My entire family is suicidal. Even the dogs. Maybe them most of all because my suicidal sister named them in an apoplectic fit of terrible taste: Agony and Ekphrasis. You got to hand it to her, though. She is pretentious even when tormented. Half of white Brooklyn would kill to be able to posture like her. The other half would kill, but insist that the murder was ironic. It is without a doubt one of the greater affectations passed down to my sister from our mother, who always seems to find a well to throw her expectations of others down. Give her an inch and she'll mourn by that well for the rest of her damned life, all because the mailman didn't look her in the eye. Before you know it you'll be consoling her while the mailman is consumed by guilt. He won't set a foot down on the mail route again without seeing visions of the husky, bleary-eyed, self-proclaimed early adopter of widowhood crouching by that accursed well in the very same squalid wedding dress she's worn everyday for the last twenty seven years.
Father, of course, knew exactly what he was getting into when he took my mother out to Olive Garden on what must, in retrospect, be considered the most ill-fated first date since China and opium. It must have been a supernatural event. The breadsticks acting like crystals of sorrow channeling the collective melancholy of the universe into the nexus of insipid, faux-Italian chain dining. In the anecdote that serves as the foundational myth of their love, my parents cored their breadsticks, wept into them, and, arms entwined, toasted to misery. The more unfortunate will hear the humorous twist of how my mother then stole the Andes Mint right off the plate of my hypoglycemic grandfather who was chaperoning the date and consequently died from the sugar deprivation.
Thus was signed the strategic copulation pact between a cerebral idiot and a demented ingenue. Their axis forged less out of love and more out of mutual self-assured sexy desperate destruction. Tales of my conception are greatly exaggerated, but in parental parlance I came to be out of an "ill-conceived thought experiment turned sex". My folks presumed they could disprove the Schrödinger's Cat Theory by placing semen in my mother's vagina in a tantric, irradiated sensory deprivation tank. In every conceivable metric they failed, except in conception itself.
Eighteen months later I was born, a marvel in delayed gestation. During the pregnancy my mother insisted on micro-dosing herself with mescalin in the hopes of creating a "amniotic Burning Man" for me. Paraded around talk shows by an hallucinating mother and labeled the "Burner at Birth" I was imbued in the womb with an uncanny connection to canned laughter. The doctors said I came out of the womb with the umbilical cord tied in a hangman's knot around my neck. Mistaking the lights in the operating room for an audience cue light, I laughed and applauded at my suicidal birth.
The next fours years went by with increasing levels of misery. My first word was ennui, my first pun was INTJ-ed off, and my first meme largely forgettable. As my language skills developed, so did my penchant for brooding. I found that life-threatening situations were the most conducive to thought so I would routinely lock myself in the trunk of a stranger's car in the middle of summer in Florida. Unfortunately, I was always found before I became a desiccated corpse. The next most dangerous scenario which I afforded myself was simply my father's company whose neglect and idiocy flirted with death harder than a campaign intern canvassing a zombie suburb. Quality time with my father was a phantasmagoria of irresponsible power tool use, wildly inappropriate aphorisms, and neglect. It was as if viewing some surrealist play with the fourth wall occasionally broken by errant circular saw blades and asides about hard work and/or sexual intercourse. "Don't force it!" he yelled as he pushed me onto the highway for my first bike ride.
Where periods spent with my father bristled with a certain sanguine fatality of the body, time with my mother ensured ego death. An afternoon with my mother is like hanging out with a omniscient third person narrator / drone operator who is constantly making tactical strikes on your self-esteem. The drones are an allegory for her delusions and are armed with histrionic soliloquies about the burdens of motherhood. Forced to escort this one woman war machine on every imaginable errand, I fantasized about my own death. I contrived to lace my Sunday clothes with poison, so that I might die in church convulsing. My soul exulted as the congregation feverishly surrounds me and praises this manifestation of the holy spirit, only to see my divine mania cut short by the excremental deluge of death. My antediluvian dingle berries sprinkled over the flock like holy water. Alas, unable to obtain the proper toxins, I consigned myself to predicting how many of the faithful might be crushed to death by the collapse of a support beam.
Just when our sorrow really seemed to be clicking, my parents adopted my sister. Neophyte to woe, but one hell of a quick study. My sister rode in the wake of our wretched clan like she was water skiing ...which was coincidentally how her biological family was murdered. Her presence amplified each of our respective and collective agonies, turning our woebegone band camp of a family into a crestfallen philharmonic. Life with her was an onslaught, your patience and sanity besieged, circumvallated, and starved into raving madness. She was the Cerberus to our filial Tartarus, appeased only by sugar and blood sacrifice. To keep the beast at bay, we offered her babysitters, those poor souls too oft included in porn video titles. The lucky ones escaped with a mild case of PTSD and a crippling fear of children. We don't talk about the unlucky ones.
Fate had ordained this assemblage, a super group of sad sacks. The Al Bundy Signal shimmered in the night sky and called us to our mutual dysfunction. Unite and suit up! Mother chugging her crying juice (a mix of water, gin, vinegar, and WD40) and layering her mascara like Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son. Father wrapping himself so tight in a layer of his own aloofness that it gives his ego a hernia. Sister rolling out the manic red carpet of her insanity. And me looking for a cave with some golden needles to stab my eyes out with. We were the Voltron of self-pity.
The strength of our family unit lie somewhere between fear and spite. Despite near constant emotional deterioration we stood firm knowing that, no matter what, we could always come home to someone to berate or ignore us. Mandatory family dinners, where we gambled food for suffering, were another element of our blight bond. On more than one occasion my mother was caught with suffering up her sleeve. Perhaps the most pivotal gear of the entire forlorn machine was the family vacation, specifically the road trip. Nothing lifts the spirits like a doomed voyage, so we celebrated our communal enthusiasm with prolonged silence and slapping. Across hideous hinterlands towards a destination we were all indifferent or opposed to, my family shared a transcendent hatred. Thus we lived for 19 years before I left for college, the ultimate experiment in extra-familial sorrow.
Much like water, piss seeks its own level...even if it takes 30 years. So it was that on my little sister's 30th birthday I returned home. I had been out of the house since I left for school, and out of school since I left for Dollywood. There I had stayed for 14 years, hiding in a theme park underworld ruled by a ruthless council of oligarchic lost children. The food was terrible, the governance corrupt, and the living conditions more squalid than a solitary bathroom in a refuge camp rave. I was too sad to move, but was forcibly evicted for not scavenging my monthly quota of temporary tattoos. So I trekked home, my ego severely wounded by the rejection from a society that's ideology was based solely around cotton candy. At my homecoming my parents regaled me with tales of their own vile travails, the constant misfortunes that beset them, and their still growing hatred for one another. It is a testament to their marriage that after 35 years their disgust was still blooming.
As a family, we sat down together to harass my sister about her burgeoning decrepitude. She looked as if in the span of 14 years she had lived the life of two coal miners and one very self-destructive child star. Sitting around the dinner table we screamed and cried and silently and simultaneously stumbled into a shared moment of taint wrenching clarity, as if we each realized that dinner was merely a ruse for an intervention. Frozen in our respective seats lest the other's begin their spiels, we individually plotted our escapes. My father stood up and announced he had left "a very important business document" in the YMCA. They found him the next morning asphyxiated by the noxious fumes of kickboards melted on the sauna hot rocks. Always class conscious, my mother clambered into our industrial dryer, filled it with pearls, and turned it on. The coroner said she looked like she had been through trench warfare at Loft. Pulling no punches, my sister climbed into the gorilla cage at the zoo and tried to put a pair of Hulk Hands on a silver back. As for me, I just took a shot of Drano and smoked a Black & Mild. Like my father always said, "Smoke em if you got em!" Which, in retrospect, seems like a metaphor about something because this cigar sucks.
