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December 02, 2004
Crazy Parents
Last night I was trying to explain the craziness of my parents, but I'm afraid I was at a bit of a loss. They are each crazy in their own way, my dad sane but very strange, my mom definitely illogical and borderline hallucinatory.
I know exactly how they are, but it is rather hard to really describe, and even harder to pull up a single example that epitomizes each one's distinct version of humanity.
So I've given it some thought and I've come up with a few actual descriptive incidences:
I brought a girlfriend home and my dad used tear gas on her "as a joke." Very serious choking, vomitting, and hours of tears followed.
My mom walked in on my sister and her boyfriend having sex, called up every member of her immediate family, then chastized my sister not only for boinking the meathead (who later threatened to murder her and her friends) but for embarrassing her, because "everyone in the family" knew.
They have never used nor drained the hot tub that came with the house they moved into over 5 years ago.
My mother insists that because I talked about going out in public with her and later did we are "dating."
My dad used his riding lawnmower's virgin voyage to run over my childhood dog.
Mom insisted on buying a piano to make the house more like a home; so we could gather around it and carol or something ridiculous. No one has touched the piano. Ever. No one in the family has ever known how to play piano.
Mom has ruined no less than three car doors driving with the car door open.
Dad combed and saved his dog's hair for years so he could use it to stuff a pillow.
Dad is not sure how to spell my name. He chose the name.
After a wedding reception my mom asked me to drive her home because she was "too drunk to drive." I told her I was totally shit-faced and could barely walk, but she insisted. She had had a glass of wine.
Dad has on several occassions urged me to "shack up with" foriegn hookers in order to "learn the language."
My mom prefers to have a car without a radio despite their relative inavailability, "because conversation is better." She spends a vast majority of her driving time alone.
the list goes on...
Posted by calculatoronfire at December 2, 2004 02:42 PM
Comments
hahhahaa dog hair pillow.
Posted by: liveinlove at December 2, 2004 04:07 PM
hi calculator,
nice blog. if this stuff is true your family is extremely weird. especially about not draining the hot tub and spraying your girlfriend with tear gas. it reminds me of stories by david sedaris. you have really cool taste in books and music.
the fact that it reminds me of sedaris means i think you are a good "creative" writer, too. here's a coupla "creative" sites you might like: (1) this site: www.callmegod.blogspot.com (i've never met the person, just happened upon the blog by clicking on the random blog button on blogspot, but this guy writes entertaining stuff so i keep coming back) and (2) my high school friend aaron's site http://www.geocities.com/jawboneofass/
yers,
carl
Posted by: carl at December 3, 2004 08:14 AM
He spent some time telling me about how to make a dog hair pillow. Most of it involved gathering hair for months. Then you had to boil it to kill the junk that lives in the hair. Then finally you fill a pillow with the hair so that you can bring your dog with you where ever you go.
Posted by: brian at December 3, 2004 10:44 AM
Carl,
First off, thanks for the links. I will look at them when I get time. They better be good. If they're not I'll become extremely depressed, and I can tell you are concerned about me and my mental health, so I will give you time (till 1:00pm EST Dec 3, 2004) to retract your suggestions if you see fit. After that it is game on, and I will read and decide what I think of the random blog and your high school friend's web site.
Second, I hold myself to my word. When I say I'll do things, even to myself - and when I talk it is mostly to myself, I do them. Last week I said, "Brian eat all your ham." I've been eating ham sandwiches since (Well, until last night. I got the crazy idea to eat my last dose of ham with potatoes and mushrooms because I didn't have an egg pie handy). And some time ago I told myself to only write absolute truths, or what I perceive or remember to be true on this web site. Sometimes I post fake comments on others' blogs simply because I can. Like once I wrote to somebody and left him a fake comment about my mom dancing the tango with a guy named after a hurricane in a dancehall where the men grabbed the women and spit tequila in the women's mouths (and you can go to his blog http://badnewshughes.blogspot.com to find out if this is true). But as you can tell that is way over the top, and it would never actually happen because my mom is too occupied trying to remove door-open-driving inflicted dents from her car with a bathroom plunger to go to any dance hall.
I promise you it is true, and therefore take offense to you calling my family "extremely weird." Only I can do that.
Just kidding, call them whatever you want. (That was a joke - sometimes I post jokes as well.)
Finally since this is all true stuff it is inherently un-creative. I am sorry if I confused you. But I have read about 3 pages of "Naked" by David Sedaris and find any comparison of my writings to his flattering, which is basically why you got yourself a long winded re-comment to your comment. I felt I owed you (that and I just drank some coffee).
Most of the time I would have just written "thanks."
Posted by: brian at December 3, 2004 11:12 AM
carl,
I am the fruit of the same loins(as my father so eloquently puts it, in public no less) as brian. Everything that he writes is pretty much the truth, he sees things a bit differently than I do in the stories he tells but the differences are in the details. The dog didn't die as a result of the maiden voyage of a riding lawn mower. The lawn mower had been in my fathers service for well over a year. It died because my dad had imbibed too much resonably priced fermented grape juice, impairing his ability to react quickly (especially since the lawn mower was throttling at max speed). The plunger on the dented car door I was present for although I am sure my mother did that a number of times since she asked me a few days earlier if I would come down to do it for her. She saw something similar happen at an auto body shop (she frequents them since she doesn't really know how to drive without hitting things) and figured it would be a good idea.
Our parents are most definitly crazy. I am terrified that I will end up crazy also, I think it would be worse to be crazy like my mom though. I think suicide would be in order then.
truthfully,
Nick (brians older brother)
Posted by: nick at December 6, 2004 12:02 PM
Nick (brians older brother),
Thanks for so eloquently "getting my back" on this one.
Thank you for also cluing me into the fact that I was lied to about my dog's death.
I was told that Dad ran the dog over on his first trip on the yard with the new riding mower. I suppose they figured that with a new mower he had an excuse, like he was unfamiliar with the extremely wide swath it cut (like I was when I, in the same yard, ran over one of their "precious" trees while trying take corners as fast human/riding lawn-mowerly possible), or the brake speed or something. But now I find that dad was just drunk. He will suffer my wrath should I finally get some tickets for my annual visit.
Luckily no one is coming with me and everyone can go un-tear gassed with dad's home made tear gas this holiday season.
Furthermore, thanks for not objecting to the fact that I tried to make some jokes with you involved, and the fact that I think I mixed up the ship/boat thing, and that I never actually told you that the boss said he would put the stories on the web site (if they were good enough) and chose to simply tell you to send them to me so I could show them to my boss.
Also. Does dad pinch your ass when he calls you the "fruit of [his] loins" in public? Or is it just me?
Why do so many people grab my ass so regularly? Is it shaped in such a way as to make its grabbing so tempting or is it a pheromone thing? As a genetically similar male shaped differntly, do you get it to? I realize we've never talked about it before, and this seems like a rather public setting for such a discussion (appearances are deciving, however as I do not think that more than, say, 3 or 4 people read this web site, and you don't know any of them personally), but do tell. I need to know. I've been convinced to banish all forms of deodorant from my home (only a slight exaggeration) in order to umm, well... Never you mind. I just want to know if my ass is going to be grabbed a lot more than it is now.
Brian
PS Never, ever, help mom plunge the car. Not matter how much she asks.
Posted by: brian at December 6, 2004 12:31 PM
yes he does try to pinch the booty but I am bigger and faster than the old man. Mom is getting worse, I went there yesterday and the house was more wrecked than normal. only one room was clean and not stacked a mile high with precious material. as I entered the house she was moving stacks of unread magazines (architectural digest[she loves getting it but never reads it] and other paper crap) off of the chairs in the livingroom. She called Cheryl (my wife for all but brian) into the one clean room and shut the door behind her. Cher got scared when mom asked how thanks giving was since we didn't spend the holiday with her. Cher got out of there asap with as little damage to her as possible. We alotted a half hour to the visit but ended up staying almost a full hour, I was not happy although no plungers came out.
Posted by: nick at December 6, 2004 01:25 PM
Nick (Cheryl's husband),
Mom walked your wife into a room and then closed the door behind them? Like talking about how someone's Thanksgiving went is way too personal to be done in front of one's husband and father-in-law?
That would have freaked me out too. Why is the door shut? What is she going to slit my throat if I say I had a bad holiday?
Are you sure she still gets those architectural digests? I'm not sure, but I think she subscribed once, back in the late 80's (definitely not the 90's) and still has the same stack. After 15 years of looking at the same magazines I'm sure she should have them memorized. That is if she ever even reads them, which I doubt she does.
That is not to draw away from your point that she is getting worse. Last time I was home she forced me to accompany her to Sears (Sears, what the hell is that?) so she could get a lawn mower blade (perhaps to facilitate another of dad's lethal drives around the yard). After a while I gave in, having nothing else to do but stare at the table filled with broken and chipped glassware and desperately try to figure out why they have not replaced their stove that quit working, what, 2 or 3 years ago.
Once there she demanded the cashier give her a lesson on how mulching mowers worked and why her lawn did not look as pretty as her neighbors'. I supposed I was there to call any of the offguard, unknowledgable cashier's bluffs, but I instead slunk back and hid behind a refrigerator like the brave adult that I am.
Are you saying the plungers depress you? The riduculous behavior gets you down?
Just wondering, because it does for me. I sometimes laugh aloud.
You should have seen them fighting over the coleslaw rights after they forced me to pick them up several buckets of crap (coleslaw included) from KFC (why does everything there come in an oversized bucket?). Seriously, like 5 year olds.
That made my day.
Posted by: brian at December 6, 2004 01:57 PM
She took Cheryl there because she was embarrassed about the mess in the rest of the house, Instead of throwing things away and actually cleaning. They got a new stove, dad wants me to come down and help him put it in which means it won't get put in because he won't lhave everything necessary and he won't listen to me when I tell him what needs to be done. once he decided to argue engineering concepts with me like I had no clue. Has he ever taken an engineering class in his entire life? NO! I don't look forward to the days I have to go down and "help", last time I went down to help him set up his jewelry shop which hasn't been set up in seven years or so, I ended up making two cuts with a circular saw. He could have done that himself but I had to drive an hour there and an hour back. they still haven't put furnature back into the dining room that Sean and Sonja tiled nine months or a year ago. I couldn't live like that!
And mom still gets architectural digest, she was getting it all through the '90s. Cher was afraid mom was going to go into another rant about how our family celebrates holidays together and we should be going to the Christmas and all that crap. She wants us to go to midnight mass on new years eve... that's going to happen.
Posted by: nick at December 6, 2004 03:01 PM
Midnight mass on new years! Awesome!
Blood of Christ all around!
She still gets Architectural Digest? Don't you think that some time in the last 15 years or so they would have had an article on how people don't like going over to your house if the only place to sit is covered with stacks of back issues of their magazine?
Dad never asks me for help with anything, with good reason. He asked me to start the grill once (because the stove was broken then too) and I threw in a bunch of sage brush.
The food tasted like crap (and according to dad, who marched down to his lair and looked it up on the internet, potentially poisonous), but I have never been asked to do anything with food since.
Posted by: brian at December 6, 2004 03:32 PM
As the tear-gassed girlfriend of Anecdote #1, I feel the need to throw in my two cents here. Brian, your family is adorably eccentric. I can say that easily, being about 900 miles away, well out of the range of toxic household fumes or any other Manifestation of Crazy. That's how well my therapy has worked.
Posted by: L at December 8, 2004 05:33 PM
Adorably Eccentric?
That's a good one. I'll use that next time I try to get someone to meet my parents. They're adorably eccentric. You'll have a good time. You've got the gas mask, right?"
"No. No reason really."
I had a crazy friend (like, hospital crazy) he called me eccentric. I'm not sure if that is a good or bad thing... A crazy guy calling me eccentric and not the other way around.
Posted by: brian at December 9, 2004 10:58 AM