Wow, it's been forever since I wrote in this blog! I'm so terribly sorry to all of my [non-existent] readers for failing to provide you with my anecdotal ramblings that are surely the only reason you choose to [not] exist. I have some excuses if you care to read them. Last year, for lack of a college-educated term, totally sucked! Well, I guess it didn't totally suck, only a sum of it did. One good thing: I got a new IPod Touch (4th gen) which is great to have with an FM Tuner so I can listen to it through my car's stereo during my work day. Heh... "stereo"... not hardly a fair or accurate title for it, but it emits noise from speakers on either side of the car, which I think, I guess, technically qualifies it as a stereo. The CD player broke on that thing before I even met my car and so I've been forced to listen to the same old classic rock songs on the same old classic rock stations over and over for the past few years since I've owned it. There is only so much Fleetwood Mac/Elton John/Eagles/etc a human brain can contain and I'd reached my limit in 1986. It was patently superfluous and wholly insane, thereafter, to listen to any of them any longer, but I did, because it's better than listening to the rambling anecdotes that mercilessly swirl in my brain whenever I'm driving in silence. I suppose I could've listened to stations that played newer music, like Top 40 stuff or something, but, ya know... I gotta say... I am far, FAR too cool for that! So, now that I've married my new Ipod to an FM Tuner accessory and can listen to my MP3s in the car, work-life is mucho grande (if that means really good, I don't know, I don't speak mexican) and for brief, fleeting moments I feel like an ambassador of coolness who is CERTAIN everyone around her (within earshot) is grateful for her awesome taste in music. I mean, come on, anyone who first hears the signifying shriek of Cowboy Bob's saxophone as it whizzes past them in traffic would surely be enlightened on what real music is all about and would have probably even taken the time to thank me if the light we were stopped at hadn't turned green.
Yes, my new-found musical freedom, plus the fact that I still have a house to stuff all my kids in and food to stuff down their throats, equals up to being all good and not completely sucking, for lack of college. But, as my title eludes, 2010 had some issues and I've got some obituaries to write, here. So, in no particular order of importance, here goes nothing.
Obit #1
My Sex Life: Born 1988, Deceased 2010
Okay, that's a little harsh to say my sex life is deceased. I'm exaggerating a bit. I still have sex but it's purely mechanical, dreadfully safe and horribly routine. And here's why.... The main reason 2010 sucked for me is because my husband developed, early in the year, like around January, a real bad case of something called, Chronic Prostatitis. To the little red line currently squiggling itself under the word 'Prostatitis', it is not spelled wrong, ok, so you can stop squiggling. I don't know what you're insinuating, but I think I'd know if he had a bad case of Chronic Prostitutes, thank you very much. I know prostatitis is spelled correctly because I've read absolutely everything there is to know about it, which is not much. This would be why spell-checker has no idea what I'm trying to type, nobody really knows much about prostatitis. I consulted my old colleagues, Dr. Google and Professor Web, MD, on Paul's symptoms and together we diagnosed it long before Paul's first [real] doctor's appointment. I found out there's no cure for it and the management of the pain offered by the medical community would barely be enough to manage an itch on a mosquito's prick. It took a few months for said medical community to catch up to my googled prognosis and so, by spring of last year, it was officially stated by three different [real] doctors that Paul has Chronic Prostatitis (not prostitutes, which both Paul and I agree, would be much, MUCH better) and it is not curable and is something WE BOTH (mainly him) will have to live with for the rest of our natural lives, thus the "Chronic" part of this condition's name. That means no more of the not-so-safe-sex we once thoroughly enjoyed at random times of the week. Oh and a routine has been developed, on [real] doctor's orders, to ejaculate sperm at least once every day to clear his urethra. So clinical, so yawn-inspiring. The sex life we once had is dead, pretty much, forever. May it RIP. (Okay, the real truth of the matter is, the death of my, let's say youthful, sex life isn't nearly as bad as us coping with Paul being almost completely debilitated but I don't feel like bumming this obituary out with such depressing facts. On to the next set of obits.)
Obits #2 & #3
A couple guys I once knew: Henry and Don
They did not know each other, at all. I knew them each individually and fairly well, all things considered, and they both died this past year.
One guy (Henry) was from SW Michigan, served in the Army during the Vietnam conflict in the late 60s early 70s (or so), became a father shortly thereafter (mine, as a matter of fact) and became a divorced, playboy, drunkard shortly thereafter that. He never remarried which is not a shock because he was unruly, uncommitted (even to himself) and unclean. He lived a Henry Miller-esque life right up until dying right after his 59th birthday. He had no money, no resources and no hope. He had never read Tropic of Cancer (or Capricorn) but still knew to call himself the happiest man alive. He died on a Friday night, or at least, that's when his landlord found his lifeless body in the trailer he was about to be evicted from. I didn't get the news until the following morning.
Saturday mornings... my gosh... I'm blocked from being able to describe exactly what saturday mornings mean to me... there just aren't words good enough to do so. Everyone in my house sleeps in on Saturdays, except me. Coffee, quiet, alone... so good, so very good to me. This quiet-coffee-alone time was disrupted on one particular Saturday this past summer by a phone call from my brother, Brady, another one of Henry and Nan's kids. Those two nut-jobs (Henry and Nan) only had two kids together (THANK GOD). My mom, Nan, went on to have one other kid (my baby brother, Keb) with one other man (some mexican guy named, Manny) but my dad never had any other kids. I always suspected, however, after hearing my dad's wild tales of the French-Cambodian hookers who worked the streets (and hotels after curfew) of Saigon whenever he and his soldier-friends took leave of the battlefield, that I had a sibling of French-Cambodian-Michiganhick decent that was just a few years older than me, but this was never confirmed (nor denied) by my father.
Here's the phone conversation, verbatim, between my brother and I on that quiet saturday morning.
Brady: "Hey, it's Brady, whaturya doin'?"
Me: "Nothing and loving it, how 'bout you? How's the fam?"
Brady: "Good, good, everyone's good. Hey listen, I got some bad news. Or good, depending on how you look at it. Are you sitting?"
Me: "Um, it's Saturday morning, of course I'm sitting. WTF is up, my brotha?"
Brady: "Henry died."
Me: Silence. Eyes blinking.
Brady: "You there?"
Me: "How, when, wait... what? What happened?"
Brady: "Well, you know what happened, he was a drunk. I guess it was kidney failure or something." (It actually turned out to be lung and heart disease that did him in. He was a heavy smoker, too.) "They found him last night in the trailer he was about to get kicked out of."
Me: "Well that'll take the snap out of an angry evictor... finding the evictee dead."
Brady: *chuckles* "Heh, yeah"
The rest of the conversation is too boring to repeat and was mainly about the funeral my brother would pay for entirely (he married well) because I'm too broke and couldn't pay for any part of it (I married a penniless bohemian) and neither of us actually went to. My Dad's brother, Ron, made all the arrangements. My Uncle Ron and his wife, Delores, were there as were my dad's other brothers, Larry and Fred. A few old friends and cousins showed up, too. He was given military rites for his contribution to the "bullshit war we weren't allowed to win" (he watched too many nam movies once he got state-side) and buried at Fort Custer National Cemetery in Kalamazoo County, Michigan.
If you can't tell already, I wasn't raised by my father. My mother decided to divorce him, after 3 years of marriage, when she caught him and his cousin, Jim, having a threesome with some extremely ugly, fat, and a bit retarded, prostitute who lived in the same trailer park we lived in. (My mother would kill me if I described her in any better of a light). Nan was like, 9 1/2 months pregnant with Brady at the time, but only for the rest of that day. -I was recently pregnant for the last time in my life (I SWEAR TO GOD) and in the last trimester all my online pregnant friends who went past their due dates would ask me for advice on how to naturally induce labor. Catching your baby's daddy and his cousin DPing the town hooker-retard is as natural as anything, I think. And apparently, quite effective!- Hey, spell-checker, you may be on to something, I think my dad really did have Chronic Prostitutes! Too bad that wasn't what killed him... woulda been his dream!
He was sexually depraved, for sure. I recently recovered a buried memory, (holy shit, here we go *eye roll*) it was my first memory, actually. I think I was just under 2 when it happened. It's something I've briefly thought about over the years, every once in a while, but never spent more than 2 or 3 minutes trying to remember full details. The recurring first memory always went something like this.... a man walks into the room where I'm playing with some toys, I can't remember, at all, which toys. The man unzips his pants and pulls out his fully erect penis and asks me if I know what it is. I think I answered "no". He says "it's called a penis." and... that's all I've got... I can't remember anything else. For the longest time, the man had no face, I could only look up at him from my short perspective and the portion of my memorial vision of him above his shoulders was always blurred. It occurred to me many, many years into my adulthood, that the man was my father. I forced myself, for some stupid reason, a few years ago, to spend more than 2 or 3 minutes remembering the details and the truth clicked like the sound of a suicidal man's gun going off, that wasn't loaded. The memory is absolutely true and real. The man who gave me my unwarranted, and certainly inappropriate, first lesson in human anatomy could quite possibly not have been my father, but the most unsettling fact remains that he is the most probable culprit.
As I stated earlier, thankfully, I wasn't raised by my dad. I did live with him for about a year when I was a teenager, before I decided to brand him a pedophile in my mind, because my mom and I were perpetually fighting and needed a break from each other. One great thing about Henry, besides the loud-mouthed, loose-living, bar-flying, party-girls who were always around during that year (who I secretly loved and coveted), was his sense of humor. Top-notch! It was tops, I say! To put it plainly, he was fucking crazy! CRAZY I TELL YA! Fun crazy, though. Not psychotic... well maybe psychotic, but fun psychotic. But, he was safe... well maybe not safe, but fun unsafe!
Examples: Everytime we got into his yellow, painted-like-a-bumble-bee, '71 El Camino, he'd throw all the [mostly] empty beer cans from the front seat into the back so I could sit down and he'd say "now, remember, if the cops try to pull me over, I'm not pulling over, I'm just gonna gun it and outrun 'em all the way to Shipsy" and this is where he felt like a father "so you might want to wear your seat belt." I'm not sure if he was serious or not, either way that's some funny shit.
Another time: When I turned 6 my mom let me call my dad so I could talk to him for my birthday. He kept saying "you're sick?! well, you should get to the hospital!"
"No, daddy, I'm six, SIX! S.I.X."
"Oh, wow, that sounds serious, where's your mother, does she know how sick you are?"
"Daddy! Come on! You know what I'm saying! I'm six!"
"Well, sweetheart, I'm so sorry you're sick on your birthday. Hey, I heard eating a bunch of cake will make you feel better."
"Daddy!" I giggled "you're funny!"
And yet another time: When I was living with him as a teenager he would let me have parties at the house. I'm talking legendary, drugs, booze, cops, guns, kids-in-bon-fires, type parties! I grew very popular during the short time I lived in that small, Michiganhick, two-horse, shit-hole town. At one such party I hosted, we were all drunk out of our mind. My dad's friends had decided to come over and show us youngins what the word party really means! "You may know how to spell it, but we know how to do it!" kind of thing... Anyway, one snobby girl from my school ended up at this party and, bless her heart, she fell victim to my dad's favorite drunken prank, the old folded-ketchup-pack-under-the-toilet-seat trick. I remember it well and I never laughed so hard. I'd fallen victim to it myself too many times in the past not to laugh. I was standing in the kitchen smoking a joint with my uncle (seriously) when snobby girl walked in with a look of general-disgust-for-the-entire-room on her face. She managed to yell out, quietly, "where's the bathroom?" My dad perked up "right over here, darlin'!" he yelled back, snickering. I knew she was in for it and if she hadn't been so disgusted with the room in general, I would've stopped her. Instead, I waved as her stare-of-disgust beamed my way and with a smile I pointed towards the bathroom door my dad was gleefully holding open. She was in there for about 2 1/2 minutes before we heard the *POP* and subsequent shriek of horror. Brilliance. Tops, I say!
My dad had the best sense of humor of anyone I ever knew in my life. Mainly because he didn't give a fuck what he said, where he said it, or who he said it to. For that, he's completely redeemed. The clown, the april fool that I am can easily forgive him for something he may or may not have done in the dark recesses of my memory banks or for never offering up a dime towards my support as a child, except for that time I lived with him in my teens, drinking all his beer and smoking all his pot, which I'm sure makes us even. I can forgive him for anything.
The last time I talked to him was the day my 15 year old son was born. He asked me how big his pecker was. I nervously fake-giggled and said, real low into the phone "Dad, that's not funny." Then I told him the baby was 7 lbs 7 ozs. He said "hey, 7 & 7, that's a good drink, I think I'll head to the bar and order one." I smiled so hard I'm sure he could hear it. We were both simply too lazy to maintain a cross-country relationship after that, so we became what Dad's funeral coordinator called "estranged" and never spoke again.
The other guy that died this year, Don, was an actual colleague of mine. He was a fellow appraiser, probably the least knowledgeable one I'd ever worked with, which makes him my all-time favorite. Well, that and the fact he was THE nicest guy EVER! If you knew him, you would agree and even add a "duh". He was also a drunk who served in the Army during the Vietnam conflict in the late 60s, early 70s (or so) but he only drank at night and was otherwise one of the most financially conservative, clean-cut, vanilla-flavored, straight-guys I'd ever met. Well, mostly vanilla, he might've had a strawberry/banana swirl somewhere in there. I am of Michigan-hick decent who works off ignorant stereotypes, so I often suspected him of being bisexual because he was tall, thin, effeminate and before he became an appraiser, back in the 80s, he owned, operated, and instructed at, a local, but fairly large beauty school. -Sunshine Beauty Academy... my friend, Lisa, insisted I let her "practice" on me while she was a student there. My hair was never right again.- Like my father, Don became a father shortly after returning from the war. He shortly thereafter became divorced but remarried a few years after that. His last and final wife was who he was married to when I met him and she reminded me of someone who must've once lived in the allies of New York while moonlighting as a bass player in an all-girl punk band in the late 70s, ya know, an all around heroic figure. Cool like black water, and she had black hair and a smooth voice. She drank a lot, too, but she had low, cool, pot-head eyes. She wasn't, though, a pot-head and she wasn't an ex-punk-rock-girl either. She was, interestingly and heroically enough, in a lesbian relationship before she started dating Don. He told me this fact a long time ago, in the earliest years of our acquaintance, nonchalantly, as though he were mentioning the name of her old boss at the job she once worked at as a t-shirt vendor at the mall (which she also, interestingly enough, did). In the early years when we first met and worked together, he was my superior, but then about 10 years later, when Nan and I owned our own appraisal business, I became his superior. This is the least significant fact of our relationship, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
We hired Don to help pick up the slack we were dealing with as a result of the "boom" in business we were so "lucky" to be experiencing. (If you are a human being on the planet earth, then you know a little something about Real Estate and might even catch on to how hilariously depressing, in a grand scheme sort-of-way, that last, foreshadowing sentence was.) It was during this time that Don and I grew to be good friends. He was a talker, often times to an annoying degree that would cause me to grit my teeth, invisibly, behind my closed mouth, while I nodded and fake chuckled at his stories. Some of them he told me at least 5 or 6 times if not 100. He was just like family. I loved him and his wife and even though I'd never met them, I even loved his kids. Hell, I knew every damn thing there was to know about them.
The appraisal business, eventually, shockingly, slowed back down around 2007(ish) and as an earthling, I'm sure I don't need to go into detail with you on why. Regretfully, after Don left the appraisal world to work with his son in telecommunications, something a little less recession-proof, I didn't get a chance to talk to him in the last 2 or 3 years. He passed away in September and I got the call from the old boss at the first company Don and I worked at together.
Barb: "Hey, it's Barb. How are ya?"
Me: "Hey Barb! Happy to be working. How 'bout you? How's the fam?"
Barb: "Good, we're all good. But I think I have bad news. I just heard from a barely reliable source that Don died."
Me: "What?! Oh my gosh, how?!"
Barb: "Well, I don't know, I don't even know if it's true."
Even though I hadn't worked for her in over 10 years, the boss/employee instincts kicked in...
Me: "Ok, I'm on it, I'll see what I can find out and call you back"
Thirty minutes later, I found out that he had died during emergency heart surgery the day before. I called Barb back and told her the sad news. I hadn't talked to her since her step-son, Matt, committed suicide a few years ago. And before that I hadn't talked to her in over 10 years, since I quit working for her. -Matt, the handsome one. He also worked with Don and I back in those early appraiser days. He was hooked on money and pain pills. He was so hooked on both of them equally he hung himself when they ran out. Many years earlier when we were co-workers we were discussing current events, in particular, Monica Lewinski. He was what the superficial like to call "hot" and I don't mind being superficial when talking about him. He said "of course she sucked him off, he's the president! Hell, even I would suck the president off! *blush* Ya know, if I was a girl, I mean." Good GOD I wanted to fuck him on his desk right there! But, I was married and he was the son of the bitch's husband who signed my paychecks, not to mention barely over the edge of seventeen at the time (god bless that fleetwood mac sometimes, ya know?).-
Anyway, enough of that memory *whew* (I need to get shagged like a retarded hooker!) Where was I? Oh yeah, a few days after talking to Barb about Don's funeral, which I didn't attend, she sent me an e-mail. The subject title was "Don's Obit". In it she said "it's really nice, you should read it." Because I always do what a woman boss tells me, I read it and signed the online guest book with something hoaky and sappy. Unfunny. But, I've decided, since that day, I like the term obit. I never heard or saw obituary shortened that way before. (I'm not that cultured or worldly.) So, Obit it is! What a succinct and cool way to be remembered!
Happy New Year! And plant some new daisy seeds out there before I write your obit, will ya!?!
