Investment advice from the fifth dimension

I got an email from my sister who’s not really my sister the other day, which is a relationship sufficiently out of the ordinary to call for some explanation. Barbara and her family lived next door to us in the Bronx, back in the days when Ike was the President of this our Great Republic and all was right in the world, except for the usual suspects like the Middle East, which was as intractable then as it is now. Barbara was a teenager then and whenever Mom and Dad had to go out, she’d come across the hall to baby-sit my brothers and me. Her own mother was in the last stages of lymphatic cancer then, so Barbara and my mother became very close during what had to have been an incredibly trying time.  Barbara always called our mother Mommy and we (my brothers and I) always thought of her as our cool older sister. She took us to the park and the playground and to the movies too; I still remember seeing Goldfinger and Thunderball—I was big on James Bond then; I had the action figures and everything—and Barbara took us all to see Mary Poppins when it opened at Radio City Music Hall in 1964, a year, I should point out to the younger readers, when there were no dinosaurs living in the New York City sewers or anywhere else on Earth, except for Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the shock wave from the asteroid hadn’t arrived yet. 

As time passed, Barbara’s fate was the fate of all cool older sisters: she went to college, she got married, and then she moved away and started a family of her own. We stayed in touch, though; she called her Mommy at least once a week, no matter where she was, and when we needed advice, we’d call her and talk to see what she thought. And we would listen to what she had to say, because her advice was always sound and because she was our big sister, and we loved her and her good opinion was important to us. 

So, it shouldn’t have surprised me that I got an email from her the other day advising me to invest in hotels in the greater New Delhi area.  Like my mother, Barbara was always on the lookout for a good deal, although the sudden interest in foreign real estate puzzled me. She’d never shown any interest in the subject before she died last year of the same kind of lymphatic cancer that killed her mother in 1959 and I wondered why she’d developed such an interest now. But I suppose being dead broadens one’s horizons in much the same way that travel does, and getting investment advice from one’s dead relatives via email certainly makes more sense that having to go to séances run by Madame Griselda, who tells her customers that she is a Hungarian Gypsy and who is, in reality, a third generation Italian American from Secaucus, New Jersey, or cracking out the old ouija board and wondering what the spirits are trying to tell you. Email is a much more efficient form of communication than mediums, ouija boards, or even the occasional burning bush, even if burning bushes have a really good spam filter.

And getting investment advice from the dead certainly makes more sense than getting advice from some Wall Street financial type. With the latter you have to spend a good amount of time wondering if they are trying to get you to invest because it’s good for your portfolio or whether they want you to invest in one thing or another because they intend to make a fortune shorting the stock once they’ve gotten enough suckers to take the bait. With your dead relatives, on the other hand, you can rest assured that they have your best interests at heart, assuming, of course, that they weren’t organ donors and their heart is now in some checkout clerk at a Wal-Mart just outside of Boise, Idaho. It’s not like the dead have any interest in earning sales commissions or shorting stocks or have someplace to spend the money once they’ve earned it. There’s a good reason why there are no good delicatessens or Citroen car dealerships in American cemeteries and the steadfast immobility of the deceased labor market probably has something to do with that.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. We live in a cynical age and I know that you’re thinking that the person on the other end of those emails is not my sister who’s not really my sister, but some subcontinental digital goniff who hacked into her account and does not know that I am on to him and his thieving ways. I would be a terrible person if I even considered this idea for even a moment. If I did, then I would be the kind of person who thinks that someone who did something like this is the verminous spawn of a syphilitic latrine cleaner of the Bhangi caste and a leprous sow, a piece of filth who enjoys inserting razor blades into his own penis in order to alleviate the pain of his baseball-sized kidney stones and telling people that if they like their doctor, they can keep them. Well, maybe that last one is an untruth too far, but you get my point. We may live in a cynical age, but I refuse to allow this to affect my happy and joyous outlook on life or to wish my older sister who isn’t my sister all the success in the world in her new career in finance and real estate.

POOR UNCLE MAX, RIP: Oh my God, that’s terrible news! Oh, I’m so sorry to hear of your troubles, Akaky, your Uncle Max, he was a good man, may he rest in peace. His troubles are over, poor man, and he’s in a better place. He didn’t suffer, I hope. Ah well, lad, it happens to us all, sooner or later. His time had come, that’s all, and [I really love this bit] things could have been much worse, you know [how? The guy died, for chrissakes, how does it get much worse than that?]

The above is just a portion of the sort of thing you hear these days at an Irish wake, which is not the drunken bacchanal of the fevered non-Celtic imagination—we have St. Patrick’s Day for that sort of thing—but rather a somewhat somber event where you remember the dearly departed’s good points, gloss over the dearly departed’s not so good points, comfort the widow in her hour of grief and tribulation, and stare sharply at those members of the clan who didn’t get the memo about the Irish wake not being the drunken bacchanal of the fevered non-Celtic imagination. In Uncle Max’s case, however, much of what I’ve mentioned did not occur and when it did occur, the occurrence became an exercise in trying to keep a straight face. Everyone found glossing over Uncle Max’s not so good points something of a trial, as the only things most people who ever dealt with Uncle Max really remembered about Uncle Max was his not so good points. In short, Uncle Max was a complete shit.

Saying such a thing about Uncle Max pains me deeply, a statement that falls somewhere between a campaign promise and a Spanish fly ad on the Albany, Chicago & Washington mendacity scale. I forget where Uncle Max stood in the birth order; I think he was the last or the next to last of my father’s siblings, not that it matters now, but anyone who ever met him agreed that Uncle Max was the handsomest, most charming bastard that they’d ever met in their lives. There is an Uncle Max in every family [I think]—the lovable rogue who gets away with stuff the other kids can only dream of getting away with. The problem with lovable roguery is that after a while, it gets tiresome and by the end of his life Uncle Max had gotten incredibly tiresome, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

My first childhood memories of Uncle Max are set in the bucolic splendor of our happy little burg, where my parents had just bought a small vacation home where my brothers and me could spend our summer vacations having good clean fun instead of roaming the hot and gritty streets of the great metropolis thinking of new and ingenious ways of getting into trouble. At first, our enforced sojourn amid the fresh air and the green, green grass of not home had a profound psycholaxative effect on my brothers and I—we were bored absolutely shitless. But kids will be kids, after all, and soon we found things to do that were just as exciting as the things we could have done in the city. A burning barn, for example, may not provide the high drama of an apartment house fire, but the lack of tragic potential is more than made up for in comic possibilities; watching the local volunteer fire department trying to get itself organized and put out an actual fire was, in those far off days, one of the better shows on Earth. I should mention here, before the onslaught of angry letters from volunteer firemen and the ladies’ auxiliaries from one end of this our Great Republic to the other arrive on my doorstep, that our local volunteer fire department has become much more proficient at their job since the days of which I speak, and that my brother wishes to apologize yet again for setting that barn ablaze. It was, as he has maintained for the past forty years, an accident.

Well, no sooner had our happy little family ensconced itself in our happy little burg than Uncle Max decided to pay us a visit. When he called my father, Uncle Max assured him that no, he wasn’t coming up to borrow money—he had plenty of money, thank you very much, and he didn’t need anymore, a claim my father doubted—fiscal responsibility, like almost any other form of responsibility you might care to mention, was not a virtue Uncle Max chose to cultivate with any degree of assiduity—but his brother being his brother, my father could not slam the door in Uncle Max’s face, even if that’s what my mother wanted him to do.

Uncle Max called on a Tuesday, if I remember this right, and he arrived the next Saturday in a very large car. I don’t remember what model it was; it might have been a Cadillac, but I can’t really be sure now. He’d borrowed the money to buy this particularly conspicuous bit of conspicuous consumption from a loan shark; banks in those halcyon days of yesteryear disliked lending money to someone who could not repay the loan, a prejudice many bankers seem to have overcome in the years since these events occurred; and, as he would have done with the bank, Uncle Max chose not to repay the loan shark, an insouciant attitude towards the financial verities that the loan shark no doubt found irritating in the extreme. In order to convince Uncle Max of the many benefits of the free market system in general and the installment plan in particular, the loan shark dispatched two of his minions to cajole Uncle Max into seeing economic reason. Something must have gone wrong with the interview, as the two minions woke up in the hospital the next day being treated by doctors convinced they’d stepped in front of a moving truck. [N.B.: Uncle Max had a bit of a temper, as you may have guessed, and he was a boxer in his teens. He was also one of the strongest men I’d ever seen. I saw him bend a Kennedy half-dollar between his thumb and his index and middle finger when he was sixty years old.]

As you might imagine, the loan shark was utterly aghast at this attack upon his employees and by his not getting the vig, although I suspect that latter aghasted him much more, if that’s even a word, than the former, and so our aggrieved Shylock sent forth squads of ill-intentioned men to find Uncle Max and show him the error of his ways, preferably in a very gory, painful, and public manner, lest Uncle Max’s example breed imitation amongst the rest of the loan shark’s clientele. Uncle Max, for his part, was also utterly aghast, possibly for the first time in his life, at the possibility that his actions might have adverse consequences, in this case very adverse consequences indeed, and so took this opportunity to vanish completely from the face of the earth.

Six months later, Uncle Max re-emerged as…Uncle Moshe. For reasons best known to himself, Uncle Max decided that being a Hasid, complete with blond beard and long dark coat, was the perfect disguise for a very erstwhile Irish-American altar boy on the run from an unhappy mob-connected loan shark (is there any other kind of loan shark, I wonder). To advance the verisimilitude of the disguise, Uncle Max had acquired a truly outstanding command of the Yiddish language, speaking with almost perfect accuracy a dialect of that language unknown to the vast majority of Yiddish speakers past and present. Uncle Max’s Yiddish was Yiddish in much the same way that pouring ketchup on your spaghetti and meatballs is Italian cuisine.

But the disguise must have worked; Uncle Max arrived on our doorstep one sunny Saturday afternoon in July all in one piece and without a scratch on him, his blond peyos fluttering in the wind, complete with the huge car that all the fuss was about and his Portuguese girl friend, Maria, and no, I have not counted the number of mitzvahs violated in either the letter or the spirit in the first part of this sentence. I don’t where Uncle Max met Maria and I am pretty sure I do not want to know. Maria could have been a gargoyle in another life and she could have been a gargoyle in this life as well, if she wanted the job. On the other hand, the two other things that really stood out about Maria really stood out, to the point that even I, at that tender age, wondered aloud if those things were real. My mother, ever the soul of etiquette, whacked me across the back of my head for my impertinence. To complete the inventory, it soon became self-evident that Maria’s English language skills were more than a little wanting; her contributions to the conversation were basically yes, no, please, thank you very much, and is that so, either singly or in some combination thereof. Whether she actually knew what these stock phrases meant is one of the great mysteries of modern times, but I suppose she meant well. She called Uncle Max “Moyshee” and she chain smoked cigarettes, often lighting a fresh cigarette with the still burning butt of her previous one, a once common habit here in this our Great Republic, and a fact I include here for its anthropological and historical interest to the younger readers. Maria and Uncle Max seemed very happy together, or as happy as a man who couldn’t speak Portuguese could be with a woman who couldn’t speak fake Yiddish.

As my parents settled down around the kitchen table with Uncle Max and Maria, my mother told my brothers and me to go out and play until she called us in for dinner. This happened much more then than it does now, when parents feel that they aren’t properly parenting unless they are constantly annoying their children every minute of the day. We trooped out the front door and spent the next several hours doing whatever it was we were doing—I forget the details now, but it probably had something to do with riding our bicycles down a very steep hill and seeing if we could stop before we ran into a very high stone wall, an amusement my father banned a few years later after a series of mistimed stops resulted in several expensive broken bones, three concussions, and one broken nose. After that, we played a lot of baseball, which, while interesting in its own way, did not have the same thrill quotient for us that potentially fatal blunt force trauma did. On this day, though, we did manage not to break anything by the time my mother started calling us in to eat, but it was not for want of trying.

I remember walking up the driveway when I heard something strange coming from the grass. I should point out here that at this time my home did not have a lawn in the conventionally understood meaning of that word, namely a largely pointless expanse of unnecessary foliage designed to give Mexicans of uncertain immigration status gainful employment. Instead of the trim, clipped green strip of your typical suburbanite’s darkest botanical fantasies, we had a wild, uncropped, uncut retro thatch of bush populated with ragweed stalks the size of dwarf sequoias towering over our heads and tall grass so impenetrable that a company of Viet Cong could hide out there for months on end without anyone realizing that Charlie had tunneled his way into the land of the free and the home of the brave.

My mother called again, this time for me, and told me to find Uncle Max and his guest—that’s the word she used, guest. I said okay and I started down the path through the front forest; it seems ridiculous to call such a broad swath of flora a lawn, now that I think of it; to find them. I got halfway down the path and called for Uncle Max, whereupon I heard an immediate “Jesus frigging Christ!” It was Uncle Max experiencing not a sudden Pauline road to Damascus conversion from faux Judaism to faux Christianity, but rather him proclaiming the usual male response to kid induced coitus interruptus. Maria screeched something in response in what I guess must have been Portuguese—I don’t speak that language so I can’t be sure. There was a momentary pink flash of this and that; apparently they were real; and then the sound of my father shouting angrily at Uncle Max from the porch. My mother appeared miraculously from nowhere and whisked me away into the house, where she scolded me for reasons I did not fathom at the time and that she would not explain, and the evening and the morning were the last day I would see Uncle Max for a long time.

And so Uncle Max is dead. I don’t know what happened to Maria; he may have married her; Uncle Max married several times, although I can’t say for certain that he ever divorced any of the wives. He died and his daughters wouldn’t pay for the funeral. They hadn’t seen or spoken to Uncle Max for thirty years or more and therefore saw no reason to shell out good money to bury a man who’d been little more than a sperm donor to them. After much hemming and hawwing, and a threat from the hospital that they’d send Uncle Max to potter’s field if someone didn’t pick up the body soon, my uncles paid for the cremation, complaining all the while that Max had managed to screw them over one more time. But the uncles got even with Uncle Max, though. Having Uncle Max’s name embossed on the urn would have cost another fifty dollars, so my uncles didn’t bother; they printed Uncle Max’s name and vital dates on a post-it note with a magic marker, taped the note to the urn, and then put the urn in my grandmother’s coffin. It’s not much, of course, but it’s a lot more than some people get.

FAMILY PIX: Family photographs are wonderful things, or so people keep telling me, but I have very little use for them. I will admit to a certain amount of prejudice in the matter, as family photographs of the Clan Bashmachkin invariably include members of the eponymous clan (and I know this for a fact, too; I’ve seen some of those photographs and there are family members in each and everyone of them). Given that I do not want to see these people in the flesh, a phenomenon that ineluctably leads to my handing out money I will never see again, I do not care to see them in photographic reproductions in either color or black and white. To be honest, I find the idea of willingly looking at those people more than a bit nauseating, if not actually perverse, a vile and unnatural act akin to putting spicy brown mustard on chocolate ice cream or rooting for the Red Sox.

I cannot say with metaphysical certainty when I developed this aversion to my own flesh and blood, but I am pretty sure that it arose in utero, when I learned that I was not going to be Bill Gates. I was profoundly nonplussed when I got the news, an understatement if there ever was one. I thought the interview had gone well and I knew that I’d scored high in the swimsuit competition and I was sure that things were going my way, so finding out that not only was I not in the running anymore, but that some little dweeb from Washington State had beaten me to the job did not make me very happy, as you might imagine. I knew that there was some chicanery afoot and I immediately demanded a recount, but alas, it was not to be. In such matters knowing the people who count the votes is much more important than having the voters on your side, and under the circumstances I had no choice but to concede. I didn’t like conceding, not by a long shot, but sometimes you’re just stuck with a bad hand. What can you do?

In any case, the folks who decide these things did not take kindly to my challenging their decision and, in their infinite wisdom and not at all in a spirit of malice, payback, or making an example for others who might think that they got a raw deal as well, they dropped me into the Clan Bashmachkin, as ill-fated a crew that ever stepped into a pile of bad karma while walking down a city street. The relatives keep telling me that things could have been worse, which is an Irish way of keeping things in proportion: no matter how positively awful the bad thing that just happened to you was, it could have been much, much worse. They will then regale with a story about their Uncle Liam in Mullingar, who had a stroke in a barn while trying to saddle a horse and couldn’t move or call out for five hours and had to lay there up to his neck in chicken crap while the pigs ate his left leg down to the bone. The story is usually pointless: Uncle Liam is back in the saddle now, the stroke was minor, and he never liked his left leg when he had it nor does he miss the limb now that it’s gone; and even if the story is not entirely pointless, which is only true in a miniscule number of cases, I find that this is usually the sort of willful denial of reality that I would prefer to skip without hearing the punch line.

You find this sort of denial everywhere these days if you really know where to look. Take squirrels, for example. Squirrels are homicidal little bastards, not that you would learn this from the press these days. Squirrels are one of the many species protected under the terms of the Disney Dispensation, which declares that all cute, furry mammals are cuter than a bug’s ear, an idiom I’ve never really understood, since if you could see a bug’s ear, assuming the bug in question has ears at all—some don’t, you know, even the ones who used to work for Richard Nixon—you would probably find the bug’s ear just as repulsive as the rest of the bug. Bugs, as a rule, do not fall under the protective folds of the Disney Dispensation; they tried, even picketing Disney Studios to get themselves included, but Walt brought in the strikebreakers—the Beagle Boys did the dishonors, as Uncle Scrooge McDuck was in Howdoyoustan that week foreclosing on a dung beetle—and broke the union; and now everyone everywhere may slaughter bugs in droves, hordes, masses, or whatever other collective adjective you wish to use without your conscience bothering you in the least.

Squirrels, by contrast, are too damn cute for words. I realize that cuteness has its place in the world, preferably a place as far away from me as possible, but I should point out that no one thought the Nazis were cute either, except for the occasional lonely Naziette. I realize that this bit about Nazis has nothing to do with squirrels and their effect on twenty-first century American social and political reality, but it does give me the chance to use the neologism Naziette in a sentence. If you don’t like Nazis, Naziettes, or neologisms, just skip this sentence and move on to the next one. It’s a pip… not this one, the next one. Cute or not, it is difficult to get Americans to see squirrels for the vicious and violently territorial critters they really are. Your average American will look upon a knock down, drag out, winner take all grudge match between two squirrels over who gets an especially big acorn and smile and tell themselves, oh, isn’t that cute, look at those two sweet little squirrels playing with one another when what is actually going on is that the squirrels in question hate each other’s guts and are trying to sink their teeth into each other’s necks. I also doubt that most mothers in this country would want their offspring to hear the profanity laced abuse these two squirrels are heaping upon one another as this fight gets nastier and nastier. Like modern twelve-tone Moldavian folk opera, one appreciates the spectacle better when one doesn’t understand a word anyone is saying. Knowing only spoils the mystery.

The same is true with your average family photograph. You’d never know from looking at them just how much your Uncle Harry hates his deadbeat brother in law who lives in the cellar of Uncle Harry’s house rent-free because his wife says so or how many people in a wedding picture know that the father of the bride is not the proud man walking arm in arm down the aisle with the blushing bride, but the older gentleman with the incredibly fake looking toupee sitting two rows behind them on the left, the somewhat seedy looking man leaning over and whispering something into the ear of his fourth wife, a once and future ecdysiast who did not get the memo on what to wear to a wedding and consequently looks as though she’s just looking for a handy Pole to leap onto. No, when the photographer is around snapping away everyone’s just one big happy family and don’t you forget it, buster, even if the family involved makes the Borgias look positively warm and fuzzy by comparison.

THE KNOW NOTHINGS HAD A POINT: First of all, I would just like to say for the record, and just for the record I’ve always wanted to say that something was just for the record, as if someone was actually keeping a record these days, except for St. Peter, the credit bureaus, and the IRS—that I have nothing against foreigners per se, despite their ongoing and persistent foreignness. I know that there are people who will go out of their way to make excuses for foreigners retaining their foreign ways, even in their own native foreign countries, but I have never been one of these poor benighted individuals. The sooner these aliens start cleaning up their acts and start acting like normal people—ordering pizza, going to the deli to buy a baloney sandwich and a handgun, joining the Republican Party, and speaking English 24/7—the better off they and the rest of the world will be.

At first, of course, the transformation from heathenish foreigner to solid American citizen will be difficult and not everyone will be able to make the grade. There are members of my family, for example, who never bothered to get right with God and remained foreigners until the day they died. Some of them even came to this country and remained foreigners. My aunt Ellen, to use another familial example, has lived in deepest, darkest New Jersey for most of her adult life without ever losing the mindset of the small Irish village in which she was born or her Irish citizenship, either. But for the vast majority of the wretched masses yearning to breathe free, the change will be beneficial in the extreme, and will lead inevitably to cleaner skin, whiter teeth, and perhaps even a well-paying job at the department of motor vehicles, where their inability to speak English properly will make our standing in line only for them to tell us we’ve got the wrong form an even more hellish experience than it already is and will go a long way towards advancing the DMV’s longstanding goal of making their agency even more hated than the Internal Revenue Service, if such a thing is even metaphysically or metaphorically possible. But the one thing that foreigners will absolutely have to change, beyond their propensity to stand around hollering at each other in utterly incomprehensible gibberish and not understanding that the inventor of the shower intended that people use his device for the promotion and advancement of personal cleanliness and not as a convenient way to water their marijuana plants, is their unfortunate tendency to show up at my house and eat corn flakes.

Allow me to say here that I am sure corn flakes are a wonderful product; they are certainly one of the staples that has made this our Great Republic the nation that it is today and that more Americans would be better off if they would abandon the milk-covered camouflaged candy bars that constitute a large portion of the nation’s breakfast menu and eat corn flakes instead. It does not necessarily follow, however, that I should eat corn flakes. Since we’re speaking plainly here, let me just say that there are few things in the world that I dislike more than corn flakes. Corn flakes are boring, insipid, boring, mind-dulling, and very likely to bring their galoshes to work with them on a sunny day on the off-chance that an out of season monsoon might occur sometime between nine in the morning and five in the evening. Corn flakes are, in short, too much like me for my psychic comfort and so I won’t have them in the house. So when I open the pantry door and see box after box of corn flakes, I know that the relatives are coming to town, emerging from their dark foreign earth into the bright sunlight of the American day, arriving like a swarm of passport-carrying locusts looking for a place to sleep and directions to the nearest ravageable amber wave of grain.

And so it was that, despite my best efforts to prevent the disaster, foreigners came into my home, ate their vile corn flakes, drank everything alcoholic in the house down to my aftershave, and then stayed to shop. Shopping is all-important to the flotsam and jetsam of Europe accumulating at my house, taking, as it does, the place of Christianity as a system of belief and worship, and unlike their predecessors from the Emeril Aisle (yes, I know that it’s Emerald Isle; this is a pun, a double pun, in fact, which I tossed in for the hell of it, and therefore you do not have to tell me that the Food Network’s own Emeril Lagasse does not rate his own aisle at the supermarket yet—I already know this, thank you, and he’s working hard to rectify this situation) this lot has no intention of staying on and building a bright American future for themselves; they are here for as long as it takes to push their bloated piles of swag through the fifty tons or more line at Sam’s Club and then they are blowing this red, white, and blue Popsicle stand while the blowing is good, and not a moment too soon, if you ask me.

Still, the experience has been more than a little instructive, in a strange sort of way. Apparently, there are large numbers of young Europeans who honestly believe that American citizens must shop at Wal-Mart twice a week in order to vote in presidential elections and that the United States Army is not doing enough to secure the borders here against Indian attacks. I am not sure where these young people get such nonsensical ideas—I suspect that one of the brothers has been making up stories again—but they believe these things with every fiber of their beings, in spite of my trying to tell them otherwise, and I think it might not be such a bad thing for Americans to realize that real live foreigners regard our beloved land, from sea to shining sea, from alabaster cities’ gleam to purple mountains’ majesty right on down to our fruited plains, as one vast emporium where almost anything they want can be bought dirt cheap. It’s a bit disheartening to suggest that we might go to some nearby historic site, just to do something a little out of the ordinary, and all these people want to know is if there’s a mall nearby. It is equally disheartening to know that the taxpayers of the Irish Republic, who are paying for this extended raid upon our Chinese made American goods and services, are also actually paying some of my cousins to be asthmatics.

As a result of my two decades in the library profession, I am more than a little familiar with that outstanding reference work, the Occupational Outlook Handbook, which the U.S. Department of Labor publishes every two years or so to outstanding reviews, except for the deconstructionist critics, who think the work smacks too much of 19th century Russian realism, you know, Tolstoy and all that sort of thing. I have been through that work from the beginning of Volume I to the end of Volume II, and I know, with a fair degree of probability, that asthmatic is not one of the career choices listed. If I looked really hard, I think I could probably find a couple of interesting lines of work like aardvark acupuncturist or celebrity celery salesman, but asthmatic? I don’t think there’s a job listing for that. As a general rule the United States government does not pay people to be sick. There are some exceptions to this rule, of course. The government will pay a person a pension if that person is disabled or in some other way unable to work, but I think we can all see the difference between supporting someone who cannot work because of a disease or disability and actually paying that person to have the disease. In this our Great Republic we do not pay people to be sick; we encourage them to get better quickly, preferably with their own money.

I could not get any of the visiting vultures to see just how unfair this situation is to America’s ailing, most of whom are actually sick and had to stay home from work, as opposed to traipsing all over the countryside of the Vampire State looking for the stray mall to buy out. For foreign governments to finance shopping raids on American malls for people who really aren’t feeling that poorly deprives America’s ill of those goods and services and makes it impossible for our sick to compete on the global unwellness market. Sick Americans deserve better than to have commercial outlets push them to the back of the line in order to serve the not so wretched refuse of someone else’s teeming shore. This sort of attitude puts a considerable strain on my deeply held beliefs about free trade and there are just times when I want to raise the tariffs on foreign diseases a good two or three hundred percent—at times like these no one should be driving a German measle around, anyway, not when there are American measles getting laid off every day of the week. Yes sir, raise them tariffs; that'll show them that Uncle Sam’s no sap, you bet it will.

The relatives having finally toddled off to foreign parts, and not a moment too soon, if you ask me, silence minus corn flakes finally reigns in my house, and so there will be something new here tomorrow, in which I comment on the disrespectful and altogether consumerist attitude foreigners take towards this our Great Republic. It is one thing, in my opinion, to have this sort of attitude if one is an American citizen; we live here and have paid for the privilege of taking a snotty attitude towards the land of our birth; but having aliens, documented or otherwise, adopt the same attitude is clearly unacceptable and may even be a grounds for a declaration of war. In any case, see you tomorrow.

MY APOLOGIES: I'm sorry for the lack of posts this past week, but my home is currently infested with foreigners and it is difficult to think whilst they eat me out of house and home at such a high decibel level that it is impossible for me to think. When they depart, which cannot be soon enough to suit me, I will have something new for everyone to take a gander at. Until then, I'm screwed.

WHERE THERE'S A WILL: Well, all things being equal, I can now die happy, I’m told, for I have, after much intense familial pestering, made out and signed my last will and testament. The family has been after me for years to make out a will, for reasons I’m sure I don’t want to think about at the moment, and for years I’ve put them off with the same story about not caring about what happens to my stuff after I’m gone; I’ll be dead, what difference will it make to me one way or the other? I always thought that this was a reasonable position, because let’s face reality, a will does absolutely nothing for the person making it out. You can hardly leave all your earthly goods to yourself, even assuming the Hindus and the Buddhists are right about reincarnation, and even if they are, do you really think your relatives would give you your stuff back once they get their hands on it? And don’t even think about your relatives’ complaints about having to pay your death tax; this is most definitely not your problem, if you give the matter any thought; you’ll be dead—it’s not like the taxman can dig you up and go through your pockets looking for the money, can he? And if he does, will you care?

So I have given in to the ceaseless nagging about my not having a will and made one up. Yes, I can now rest in peace assured that the court-appointed legal jackals of the Vampire State will not divvy all my worldly goods and chattels (I did not know I had chattels until I got involved in this whole will business, but apparently I have a whole herd of the things, and me without a Stetson or a six-shooter anywhere on the premises) amongst themselves, leaving my poor family in the streets to beg passersby to take pity on their poverty and give them a pittance for their daily bread. Now if there was some way of making sure my family couldn’t have my stuff either, I’d be a really happy corpse. But there is a benefit to having a will, of course; if nothing else, your will is the last chance you’ll ever have to let those nearest and dearest to you know what lousy bastards you think they are.

Yes indeed, once you’ve passed over to the other side, you don’t have to keep your opinion to yourself for the sake of family peace; you can finally sound off about those mooching deadbeats and get even with them, too. For years they’ve fawned all over you to your face and stabbed you in the back whenever they could, and now, there’s nothing they can do to you except hope that you didn’t find out about them bringing up your unnatural craving for eating loganberries while wearing purple socks all over town. Yes, suck up won’t help them at all now, will it?

Still, I don’t have a lot to give away in the first place. There are my cameras, which are junk, mostly, my car, which is eight years old now, and my house, which I left to the two brothers who don’t want it. On the one hand, though, is the brother who does not want the house but who will not sell it because the house is our childhood home, and on the other hand is the brother who will try to turn the house into a down payment on a Mercedes-Benz before I start to rot in the coffin. This should prove interesting, as well as more than a little gruesome, I think, something like a Eugene O’Neill epic of family dysfunction crossed with a steel cage match starring pro wrestlers and Teamster union organizers with bowie knives and flamethrowers. I’ll be sorry to miss the fireworks, or I would be, if I weren’t already dead when the festivities commence.

For all the equanimity we can bring to family nagging once we are dead, however, for the living, nagging is a never ending annoyance and we must, like caribou diving into lakes of ice water to escape the mosquitoes, do something, anything to get the relatives off of our backs and to buy some psychic peace of mind. So a few weeks ago I hied me hence therefore to the family lawyer’s office here in our happy little burg, there to apportion out my worldly goods. As I mentioned previously, there’s not a whole lot to apportion, but I liked sitting the lawyer’s meeting room for the while I was there. It was a classic lawyer’s meeting room, with the long table and the legal pads and the walls lined with shelves of law books, all of it designed to give the person frightened about giving their collection of priceless 17th century left-handed Albanian accordions, the product of a lifetime of ceaseless work and worry, to their feckless grandchildren confidence in the power and majesty of the law. Then you look at the name of the state on those books, realize that the proscriptions contained within are the product of your very own state legislature, a collection of some of the most incredibly venal and warped minds any state could produce in a year of Sundays, and then you bid good day to one and all, go home, and smash all of your accordions to bits before you let your idiot grandchildren or their moronic lawyers get anywhere near them.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any accordions, Albanian or otherwise, in my house; all I have is the house, which I can hardly burn down with all my stuff and my mother still inside. I suppose I could take the stuff out, but Mom doesn’t want to go, not when she can stay and bug me about my not finding a nice Irish girl and getting married. I thought that the nagging would end once I signed the will, which I did today for the price of three hundred dollars, or a hundred dollars per page, which is more than I’ve ever gotten for writing three pages of anything, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards now; the pestering has simply moved on to another subject. There ought to be a law against moving pestering from one topic to another, and maybe there is, for all I know, but I don’t think I can afford another three hundred bucks just to get the thing enforced. Life is like that sometimes…maybe I’ll feel differently about it all when I’m dead. I can only hope.

IN MEMORIAM: It is a fundamental law of science that any relative you haven’t seen in twenty-five years will, and not through any spirit of ill will or personal maliciousness, either, although I’m starting to have my doubts about that, choose a holiday weekend you have plans for to drop dead on. This is as inevitable as the passing of time, the failure of socialism, and not knowing what you call those tips at the ends of your shoelaces. My father did this to our metropolitan relatives a few years ago; he died just before the Fourth of July weekend, thereby causing them all manner of psychic and entomological distress when they traveled here to our happy little burg for the funeral, as they tend to regard almost any form of insect life other than the cockroach as highly suspicious and probably criminal in its intentions—does anyone, after all, really know what those damn crickets are talking about all night long? I didn’t think so. For a group of people as urbanized as my relatives, the shock was almost too much to bear, and although they were very sorry my father was dead, they were nonetheless happy to get into their cars and begin the long trip back to the great metropolis.

This time my slightly batty Aunt Cathleen was the reason for the trek southwards. Aunt Cathleen was my father’s oldest sister, and therefore you should not, in any way, shape, or form confuse her with my mother’s sister Aunt Cathleen, who died about a year and a half ago, or my other Aunt Cathleen, who is married to my father’s youngest brother Bill and has not died yet; Uncle Bill has suggested she shut up and drop dead on numerous occasions, but Aunt Cathleen appears uninterested in a sudden change in lifestyle at this time. My maternal Aunt Cathleen and my Aunt Cathleen by marriage are or were, my maternal Aunt Cathleen having died, both Irish, as is my mother, but I’ll bet you figured that out already, and were not batty, slightly or otherwise, except in those ways peculiar to the Irish condition. While I would rather my paternal Aunt Cathleen had not passed away at all, especially on a holiday weekend I had plans for, the fact of the matter is that death has done the family a favor of sorts by eliminating the longstanding familial confusion of which Aunt Cathleen we are talking about when we talk about Aunt Cathleen. Clearly, any reference to Aunt Cathleen in the present tense means my second Irish Aunt Cathleen, who is now my only Aunt Cathleen, the other two Aunt Cathleens having moved on to bigger and better things.

Having solved the mystery of the decedent’s identity, we can move forward to the wake, which is the only part of the festivities I actually attended. I suppose I could have stayed on for the funeral Mass the next day, but that would entail two trips to the city in as many days and I would prefer not doing that; I do not travel well. The wake was very nice, if you can call wakes nice. I suppose some people do; it always seems to me that you can see the same set of old women at every wake you go to, always sitting off to the side and looking at the corpse and whispering to each other while everyone else in the room is studiously ignoring the guest of honor. I don’t know if those old women are there to gloat over outliving the deceased or whether they are there to judge how the undertaker did his job, with how well the deceased looks for someone in their former state of ill health being just one of the many criteria necessary for an absolutely superlative gold medal performance. I have not seen any of those old women hold up scorecards or appear on ESPN yet, but I am pretty sure they are angling for a contract.

There was the usual polite chit—chat you always get at this sort of thing: how well you look, how was the trip down, how’s your mother doing, how’s everything going with you, it was nice of you to come on such short notice. I agreed modestly with that last point; it was nice of me to come, considering I could pass some of these very same people on the street and not realize that they are my relatives. I went over to the casket and paid my respects; Aunt Cathleen looked about as well as anyone in her condition could look, what with cosmetics slathered on like butter on an English muffin, veins full of embalming fluid, and that odd pink lighting undertakers seem to prefer. I am not sure why they have this type of lighting in funeral parlors at all; I imagine they believe it makes the deceased look more life-like, but it doesn’t really. Aunt Cathleen didn’t look like she was alive or asleep or whatever effect the undertaker was aiming for; she looked like she was auditioning for a spot in the Epcot Center’s American Adventure animatronics exhibition and about to learn that Anna Nicole Smith was getting the part instead.

Things were going quite well up to this point; the younger generations of my father’s family didn’t know us, we didn’t know them, and so we were all on our best behavior. And then the other relatives showed up, which reminded me of why I usually go out of my way to avoid these people like the plague. Some people showed a certain consistency that you have to admire; my Uncle Paddy (yes, Irish people have uncles named Paddy—this is not a Hollywood invention) was an obnoxious jerk the last time I saw him twenty-five years ago and I am happy to report that time has not softened him in any way: he’s still an obnoxious jerk, the only change being that back in the day he would poke you over and over again with his forefinger to emphasize whatever nonsensical point he was making at the time. He doesn’t do that anymore; now he pokes you with his cane. Uncle Bill and my only Aunt Cathleen showed up as well, bickering about something or other. They used to bicker much more than they do now, and I am certain that anyone outside the family wouldn’t know the difference, but I’ve noticed the slacking off in their ongoing disagreement about everything under the sun. This is the inevitable result of age; sometimes you just can’t keep an argument going no matter how hard you try; and then my uncle is slowly going deaf, although he is not going deaf fast enough to suit him. He could afford a hearing aid, of course, but then he would have to listen to Aunt Cathleen morning, noon, and night, and why on earth would he want to spend good money to do something like that? This is a good question and one for which I could not provide an equally good answer, and even if I could, what good would it do? Uncle Bill couldn’t hear what I was saying anyway.

In any case, the wake went well; I am not sure how wakes do not go well, as the guest of honor at these affairs is not likely to get drunk, do a striptease, or tell dirty jokes about the other guests, but I am sure it must happen. Not doing well is part of the human condition, as two of my Aunt Cathleens can now verify, as they are not doing very well at all these days. And for those of you interested in such trivia, those plastic or metal tips at the end of your shoelaces are aglets. No, I do not know if anyone from Texas A&M was involved in the discovery of the aglet or whether the word originally meant a coed at that august institution; I just know that’s what the dictionary calls those tips now. Argue with Noah Webster, if you feel the need. He’s dead, too.