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Welcome to my utmost random thoughts on random shit that really doesn't matter much.
Behold the glory of my mind takinga dump.
~ Sticks, Stones and Funnybones ~
Part 34 - The Drama
I realize that most of my Scissors deal with the world, and the ins and outs of crap that doesn't really concern me, or you, much, personally. So, to give this column a more intimate spin this week, I will lay it all out on the table: The ugly truth of what goes on in Graceland after hours. It ain't pretty, kids.
The Drama
So there I was: Sitting up all alone at night, writing the Great American Novel while the rest of the house was sleeping (with dreams of my future royalties dancing in their heads). Or so I thought. At exactly 2:34 my mother-in-law came flying (like a lead balloon) out of her room in her Heavy Duty Wheelchair 2000, screaming her head off:
“Help! Graaaaace! Graaaace! Heeeelp!"
Naturally, I fell off my chair from the minor heart attack I just suffered, considering how abruptly that pleasant silence was shattered. I got on my feet and ran to see what the devil is wrong. I found her, sticking her head out into the hallway, her Xtra Wide Wheelchair 2000 jammed in the doorway (there’s a trick to it that only I know – but I ain’t telling – what am I, stupid?). Anyway, she bellowed on:
“Call Poison Control! Help! Call-“
And at that she grabbed her throat and kinda choked herself. I am thinking she finally lost her fucking mind, and is trying to give herself assisted suicide like some Kevorkian parody on poetic justice, but since her face looks kinda “off”, I try to take her seriously. Even bat shit crazy people have feelings. That sort of thing.
“So, what’s going on, Karen?”
“Help! Call Poison Control! I have poisoned myself! Call 911!”
Now, since my mother-in-law is on more drugs than all the kids in Ybor City on a Friday night, combined, I am thinking she probably goofed up on her medication and swallowed one Methadone pill too many. God knows she has been fucked up lately (that’s another story). I smile and pat her head. “There, there, Karen. I am sure you can sleep it off. Don’t operate any heavy machinery, though, you crazy kid.”
“No, you ass! I didn’t overdose! I drank something I shouldn’t have! You have to call POSION CONTROL!!!” Again she lapses into a self-choking frenzy.
Jesus Christ. Maybe the fact that her eyes were bugging out like Marty Feldman’s on a coke binge, made me finally take her absolutely dead serious. “What, Karen? What did you drink?”
She looks at me, with her good eye (whichever one that is – I can never tell), and says, a little more softly:
“My room deodorizer.”
I look at her, sure I didn’t hear her correctly. “What?”
“My room deodorizer! My ROOM SPRAY, DAMMIT! CALL POSION CONTROL!”
I am still not hearing her correctly. “What?”
“This! THIS SPRAY!” And she shakes this tiny little lilac metal bottle in my face. It says Room Spray – Fig and Lavender on a neat little label on the front. Come to think of it, now that she mentioned it, she did smell pretty good for a change.
“You drank this? This… lavender fragrancer shit?”
“YES! I thought it was a bottle of seltzer!”
“Karen,” I say, turning the little metal bottle incredulously in front of my eyes, looking for a list of ingredients, “this looks nothing like a bottle of seltzer. How much did you drink?”
“I don’t know, maybe-“ and she finishes the sentence by burping. She burps lavender. She is a big coughing purple flower in a wheelchair. Maybe I had OD’d on something (Benadryl? Second Hand Smoke? I am a party-monster) and was dreaming all this shit?
“That much, huh? OK, calm down, and I will call your buddies at Posion Control.”
“HURRY UP! I am POISONED!!!”
“OK, I noticed! Jesus! Throw up or something!”
“I can’t!”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t, that’s why.”
“Ah, undisputable logic. I see. Just stick your toothbrush down your throat, and… Wait, you do have a tooth brush, right? Even with the dentures?” I had never really given it a thought much; how people clean their false teeth. Life has spared me those details.
“Uh… Maybe if I drink seltzer really fast, the bubbles will make me throw up!”
“Very good, Karen! Do that! Hurry up!” Some people get the Nobel Prize for particle physics, or invent the cure for thyroid diseases. My mother-in-law just contributed to the world of science, in her own drugged down way.
I make my way to the computer to look up the ingredients for this Fig and Lavender – Room Spray, because they are not listed on the bottle. After all, who would be dumb enough to drink it, right? That’s what I thought, too. There’s a first for everything, I guess. I realize now that it is because of people like my mother-in-law that we do have “Do Not Eat” signs on styrofoam containers, and “Do Not Use This Tool For Shaving” on rented chainsaws. They are the disclaimer crash test dummies of the world.
I find the company’s website, or something close to it, and look up the ingredients for the Fig & Lavender bottle. What’s with the fig anyway? Then I remember that there’s a passage in the Bible where Jesus cursed a fig tree, and I guess my mother-in-law is the end result. Makes sense. Hmmm… There’s no listing for that particular bottle so I find a list of ingredients for a Plum Bath Oil instead. Bottle looks the same. Close enough for jazz. I quickly dial the number to Poison Control, happy to hear my mother-in-law blurghing away in her bathroom.
Rrriiing.
“Poison Control. Is this an emergency?”
“I don’t know, you tell me. My mother-in-law just drank a bottle of room deodorizer.”
Dead silence… then: “What?”
“Yeah. Lavender and Fig.”
“What?”
“That’s what I said.” I look over to the hallway as Karen is unleashing on the toilet with mighty vomit. “Good going, Karen! Throw that shit up!”
“Eh, sir. It’s not really a good idea to have the victim throw up until we know what she drank.”
“I told you. Room Spray. Fig and Lavender.” I turn to the hallway. “Karen. Stop throwing up! What’s the matter with you?”
In between choked gagging noises, her voice comes from the bathroom. “What? I was… BLLUUURGH… I was… WUUUAAAAHHH... I am... BEEEOOORFFFF!”
“Eh, never mind, Karen. So, no throwing up, huh? OK, she’s not, really. Much.”
“Well, Sir, we need to know what’s in it, because some toxins or acids can hurt just as much going back up as going down, so-“
“What? They put battery acid in this crap these days? Wait, I’ll read you the ingredients.” And then I struggle to pronounce things off the Plum Bath Oil description I am sure the fragrance company only made up to make me sound dumb. I skip the oil part since I don’t want him to know I am reading him the wrong list of ingredients. I add Lavenderucium (sounds great, right?) to make it seem like it’s all straight from the hip, too. (I am a genius, after all.)
“OK, Sir. There’s nothing on that list that is toxic or acidic. Just have her drink a glass of milk, maybe even give her a bowl of ice cream, and-“
“What flavor?”
“What?”
“Does it matter what flavor ice cream I give her?”
“Eh, no.”
“There’s no chance of the butter pecan interacting with the lavender?”
“Eh, no.”
“OK, good. So milk and ice cream. All party-party for Karen. Anything else?”
“Well, just have her sit up for an hour, to make sure she doesn’t have an allergic reaction.”
“With me?”
“Excuse me?”
“Does she have to sit with me? Or can she monitor herself?”
“Well, I guess she can, if-“
“Thank you so much! You are a life savior. Really! People don’t pay you guys enough! Have a good night.” I hung up. What a great guy. Really.
I go in to give my mother-in-law the great news and see, to my disgust, that she has thrown up on the rug. I go into her bathroom, and when I see her foaming at the mouth, lavender scented tiny little bubbles, I just turn and walk into the kitchen to scramble up the remedies instead.
And so it came to be, that I found myself, at 3:30 AM, on hands and knees, in the hallway outside my mother-in-law’s door, trying to neutralize the lavender puke stench with Lavender Febreze – while my mother-in-law was inside, wolfing down my Butter Pecan ice cream, washing it down with a glass of milk, smelling like a big ole purple flower.
Lavender is a flower, right?
And my wife and daughter? They slept like babies through the whole thing.
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The Fatherlessness
My dad sent me an email, out of the blue, letting me know that he "resigned". That's all it said: "I have resigned."
Knowing that my father is a big old drama queen, and that I now, according to the Father Grace Modus Operandi handbook, am supposed to call him and find out exactly what he resigned from (ten years after he retired from his actual job), coaxing and prying while getting one-syllable answers in return, I call my brother instead (Joe) to see what the hell is going on.
Turns out my father decided to resign from fatherhood altogether, and move to a cottage in the woods.
Sounds harmless enough, right? Especially considering how I am 34 and my brother is 32 and none of us really talk to him much anyway. Only problem is that he has three other children, between 12 and 18, and those are the ones he is walking out on.
Did he put forth some great rhetoric, giving any sort of sensible reason for why this decision was made? Did he fight with his wife for days on end, making the kids’ existence a nightmare? Did he drink cheap vodka and beat them all senseless after dark? No. He "just didn’t feel like being a dad” anymore. The whole family thing was hampering the life he would rather live. He wasn’t divorcing his wife. He divorced his kids, telling them they were in his way.
Selfish, cruel and immature.
And very Swedish, I guess (I am blessed with the Oraclish wisdom that only comes to long-time foreigners living abroad).
The fact that he did the exact same thing to me and my brother when we were 12 and 10, kind of proves a pattern here: A pattern of absolute selfishness, on a level of astronomical proportions.
I know he wants me to write him, call him or contact him in some way, so we can have some sort of 20 Questions Discussion, where he can be the subtle general, snarking away with pompous and perfectly acceptable reasons to why he has a right to be a fucking asshole that everybody should bow to.
Fuck him.
I am not getting back to him.
I think the last contact we ever had was me asking who was ever there for my sister, and him saying “No comments.”
Well, I’ll be there for her then.
Fuckhead.
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The Quotes
Random Quotes from the Grace Household over the last month:
“If you have the Flesh Eating Disease, mom, you’re going to a fucking home.”
My wife to my mother-in-law in the waiting room to the doctor’s office
“Do you want this sick ugly motherfucker to rip you off the sidewalk in broad daylight, then rape you and eat you whole? Huh, do you?”
Me to the kid, after discovering she was talking to a boy online (she’s 11) and showing her a pic of the ugliest sex offender I could find online.
“Tiny Bubbles!”
What we sing when my mother-in-law opens her door and bellows for food. Sometimes we just ask, “Would you like a glass of Windex with that, Karen?” or “This apartment smells a bit funky. Could you come out here and cough around the corners for us, please?” She hates us.
“It means what it means. We’re not victims.”
My prospective new employer, on my question why the company slogan is “No Victims”.
“As soon as you get that job I am hiring a maid.”
My wife, terrified at the thought of household chores once I am strapped into a cubicle. Maybe I’ll send her a French Maid strippogram from work one day, as some sort of gesture. (Flesh for fantasy.)
“I like that comforter. Does it come with a young boy?”
My mother-in-law, talking about things I don’t want to know about. Fortunately I have the swift reactions of a ninja cobra and everything after the above statement is a pantomime to the soundtrack of my “lalalalalala”.
“Bubba, I can’t penetrate your fat ass with the remote!”
My wife, yelling to the dog when he was in the way of the TV. Now I know why our neighbors look at me funny and call me “Bub”. We may have to move.
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