eerie quiet
Morning. Not too early here, but I'm still on West Coast time and I feel underslept. The house is strangely quiet. Mom's enormous tv with surround-sound is off for a change and, in fact, Mom's not even here. She's at the gun show with her sister and dad, taking a class so she can get her concealed weapons permit. It's what every girl needs, really. A concealed weapon. I wonder if my aunt will shoot anyone through her purse today... I guess it depends which purse she's carrying...
My brother is in the living room tapping code into his laptop. He's writing a program that he hopes will make him a lot of money. If he can make a lot of money in a few years, he wants to stop working and just "live," which, I think for him, means read dusty tomes of philosophy somewhere, which is better than, say, shopping at Wal-Mart twice a day or going on safaris in Africa to bring back the severed heads of beautiful animals. My brother is an OK guy.
The rest of my family are all wacko. I mean, they're people so they have dimension, but often the wacko part is out of balance with the non-wacko part and time spent with them gets to feeling pretty disturbing after awhile. For me, the worst part of it is that they're loud. I'm not loud. I'm quiet. It's like I was raised by wolves. Or laughing hyenas. First, it's the television, which is always on. Add the surround-sound and its like there are eight televisions all over the house blasting at you. Let's not even talk yet about what's *on* the television (hello Fox News) because for now I'm just worried about the noise.
But after the television is the yelling. Everybody yells. They aren't angry, they just want to be heard. And they want to be heard right *now*, whether someone else is talking or not. That's why they yell, to drown someone else out. Family conversations are like freeway pile-ups, messy and clamoring. Everyone's talking at once and eventually someone wins out for a moment and people hush up long enough to get the gist of what they're saying before launching off into their own spiel again. It's also not uncommon for two or more conversations to be underway which criss-cross the room and collide with each other. My grandmother and I who sat in opposite corners of the room yelled out a conversation last night, while my brother and grandfather stood basically in between us and yelled out their own conversation, while my mom in the kitchen was yelling out a conversation with my aunt in the dining room. Thank god the t.v. was off by then.
And then there's the laughter, the laughter, as I said, of wild hyenas. They laugh loud and long and often at the expense of someone in the room. If you're that lucky someone, your only hope is to laugh so long and so loud yourself, they forget they're making fun of you. They laugh about everything and every topic is open-season for friendly ridicule. When they laugh it's with 10% malice, 40% ignorance and 50% good-natured-humor. So, I guess it could be worse. I'd rather my people laugh a lot and at fucked up things, than never laugh at all. That's my dad's side of the family, actually, and we'll meet them next week.
My brother is in the living room tapping code into his laptop. He's writing a program that he hopes will make him a lot of money. If he can make a lot of money in a few years, he wants to stop working and just "live," which, I think for him, means read dusty tomes of philosophy somewhere, which is better than, say, shopping at Wal-Mart twice a day or going on safaris in Africa to bring back the severed heads of beautiful animals. My brother is an OK guy.
The rest of my family are all wacko. I mean, they're people so they have dimension, but often the wacko part is out of balance with the non-wacko part and time spent with them gets to feeling pretty disturbing after awhile. For me, the worst part of it is that they're loud. I'm not loud. I'm quiet. It's like I was raised by wolves. Or laughing hyenas. First, it's the television, which is always on. Add the surround-sound and its like there are eight televisions all over the house blasting at you. Let's not even talk yet about what's *on* the television (hello Fox News) because for now I'm just worried about the noise.
But after the television is the yelling. Everybody yells. They aren't angry, they just want to be heard. And they want to be heard right *now*, whether someone else is talking or not. That's why they yell, to drown someone else out. Family conversations are like freeway pile-ups, messy and clamoring. Everyone's talking at once and eventually someone wins out for a moment and people hush up long enough to get the gist of what they're saying before launching off into their own spiel again. It's also not uncommon for two or more conversations to be underway which criss-cross the room and collide with each other. My grandmother and I who sat in opposite corners of the room yelled out a conversation last night, while my brother and grandfather stood basically in between us and yelled out their own conversation, while my mom in the kitchen was yelling out a conversation with my aunt in the dining room. Thank god the t.v. was off by then.
And then there's the laughter, the laughter, as I said, of wild hyenas. They laugh loud and long and often at the expense of someone in the room. If you're that lucky someone, your only hope is to laugh so long and so loud yourself, they forget they're making fun of you. They laugh about everything and every topic is open-season for friendly ridicule. When they laugh it's with 10% malice, 40% ignorance and 50% good-natured-humor. So, I guess it could be worse. I'd rather my people laugh a lot and at fucked up things, than never laugh at all. That's my dad's side of the family, actually, and we'll meet them next week.
posted by reasonably prudent poet at 6:49 AM
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