Cornhole Country

Cornhole Country

12.14.05 (9:17 pm)   [edit]
Listening to Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love. Been a while. What an amazingly unusual, captivating, beautiful woman she is. I need to get her new album.

This should be a great weekend. Sheryl has been kind enough to offer to bring Katie up here Friday night when I get off work. Which saves four hours of driving plus the gas money, but also means I'll have my girl for two nights and a long day (sans all the driving) on Saturday. The last two times Katie has been here, she's said that she wanted to stay two nights. I'm looking forward to it. My time with Katie is one of the few times I feel human.

We'll go up to Marion Saturday. I need to leave her at my mom's for two hours for a brief drummerless band practice (he's in Boston for three weeks) then off to Christmas a week early with my Mom's family. Katie can play with her cousins, and we'll come back here late that night and have most of the day Sunday together.

This past weekend, I spent Saturday night with my Dad's side. I didn't leave until 4PM and it was great to just hang around the apartment for a while.

Something very interesting happened in the Swayzee Town Hall that night. I found myself truly feeling like part of something I never really had before. Getting into genealogy has made me think more about family, but it's always been weird. I was closer to Mom's side, but they've always annoyed me. I've never known my Dad's side enough. We spent more time with my Grandma (who will be 97 in a month and a half) and my aunt and one of my uncles when I was younger, but not a hell of a lot. My cousin Nathan (a couple years younger) is the only one I really connected with. He's a lawyer in Minnesota now, and I was very happy (and surprised) to hear that he was helping the Dean campaign back in early '04.

I made a point of talking to my cousin Pam. I seldom see her. I mentioned her here back in September. Her husband Gene was killed in a car accident.

She looked terrible but held together a good mood. She was laughing more and louder than anyone else, and it was genuine - not forced. But she also looked like a woman who has spent far too many nights crying and not sleeping. She's a very cool and pretty Indiana-redneck lady in her late 40s who has lost not only her husband, but a friend she's known almost her entire life.

Her kids are in their 20s. Amber is a knockout thin blonde who is finishing college this week. Jason came in late with his fiance. His fiance who fucked my head up for a few mintues because she looks a LOT like Melinda. Not actually a lot, but from one side just as she walked in, I nearly shit myself. I didn't talk to her, but I almost asked her "who's your daddy?" just to see what would happen...

I talked to my cousin Jeff (Pam's brother) who is ten years older and I NEVER talk to him. We had a nice time talking music (he's trying to sell his PA and I forgot he even played at all) and listening to my Uncle Neil's crazed bullshit stories. Neil is a true lunatic. Crazy old fart. He told me he'd been eating some hot peppers out of his garden. "Don't touch yer balls after you eat 'em." It looks funny to read, but it's HILARIOUS to hear the old bastard say it. I love him.

Pam and Jeff's dad is my Uncle John, who is the next oldest from my dad. I talked to him a bit at Gene's funeral, but more this weekend. I asked him if he remembered his grandparents. They died when he was very young, so I got the answer I expected - he doesn't remember them. But he does remember going to their house in Greentown. That's about it. Maybe if I can get Neil to wash the jalapeno juice from his testicles long enough to get his brain uncluttered and remember who's who (I think he's losing that) he can tell me about my great-grandparents who died before my dad was born.

I told John the guy two doors down from me reminded me of him. "He must be an old bastard!" John's a great guy. Why I didn't spend more time with him when I was a kid...

Aunt Margaret is the classy-looking one of the family. Always dressed good, always proper. But she has a good sense of humour and is a very nice lady. Her mom is very sick and is staying with her now. I'd never seen her. She was in a wheelchair with tubes up her nose. My Aunt Rosanne (wife of my dad's brother Rex) just found out she has emphysema (she's smoked like crazy her whole life) and has the tubes too. Jeff went over to them as they were talking to each other and said, "What are you two old women doing here? Sharing oxygen stories?"

Another cousin is Jerry, a year younger than me. I wish I'd talked to him that night. He was there with a friend. They had cowboy hats on. And it never occured to me to put two and two together on something that Mom told me the next day - my cousin Jerry is gay. I never knew it. She didn't either. Dad has known for a while.

It would seem that nobody is giving him shit for this, which makes me very happy. My family are all pretty conservative farm-folk, but it's occurred to me in recent years that they have never been as stupid about some things as my Mom's side, who are just nuts. That my cousin felt comfortable showing up to a family holiday with his "friend" is a good thing. They probably don't all like it, but they have much more of a live-and-let-live attitude than I've given them credit for. Mom's side would be weird as hell about that kind of thing.

It occurred to me that I never really fit in with Mom's family, though I was closer to them. Yet Dad's side...I DID fit in. I just never knew it. A couple of them have given me shit about the hair and trying to make my money at music, but not most of them. They've been good to me, even if distantly so.

Why the distance? Why have I never really sat down and truly enjoyed this part of the family? Most of my cousins are a lot older than me, I'm sure that has something to do with it. But not all.

I think it's Dad. He doesn't avoid them, but he's never gone out of his way to involve himself with his own family like Mom has. I don't mean that in a bad way per se, he just hasn't done that. I think Dad felt some distance too. Mom told me that my grandfather (who died when I was 10 months old) used to refer to my Dad as "the odd one" because of his pilot ambitions.

My Dad. Who dared to break out of the normal day-to-day routine most of his family stayed in to chase down a dream.

Holy shit.

I've never really thought of him that way. Probably because he did the SAME SHIT to me all my life that his Dad did to him. Made me feel weird. My goals weren't what he felt fit itno his mode of thought. And I hated him for it. For...the only thing HE had known growing up.

He's always taken care of me. I've never had to worry. But I always felt that it was just his JOB and he would just as soon go hide in the back of the house and watch TV.

I'm more like him than I want to admit.

I wonder if it's why he doesn't use his middle name now. They always called him Hal. He's been using his first name my whole life. I've never heard him called "Hal" except by people who knew him as a kid, and most of them don't call him that anymore either. Halbert was his Dad's middle name too. My middle name is Eugene, after my mom's stepdad who she only knew for a year before he was killed in a car-train accident near Peru.

I wonder if he tried to forget his younger years. He sure hasn't told me much about them. He has NEVER mentioned the woman he was engaged to for five years, who left him. Before Mom. Mom has told me about this. Dad hasn't brought it up. He doesn't talk about much of anything unless it's safe. He didn't tell me SHIT about sex. Anything mechanical he did for me because I was obviously too incompetent to do it myself.

I think he's the reason. Not out of anything malicious, he just hasn't wanted to go the extra distance to be close to his family, even though he gets along with them fine now. Because of that, I barely know these people. People who for all their redneck-isms are a LOT more attuned to my general wavelength than I thought they were. They're a little bit crazy, their sense of humour is a tad on the blue side, and they like to eat good home cooklng and bullshit with each other. I'm more extreme, but not a hell of a lot.

I need to know these people more. This Christmas, Katie will be with my Mom's side. Next year - if it all doesn't fall apart after Grandma dies, and who knows how long she'll be here - I want her to go over to Swayzee and see these people. I need to take a day and go visit John and Margaret. I've got a cousin here in town (Nathan's brother Justin, recently home from Iraq and expecting his second child) and I need to talk more with Grandma before she's gone.

She's really sad to see. Five years ago she was kicking ass at 91. Sharp as hell, driving around. Her hearing was shot to hell, but that was about it. She cooked with lard her whole life, made killer taffy. Quilted a lot. She told me Saturday that she has a new one for me soon. Even now, with the stroke having taken so much of her energy away, she's still quilting.

But it's fucking sad. She wouldn't have appreciated her older self even five years ago. The old woman sitting on the couch hunched over and saying "Well, I'll be 97 soon, I guess it doesn't matter. I won't be here much longer." That's not my Grandma. My Grandma had no time for that. She was MOVING. When my Aunt Ellie was dying a few years back, Grandma said to me "She'll die because she WANTS to. She's given up, dammit." There was no sympathy. You damn kids. Get off yer ass! I can run rings around you little fucks! Where's my hearing aid?

Not now. She's going fast. And I'll miss her. I didn't give her one tenth the love she gave me.

I drove home in the shitstorm. The east-west roads had blown over with snow (Indiana flatland, cornfields barren, LOTS of room for wind to blow the white shit around in) and I headed west to Kokomo then down Highway 31 to home.

Stopped in Kokomo for a little "adult entertainmet." The video store I used to go to when I lived in Marion has 'em for ten bucks. I know my porn mostly from the late 80s and early 90s. Rachel Ryan. Yeah, baby. My favorite brunette. Yummy.

I was joking with Bob today about porn websites. I'm in awe of the names of these things. You remember the 80s metal package tour "Monsters Of Rock"? Well, there's a website called Monsters Of COCK. Gotta love the picture where all you see is the massive sausage and a girl doing this. (Makes eyes-wide mouth-hanging-open holy-shit-look-at-the-siz e-of-that-thing face.) Shit, even *I* made that face. I feel so insignificant...

How about "Anal Adventures" for one? Now maybe it's just me, but I think "adventures" implies something a bit different. Daring adventures on the high seas. Voyages of discovery. Well, come to think of it, I guess that works. "Charting new territory", so to speak. Ahhh, anal adventures...

But my favorite is "Ass Traffic." I'll repeat that. "Ass Traffic."

Let that one sink in.

See, to me the word "traffic" implies MORE THAN ONE. And usually AT THE SAME TIME. In fact, I think two doesn't quite cut it. Doesn't "traffic" mean, oh, I don't know, at least six or seven going in opposite directions?

I don't think I want to meet this woman. Well, maybe. I'll shake her hand. Buy her a drink. Donate a couple dollars towards the reconstructive surgery. "Ass Traffic." My friend D9 suggested that this doesn't have much to do with Steve Winwood. Sure would give new meaning to "The Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys", wouldn't it?


Tom Petty comes to mind:

She's a good girl, loves her anal
Loves Peter North and Sweden too
She's a good girl, crazy 'bout rimjobs
Loves horses and her boyfriend too

It's a long day livin' in her bunghole
There's a freeway runnin' through her back yard
And I'm a bad boy cos I don't even lube her
I'm a bad boy for makin' her fart

And I'm ass, ass-fuckin'
Yeah I'm ass, ass-fuckin'

All the pornstars filmin' in the Valley
Move south down Hershey Boulevard
And all the bad boys are wackin' in the shadows
All the good girls are home with bleeding parts

I'm ass-fuckin'...

I wanna glide down her butt-tunnel
I wanna write my name on her face
Gonna ass-fuck out her butt-muffin
Gonna leave this splooge for a while...

I'm ass, ass-fuckin'...


I had more, but I can't go on.

Love,
Dougie