Category: Family

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One Disaster at a time please!

Scnet beetlejuice 5408As of today, all disasters must take a number!

I’ll get to them in the order they occur and in my own damn time.

On the other hand, perhaps just ignoring them might be an option. In the case of sick relatives… Well, that will probably resolve itself on its own.

I know CostCo sells coffins, but do they have a family pack?

The past weeks have been eventful, and while I’m not complaining I sure could use a break.

The problem with aging and having aged parents is that with each passing day it’s ever more likely that something is going to happen where someone you care about someplace winds up in a hospital or the morgue.

In the last month I’ve learned that while I like tiled floors, cleaning blood out of grout is virtually impossible. So that scene in Scarface while memorable, is impractical with advanced forensics and DNA evidence. If you do a chainsaw murder make sure the area has nothing porous anywhere within the splatter zone. 

Not that I’m advocating bloody murders in anyway, it’s just that you’re going to get caught if you use a tile enclosure. Call that my criminal PSA for the year.

About a week after learning the lesson of grout. I was faced with the worst nightmare of anyone living a great distance from family. Death and hospitalization, not in that order… It wouldn’t make any sense to put someone who died in a hospital. What’s the point, right?

Most of my parents generation is in their 80s, many of them are single handedly keeping their local pharmacy open. With advancing age and infirmity comes the likelihood that someone is going to wake up one sunny morning dead. That’s happened in my family. Two days later another member was hospitalized. I’m waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop and taking care of the other half who’s been “off” for the better part of two months. Remember the grout? 

So the horns of dilemma are poking my bottom mercilessly. Do I stay on one coast to look after the other half, or do I head to the other coast to attend one funeral, visit another hospitalized family member and perhaps get back home only to go back to the opposite coast a month of two later.

Numerically speaking two events on the East Coast outweigh one event on the West. Excluding the deceased family member though, the numbers stack up even 1 to 1. Logic says take care of living people because the dead ones are beyond caring.

Over the last year I’ve seen way too much of hospitals, rehab clinics, and Emergency rooms. I hate them all.

So family, you’ve got a choice. Either all go to the same hospital / funeral home at the same time, OR schedule getting sick! In other words take a number and wait your turn!

Yes, yes, I realize that waking up dead is inconvenient and you’ll lose your Tee Time. But think about the rest of us having to clean up the mess. The squabbling, and infighting are awful. Outliers of the family skulking about trying to see if they can score a car or silverware. It is simply annoying and messy. The stress on the other old members of the family takes its toll too. The last thing anyone needs is one of them, already with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, getting a shove into the grave stressing out about your funeral.

So to my family members… Just stick around spend the children’s inheritance on hookers if you want.

Be polite. Be immortal, and make that 6AM Tee Time, maybe you’ll finally break 80. Given that your vision is failing, you’re all old, and no-one is going to say a word if you play someone else’s ball on the green. Just don’t wander off with another group of golfers while the rest of us are looking for the ball that you sliced into the water trap on an adjacent fairway. If it comes to it, I’d be willing to “mulligan” you right to the green if you’d just stick around.

Give it some thought.

Love you all.

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In Northern Florida

Made it to the Tallahassee area.

My Brother was at work when I arrived but I know the secret handshake to get into his place.

It was so nice to walk into a silent house where the temperature wasn’t 83 because unlike at my parent’s house the A/C was on.

I made myself a drink and sat down on the couch listening to quiet music. I guess I fell asleep because I lost some time. The sound of the garage door opening, woke me. I feel so at home in my Brother’s place. Everything is neat and orderly unlike my house, and certainly my parent’s place.

But most wonderful of all was that the dang TV isn’t always blaring. My Brother, like myself only turns on the TV when he’s actually going to watch a program. Neither of us are big on having shouting matches over the racket of the TV. If you’re going to have a conversation, turn off the TV and set aside your phone.

I drove him to work today and will pick him up tonight when he gets off. My being here allowed him to have some work done without needing to take a day off. I’m glad I’m not creating an inconvenience for him. I really like this part of Florida and wish that I could just leave California altogether. 

I’m hoping to be able to do exactly that in the next few years. 

Sitting here in my Brother’s living room I’m catching up on stuff. The ticking of his ships clock on the shelf behind me is comforting and oddly calming. On some level, I’m working through the issues that I observed at my parent’s place. It is only a matter of time before my Mom will be too much for my stepdad to handle. Neither of them are spring chickens and both of them ingest a pharmacological cornucopia with each meal.

I suspect the number of drugs they take will be increasing in the coming months or years. This might be why my Mom is hungry/not hungry a lot of the time.

Speaking of hunger, that’s something I hadn’t been until today. I’m thinking about going out to find something to eat, after that I’ll probably come back and see if I can finish a story I’ve been working on.

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In Florida

I came to Florida to visit my parents. They’re both getting up there and my Mom isn’t doing well.

She calls it a vacation, this is not what I call a vacation. To me a vacation is going someplace that I want to go, and doing stuff that I want to do. Something like hanging out at the beach, or diving a reef, or wandering through a national park.

Her idea of a vacation is having the TV blaring and shouting over it to have a conversation. Her other idea about vacations is stuffing your face all the damn time. As a rule I eat when I’m hungry but that is not allowed here. I think part of the reason I eat only when I’m hungry is because everyone in the family is pretty obese. I do not want to be obese, so I eat in a way that’s dependent on activity. If I’m very active burning a lot of calories, then I’m hungry.

Sitting around blocking out the noise from a TV at 75% volume screaming to have a conversation as if I’m in a bar is taxing but not overly physical.

I’ve not been able to write because if I go into another room to reduce the volume of the TV, then I’m apparently being antisocial. Truth is, I can’t think clearly with the noise, and my stepfather droning on and on about something that is only obliquely related to a question I asked 25 minutes ago. Typically, the question I asked has not been answered, and I’ve forgotten what I asked in the first place.

That being said, I’ve finally come to realize that he’s always been this way, which is why it was so hard for me to get my homework done, and so hard for me to read my schoolbooks when I was a kid living under their roof. I was one of those kids that hated homework, It was a real effort for me to put in the work because I’m easily distracted. So some of this is absolutely on me, but some of it is on them because they didn’t recognize the problem. 

They were both quick to tell me I was smart so there was no excuse for me getting poor grades. It became a no win situation so getting through school became increasingly difficult because my logic is, “If there’s no possibility to win, playing the game is pointless.”

By the time I got to my middle years in high school I’d stopped asking him or my mom for help or clarification on assignments because it always devolved into some weird conversation that didn’t answer the question I’d asked and left me completely confused. 

This was particularly true in math. Asking if I was doing an algebra equation correctly led to all the ways one could do an algebra equation, and how calculus was better anyway. But because the answer was all over the map, instead of looking at the equation on the page and confirming or correcting my process, I didn’t build up the fundamentals and was never sure if I was right or wrong until I got the quiz back.

All this time, I’ve thought I was simply a moron. This is perhaps why I had very little interest in college. 

If you’ve got kids, I beg you. Answer their questions about their homework in a simple straight line fashion. They don’t need to know about all the ways a problem can be solved, binary theory, or the history of the planet, if they’re asking about (a+b)-a*b.

Just a thought.

At the moment they’re at a doctors appointment. I’ve turned off the TV, am doing my laundry, have taken out the trash, and cleaned the place up a bit. I’ve caught up on e-mail,, text messages, and calculated the costs of my trip out here. It’s amazing what I can accomplish if I’m able to hear myself think.

My parents aren’t bad people, they’re just oblivious. My stepfather is a good guy but very self involved. Everything always has to circle back to him and something he’s done or seen.

So everyone in his sphere is minimized and he’s always the most experienced, most intelligent, most wonderful person in the room.

That’s not really good for children who are trying to build a sense of self worth. Sometimes parents need to step back and just acknowledge their children’s accomplishments without comparing them to their own personal accomplishments. Unfortunately that’s now how I was raised when my stepfather came into the picture.

My sister, and my deceased brother who lived in this house much longer than I did are, (or were,) damaged in similar ways.

Like me, my sister has worked very hard at developing her own sense of self and value. I don’t think my deceased brother ever did. I think he might have tried to fill the hole in his heart with sex, (I still don’t know how many times he was married,) I suspect that part of his fantasy world, and substance abuse may have been him self medicating. I don’t know, we didn’t talk and had very little contact through the years.

When they get back, I’ll not be able to write because as soon as I start writing one or both of my parents will want to have a conversation. That’s reasonable since I’m here for a visit. The problem is that it’s kind of the same conversation over and over again.

I’ll hang out until Halloween because it’s one of the holidays that my mom likes, and it will lend itself to family time, the day after halloween I’m probably going to bail. A week of this is enough and I’d like to see my brother in Northern Florida. I can spend a couple of days with him and be in a more normal environment. Then I need to get back to California before Winter really hits.

There’s so much I haven’t gotten done around the house this year. Maybe I’ll be able to do some of those chores before it gets too cold to do them. Then again, maybe we’ll have a warmer year this Winter. 

Guess that’s one of the perks of Climate Change…