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15:13:36 - 2000-06-04 Today was my family barbecue. I went to work today but when I went in, the bakery told me it was sunday. As I entered the bakery I was late and so I said "Hello, Beautiful Bakery!" very loud so they would not hate me for being late. Turns out I didn't even have to work, this guy I work with told me the wrong day because he thought it was sunday all day yesterday. I stuck my head into the freezer and he apologized so I said it was okay. The thing is, is this meant I was condemned to a day with my family. I drove to ______'s house and found her mother at a gas station en route. I pulled up besides her car and stared at her for a while until she noticed me. She was surprised and laughed really hard because I was there like 5 minutes before she noticed me. Turns out _____ had gone to the beach with some friends. I drove home with a cross strapped to the roof of my car, like this modern martyr of american barbecues. I don't eat meat- I don't even eat eggs or dairy and that includes, for the uninitiated, chicken, fish, milk, soups with milk, bread with eggs, whey butter and honey and anything made with whey, butter, or honey. I am lax on the "made with honey rule." I am not lax on very much else- unless the eggs are local eggs, and I am undecided as to wether locally caught fresh fish is acceptable, but have not yet been faced with that option yet and so don;t have to decide until then. My family today made garlic bread, eggplant stuffed with ricotta, (Italian side) and then steak tips, sausages, and chicken. There was carrots with a cream cheese dip. I ate a bagel and some grapes. My mother is an astrological counselor, aka a tarot card reader, aka, a psychic friend. Or, as we call them in the universities, a fraud. It is not only that she is a Tarot card reader, but she looks down on the traditional tarot card reader. My mother will only read cards in tea rooms, and maintains that she is a Christian tarot card reader because what she does is not "Tarot" but Angel Energy Readings. This means that her detection of your future is based on the "angels" directing her cards. Oddly enough, she still uses the Aliester Crowley deck. The same Aliester Crowley that wrote the Satanic Bible. I have pointed out to my mother that if, perhaps, calling herself a "tarot" reader brings about "the wrong energy," why it is that using the deck of cards designed by the self-proclaimed anti-christ doesn't. I believe her answer had something to do with the fact that she kept the cards under a white crystal when they weren't being used. And some salt. Its easy to see why my mother doesn't believe college helps your future. I should tell her I need $30,000 for a giant prism and a years supply of salt. Meanwhile, My Aunt J is here as well. She decided, as my mother's backdrop of new age music permeates the background, to start doing stretching excersizes with a stick. 360. She draws attention to these excersizes and will not change the subject while she is doing them. They are ridiculous excersizes. She moves a stick back and forth in front of her 60 times, then lifts it up and down 60 times, then back. After, she proceeds to tell us all about three events that happened, and we are unaware of what conclusion we are supposed to draw from these facts. 1. She has had chronic Diarhea for the past month. "Its the flu," my father says, "the flu has been going around." "Its not the flu." she says. "Listen to this." 2. While crossing the street, a car "nearly hit her." "Did it hit you? Were you hurt?" My father asks. "No." she says. "I held out my left arm-" the one that hurts her, she says- "and it just brushed against my arm." 3. While in line for a bus, someone in the crowd with a cast jostled her. On her left side, she obviously wants emphasized. My father is silent. The conclusion? "That bitch." she says. "That bitch has put a curse on me." I am speechless because my aunt is really exceedingly serious. She believes in curses. She is "Italian from the old country." She moved to America when she was 4 in 1926. She is looking, now, to call the police on this woman. The woman is my aunts ex-husbands sister. They are all between 70-80 years old. My Uncle P, who was her ex husband, is dead.
I am quite happy to be only half as italian as all of these people. I am content with my WASP heritage, of french, norwegian and english. I try to emphasize that side more than most. My Aunt was relating a story of a vision she had to my mother- who interrupted her at various points to shout directions to my father, as to where to put the food- about my Uncle Phil. They weren't speaking before he died. She called him after he returned from the hospital to see if he needed everything. As she tells the story- and yes, this is as SHE tells it- he responded with "I need something almost every day, thank god my sister is here." To which my aunt replied, "WELL F*CK YOU AND YOUR SISTER." and hung up. To hear my aunt, who is 74, say "fuck" is a terrible thing and means that she is more than likely very much impassioned about it. "He had his chance at my forgiveness." She says. "But that was that." The original argument between my aunt and uncle stems over a house that is part owned by three brothers. My grandfather- who is not present today- and his two brothers. Uncle Phil was one, and so was Uncle C. The house was inherited by thier mother. It is a three story apartment building with one apartment on each floor. It is located literally in the middle of Logan Airport. The house shakes for 1/3 of the day. I have been in the house. The kitchen on the first floor is slanted at a 15 degree angle. My Grandfather, thank god, said he didn't want the house at all, and left it to the two brothers. Then Uncle Phil wanted to sell it. Uncle C. did not. (If you are wondering, teh term "uncle" is not being used appropriately, but "uncle" is the honorary title given to third cousins, grandparents relatives, etc, who, though distant enough to have no real title, still feel they are close enough to the family to expect one.) They did not speak over it for 35 years, though both continued to live in the same house. Phil's sister lived in the second floor. My Aunt Jenny left my uncle Phil and married his brother. This is what Phil needed her forgiveness for. Meanwhile, my grandmother is losing her memory. She asks the same questions several times a day. Weird things happened today with old people. They made eggplant. My aunt J tried to say she made the eggplant. My Grandmother realized about 10 minutes later what J had said and said "You bought the eggplant." Then my Aunt J said yes, she bought the eggplant. I wonder if my grandmother is losing her memory or just losing track of all the lies people tell. Then later she asked who made the eggplant. At this point even I was confused and didn't blame her for asking. My mother, for some reason, then said that she made the eggplant. I don't understand why. It only confused my grandmother and me more. Then, fully aware of all that had just happened, my Uncle C asked my father if he had made the eggplant. We are sitting at the same table and all of this went down in the time frame of precisely 15 minutes. The strangest part though was that my father admitted that he made the eggplant and had gone so far as to admit that he had grown it in his garden, and launched into how his garden was doing and how the eggplant was coming out this season etc. the thing was is none of this was sarcasm at all, or humorous. Everyone just started lying about the eggplant. The eggplant is in weird metaphysical limbo right now and could or could not exist. Its like that Schrodingers Cat box, where you put the cat into a box with a radioactive particle and a vial of poison and so there is a fifty fity chance that the radioactive particle will trigger the vial of poison and kill the cat. So until you open the box the cat is neither alive nor dead. Hence we have the scenario of Schrodingers Eggplant, placed on a table with my family members, and the true origin point will never be known, and therefore we could never prove conclusively that it has ever truly come into being, particularly now, as it has all been eaten. Anyway I was thinking about my Aunt M, who has a gastrointestinal condition that makes her burp all the time, and trying to figure out what is at the heart of laughter. I mean there are these things that i could alternately weep over or cry over, and I think that I could also perhaps go downstairs and laugh until my throat is sore. I think that there are some things that say too much about the goddamned tragedy we live in. there is nothing at all like someone burping or farting uncontrollably to make you immediately stop believing in any sort of hope for the universe. My Aunt J has got diarhea from being cursed by her ex husbands sister. My Aunt M burps and farts uncontrollably. My mother is playing New Age music in the background and asking my niece about her new cat and my mom asks her, "Does your cat have an angel name?" Meanwhile we are all feasting on huge chunks of charred cow flesh and the torn off limbs of chickens, or, for example, a mixture of flesh and spices shoved into the intestinal lining of a pig. It all keeps getting either more and more horrid, or more and more funny. And I think thats essentially what humor does. It gives you this allowance to excuse the certain things that make you question everything good about the world. Two jokes: 1. I'm terrible at figuring out women. I was invited the other day to have dinner with this girl I met at college. She told me to bring wine and candles. I expected a candle lit, romantic dinner, but it turns out she just wanted to stain my pants and burn me in effigy. 2. My mother never sent me to pre-school. She said it wouldn't really help my career. The core basis of these jokes is just that, to a lighter degree. 1 deals with my frustration at the fact that I consistently misinterpret women and womens intentions. The second joke deals with my frustration at my parents lack of interest in my college career. My thesis is that you can tell how frustrated and hopeless someone is by the mean spiritedness of thier jokes. I think the most depressed, hopeless people are the ones who find fart jokes the most amusing. This is my thesis anyway. Perhaps its not an excuse for the things that make you feel the most hopeless about the world. Its a coping mechanism. But i mean lets face it, while its not a new idea, you know, it is a very meaningful one. It means that our brains have evolved or nature has given us this capacity to deal with these major, pressing philosophical and ethical concerns on meaninglessness and morality and terror and beauty and also has given us the ability to laugh at them and render them unimportant to immediate experience. I think a good joke is like zen, I really do, a good laugh is a very pure experience. I don't know many people who can make me laugh. Maybe three people in the world. Three of whom I have fallen madly in love with and one of whom is Woody Allen. There's this other comedian named Stephen Wright who is kind of hit and miss but when he hits I go crazy. My favorite joke is by him. I wrote about it before, but I'll tell it again. I think it really does capture that whole essence of capturing something very profound in a very simple way; in a way that clicks and makes perfect sense; "As you may know I am the owner of a very large seashell collection. I keep it scattered across beaches all over the world."
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