Nothing to see here...

Rather than reading my usual blather today, go read this instead.

Jake and his DP (domestic partner) are awesome.

A Death in the Family

No, not him. This is just a screen cap of him from last night's debate (more like "hissy-fit" than debate, but that's a moot point now).

I'm referring to my aunt who, in her youth, looked like this. She passed away on Monday.



There was a time in my life when I worshipped this woman (no, no Do Day, but my aunt). I thought she was the sanest member of my family of origin. She was the only one of the women whom I lived with while I was raising myself who didn't drink. I loved her for not drinking, and hated my mother and grandmother for getting drunk all the time.

Anyway, as time went by, and I got sober, my aunt and I started drifting apart. She made it clear that she wasn't interested in hearing about my recovery from alcoholism. Her sons, my cousins, also made it clear that they had no intention of getting sober, even though there had been numerous arrests on drunk driving charges and even court-mandated attendance at 12-Step meetings.

Then, about five or six years ago, two things became clear. 1. When I was young there was some disturbance in the family involving some state-sponsored hearing after which my aunt, who had previously been a registered nurse was, suddenly, merely a licensed practical nurse. And 2. When I wanted to talk with her about how her sister and mother's boozing had wrecked my childhood she violently interrupted me with, "the only problem with your childhood was that they loved you TOO MUCH... that was why they drank and fought." In other words, as a child, I was responsible for their drinking and fighting.

It didn't take me long after that call to piece together the whole story. My aunt had become a prescription pill junkie, way back when, had gotten caught stealing drugs, had lost her license over it, and she'd spent the rest of her life numbing the pain with prescription pain killers she'd managed to wheedle out of a succession of doctors whom she bullshitted into dispensing them to her.

And she did NOT want to hear about the "family nature" of addiction (mine) because it would've meant that she would have to look at her own.

And that would not do.

No one in her immediate family called me to tell me the news. True to form for our family I found out about it through a second cousin in Pennsylvania who heard about it from another second cousin in Delaware who thought she read the obituary in the local paper. I confirmed the obit by logging into the paper's site. It said she was survived by a husband and two sons. No mention of any other relatives. It also said that the funeral arrangements were private, with no mention of a service, viewing or burial.

I have chosen to respect their wishes and to stay away. I'm sorry that my family of origin just sort of fell apart like this.

But when push comes to shove, and it comes down to my family or my sobriety,

my sobriety wins.

REVISED: Down with Tyranny Tuesday

This is a redacted version of yesterday's post.

Aside from the fact that I had the most meaningful conversation with my Dad last night that I have ever had with him, there's nothing much to report on the home front. Except that I'm mighty grateful to have been sober long enough for our relationship to have evolved into something I've spent a lifetime wishing we had.

It's a beautiful thing.

Moving right along, it has come to my attention that King George V made a speech on the 4th of July and, apparently, some people actually listened to it. Enough, in fact, to know that he deliberately misquoted Thomas Jefferson by excising a reference to the populace throwing off the tyranny of "monkish" mindlessness, etc., etc.

Apparently KGV has a problem getting behind the idea of the people throwing off anything. Such as tyranny. Especially his.

Here are some other spiffy quotes from Thos. Jefferson, chief author of the Declaration of Independence and fierce opponent of mindless obeisance to tyrants on the subject of religion.

"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity."
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

"But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814

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Mitt Romney did some fudge-packing over the weekend.



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John McCain's minions of evil ejected a little old lady librarian from some get-together in Denver because she had a sign saying that "McCain=Bush." My question, posed elsewhere, is don't the Republicans like Bush anymore?

(The following is a video of the action that ensued, plus some commentary from MSNBC):



Note that the 12'9" cops fairly loom over the little old lady.


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And, finally, there's this. Apparently there really is such a thing. In Ft. Smith, Arkansas. Which may explain a lot of Bill Clinton's hard-coding.

(NOTE: This, apparently, was an elaborately staged gag by Sascha Baron Cohen for some upcoming movie of his... still, I think it's funny enough to leave it.)


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Have a great Tuesday. And don't forget to call the folks. You never know how much longer you'll have 'em.

The Unbearable Yuckiness of Being

My life, for the most part, is one unending string of serene moments. That's been the case ever since I stopped drinking ... and suffered through the first couple of years of sobriety.

Whenever life got disruptive, even for a little while, it generally involved some interaction I was forced to undertake, or to endure, with my biological family of origin.

Things had been pretty quiet on that front for a few years now until a phone call came on Monday evening from my aunt informing me that her first cousin (and my late mom's), the family priest, had passed away that day.

Albert (his name) had, by all accounts, started out in life as a prissy little thing who loved dressing up... like a priest. I remember comments being made about how he was always holier than everybody else and would walk around with a rosary draped over his hands. They packed him off to seminary when he was 18. I can actually remember attending his ordination in Connecticut even though I was only 4 at the time. He was then sent off to Puerto Rico to do his time as a parish priest somewhere in the mountains (no cabanas or beach boys), coming home only occasionally to preside over baptisms, weddings and funerals.

In time I became an altar boy and celebrated mass with Albert a couple of times at the local parish church.

But eventually I outgrew Roman Catholicism (when I grew pubes and realized that they were wrong about me) and I once shocked Albert by playing "The Vatican Rag" by Tom Lehrer for him. Things were never the same between us after that.

We lost touch for years, others kept up the family cohesion. Eventually he got reassigned back to the states. In 1995 I copped a giant resentment over the fact that he wouldn't come home from Pittsburgh to preside at my mom's funeral. I ran into him and his brother, Victor, at my aunt and uncle's 50th wedding anniversary a few years back. Albert had had a foot removed because of diabetes and his brother now helped him around.

After that we started exchanging Christmas cards every year. His were religious but not odious, mine were secular but respectful. We'd both jot a short note to each other expressing our sincere wishes for the health and happiness of the other in the coming year and that would be the end of that.

And now he's gone.

The family (his brother) won't have much to say about the funeral arrangements. The Order he belonged to will pretty much dictate policy in that regard. And trying to find out their plans is like trying to pull sanctified teeth.

Meanwhile, I'm forced to interact on a nearly daily basis with a bunch of people I really don't have very much in common with these days. They tend to be racist, bigoted, homophobic, alcoholic, drug-addicted (legal), co-dependents who love to live their lives as self-inflicted victims. I've been thinking that they'd gotten even nuttier in the last 15 years.

But I was telling this to a friend of mine in recovery earlier today and he said, "Maybe they're not any crazier than they used to be. Maybe you're just a helluva lot saner."

And all of a sudden I was overcome with a feeling of yukiness. How am I supposed to love these people when I can't even stand to be around them anymore?