My Nutso Parents: Part 2 of 3

Perhaps if I'd given cards like this one to my father he wouldn't have ended up so insane. So many regrets...

For all four of you who read my lengthy diatribe last week regarding my neurotic, crazy mother and her wacko views on drugs, poop, and Jesus, this week's update is more of the same but instead focuses on my male parent and his tendencies to be at least on par with my Mom when it comes to sheer lunacy. My Dad might not have the hypochondria that my mother has nor does he have the Jewish heritage that almost necessitates various neuroses, but he is an enigma at the center of a cheese-filled bowling ball despite his otherwise sane circumstances. Hopefully after I finish discussing the ways in which he's crazier than Don King after a severe head injury, the picture will be complete and the door will be opened to the wonderful world of drugs, lies, and law enforcement that my parents have left in their wake since my move to Seattle last April. I will cover that sad tale in next week's update but I need to finish substantiating my claims of parental psychosis before I move on to their most recent crimes against humanity. In the mean time, feel free to read about my Dad and be thankful that he's not your Dad. I would be if I were you.

Like last week's update, all of the stuff I'm relating here is absolutely factual. I really wish that I could say that I was making these things up, but unfortunately for me and the rest of the free world it's all sad and true. I have no idea how I have managed to live with these people as parents for such a long time and not become absolutely loopy like orange pie myself, but who knows, maybe my true nature won't be known until the year 2058 when I murder hundreds of people in Akron, Ohio with a nerve gas that I am secretly developing even now in my underground lab and the legions of pestilence and slaughter move forth from the bowels of my stronghold to conquer and consume all in their path. As in my previous update, let me repeat the fact that EVERYTHING WRITTEN HERE IS TRUE AND ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

Dad

Daddy dearest.

There are things about my Dad that are "crazy" by most standards but that are not worth mentioning in detail. A couple of these include the fact that he is completely and utterly carnivorous and also completely and utterly homophobic. You wouldn't think that these things go together, but somehow they fit each other nicely like a tight boy-ass and a thick, pulsating cock. I don't mean that he is one of those guys where people say, "Oh, you know men, they like their meat!" I mean that HE WILL NOT EAT ANYTHING EXCEPT FOR MEAT. BECAUSE IT'S GAY. This means that his diet consists primarily of steak and bacon and hamburgers without the buns. Occasionally he will eat seafood but in general he considers it to be too "foofay" (I hate hate HATE THIS WORD and he labels EVERYTHING with it INCESSANTLY) for his liking and avoids it completely. In fact, he won't even eat most pastas because he thinks that "pasta is for faggots." He also refuses to wear any color that it not a very dark shade of grey, blue, or green because he thinks that certain colors on men mean that they are gay. Good old Dad.

Maybe it's not fair of me to call my Dad "crazy" because he's actually slightly delusional. Whereas my mother, I believe, secretly knows that she is being irrational and nuts, my Dad on the other hand moves through life with the distinct unawareness that he is behaving anywhere short of the norm. It's easy to feel sorry for him. Sometimes my Dad's insanity is sort of funny and almost laughable because he says funny things and repeats himself more often than that part of the movie "Groundhog Day" with Bill Murray and his childhood acne scars where things keep repeating:

When I was about 11, I dressed up like a pirate for Halloween and I was so convincing that people gave me double the candy. This was because I tied one of my legs up and attached a wooden peg to it so people really thought that I had one leg. Heh heh, that was a good costume.

(5 minutes later)

When I was about 11, I dressed up like a pirate for Halloween and I was so convincing...

The pity only lasts so long, however, because my Dad's craziness is a force to be reckoned with and it is much better to avoid him or get out of his way when he is in "one of his moods" than try to talk with him and rationalize it in any way whatsoever. Let me start at the beginning, sort of.

How many lives will you ruin, John Milton?

My Dad got a PhD in 16th and 17th Century English Literature (Milton, Spencer, all of that horrible, boring stuff with extra vowels all over the place) back in the early-ish 1970's when everyone was a hippy or fighting in Vietnam or whatever. All of those readings of The Faerie Queene must have damaged his brain in some amazing way (which I completely understand, having been forced to read that dumb book), because when he had been teaching college for only a year and a half or so, so the story goes, he was at a cocktail party and was offered a job distributing wines internationally for some crazy beverage company, and he took it. He kissed academia good-bye and began making regular trips to Italy. Very regular trips.

As I was growing up, my Dad never wanted to talk about his job. It was very odd, because while most father figures are at least open with their families about what they do for a living, my father remained very secretive and quiet. Every couple of months or so he would vaguely explain that he had "business" overseas and would go away for a couple of weeks or so to "take care of things." We never pressed him for details about this and he'd always bring my brother and I neat-o Italian stuff like sausage and boxes of hair from Italian women's armpits and occasionally chocolate that tasted like meat sauce. It was understood that he didn't want to talk about it and if either my brother or myself asked him for details, he always replied that he had had "business to take care of there, so stop being nosy." We respected his wishes out of fear rather than anything else and secretly whispered to each other that he was in the mafia. He never said that he wasn't and still hasn't to this day.

One day when I was about 10, I was snooping around in the basement for nothing in particular. My Dad was down there, too, maybe cleaning things up or something, I have no idea. I was looking through boxes of what looked like old papers and knick-knacks and things, when I came across some things wrapped in towels with red stains on them.

Me: (unwrapping the stuff) What is this, Dad?

Dad: Get away from that!

Me: (continued unwrapping it) Why, what is it?

Dad: It's nothing, just leave it alone. It's just some tools.

Me: Oh. (the several guns that had been wrapped in the towels fell to the ground) ...Oh.

Dad: Just don't touch them! Get away from there.

Me: What about these boxes of bullets? Can I touch those?

I have no idea what the fuck this thing is. It came up on my Google search for "evidence." I was hoping for guns but I got this instead, so... sorry.

At this point my Dad forbade me to snoop through things in the basement again and actually put a lock on the door so that my brother and I couldn't "go poking around." Of course, I didn't really listen to him and on more than one occasion that door was left unlocked, but he never put his guns in a place where I could find them again. Of course, those guns had "evidence" written all over them in what appeared to be blood, so they probably got tossed into the murky, PCB-laden depths of Green Bay.

All through the time that I was growing up, my Dad was working on what he called his "epic poem." The thing really is an epic. He must have been inspired in a dream by Milton himself or something because his poem is about eight times as long as The Faerie Queene and about four hundred times as cheesy and boring. I can just imagine Milton chubbily appearing in front of my awestruck father and charging him to write reams and reams of useless, rhyming drivel about escaping from a labyrinth and whatnot. In any case, my Dad has been trying unsuccessfully for about five years now to publish the damn thing and with good reason has had no luck. He claimed that no publisher would touch his work because it was "too groundbreaking and cutting-edge" and said also that he had created a new rhyming scheme all of his own in which the last word of the previous line rhymed with the fifth word of the next. "Swing-Rhyme." It was going to revolutionize the world of poetry. We're still waiting for the revolution but oh boy, when it comes it will be RADICAL.

In between killing people and writing poetry, my father had a temper. he would be fine most of the time but he would blow his top at what seemed the most unlikely thing. I remember one day he came home early from his job at the local mafia and found my brother paying with a BB gun in the backyard. This was nothing new, but my brother had failed to empty the dishwasher even though he had been instructed to do so. My father got very upset, and he marched outside to where my brother was standing, yelling all the while at the top of his lungs, took the gun, and BENT THE BARREL UNTIL IT BROKE. My Dad is a strong guy. He wrestled in college and I guess his job as a hitman kept him in shape, because that was a strong gun. My brother went in the house and emptied the dishwasher STAT. Meanwhile, my father banged through the house and found my brother's other two BB guns and broke them in a similar fashion.

Dad was also the king of, "It's not in the game plan." This was the explanation that he offered at almost every turn of my life and certainly whenever I asked him permission to do anything, even small things.

Me: Dad, Can I stay over at Becky's house?

Dad: No, it's not in the game plan.

Me: Can I have a soda?

Dad: No, it's not in the game plan.

Me: Can I play the quarterback in the neighborhood football game?

Dad: No, it's not in the... DON'T GET SMART WITH ME!

I guess that my Dad had a point after all, because I read this and it didn't say anything about me sleeping over at Becky's.

I am still to this day not sure about what game he was referring to. I wasn't playing any sports and I don't believe that he was, either. Even my crazy mother knew that when my Dad said those magic words that there was no arguing, so asking her would only result in, "Ask your father," and so the magical "game plan" circle of life would continue. Maybe the game was "Scrabble" or something. Or "Sorry." Ok, now that I think about it, "Chutes and Ladders."

The most recent aspect of my Dad's psychotic nature has manifested itself by means of the local landfill. Yes, the garbage dump. He is on a crazy rampage with the county board claiming that they are cheating the county out of millions and millions of dollars and that the landfill that they are building on top of the old landfill is leaking dangerous chemicals into a nearby watershed. He is correct about all of this stuff, but he is also freakily obsessed with this garbage situation. He has made countless speeches at county board meetings and spends all of his time trying to convince the county board to build this thing somewhere else. Of course, they don't listen, so he continues to obsess. He talks about it at the meat-laden dinner table and on the phone at all times. When I went home to Wisconsin recently to visit my parents for the first time in roughly six months he didn't show up to pick me up at the airport because he was on the phone with some high-ranking garbage official and couldn't hang up. He proceeded to spend the next week or so while I was home talking on the phone with people about garbage or at meetings about garbage or telling me about garbage. When I told him that he wasn't talking to me at all and that I might as well just go back to Washington he took me out to see the dump site. Thanks, Dad.

So my Dad has issues, I guess you could say. He's a senile, garbage-loving, poetry-writing hitman. I don't know how he and my mother have managed to live together for the past 28 years or so without killing each other or imploding or something, but I have a feeling that it has something to do with their mutual insanity playing off of itself and forming a protective buffer around them. I hope that the past couple of updates have at least demonstrated the case against my parents and suggested that they might just be one barrel short of the Long Lake at Esgaroth (lol that's a little dork-humor for you there).

Now that I have the two of them neatly categorized, it remains for me to relate to all y'all how their craziness has resulted in even more craziness and also police since I moved here eight or so months ago. That, of course, is an update unto itself, so I will leave you to ruminate on the reason that my father is obsessed with garbage at this time. Stay tuned for next week's thrilling conclusion in which I explain that Rich "Poopypants" Kyanka has to be in some way affiliated with buying and selling drugs because no one makes money on a website and there is no other way that we could afford to live from day to day. I'm hopped up on drugs right now, aren't I? I knew it!

Stay Safe With State Og!

Another weekend, another thrilling State Og Update!

There's nothing more precious to give your child than the gift of knowledge. However, taking them out to the desert to see that ripening body just isn't enough in this hurdy-gurdy modern world, and you have to wait for them to turn thirteen before you can take them on that very special trip to Tijuana. What to do in the meantime? Telescopes will just be used to spy on the neighbor girl, and why should your kids have all the fun when you pay the bills? You really don't want to know what your adolescent will be looking at with a microscope, but let's just say that afterward it'll just go into the closet to gather dust. Chemistry sets, a mainstay of educational gift-giving, may seem like the perfect gift to exercise your child's flabby mental muscle, but in fact your kid will not learn valuable skills like making methamphetamine and untraceable transdermal poisons. What a ripoff!

Check it out or else something... "unfortunate" may happen to you. Something involving a gun and your head and the gun shooting a bullet into your head. Oh, and a monkey too, because monkeys are inherently funny.

– Integral