Think back to the time when you were a very small child, you know the time, back when you thought that your parents had been granted the gift of ultimate wisdom; they knew every little detail about every little thing, or so you thought. It turns out that thunder doesn’t have anything to do with God moving his furniture around (if it does I am on a bee line to hell), it is all about atmospheric conditions. Things like the hot/cold fronts clashing against each other, the charged particles in the clouds looking for a surface to release their potential energy, a conveniently placed ground that can make the lightning happen, then, BAM you get the thunder. I doubt I would have been able to wrap my mind around something like that when I was six, but still, “God moving his furniture”, what kind of an answer is that (a variant of that is that it is God bowling)?
I have a very vague memory of asking how they made crayons. While I can’t remember for sure who gave which response, I am pretty sure that Mom was the one that tried to explain to me about the gathering of wax, adding of the coloring and so forth. The other response that I got (which I am pretty sure was from dad) was that they just take the nubs of crayons, sort them into bins of same colored crayons, melt them down, then make new crayons. Neither answer really made much sense to me at the time, of course I was pretty young. Looking back I am left only to wonder how, if the latter theory is true, did they make the very first crayon?
My parents had the ability to fabricate very elaborate lies. Example 1: Santa Claus, turns out he was never real at all. Example 2: The Easter Bunny, totally fabricated. Example 3: The Tooth Fairy, my parents didn’t even bother to have us put the teeth under our pillows, we just left them in a glass near the kitchen sink; The tooth fairy had a lot of ground to cover, you see, and it was easier to just leave them there, or something (I don’t remember either parent explaining why we had to leave our teeth by the kitchen sink while all the other kids put them other their pillows, but I do have a pretty selective memory). Example 4: God. While the jury is still out on whether or not this guy really exists, I am pretty sure that he is yet another example of how my parents fabricated so many beings to keep us in line. After all, if God was so good then why didn’t the parents go to church with us kids?
By the time my parents divorced I was pretty sure that all of those characters weren’t real. Slowly, one by one, my Mom admitted that they were made up. All except God, that is. To this day I don’t know that I have ever gotten a straight answer out of Mom about God, though at this point I have already made a decision so it’s not like it would matter. Note to Christians: if you want your children to truly believe in god try to stay away from feeding them crap about the tooth fairy, Easter bunny and Santa Claus, then switch right at the end to say that you made the rest of the people up, but that GOD is real. Children may have small minds, but they remember the lies you feed them.
I have gone way, way off topic here. Well, way off the intended topic at the very least. So, moving on.
Those same parents aren’t without faults, but I am not going to go into that. I do want to go into some of the weird phrases that they, my parents, used though. One of my all time favorites has to be “get up and sit down”. Has there ever been a phrase uttered that is more of a dichotomy (not counting rap songs)? So I am expected to stand for an undetermined amount of time, then sit back down again? That must take some all-knowing parenting skills to use effectively, but what if I stand to late, or sit too soon? There is no goal there. What if I sit at the correct time, yet miss the getting up period by a fraction of a second? We need goals people, goals. We might be little now but eventually you will be in the old people place, how, then, will you react when I say “get up and sit down”? Work with me here!
I am getting closer to what I was wanting to bitch about, if you don’t like the fact that it has taken so long then why don’t you just “get up and sit down”?! Guess I told you.
So when I was in the 9th grade, Dad caught me and Dan smoking again. Dad had trained us from birth to be smokers; it was party entertainment to show us off to his friends while smoking, long before we ever hit our fifth birthdays (thanks dad). I haven’t quite been smoking since I was in the womb, but I am pretty damn close (thanks dad). When we got caught that time I got pretty irritated. First, because he was searching our room, second, because he got really pissed about me smoking, third, because he took my damn cigarettes. My allowance at the time was like a couple of bucks; it took my allowance, Dan’s allowance, and the buck a day, that dad gave me, that I didn’t pay for lunch (it was a buck a day for lunch at the time, in that school) to buy the damn cigarettes in the first place. Yeah, that pissed me off.
The best/funniest part of the whole ordeal was when dad was giving us the speech about how disappointed he was in us. One of the things that he said was “I better never catch you doing this again.” While I never said it, I was thinking exactly the same thing: Never let him catch us doing this again. To be honest, I was pretty pissed that he caught us that time, I was going to do everything in my power to make sure that he didn’t actually catch me doing it again (as per his request). Well everything short of just not doing it anymore; he threw down a challenge and I ran with it.
He never actually caught either myself or my brother smoking again, but he died only a year or two later. He knew that I was still smoking though; He asked me to pick him up a pack of cigarettes on the way home from town, then told me that he knew which gas station would sell them to you as long as you were in a car. He knew, but he never caught me.
The absolute worst moment in my entire life was on Christmas day in 1990. My father died on Christmas eve in 1990, so you do the math. I doubt I will ever be able to talk about that. Maybe I will try to call my mom right now and see if she has a sympathetic ear…
Tune in tomorrow for more fascinating, useless information.