Home on the Deranged

[Dylan Wiles]

There is a plethora of crap blowing my way lately. It's everywhere I go and I can't escape it no matter how hard I try.

I get it from the internet howlers, from people in the grocery store, even from Conception, my Salvadoran housekeeper ( One dasn't call her 'maid' and why should one? She hasn't hit a lick since I hired her. But she gets the big orange industrial power cord out, hooks it up to the blender and moves our base of operations to the front porch of an evening and I pay her handsomely for that.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah. There is a plethora of crap. And when there is a plethora of one thing there is invariably a dearth of something else. In this case the dearth centers around common sense, basic decency and my inability to find a happy place to sit whilst I wait for the doctor.

I know the late carnage abroad and at home has the yeomanry up in arms and highly nervous but I feel absolutely no need to discuss it around the clock, sometimes with total strangers who pluck at your garments and rail at you over one issue or another. . . pro. . con. . it doesn't matter, putting the squeeze on you for your opinions and then flying into a rage when you have the bad sense to air them.

Please keep your political leanings, your religious convictions and the details of your latest surgery to yourself. I don't do that sort of thing to other people and I don't like having it done to me.

Yes, I respect your opinions, all of them and would fight to the death for your right to have them, even if most of them are the verbal equivalent of the stuff in the bucket they used in Jaws to chum the shark with. And yes, I've occasionally let you 'blood in the water' types actually get me aboard the Orca, against my better judgment, where I inevitably find myself in the stooped position, shoveling right along with Quint and Richard Dreyfus. I confess. I'm guilty.

I've tried, on occasion, to explain my over-the-top hatred of political discussion to one contingent or another but so far I don't think I've been heard above the roar so I'll lay it out one final time.

The reason for my aversion to this sort of sparring goes back to my family (doesn't it always?) and the slings and arrows and sucking chest wounds I sustained in that heaving bosom before I was old enough to fight back or beat a hasty retreat.

My family was a conglomerate of crazies and represented the most diverse cross-section of religious and political blowers you'll be likely to find in this world or any other experiment gone terribly wrong.

We had Republicans, Democrats, Irish protestants, Italian Catholics, Bolsheviks, Marxists, right wing conservatives and left wing liberal 'Ban the Bomber's'. Tossed into the mix in no particular order were rabid bible-thumpers, agnostics, atheists and an assortment of fence-straddlers who came down on the side of anybody that seemed to be winning the argument of the moment or knew where the bourbon was stashed.

And they just had to gather every chance they could.

We'll start with the immediate fam, the inner core of the familial Heart of Darkness if you will, my parents

Dad fancied himself on the side of the liberals. That is if you were white, upwardly mobile and owned a gun. He and my Uncle Newt would always start the festivities, exceeding the two-drink minimum about two hours in, way too early to hope a dose of tryptophan would shut them up.

Uncle Newt was a conspiracy theorist and a man ahead of his time who would begin by informing the room in general that while he lived in New Mexico he'd see'd things at night. He never divulged exactly what things he'd 'see'd' and my Dad would always squelch him saying "Well, hell Newt. If you stand out in the desert sun long enough without a hat on you're bound to see something." It was a well known fact that Uncle Newt drank and not just at holiday gatherings and though he did live in New Mexico in 1947 and his ranch was close to Roswell I think the only thing he 'see'd' was the police towing his pick-up out of a ditch alongside the Extraterrestrial Highway.

Mother's brother, Ripper, was a staunch Baptist reformer until he fell in lust with a Sicilian Mafia Princess named Maria (what else?) and converted to Catholicism in order to win her hand. She returned the favor by informing him on his wedding night she was going the way of the Buddhists, thanking Uncle Ripper for getting her out from under the iron hand of her family. He lived in fear the rest of his life but placated himself by wearing $1200 suits, using the word 'Vegas' to excess and dreaming of playing cards with Frank Sinatra at the Sands. Maria's well connected family attended only one gathering of our tribe and forever thereafter always found an excuse to abstain. I guess we were a little too violent for those timid 'bone-crusher' types.


Aunt Min was a devout follower of the The Church of the First Born and didn't believe in anything except the Power of Prayer. The First Borners did not seek medical attention for their dying children but if one of the elders got a hangnail they hot-footed it to the hospital like Carl Lewis doing the 440. When the argumentation got too intense she would sit in the corner and sway back and forth, trying to 'get an ecstasy', one eye cocked to watch the Macy's parade. Aunt Mobile would sit there across the room, hollering "I see you Min!" every time she caught her peeking.

In the middle of the room would be another Uncle on my Dad's side, Elvin, who in conjunction with his wife had managed to bring prize fighting back to the living room where it belonged and produced three of the ugliest kids God ever allowed to live. (Think 'Booger' in Revenge of the Nerds times three but nowhere near as endearing.) Uncle Elvin would buttonhole a selected victim and stab at them with his finger ( the one on the hand that held the scotch glass) while he expounded on conservative issues of the day and soaked your earth shoes. And since there was no way of winning an argument with Uncle Elvin, at some point Aunt Mobile would rise and sing, "Deuschland, Deuschland, Ubber Alles' in a quavering soprano.

Mother seldom got sucked in to these frays as she and Aunt Maria barracaded themselves in the kitchen, kept the ice trays full and stuffed whatever dead animal was being offered up, but Mom had her own way of getting her ideas out there. She would protest against the war in Viet Nam when Dad was out of town, marching up and down in front of the beauty parlor with her 'Hell No We Wont Go' placards and wrote long disjointed diatribes to Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater that always began,

Dear Crazy Motherf***er,


My cousins, Belle and Thurman, twins who went to NYU and had seen and responded to Patricia Hurst in her beret, wore only clothing from the army-navy store and went on for mind-numbing monosyllabic hours about the Jewish money cartel, the political infrastructure and the running dogs of capitalism. This was a never ending refrain because when one comrade fell the other automatically took up the rant without missing a beat or an adverb.

I never brought friends home for the holidays, or even allowed them to know where I lived because Christmas and Thanksgiving looked a lot like the fall of Saigon. I could never be sure I could secure rescue to innocent bystanders and get them on that last ' real-world' helicopter out by 4:30. That was the deadline because by then the Commies were indeed coming in the persons of my god parents who were invariably late to all family functions. But they had their tracts clutched firmly in hand and ushered in round three, pumpkin pie ala body politic, the 'real time' home version of Final Fantasy.

Is it coming clear now, Slick, why I can't sit still, even at this late date and engage in the screed of the moment with normal people~~or you either? I refuse to do it. I'm too old and cranky now and I might lose control and hurt somebody.

Looking over the above, I now see this is indeed just a sample. I am working on a longer extended version of this piece which I will call ' Insane in the Membrane for no Damn good Reason ' or ' How I escaped the Urban Army and got lost on the Ho Chi Minh trail with George Lincoln Rockwell.'

Love
Dylan

[hester_prynne]

Hah! Tremendous read Dylan. Absolutely love this piece, looking forward to the longer version.

jus fuckin fantastically written, and the contents equally so......
I'm a fan now, for sure!
H

[Arcadia]

what a background display!
I didn´t understand all but I enjoyed reading it.
saludos,

Arcadia

[Axanderdeath]

what a background display!
I didn´t understand all but I enjoyed reading it.
saludos,

Arcadia

r u new to the site? a am the local misspelled and angry fuck--drunk.... NE way your shit id person-nill--whatr I mean by that is, if you ever need to vent email

geoffparsons_3@hotmail.com

I will resomd quickly and be a dick!!


any way any problem you ever have can be triviall,,, live to write and write to live


love


geoff

[Arcadia]

Axanderdeath: I´m not new here. Thanks anyway!

[tinkerjack]

I think I will enjoy the holidays with my family a lot more now that i have read this.