Woman behold thy daughter, daughter thy mother, & BOTH OF YOU LOSE MY NUMBER!

The BBQ Pit
1

BEING A VERY LAME AND LONG AND POINTLESS RANT ABOUT THE GENS SAMPIRO, appearing in the PIT due to language, and covering the span of three weeks, or thereabouts.
My mother (refresher from other posts: very complex former lady wrestler turned teacher turned therapist who is an all around wonderful human being when she’s not being a barking mad virago determined to turn her children into Carol Burnett’s Eunice “You’ve.gone.one.step.too.far.OLD.WOMAN!” Higgins) and my sister (refresher: self made multimillionaire retired (at 45) Fundie Pharmacist who is a wonderful person when she’s not convinced that Hillary Clinton plans to use aborted fetuses as a tiny zombie army [and dessert topping] or blaming hurricanes on queers) have been at war for the past month. It’s going in Metamucil overdose like waves in which they either won’t talk at all or they talk 10 times a day and each calls me each time because they think I’m on their side and that I give a damn.

It started over the Fourth of July weekend. My sister has a small 2 BR beach house and a small beach condo within walking distance of each other on Alabama’s gulf coast. My mother loves the beach, always has, while I honestly couldn’t care less about it (my apathy for the beach and my apathy for football are the greatest shames to my family [well, there’s the gay thing, but my sister doesn’t know about that and my mother pretends it doesn’t exist]). My sister also has several other homes in the area but all far from the beach. The condo was rented for the holiday until the night of the Fourth but the beach house was free (she rents it only enough to defray the insurance).

My sister invited both of us down. I didn’t want to go as it’s a two hour drive to my mother’s and a three hour drive from there to the coast, but I was guilted into it. My mother is increasingly reclusive, discriminatingly helpless and needs somebody to drive the Isotta Fraschini (I was a teenaged Max von Mayerling to her Norma “I was the greatest flying leg scissors of all time” Desmond, but that’s another story). She also feels the need for somebody to run interference with my sister because she likes to pretend that nobody but me knows that she still smokes two packs a day, plus she needs somebody to walk her sweet obese little terrier because she sure as hell isn’t going to do it as that would almost look like exercise, so I agreed, fine, I’ll go down with you. All is well.

Until I woke up on July 1 with a hacking cough and feeling generally crappy with bronchitis. But, my mother had been looking really really forward to the holiday on the beach, there was a huge fireworks display planned for just off the beach house, and as I said she never goes anywhere (her own fault, but nevertheless pitiable in a way) so I’ll bite the antibiotics and go, planning to leave once I was off work. And, once I was off work (I had just changed offices and my phone hadn’t been crossed over yet so I was hard to reach) I got into the car and noticed there were 13 messages on my cell phone. That’s never good.

Message 1, from my mother: “Call me… you won’t believe what… she… Call me!”

Message 2, from an hour after Message 1: “Call me! I need to tell you what your siste…” [voice breaks]… call me…” (as pitiful as Jane Seymour’s “come back to me!” at the beginning of Somewhere in Time)

Message 3, from 45 minutes after Message 2: “WOULD YOU PLEASE CALL ME! I NEED TO TALK TO YOU! I NEED TO TALK TO SOMEONE! CCCALL ME!”

Message 4, from 30 minutes after Message 3: “I guess you’re on your sister’s side… I’m not surprised… she has money and I don’t and you kids have always bound together in your hatred of me… c-a-l-l me…

Message 5, from 25 minutes after Message 4: “JON ARE YOU THE-YAH? WHERE ARE YOU? THIS IS YOUR MA-MA! WOULD YOU PLLLEAAAAAASE CALL ME!”

By Message 9 or so the contractions are coming 3 minutes apart and I can see the head of the argument. It has something to do with somebody my sister has invited. Then Message 11 is from my sister: “Have you talked to Mama today? I know she’s been trying to call you and God alone knows what she’s gonna tell you, probley that I burned the beach house so she couldn’t enter it and hired a guy from Milwaukee to go and piss in her coffee or some crazy shit like that… well, you call me because I want you to hear my side of it… “

Messages 12 is my mother’s plaintive almost-too-weak-to-hear call me and the last message is just the sound of her TV playing in the background (but caller ID lets me know it’s her).
[LouisArmstrong]”…and I think to myself….”[/LouisArmstrong]

Oh shit, this is going to be a long weekend…

To be continued.

2

Ooh! A Sampiro family post!

grabs popcorn, settles down into the beanbag chair

3

What is it with Alabama? You, Sauron, John Carter of Mars? Whatever… I sit here entranced.

Or I’ll check back in the morning prepared to be entranced. Whatever.

4

My sister’s husband has almost no family. He’s an only child, his dad left when he was a kid, his mother and grandmother who raised him died recently, and most of his cousins are (what’s the policy on whether “white trash” is a hate term when used by whites? well, to be safe I’ll just say that they are) socioeconomically and morally challenged. The exception is his cousin Becky, a 50 something year old teacher who is short and fat and country and bubbly and about as good a “salt of the Earth” person as you’d ever wanna meet. Becky is married to Billy, a… well…

okay, he’s a nice guy, I’m not gonna say he’s not. BUT… he can be annoying. For starters, he recently lost 150 pounds on the Atkins Diet so that he can walk again, which brought him down to (no exag) about 350 pounds and he walks on two canes, and yet he makes constant comments about how smokers have no willpower and people who can’t handle their [illegal drug] addictions should be jailed or deported. He had to retire early due to his obesity related infirmities, but talks about “colored women using up all the workmen’s comp and always being on maternity leave cause they can’t control they’ urges” at his place of employment. He thinks Pat Robertson is this generation’s Isaiah and that George Bush is the nation’s Last Hope. But as long as you can get him off the subject of politics or religion or social issues he’s a really nice guy.

My sister has weird eating habits- she’s a grazer rather than a meal eater- a bag of pork skins here, some peanuts there, some grapes over here, a chicken leg there, and so she’s never hungry for meals and assumes nobody else is (just as she assumes that if she’s awake then by logical extension everybody she knows is and it’s fine to call). Billy as I mentioned is on Atkins, which essentially means his wife is (she’s chubby but nothing like him) which means their diet is severely limited. My sister’s husband is- technically- not supposed to eat fat (due to his gout and weight), leafy vegetables (he takes blood thinners due to a stroke two years ago when he was in his mid-40s [which he’s pretty much recovered from], or sugar (he’s borderline diabetic), meaning his own diet (if he followed it which he rarely does [for which I can’t fault him, it would be damned near impossible to derive any pleasure from eating if he did]) is the most restrictive by far.

My mother otoh is a coffee/danish for breakfast person who eats two balanced meals during the rest of the day and can’t stand snacks. She also has a major sweet tooth and loves her desserts. She’s a great cook, though she couldn’t be more southern if she tried (save for a love of congealed drippings passed down from her Jewish grandmother to add just a little cholesterol to her diet). “Vegetable” to her is defined as “any dish that is less than 40% pork by mass” (she stops just short of adding sidemeat to Cheerios and hot chocolate). One of my favorite tales of my mother and her culinary practices is when I attempted to persuade her to cut some calories and cook fewer fried foods by giving her a George Foreman grill. The next time I came home she used it to cook some pork chops and told me “These things are great… I love the way they catch the drippin’s” whereupon she took the drip pan and poured it back over the meat she’d just taken up. (Other times she let’s it congeal and eats it on a biscuit.)

So, the point is that my mother has to have balanced fatty meals with loads of carbs (she loves sugar, bread, rice, potatoes, etc., and though overweight isn’t grossly so and has unbelievably low cholesterol). She used to complain that whenever she visited my sister she practically got chained to the stove so that my sister and her husband could have home cookin’ (this is true, my sister and her husband rarely cook themselves but love other folkses meals), but the last couple of times she visited she was even more frustrated because nobody else ever wanted to have an actual “set down say your prayer and pass the peas” meal due to the grazing and weird diets, but at the same point she felt they were “holding me hostage” and “God forbid I try to go to a restaurant- they’d have a fit” (which is semi-true- my sister for reasons known to her and God has issues with people leaving her house when they’re visiting, but not to the extent my mother claims she does) and for Becky and Billy, whom my mother has met many times (she likes Becky, Billy not so much- good guy but gets on your nerves really quick) it’s impossible to cook a meal using her usual repertoire. Okay, sound complicated? It is.

Now let’s add that Billy is allergic to dogs, and Becky is afraid of them. And my mother was going to bring her (supersweet but obese) Rat Terrier and I was going to bring my (supersweet but “endearingly stupid” and super hyper) Rat Russell terrier. And Kathi invited Becky and Billy for the Fourth as well (remember that they’re her husband’s only relatives) and didn’t tell my mother this until Friday, July 1.

So, the backstory took a lot of time, but it’ll get faster from here.

TBC

5

I call my mother, who tells me about my sister inviting her husband’s cousins.

"I JUST CAN’T BELIEVE SHE DID THAT? WHY IN HELL WOULD SHE DO THAT? IT’S BECAUSE SHE HATES ME, THAT’S WHY! SHE’S SETTIN’ DOWN THERE LAUGHING AT ME RIGHT NOW! "

Me: Or because they’re her only husband’s only relatives…

“BUT THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE OUR WEEKEND! MINE AND YOURS AND HERS AND JOHN’S [my sister’s husband] AND THE DOGS! AND MARTY [the obese terrier] HAS BEEN SO EXCITED ABOUT GETTING TO GO SOMEWHERE AND HE’S HAD HIS NAILS TRIMMED AND HIS BATH AND HE HAS ON A LITTLE FOURTH OF JULY BANDANNA AND NOW HE’S NOT… [voice breaking]… he’s just settin’ here in his place on my recliner looking so unhappy cause you know how sensitive he is…”

My mother absolutely adores her dog. Sometimes. Other times she complains that he’s playing mindgames (she really does), but this is one of the “come let us adore him” moments. The dog is sweet but neurotic as hell and uses food as a coping mechanism with my mother. When I bring my little dog (Ollie) he forces Marty to excercise by constantly chasing him or playing keepaway with whatever object Marty is nearest but they generally like each other.

“And I just can’t believe she did this I just can’t believe she wants me to spend my holiday with strangers! Redneck strangers! A redneck whale and his bleach blonde silly wife!”

I thought you liked Becky…

“I do but that doesn’t mean I wanna be around her… and more importantly, what are we supposed to do with these dogs?”

Now, she has a point. She has several points, actually.

1- My sister really shouldn’t have gone that long without mentioning that she’d invited Billy and Becky. (Among other things it means I have to share a bedroom with my mother which, while you’d think that’s what every single 38 year old looks forward to, it really isn’t.)

2- My sister (Kathy) really didn’t think it through about the dogs. True she has houses all over Baldwin and Mobile Counties, Alabama, but the beach house is about 15 miles from the nearest one, and it isn’t fair for the dogs to have to be isolated or for us to have to go check on the dogs constantly (her properties aren’t fenced except for her “big house” [the one she lives in], and that one’s out because she has two semi-domesticated bison she calls dogs in the back yard and one frigging insane Belgian shepherd bitch who sleeps two minutes per year and manages to bark during those two minutes. Send this thing to Maine and it would scare the shit out of everything that ever dug its way back from that PET SEMETARY and then attack a TV set. (The dog has destroyed two TV sets- she charges them when there are dogs or animals or children on them- the current one is safe because it’s in an especially built “Dixie the Batshit Crazy Shepherd Proof” entertainment unit.)

3- As unfair as it is for us and the dogs to be separated, it’s equally unfair for Billy (who, hard to explain unless you know such people, for all of his primitive views on blacks, gays, welfare mothers, etc., really isn’t a bad sort) to have to be around dogs when he’s allergic.

It was thoughtless of my sister, no question. But, on a scale of reaction in which 1 inch= 1 standard deviation, where the distance between my salt shaker and my pepper shaker is irked and the distance between my salt shaker and my sidetable is equal to irate, my mother is roughly the distance from my salt shaker to the Greek pizza place in the suburbs of Utica, New York. She will not… she will not be calmed.

TBC (damn this is even longer than I thought, and I haven’t even gotten to my sister’s rebuttals and the hurricanes and squirrels yet, but TBC)

6

Have you thought of letting your cellphone somehow become

  • lost in the sea?

  • eaten by a dog?

  • rendered unusable by being covered in pork fat?

:slight_smile:

I think this will be a good story, though (for those of us who do’t have to live through it) :slight_smile:

7

And the award for most frequent use of parenthetical (and brackethetical I suppose) phrases goes to…

Sampiro

:polite applause:

8

So by this time my mother’s having fits and I’m having bronchial spasms, barely able to complete a sentence when I have the chance to work one in between my mother’s rants about how my sister hates her, has always hated her even when she was a baby, did this strictly because she blames my mother for my father’s death 25 years ago, hates “these precious little dogs” [my sister ADORES all dogs, for the record] even though they’re just crazy about her, wants my mother to just go ahead and die, makes my mother want to just go ahead and die, never appreciated anything she [my mother] ever did for her, just wants us all down there so she can laugh at her behind her back, blah blah blah yadda yadda.

“Mama, I really think” [hack hack cough] “that she just wasn’t thinking” [cough cough hack hack hack hack phlegm cough hack] “and didn’t mean to ruin your life…”

“OH she’s been plannin’ this… you can tell! This took some thought and time!”

“Mama, Kathy can be…” [painful cough] “thoughtless but…” [SPASM] "she loves you… I’ll come into town, and we’ll take the dogs and go down and make the best of it. I’ll check on the dogs my- " [convulsive cough] “-self”.

“But then you won’t be able to enjoy the beach…”

“You know I’m not a” [cough] “beach person”

“And I was sooo looking forward to sittin’ on her patio and watching the fireworks show with the dogs…”

"The dogs are mortally terrified of " [cough cough] “fireworks…”

“Marty ran from the fireworks that one time, but he was little then…”

“He was fully grown, and Ollie’s more terrified than Marty is.” [Cough, hereinafter referred to as C…"

“Ollie’s just hyper…”

“The one time Ollie has seen fireworks was when I lived by the shopping mall in C C Milledgeville Georgia and didn’t know there was going to be a fireworks show and I was walking him C****C when they started and he ran away so fast he broke his leash and banged his head on the sliding glass door of my apartment C C trying to get back inside…”

“Oh he was just playing…”

“When I let him inside he C hid behind the sofa and I had to get him out with a C after the fireworks were over…”

“But this is on the beach. He’ll like them better. No, where I stay my dog stays and what’s the point of going to the beach if I’m not gonna stay on the beach? Oh why why why…”

cue spotlight/kill houselights/summon choragos and chorus/Mama’s gonna do the last scene from Phaedre

“Whyyyy” (imagine that word said while straining to pass a football sized piece of waste) "do I even let myself get excited about anything? Whyyyyyyyyy? Why haven’t I learned that nothing is ever going to work out for me if I look forward to it? Why do I think that this time it’ll go smoothly? I should have learned… I should have learned by now… [SIZE=1]I sho

[SIZE=4]BEEP

uld have learned by now that nothing will ever, ever

[SIZE=4]BEEP- INCOMING CALL-

work out the way I expected, the way I

[SIZE]hoped it would, but maybe just once I thought…[/SIZE]

“Mama C C I C C need to run just a second C I’ll call you back C”

“You sound like you have a cough.”

“M-hmmm. I’ll call you back in just a”

"Oh I know, Mama’s depressed, Mama’s not any fun at the moment, nobody wants to listen to Mama when she has problem…

(The call from my sister is over)
“Actually I had an incoming call C C but they’ve hung up…”

“I’m sure it’s your sister calling to tell you what a bitch I am and how I caused September 11 and how I killed your daddy and how I’m just being a total shrew…”

[LIE]“I couldn’t tell I don’t have caller ID C” [/LIE]

“Well if it wasn’t she’ll call you soon enough she’s called me all day long just thinks I’m unreasonable and I TOLD HER WHEN I’M UNREASONABLE SHE’LL BY GOD KNOW IT! SHE CAN COME TO MY FUNERAL AND SAY I’M UNREASONABLE! IT’LL PROBABLY BE ANY DAY NOW THIS COULD BE THE VERY END FOR ME… SHE HATES ME…”

“Mama, C KathY doesn’t hate you, she doesn’t think you killed Daddy, she doesn’t laugh at you behind your back, she just didn’t think this through C****C C”

“You sound like you might have a cold.”

“I’ve been coughing all day.”

“You might wanna take a cough drop and have some juice.”

“I will… but”

BEEP

“There it is again… I’ve gotta go… C”

"Well, please… PLEASE… call me back… and take a cough drop

“I love you, I’ll call you back, bye… Hello?”

Kathy: Have you talked to Mama today?

“Just got off the phone with her…”

“Goddamn, what crawled up her ass and grew horns? Somebody oughtta wrap her nutty ass in plastic and sell her to Stuckeys…”
[My sister is extremely religious and can be as charming and as sweet as the situation requires, but when “riled” has the vocabulary of a drunk Russian sailor on a payday without whores- I suspect it’s a southern thing but it may cross other boundaries]

“Oh she’s upset alright C I haven’t heard her like this since… since… C well, since the last time she was like this…”

“And all because I invited my husband’s only relatives who are worth the price of burial to my own goddamned house AND I THOUGHT SHE LIKED 'EM! SHE’S ALWAYS SAYING SHE WANTS TO SEE MORE PEOPLE AND SHE’S LONELY AND THEN SHE ACTS LIKE THIS!”

“Well, she’s irritated by the dogs C”

“I told her, that place is my house and you and her are my family and if I tell Becky and Billy that Billy’s not allergic to dogs then by God for a weekend Billy won’t be allergic to dogs and they can stay there but she’s just acting batshit crazy and won’t listen to a goddamned word I say! She”

C

“You have a cough. She just goes on and on and on about how insensitive I am and how I’ve just ruined her holiday and Marty’s crying cause he bought a Fourth of July outfit or some damned batshit crazy thing and I just don’t even try to understand her.”

C" She says she doesn’t…C"

“Good God ALMIGHTY give me patience and understanding in the name of Jesus AMEN! I just don’t understand that old woman I have NEVER understood that old woman I never will understand that old woman don’t even try to think about maybe somehow doing anything to make her happy cause it ain’t gonna happen can’t be done… Shit! She killed Daddy and now she’s working on you and me!”
[I PROMISE: THIS IS WELL OVER HALFWAY OVER AS I’LL TAKE A MAD GALLOP THROUGH THE REST OF THE MONTH WHEN IT CONTINUES]

9

Preview Is My Friend/repeat
Preview Is My Friend/repeat
Preview Is My Friend…

10

So, speeding it up dramatically…

My sister and my mother keep calling each other, then calling me. At some point I decide “Hell, if my mother’s insistent on not going to the beach then there is no reason for me to drive 100 miles to see her when I am sick and do not feel like travelling” so I decide to stay home. Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace… while there are telephones.

For 48 fucking hours, while I have bronchitis, the phone doesn’t stop ringing. I turned off the cell-phone, they called the land line. I turned off the landline they sent e-mails, both of them, telling me if I didn’t answer a phone they were going to drive up here to “make sure you aren’t settin’ cocked up there dead with that dog licking your cold dead face!” (that was my sister’s), so I turned a phone back one.

Ringing fucking non-stop-

[Faye Dunaway]My Sister! My Mother! My Sister! My Mother! My Sister! My Mother! My Sis… SLAP![/Faye Dunaway]

Somewhere along the line my mother has mentioned how broke she was 20 years ago when things got so bad she sold her wedding band to buy gas for her car (admittedly she hadn’t worn the thing in my lifetime, but that is a true story and not one of her “divide by 15” exaggerations) while my sister was doing very well as a pharmacist. My mother mentions that “YOUR BROTHER WAS HAVING TO EAT KRYSTALS IN COLLEGE WHEN HE COULD AFFORRRRD 'EM AND YOU AND YOUR OLDER BROTHER WENT TO SCHOOL LIKE LITTLE LORDS OF THE MANOR BECAUSE ME AND YOUR DADDY WENT WITHOUT NEW CLOTHES FOR FIVE YEARS!” and this upsets my sister who calls me with a prolonged and tearful "Look, I am Sorry if you ate Krystals in College, but personally I like Krystals… if you’re ever that broke again I will BUY YOU LUNCH ANYWHERE YOU WANNA GO, I PROMISE! and by this time I just want to sleep and I’m running a fever and I’ve evicted enough phlegm to sing an Arabic operetta and still going strong and I just want to FUCKING SSSSSSSLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEPPPPPPPPPP and they won’t leave me alone even when I tell them “Please let me rest!”

I can’t say “Leave me the fuck alone!” to either of them because… well, different reasons, but it wouldn’t go well on either side.

My mother would attempt suicide. Or rather, she would threaten to attempt suicide. The woman could have served as a technical advisor on Harold & Maude. Fake suicides are her fallback line. We’re not talking your standard “I’m just gonna go off and die” stuff, but the full blown waving a pistol around loudly dictating her last will and testament and assigning a time (“At exactly 3:15 this afternoon, I’m gonna blow my brains out and end this sorry life!”). She doesn’t do this nearly as much now that nobody lives with her and she’s playing to an empty house as she did when I was a kid. She’s probably cut down to maybe once every two years or so from the once every three months when I was younger.

My mother gets very dangerous if annoyed and no stunt is too wacky. Imagine I LOVE LUCY as written and created by Tennessee Williams and you have some idea. She can also be one of the most wonderful and selfless people on Earth when she’s between manic episodes, but it’s a lot like living on the beach- you know a storm is coming sooner or later.

And here’s the craziest thing about my mother: as many times as I’ve heard her threaten suicide and as full of shit as I know she is on the subject (I remember once when I was a kid she was telling me and whoever else was present, while waving a .38 in her hand, “I am going to end my life at 4:00 p.m. this afternoon because I just can’t take it anymore…” while with her other hand she was reaching into the freezer to take out meat for dinner- perhaps her suicide note would have read "I cannot go on like this… cover chicken with garlic, lemon pepper, salt and parsley… the world has made it clear I am not wanted… preheat oven to 425… ") she can still- it’s impossible to explain but those who’ve lived in the house with her can attest to it- somehow she has the power to make you think that she really just might do it this time.

Well, this comes into play. And so does my sister’s decision to save money on dog grooming and how it affected everybody in the family during a hurricane. And my sister’s squirrel comment. And the conclusion, but for now I must go to bed.

TBC

11

note to self- remember to mention Marty’s stomach/squirrels/beach paintings/trash/vinyl

12

This is my favourite part.

13

Ooooh* yes*, please do tell us about the squirrels and stomachs and such. You don’t need rest and recouperation Sampiro. If Billy can not be allergic to dogs for a weekend, you can not have bronchitis long enough to finish this story.

I loves me a** Sampiro** family story. So comfortingly/frighteningly familiar, but funny because it’s not happening to me. Thanks for going west as a young man, Dad.

14

This part alone is worth the price of admission. :smiley:

15

Can’t wait to see how this goes. :smiley:

16

Sampiro. I don’t know you. I don’t know your family. And yet oddly enough, though my family is as Yankee as can be, not a Southern accent amongst a one of them…you could be right now reiterating one of the many of my family’s not-so-historical tribulations.

I think you’re an amazing person to be able to continue to put up with such (at least, the way you’ve presented them) toxic personalites.

I’ll be perfectly honest right here and say I ended up at a span where I literally couldn’t tolerate my mother’s passive-aggressive abuse anymore, and ended with one stroke, not only my mother’s and my relationship, but with that one move severed any bond between me and any of my extended family (because they all apparently took her side. So be it.).

I regretted it for a while, and still regret the loss of my family to this day, but eventually I stopped blaming myself for it. I eventually came to realize keeping them happy and a cohesive family wasn’t my job, even though alot of times they tried to shift some or all of that burden onto me.

You sound like, even in spite of it all, you really love your family, so I won’t advocate you doing what I did to end the passive/aggressive bullshit cycle in my family. What I ended up doing is walking away from all of them, and not looking back. My family just made me really fucking tired, and made every effort to make me feel really worthless, in every sense of the word, at every turn. And you know what? FUCK them, I am fucking better then that.

I do hope you can come to some sort of happier resolution than I was able to at some point. Like I said, in spite of it all, you really do sound like you love them in spite of their quirks.

Maybe it’s just my experience, and to be honest, I hope it is, but when there’s a pattern of this sort of back-and-forth/he said/she said within a family, it never leads to a happy place from anything I’ve ever seen. All you can really do is not get involved with their pettiness, no matter how much they try to suck you into it.

Stay strong, and if you need a random hug, I got one waiting here for ya…just holler if you need it.

17

This might be the most brilliant thing I’ve ever read. There’s good money in these stories, I’d bet.

18

I particularly like the Tennessee Williams remark. I really do think you could make a bestseller out of this, perhaps with Albert Brooks playing you in the film adaptation, but this is really serious. A member of my family has often used the suicide threat as a way of getting attention and it’s very often worked, usually scaring the shit out of her kids who still believe her.

It takes two to tango. You have to pull yourself out of this death spiral. You can’t say “Leave me the fuck alone!” or you won’t? You aren’t responsible for their actions, they are. Your mother threatened suicide every three months when you were a kid? Crap on a stick. How much more abusive could she have been?

Only you can take yourself out of this madness. You need to stop equivocating. Billy is a good example. He’s a redneck, cracker, racist, misogynist, homophobe but he really isn’t a bad sort. Hershel Krustofsky the clown on a fucking rubber crutch! What does Billy have to be so you’d consider him a “bad sort?”

I really enjoy the story but for your own sake make it stop. Vaya con Dios Sampiro

19

Wherever it may be, Sampiro I want to attend your first book signing.

Please don’t schedule it on the same day as Sauron’s. I’d hate to have to choose…

20

This has me laughing the hardest so far. Well that and the suicide/cooking instructions Harborwolf quoted.

Padeye- Yes, it would be healthy for Sampiro to leave the insanity behind. But then we couldn’t immerse ourselves in his colorful stories. So Sampiro, keep yourself at arm’s length. But promise to give us a full report on the saga of your family. You really should start publishing this stuff!

It makes me sad, though… My family is just as fucked up, but I can’t seem to find any humor in their pettiness, deceit, greed, attention-whoring and seething hatred.