a little snow didn't scare her, so she made all of us kids, all 6 of us, pack the car for her trip. I was secretly praying that she would not cancel and when she pulled out of the driveway and onto the main road we stood at the window and cheered like the people of Paris cheered when the Allies took it back from the Nazi's. About three hours later she called and said they got as far as Jonesville, which was about 15 miles from the farm, and they were going to have to stay in a motel over night before setting out again the next day.

We had a three day party without her. We stayed up late, played board games, stayed on the phone for hours, ate pounds of bacon, scores of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, drank gallons of orange Kool Aid, and we scarfed down our body weights in cold cereal. Somehow she knew we had too much fun while she was gone so when she got back she made our lives a living hell once more, but nothing she could do could take back the fun we had while she was away.

Towards the end of the third week of being off from school the temperature suddenly shot up one night and a warm wind kicked up. It was almost eerie walking outside and being almost knee deep in snow while a 60 degree wind flew down the valley at us. When we woke up the next day there were hundreds of snow wheels on the ground. They looked like this except for the fact that they were laying flat. They were all over our farm and in town as well. People freaked out and some said it was a sign that the end of times was at hand, which made me laugh.

The snow wheels did turn out to be a sign though, they were a sign that the snow and cold had been broken and a week later we were all back in school and I was never so happy to be free from my crazy menopausal aunt and her psycho kids. Our high school tried like hell to cram in all the stuff we missed over January but it was to no avail because at the end of February/early March the rains started to fall, the creeks and rivers began to rise, and we were out of school for another two weeks due to flooding.

Merry Christmas from the family

That little blond kid sporting what looks like a Christmas morning chubby in his underwear is me. That's my sister Linda behind me and that's our Mom next to her. On the floor is my sister Sandy and next to her is my older brother Charlie and my Dad. My brother Karl was behind the camera and that's why he wasn't in the photo. The picture was taken around 1968 or 1969 I think. Even though we lived in the projects and were poor as church mice we always made out like bandits on Christmas morning. I loved getting up before the sun came up and running down stairs to see what Santa had brought us and watching every one open presents.

Flash forward to today and it's just me and Sparky now on Christmas morning and I still love getting up, although it's not quite as early these days, and doing the opening presents thing. I think I speak for her as well when I say, "Happy Christmas everybody!"

I'll leave you with our new favorite Christmas song:


Odds bless us all, every one!

You want to see the cutest thing ever?

My brother has put together some clips from some old home movies that "star" me and my family. If you watch it, and it's only about 5 minutes long, you'll see my late sister Linda,
my late sister Sandy,
my late brother Charlie,

my late Mom and Dad,
my Aunt Gail and Uncle Bob,
and my brother Karl,
and me of course. I'm the little blonde kid in the red shirt with the huge head. And later you'll see me with my first ever pair of glasses as I show Mom the action figure someone gave me for Christmas.

In a way it's hard for me to watch because when I see my family again it brings back how much I miss them all since they've been gone. But in another way I love seeing all of my brothers and sisters jumping around and being happy. It's cool to see my Mom smiling again and to see Dad alive again if only for a few seconds. Ah well, enjoy the late '60's/early '70's hi-jinks of of me and my family.

The shallow end of my gene pool

It's been a while since I treated you all to a dip in my family's gene pool so here's a post about one of the black sheep in my family.

That handsome dude is my late Uncle Curtiss. I'm guessing that photo was taken some time in the mid 1950's, which would have been just before my parents got married and right about the time Curt started his criminal career.

Remember those cheesy films from the '50's about juvenile delinquents? If you do then you'll remember there was always a character who drank, smoked, and stole cars for joy rides. Well that character was my Uncle Curt. His first brushes with the law, or so I was told anyway, began with him stealing cars. He'd boost the cars and drive the shit out of them and then wreck or sell them. He was pretty good at it but the cops always caught up to him. He was in and out of the Michigan prison system quite a bit in the late '50's and early '60's. He was more in prison than he was out of it and as a result of his life of crime I never knew him when I lived in Michigan. I only heard stories about him.

People on my Dad's side of the family would always tell me what a great guy he was, and then they'd always follow it up with, "If he'd only straighten up and stop stealing and drinking so much." The folks on my Mom's side never talked about him much.

Upon getting released from one prison stay in Michigan Curt decided he'd had enough of the Wolverine state and he hightailed it to California, I'm pretty sure that was in the late 1960's. He went out there and he tried to go straight. He met and married a woman named Beverly and he had a couple of kids with her. He worked a series of dead end jobs and he took up painting after my Dad taught him the basics of it. Curt developed his own unique painting style and I remember being given some smaller paintings he had done, they subsequently ended up in the hands of my late sister and she lost or gave them away. Unfortunately for Curt's family, he also developed a taste for stealing checkbooks and forging checks. He also developed a taste for heroin as well.

Johnny Law caught up with him in sunny California and Curt was put away on forgery, theft, and drug charges. He spent most of the '70's in one California prison or another. During his time in the joint he met Merle Haggard and Charles Manson. Sometime around 1978 he got lucky and got out on parole. He was able to stay out long enough to convince my Dad to come out to live with him and his family, my Dad was going through one of the worst mental illness episodes of his life during that time. Not too long after going out to Cali, my Dad decided that life in the sun was not for him and he moved back to Ypsilanti, Michigan. And after moving back there it was not too long after that that he decided that life in general was not for him and he took his own life. For some reason he had listed Curt as his next of kin, instead of his half sister, my crazy aunt, and it was Curt they notified when they found Dad's body. It was also Curt who called us in Virginia to tell us that Dad was dead. I answered the phone when he called and he told me that my father had committed suicide. Imagine that, the first time I ever speak with the guy and he just flat out tells me my Dad offed himself. He didn't mince words or beat around the bush when he told me either. I remember thinking as I hung up the phone after that our first conversation, "Holy shit, Uncle Curt is an asshole." Then the phone rang a few minutes later and someone said it was Uncle Curt again and he wanted to speak to me. The first words out of his mouth were, "Jeez, I bet you think I'm an asshole for the way I told you about your father's death, don't you?" I told him I did and then I hung up on him. That was 1979.

Soon after that Curt got busted again for forgery. This time he took his forgery to new heights, he was forging checks, cashing them, and bankrolling other criminal ventures with the ill gotten cash. They pretty much threw the book at him this time. He served about 7 or 8 years in San Quentin for his last crime spree.

I had pretty much wrote him off for good after speaking to him those two times and I didn't think twice about it, until one day in the late '80's that is. I was living with my crazy aunt and working some dead end job and hating life in general when one day a huge Cadillac with California plates pulled into the drive way. Out stepped this balding dude who looked a little like my dad and he had a woman with him. They walked up to the porch and my crazy aunt ran out and started screaming how glad she was to see her baby brother. So there he was in the flesh, my Uncle Curt. My aunt immediately insisted they stay with her in her tiny house until they got on their feet job and money wise.

I couldn't help myself, I warmed up to Curt right away. He was funny, subversive, and fun loving. He filled in some of his back story for me during that first month he and Mary stayed there. He told me that the state of California decided that since he wasn't a violent felon and that since he had served the majority of his last sentence he could go free. Upon his release he met Mary and they hit it off. I'm not sure if Mary was born with lady parts but I'm pretty sure she had at least some of them when she and Curt hooked up. They got into heroin upon hooking up but Curt decided that he didn't want to die in prison so they decided to try to kick their habit on a cross country trip that would culminate in him meeting back up with his family. Curt still smoked pot, and so did I back then, so we shared that and we'd both take a drink of hard liquor from time to time, him way more then me. We spent the next few weeks getting high, getting to know one another, and shooting pool.

But my aunt's crazy soon kicked in and she got pissed at Curt's woman for some reason or another and she booted them out. They moved into a trailer about 30 miles from my aunt's place and I hung out with them quite a bit. Mary got a job and Curt coached her on how to get hurt on that job so she could collect a settlement, which she did in short order. He also found a job and he managed to hurt himself on it and he also collected a settlement so they both were soon off work with their bills paid. I liked hanging out with him because he made me laugh and I could talk about anything with him but I could increasingly not stand Mary. She drove me batty and I hated being around her, so I hung out with them less and less.

Around the fall of 1988 I decided that I had had enough of living around my crazy aunt and my fun loving but criminal uncle and I chucked it all moved to Roanoke, VA. While I lived up there Curt and Mary decided they had had enough of Tennessee and they up and moved to Indiana to be around her family. Curt had a heart attack soon after moving there. He and I spoke a few times after his heart attack on the phone but never for very long because Curt was so depressed over his health. Not too long after his heart attck he was diagnosed with some kind of cancer and he passed away rather quickly after being diagnosed.

I'm glad I got to know Curt towards the end of his life rather than at the start of mine. We related to each other more like friends than we did uncle and nephew. True, he was a criminal most of his life but his crimes were not violent ones and he paid his debt to society for most all of them. He was the black sheep of his family and my mentally ill Dad was the lost lamb, but without both of them I wouldn't be who I am today.

Curt is survived by a son and a daughter, who I have never met, and by his first wife Beverly, who I also never met, and by Mary, his common law wife who is still living somehwere in Indiana.

Unfortunately it's World AIDS day again

I hope to live long enough to see this day renamed 'Victory over AIDS Day.' If you click here you can read my post from last year about HIV/AIDS.

"Thank you" doesn't hardly cover it...

...but it'll have to do right now.

Many thanks go out to my Aunt Gail and Uncle Bob for getting us a gift card to Lowe's. We got, from left to right, a bag of potting soil, 2 rug pads, a bottle of toilet cleaner for the half bath, a two pack of smoke detectors, 3 door stops, a can of Johnson's paste wax, a 10 pack of double A batteries, a two pack of nine volt batteries for the smoke detectors (I don't trust the ones that come with them), a new toilet seat for the half bath, 4 six packs of pansies, a mini jade plant, and an ivy plant. Bob and Gail are some of the few relatives on my Mom's side that still have contact with me and they've always been super supportive of me and my brothers and sister. Thanks again for the great card you guys sent us and for the gift card.

Feel the pride

Here's a comment someone left at the local news website where the story of my criminal cousins is displayed:

"Those two inbreds look like something from the Island of Dr. Moreau."

The last time my cousin Dearl, pronounced "Durrell," rhymes with squirrel, talked to me was Superbowl Sunday a few years back. He called to find out the point spread on the big game and when I told him what it was he asked if I knew any bookies who would take some of his action. I told him I did not since I do not bet on sports, so his next question was did I want to bet him on the game. I reminded him I didn't bet on sports and then I reminded him that I had just told him that. He didn't care for my tone of voice so he hung up on me. That was about 6 years ago.

The last time I saw my cousin Connie she had her own business cleaning houses and she seemed to be the only sane person in her family. But I guess the lure of white trash-ism was too strong for her or perhaps she tuned into the siren song of homemade meth and that's all she could hear. Either way her life is in the crapper now. Funny thing though, she and I are the same age but she looks like she's a haggard looking 60 and I look like I'm 45, which I am.

I'm all eat up with family pride and I'm praying to the monkey gods the bore me that neither one of them calls me to be a character witness at their trials because I'll have no choice but to tell the truth about their sordid past.

And in case any of you were wondering, yes, both of them have reproduced.