Rabbits, Death, Etc.

I've never really liked dead things. One time, I had a rabbit named Grace because, of course I had a rabbit named Grace. Anyway, she died. I was about eight years old when I found her chillin in her rabbit pin, stiff as a board. We got her from the flea market near our house where most things are half dead to begin with, so it was kind of a miracle that she lived as long as she did. Anyway, when I found Grace, I grabbed her and attempted to shake her into life again, but it was pointless. Grace was dead, and I was breaking down. To be fair, I had a pretty ugly road with death at a young age because my mom's parents were 46 and 60 when she was born, so a huge portion of my family starting dying before I could really understand what that meant. That, and I had watched Titanic pretty recently, and that whole Rose lives to be really old and then dies thing really got to me as well.
Because death happened so often, I didn't really understand why it happened--to me, death was kind of like getting a cold. People got death, and then you just kind of died. The whole thing was really unfortunate, but it happened, and in my mind, it was only a matter of time before I caught it myself. I carried Grace to resting place that my parents dug for her, and I said a prayer over her tiny rabbit body, and then I placed her in the grave. I wiped the tears from my face, and then I realized: I just wiped DEATH all over my face. Great.
As soon as it hit me, I lost it--like full blown 8-year-old panic attack. My mom grabbed me and tried to explain that my rabbit was with mamaw and papaw and all the other half-dead animals they had gotten me at the flea market, included but not limited to: my dog Sable, my dog Roxie, my cat Tiger, both of my turtles Jo Jo and Urkle, my dad's old dog Amos, and a gerbil that I had once named Conway that died because he got a penis infection. I'm not kidding. But I wasn't worried about Grace's eternal soul, because her name was Grace for God's sake. I was worried about my fragile mortal body that had been exposed to death--not just exposed really, but slathered in it. I wiped my face with dead rabbit hands, and clearly, if that wasn't terminal then I don't really know what could be.
My parents spent the next 16 years trying to persuade me that people don't die by being exposed to death, but I'm not entirely sure that they're right. Regardless, I'm still here, fighting the good fight and trying to stay away from death and all his friends. I actually became kind of numb to the whole death situation. It's been years since I had been to a funeral because a whole generation of my family passed away before I was 16 years old. Instead, I just focus on the random diseases that could kill me instead of actually catching death itself. I call my mom weekly or so to check in because I've convinced myself that I have anemia or a tumor on a lymph node. For a while it had gotten out of hand, and then she eventually called me a hypochondriac. Now, I've blocked WebMD on my browser, and my fear of sickness and death has gotten easier.
Funerals, at this point, are just hurdles. Very sad hurdles, but hurdles, and as my generation has grown up, we've all also grown apart. I haven't seen my entire family together in one place in a long time, let alone the super-extended family. We never did a great job of keeping up with one another because people were having babies or going to jail or in my weird case, relocating to a new location entirely. But I was able to make a stop home after work trip out to California, and when I arrived my mom asked me the dreaded question. "My nephew Stanley died. Will you go to the funeral with me?" I mean, of course I would go to the funeral with her, but the first words out of my mouth were, "I had a cousin named Stanley?" That's the tricky part of being separated from some of your cousins by 30-40 years--sometimes you don't know they exist until they've passed away or in the newspaper for doing something really absurd.
As I pulled what I imagine was probably an illegal U-turn in the middle of the funeral home parking lot, my mom said, "Oh look. There's Roger Dale. I wonder how life's treating him now that he's out of prison." I wasn't sure if she was being sincere or just being a smart ass. Either way, I chose not to recognize it as I attempted to pull my dad's giant truck into a parking spot made for a smart car.  That, and for some reason, I kind of wanted to be friends with Roger Dale. He's one of the few people in my family that's around my age--and even though he was supposedly an accessory to an attempted murder, it's nice having friends, ya know? I finally got the truck parked, and my mom looked at me and said, "No more than 20 minutes. I'm serious. 20 minutes--in and out. Let's go. Oh, and your aunt Wanda got you a souvenir from her trip to the Amish country, so don't forget to grab it before we leave."
I wasn't expecting to go to a funeral while I was in town, but then again, I don't think anyone ever expects to go to a funeral. It's not something you etch into your planner months ahead of time. Stanley was 55 when he died, which is really complicated to explain because that makes him older than my mom. But in short, my mom had siblings that were legitimately having children before she was even born, so she was an aunt baby.
As we walked up to the funeral home, a whole bunch of people sat on the porch in white rocking chairs that overlooked the parking lot/duck pond combo below. I didn't recognize anyone on the porch, but I didn't really expect to recognize anyone anyway--kind of like when you go to a party with a friend. So, as we walked up the steps, I nodded to them and said hello, but they just kind of gave me a really annoyed look--kind of like when you go to a party with a friend... and you try too hard. Come to find out, there were two funerals going on, and I was trying to speak to people that actually weren't in my family (which at funerals, is poor form).
But once someone directed me to the sign in the lobby, I had things a little more under control. I walked into a long chapel, and everyone seemed to be gather toward the front. I inspected the front of the room, but I didn't see a casket. Luckily, they had decided to forego that part of the funeral process, and even though I was well aware that you couldn't catch death, the 8-year-old inside of me was a little bit relieved. But in its place was something terrifying in a completely different way--family that I hadn't seen in years. I was out of practice when it came to this kind of thing. I barely know what to tell my friends when they lose a family member, but it's so much harder when it's your own family. I tried to survey the room, but I couldn't place any of the faces with names, so I just kept walking forward until I reached the cork board at the front of the room.
There were pictures of Stanley and his entire family, made up of people that I may or may not have met throughout the years. I followed the pictures from the bottom to the top until something else caught my eye--a giant flatscreen TV posted up on the wall with a single candle burning. The background was totally black, and the only thing on the screen was a white candle with a single flame. I'm sure it's supposed to represent something, but for some reason, all I could think was, "I mean, could we have just not put like... a real candle or something in here? And who captured this looping video of this candle... like, how do you get that job?" I spun around and stepped on a tiny little old lady who said, "Hi there. I'm Herman's sister. You know Herman," I have no idea who Herman is. "You know there's nine of us, right? Six boys and three girls. Can you even imagine?" I still had no idea who Herman was, and for a second, I thought that she might have made the same mistake that I did earlier, except she didn't see the sign in the front directing her to the correct funeral parlor.
I didn't know what to do, so I told her that I would be right back, but when I turned around again, there was Roger Dale. I immediately felt startled, but I was also really excited because in my mind, I kept thinking, This is my chance at a friend! We shook hands, and he had a really strong handshake, and as much as I hated it, all I could think was, "This is the perfect place for him to kill me because they wouldn't even need to call an ambulance. They'd just embalm me and call it a day." I froze, and I didn't know what to say, and before I knew it, I had lost my opportunity. My mom called me over to say hello to my aunt Connie who made a grand entrance from the back of the parlor. I watched her hug my mom and dad and brother with big tears in her eyes, thanking them for coming. Then my mom said, "Connie, here's Justin." She immediately stopped crying and said, "You're grown." She pulled me in really tight, put her face against the side of my head, and then it happened. I'm not sure if it was intentional, but she just blew... blew her nose with all of her might, directly in my ear.
I pulled back with a flattened smile and touched her shoulder and said, "I'm going to head over here for a second." I felt like people were watching me, waiting to see how I would react to this whole situation. I sat down in a pew behind my mom and pulled a kleenex out of the box sitting in the pew. I shoved it in my ear and leaned forward, quietly whispering to my mom, "Aunt Connie may or may not have just blew her nose in my ear. So, that happened."
My mom couldn't stop laughing, so I had to take my family outside where we congregated with my aunt and uncle that I'm closest to. By the time I got outside to join them, my mom had already lit in on the story about Aunt Connie blowing her nose in my ear, and on the other side of the circle Was Roger Dale, whose much closer to Connie than I am. I wanted to dive on my mom and tell her to stop or to cut the story short, but it was too late. I was making no headway with Roger Dale, and if he didn't smell the fear on me earlier in the parlor, then he definitely smelled it on me now. I felt like I needed to chime in, so I said, "You know, I'm wasn't upset at Aunt Connie for blowing her nose in my ear. I was just... surprised, which I feel like is the logical response when someone blows their nose in your ear." Roger Dale stared at me with the blankest expression and said, "Yeah, that doesn't happen," and then walked away. I knew that the funeral wasn't about me, nor was it supposed to be, but I wanted to fight back. I wanted to explain how brave I was for enduring getting a snot rocket lodged in my ear. I wanted to tell everyone how I was a survivor. But my mom interrupted and said, "Can we smoke on this porch, or do we need to go somewhere?"
Standing off the porch waiting on everyone to finish up their cigarettes, I looked back on the porch, still unable to recognize if any of the people hanging outside were actually related to me. It's almost comical because at one point, every death felt like the world was ending--whether it was a person or a rabbit. And then somewhere along the way, I wasn't able to even tell the difference between who was part of my family's and who was part of someone else's.
I still miss Grace. She was a pretty cool rabbit, but in retrospect, sometimes I wonder if I might have accidentally killed her myself. As an 8 year old, I wasn't really great at feeding things, nor taking care of them. In reality, my parents probably should have gotten me a goldfish, or like... one of those crabs you can get from the beach that legitimately never comes out of its shell. But no matter how mortified I was by Grace's death or the lethal rabbit death disease that she carried, it wasn't so much that I actually, you know, tried taking care of her while she was alive. And maybe that's the whole point of why rabbits and dogs and cousins named Stanley die. Maybe it's about reminding you of what's still in front of you--what you could be taking care of. Or maybe it's just a solid reminder of how many germs you carry on your face. We may never know.

Wooly Bully

I watched a documentary called Bully a little over a week ago--if you're ever looking for a solid reason not to have kids, you should watch it. Essentially what it boils down to is that kids are freaking terrible little creatures. And apparently, they're getting smarter, or adults are getting dumber, or something. Either way, it's getting completely out of control. Apparently, kids take to Twitter and Facebook now, and hell, I'm assuming they probably use Snapchat to send little messages like, "Go kill yourself," and then afterward, it just kind of goes away. And what was worst about it is that these parents have no idea what to do. I'm not saying there's a clear cut answer--God knows that having children is one area that I am not an expert in.
But the difference between these kids' experiences and mine is that their parents seemed lost as to how to fix it. And I guess there's not really a sure fire way that works when it comes to your kids and what happens to them at school--I'm sure if there were, a lot of girls I went to high school with wouldn't have ended up so pregnant by senior year. But my dad had a way of dealing with things--whether I liked it or not.
But I didn't always go home and report my bullying because that would have been all that I talked about, and I really liked to talk, so I had to ration out my topics. Most of the time I only reported general, blatant hate crimes--kind of like when Lindsay used to shake me in first grade or when Andrew tried to give me a haircut by cornering me with scissors. Ironically, the scissors were never going toward my hair, but rather my cheekbones... I like to think it was less about malintent and more about poor execution. But those were the good ol' days when bullying was pretty basic, and if your kid did things like that to other kids, it basically meant you were just raising a little asshole.
But later on, the basics were the least of you worries. hardly on my mind at that point.
I found myself in the crux of bullying--that awkward transition between making fun and full blown Internet warfare. Most everything pre-middle school was physically based. No one went out of their way to put me in a category--it was just kids being terrible on the playground. But it was in sixth grade that the big guns were revealed. Sitting in gym class, I was there rocking out my windbreaker pant/jacket combo when Megan Johnson came up and told me, "Josh Davis said you want to give all the boys in the sixth grade a blow job." At the time, I had no idea what a blow job was--actually, because someone in my house dropped the ball on anatomy, I thought everyone had a penis so any form of sex was
Being an inquisitive child, I pretty much went straight to the teacher to ask what a blow job was. Unfortunately, no one would answer my question because, well, it is not on the curriculum to explain those kinds of things to a sixth grader. So eventually I had to take it home and ask my parents, and in doing so, I had to explain why it was that I needed to know. And that was the first of many bully-related blow ups that happened in my house. I think I caught the gist of what a "BJ" was, but it was completely overshadowed by my dad's reaction to what had happened. Obviously, I didn't want to go around doing that to anyone in the sixth grade. I wanted enough lunch money to get pizza and corn from the cafeteria on Friday, and I wanted to always be picked to answer questions in Social Studies. Basic--I knew what it meant, and I was good.
After my dad left to calm down, my mom tried to explain to me the basics of sex, but she gets just as nervous about intercourse as I do, so eventually she gave up and just decided to give me double mashed potatoes at dinner to compensate for the rest of the sex talk. My dad came back into the room and told me, "Tomorrow, you're going to go to school and knock the shit out of him." Negative, Wendell. Contrary to the rest of my family, I'm not a fighter. I don't think it's because I ever feared what the pain might feel like or how much trouble I would get into--I think I was primarily concerned about my face. And I was right to think like that because I have a pretty symmetrical face. Later on, I would go to find out that a very small percentage of the world has perfect facial symmetry, so I think I ultimately made the right call.

A nice little sketch picture we got at the mall once
when I was in middle school.

But that wasn't enough for Dad because how can you just sit back and let some other kid at school hand out sexual favors on behalf of your son? In retrospect, if one of my dad's coworkers promised fellatio to all the other gu
ys on the construction crew on behalf of my dad, I wouldn't be too cool with it, either. But with limited options, there wasn't much to be done. I refused to fight, and I pleaded and pleaded with my parents not to take it to any of the teachers. The teachers couldn't do anything, or at least that's what I though.
So the next couple years were filled with stories like Josh's and mine. And they would all lead back to the same conclusion--no intervention: no fighting, no teachers, no nothing. Instead, I would go home and take a sheet of notebook paper and list random people from school: sixteen to be exact. And then I would sit for hours and decide how they would be voted out. That's right--I madSurvivor charts back home, and every challenge I would win immunity, and then I would be voted winner at the end of every game. By the time I was done with middle school I had about 247 million hypothetical dollars.
e fantasy
But eventually, the bullying didn't stop at school. Public access to the Internet was still pretty fresh out of the gate, and one of its earliest contributions to society was AOL Instant Messenger (AIM, lolz). Anyone who was anyone had an AIM screenname (rocketdog485--you're welcome) and a totally jazzed out away message to accompany it. It didn't take too long for the guys at school to get ahold of it, and eventually, they started sending me messages over that. They would call me fag and tell me how no one liked me, and eventually, they told me to kill myself. Yikes!
And that is where the buck stopped. I made the fatal error of telling my mom about the situation, who then told my dad, who then let everyone in a three mile radius know via uncontrollable yelling, and then it was settled. We were going to have to take a trip over to this kid's house. Somehow, in my mind, the only thing that seemed worse than being made fun of and having people tell me to kill myself was my dad going over to Matt's house to have a conversation about it... with him and his dad. And my dad wasn't really the type to ask for a cup of coffee and sit down in the den and "talk things through." No, my dad was more the type to show up with a cup of his own coffee, and then throw it in someone's face. I imagined what would happen--how the cops might be called. And God, what would the people at school say?
So, my dad loaded me up in the truck and drove down to this kid's house. I remember looking over at him--he hadn't even changed from work. Grease on his jeans and a tee shirt from the work day. Dad's always been a really hairy guy, so he had this monster sized beard, and his back hair was creeping up the collar of his shirt. At a glance, he kind of looked like an animal--especially when you took his words into consideration on the way there. He was pretty much silent, which is a sure fire sign that he's about to have a total meltdown. Occasionally, he would nod to himself and mutter something like, "Yep. This is going to get fixed. Tonight." I was 74% sure that I had shit in the passenger seat, but I didn't want to say anything because, honestly... who wanted to throw any more gasoline on that flame?
We pulled up to Matt's house and my dad started walking to the door. I stayed in the truck, partially because I had little to no feeling in my legs, partially because I couldn't stand to see what was going to happen. He stopped about halfway to the door and turned around and stared at me. I knew what he wanted, but I wasn't going to do it until he told me I had to. "Get out of the truck, you're coming with me."
Mortified, I made my way to the door--my dad opted to not use the doorbell, but instead just went straight for the full blown bang on the door. Not a little "shave and a haircut" knock, but more like a "YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY GET OUT" knock. Eventually, this scrawny looking man in glasses comes to the door--the adult version of what I imagine his kid would have looked like once he stopped pantsing people in the locker room and using the term "fag" so freely in public. He asked if he could help us, and my dad cut right to the chase, "Well, your son has been picking on my son, and it needs to stop." Of course, his dad very calmly suggested that we go back to the beginning, but there was no time for that. We were here on a mission--a Kirkland mission--and that mission didn't need to take any more than five or ten really, really terrifying minutes.
Eventually, the man called Matt to the door, and there he stood--looking angelic as ever, as if he had just got done brushing the dog or doing homework or something completely unlike himself at school. His dad asked him if he knew who I was. "Yeah, that's Justin. We're friends at school." And that's when I got angry. Friends at school? Hardly. My friends were the acquaintances that I put on my Survivor alliance at 4:30 when I got home from school. This kid was not my friend.
Then his dad asked him one of the stupidest questions that you can ask a kid, "Son, are you making fun of Justin at school and on the Internet?" Oh yes, father. I call him all sorts of names. Names you might not have even heard of! Isn't it grand? "No, I would never do that." And that's when Wendell, formerly known as my dad, took over the conversation. "Don't stand here and lie to me, you little son of a bitch." Apparently, in most common suburban neighborhoods, calling a child an SOB is not a readily accepted term of endearment. Then again, SOB is not a term I heard very often back home either--it was usually reserved for our neighbor who would shoot turkeys behind our house and our pet rabbits whenever they would scratch Dad. The kid's dad looked back at us and said, "I don't think it's appropriate to say that," and then Wendell responded, "Well, I don't think it's appropriate for him to tell my son to kill himself online." And then, because my dad knows how to prepare for a situation, Wendell pulled out a stack of papers--printed out AIM conversation between myself and Matt. The jig was up--Matt had officially been busted.
His dad looked at the papers and then down to Matt, and said, "We're going to have a serious conversation about this, and you're probably going to be grounded from the computer for a while." Solid parenting, if I say so myself. But the conversation was not over, because Wendell did not find this a suitable enough warning. I could see those backhairs raising up, like a mountain lion about to pounce. He pointed his finger at Matt and said, "If this ever happens again, I'm going to come back here, and I'm going to beat his ass. And then I'm going to beat your ass for raising him." And then, he pulled out one of my favorite Wendell Kirkland moves, which I like to call the "Why Haven't You Said Anything Yet?" After he's said something like, "I'm going to kick your entire house's ass," he gives you about two seconds to process it, then raises his eyebrows and slightly shakes his head, as if you were already supposed to come up with something to say in response. It's his final way of saying, "I've won this battle. You can leave now." As a teenager, I was the victim of a couple of these responses when I did things like not get up in time for school, or a blatant disregard for cleaning the pool.

And this is what he's turned into today.

We got back in the truck and he looked over at me and said, "I think we got that taken care of," and then Matt never spoke to me again. Before I was out of middle school, we repeated this routine two other times with two other kids. Those kids don't speak to me either. I think by the time I was a junior in high school, most everyone knew that if you really went after me, my dad would show up at your house and essentially threaten to burn it to the ground. People always said things--bullies never really go away. They just knew when to stop.
Looking back on it, Dad's approach might have saved me from something really bad down the road. Sure, it was pretty ridiculous that your dad would go to your schoolmate's house and reenact an episode of Maury to get the point across, but every parent has their own way of getting the job done. Eventually, bullying pretty much came to a stop--somewhere near the end of high school. But to this day, if something bad happens at work or if I pass a jerk on the street, I think twice about whether or not I should tell my dad about it, because the last thing I need at this point is for my dad to show up at work to let my boss know who the boss really is.

Because You Left

On Christmas Eve and/or Christmas day, it's always a crapshoot as to who is actually going to show up for the festivities. Because of an unfortunate string of events involving beanie weenies (see Reasons I Elected to Find a New Mamaw), a verbal altercation between my Aunt Susie and Dad, and a continual shunning of me and my brother because we read books, we no longer visit the Kirkland side of my family on any holiday other than the occasional Flag Day. As for my mom's side, there's still no set-in-stone plan, but every five years or so, the majority of us end up at once house or another and we celebrate Christmas as if nothing has ever changed.
I guess it had been a while since we had all found ourselves under the same roof because as everyone filed in, I scanned the room and realized that I hadn't seen, or just didn't know, at least a handful of people that were in the room. I was sitting at our kitchen counter, surveying the room of all these people trying to recount names and faces, when my mom asked me Do you know who that girl in the corner is? And I said, Yeah, I have no idea. I think that's Josh's girlfriend? I really have no idea what's going on. Eventually, the poor girl asked my mom if she could get a drink, to which my mom responded, Sure. First, who are you? Well, it was my cousin, Kasi. None of us had seen her in years, and I imagined that maybe she was sailing around Peru or had pulled an Elizabeth Smart on us and was living some veiled life somewhere in Utah. Once we had identified who everyone was in the room, it kind of hit me that it had been years, literal years, since I had seen some of my relatives.
I went to college relatively close, but the distance started once we had all began to grow up, I guess. People started having babies and moving to different states; we never really knew who was doing what except for that I was apparently the constant: I was in school somewhere doing something in relation to academia. Other than that, it was a free for all. The difference between then and now is that at one point, I was close enough to know what was going on. I would catch wind of family happenings on my weekend visits home, and even though I never particularly saw these people, I had the comfort of knowing they were less than an hour away if I really wanted to visit them.
But this year, I had to explain exactly why it was I had disappeared into the depths of the Atlantic seaboard. Apparently, in my rushed state, I had not reminded my immediate family to let anyone else know where I had gone or what I was doing, similarly to when they kept switching out Beckys on Roseanne. When I was explaining what I'm getting my degree in, and what I was doing, they kept asking me Why are you doing that? I thought you were doing journalism. My life had become this mystery, and when there were these cavalier bombs dropped throughout the evening about how people had changed or who they were dating, I was shocked and immediately asked for a recap. Every explanation was ended with the sentiment, oh yeah, you wouldn't know that because you left. No one ever meant anything by it, but there was this tinge of separation, as if there were some perforated edge between me and the rest of the family. I wasn't sure what it meant, but it's like in a matter of minutes, everyone had grown up and made children and/or ended up in jail or stopped believing in the celebration of Christmas.
But it wasn't minutes, and it wasn't the happenstance of six months away from Knoxville; I had left years before that, and it really didn't hit me. Everyone grew up really quickly in my family because of one decision or the other. One misuse of a condom or drunken night behind the wheel forced you to turn over your childhood card because those choices are matters that don't allow you the opportunity to go back and play with Lincoln Logs again. Me, I just happened to pursue multiple degrees and forego sex all together. We weren't the family that often played with each other, and in a way, Christmas was our only time to catch up on each other's lives. Instead of fighting to keep us together, I willingly let go of them and never considered that there would be any regret involved in that.
As the night came to an end, I stepped outside and caught Kasi, the mystery cousin, smoking a cigarette. She's sixteen. The seven year old inside of me immediately felt compelled to run inside and tell someone, but considering that she's pretty much the end of the line for my generation, it seemed kind of useless. Someone had to buy her the cigarettes anyways, so I did the cool, wise, older cousin thing and lit up with her. I apologized for my entire family's inability to identify her (in our defense: the excessive face piercings and multi-colored hair didn't help too much), and I tried to catch up on her life in the seven minutes it takes to casually smoke a cigarette. And no, you can't make up that amount of time in the course of one cigarette, but as we get older, we don't know when the next scandalous cigarette break is going to take place. So I used the moment to do what I had avoided for years because I didn't see a point in it: I tried. She walked inside because she finished her cigarette first and she was too angsty to stay outside to finish the conversation... oh to be sixteen again... but if I could have really told her one thing, it would be Please don't smoke. And don't hate everyone so much. Dress like you're sixteen and not twenty-six, and quit acting like no one understands you. We believed that no one understood us at sixteen, when in fact, we were just hoping that our lives were complicated enough to not be understood. You are much too young to be this old.
But I didn't, because I guess you have to learn all of that stuff in your own time. And I guess we've all learned it (or are still learning it) in our ways, too. My cousins have been faced with surprise children and drugs and alcohol and all these other things that I'm sure seem very dangerous and worthy of an A&E special, and maybe it is. But then there's me, who hasn't dabbled in any of those things (though I do love a Long Island Tea), but I learned the same lesson. And all it took was being away, not by distance but by priority, to teach me that anything and everything can change in an instant.

A Little More Competition

As I played my roommates in Scrabble this evening, I realized that I didn't start enjoying the game until I had secured a solid thirty point lead over second place. Until that point, I just kind of sat there with animosity churning in my heart. I always liked the motto that I grew up with, If at first you don't succeed, find something you're good at. And you know, as anti-team-player and non-traditional as that sounds, I think that ultimately it's an excellent motto. If you're not good at something, and you don't really enjoy being not good at it, then get your self together and move on to something else. And there have only been a few times that I've thought back on that motto with regret, because I'm confident that with some training, I could be an excellent football player now. Even with soccer, I was pretty decent, but I just kind of gave up on both because I wasn't the best. I moved on to things that I could dominate at because, let's be honest, being the best is so much cooler than not being the best.
I'm sure you think that the mentality is disgusting, but it's not as if I quit everything I'm not good at... and if I start something, I will definitely fulfill the obligation that I've signed myself up for. However, if it comes for signing up for it again, I will definitely decline. That's why I don't play 21 with my roommates anymore, and it's why I go to bars and clubs to drink and dance as opposed to pick up women. I know what I'm good at, and I know what I'm not. While you go and compete with all the other "bros in da club," I'm going to stand over here with my shot of tequila. I'm fantastic at tequila... like, you don't even know.
But if there's a chance that I may rise to the top, I will fight like it's my job to ensure that I've given everything I can. In high school, I gave up having friends (partly because I wasn't too popular, partly because I loved me some school) and focused primarily on getting the highest GPA possible. That's why when it was miscalculated, I marched my Walmart polo and jeans combo into the vice principals office and demanded a recount... essentially, I was the Al Gore of the South-Doyle High School 2008 graduating class. People wonder why it is that I take competition so seriously, especially when it comes to things as simple as calling shotgun or a game of Scrabble, and what I don't think people understand is that this comes from a deep-rooted, dark psychological place that I like to call: Daddy Issues. Let's recap.
As a small six-year-old, Wendell instilled the competition bug in me early on. In the wake of my grandmother's death, my parents bought me a Beta fish. His name, may he rest in peace, was George. I loved George and took care of him as if he were my own child. I would look at him, early and often every day. My dad must have been threatened by my love of George so he acquired his own fish... a small freshwater catfish. You can only imagine my surprise when I walked in and found the bottom half of George lingering at the top of the aquarium as the small catfish nipped at his remains. Much like the Titanic until the mid-nineties, the top half of George could not be found. I was devastated, and couldn't put my anguish into words. I ran up to my dad and said, George is dead! George is dead! Your catfish ate George! and he responded with only two words, Catfish. Domination. and he held his hands over his head in a way that would haunt me for years to come. Wendell never allowed me to live a subpar life, so I knew that I had to live mine to surpass all expectations... for me and for George.

And the "domestic competition abuse" didn't stop at any specific point. When we would have family game night, Dad always requested that we play Monopoly, and I would instantly get a knot in my throat. I knew how it would end... Dad would have Park Place and Boardwalk WITH hotels, and I'd just being sitting over there across the table with Reading Railroad and friggin Marvin's Gardens, counting how many white one dollar bills I had. He would offer to give me "a loan" to tease me along, and sometimes I wondered if he did the same thing to animals out in the wild... shot them in some terribly sad place just to let them bleed out in front of him. One time, I went so far to hit the table and mess up the board, after which I was given a speech on being a good sport. I wanted to give my dad (and pretty much any athlete I've ever interacted with) the "how to not be a assface when you're competing with someone obviously under your level." So, after a while, I honed in on my skills. I put together what I knew I was good at, how I liked to play, and what I was confident in and merged those things together to make a list of things that I liked to excel at. Over the years, I decided that I didn't do well at:

• team things
• movement that involved the cooperation of a group
• any social interaction that depended on confidence in my appearance
• anything that had to do with manliness or my sexuality
• actually, anything involving my own sex
• activities involving money, fake or real

But. That left me with my stronghold... books, pop culture, ironic and fast-paced wit, words and writing, and sports that only involved me or one other person (archery, shooting guns at things, fake gymnastics, ballroom dancing, and occasional tennis matches). And once I found the things I was good at, I found that I was a much happier person overall. No, I haven't sat down across from my father with a Monopoly board in years, but I like him a lot better this way than I did when I was in those crucial preschool years.
And maybe there's something deep-rooted in this competition bug; it could explain my absolute ferocious driving style and the reason I carry a metal pipe in the front seat... but that's a different blog for a different day. For me competition was so much more than someone being better or worse than you at something... my experience with competition was always a way to be belittled. If you weren't the best, you weren't privvy to the conversations and words that others had to say to and/or about you. Competition was the last thing I wanted to be apart of when I was younger, and in a way, that's why I try to avoid it today at all costs. At the end of the day, you have to sit down with yourself and say some words that I believe Confucius said first, Haters gonna hate. When I walked into the living room and found the Scrabble board on the coffee table assembled ever so carefully with a not so nice message, I found it reminiscent of my time in middle and high school, but I did not allow myself to go there... this Justin was not one who had gotten out first in dodgeball or awkwardly stood at the edge of the party with no one to talk to... no, this was a Justin with a steady lead in Scrabble and a command of words barely ever used in the English language, and that is a Justin to be proud of.

Turkey and Dressing (Up in Drag)

Southern Etiquette (which is a magazine that I completely made up for writing purposes) clearly states: "If there's something that you would like to say to someone or a conflict that you would like to resolve, it's best to not address it until that person is out of the room. At that point, you can talk as freely as you want without the person actually hearing it. Eventually, you will have told enough people that you feel like you have an army of people in your corner, obviously proving your validity in feeling the way you do, and then you don't have to talk about it anymore." And I suppose, when it comes to my extended family, there's a lot of quiet time at family gatherings.
In looking at the statistical breakdown of my family, there are thirteen cousins on either side: 4 of us graduated high school, 1 of us went to college, 7 of us have either been pregnant or aided in the gestation process, 5 of us have done jail time, and 1 of us left our baby on the side of the road (hashtag faux pas). And when I say "us" in that exhaustive list of familial accomplishments, I am not included in that "us" after the college stat. I keep tabs on this information in case I'd like to ever kill someone or needed to come out as gay to my family. These facts and figures are my ace in the hole... yes, I stabbed that man fourteen times, but I didn't have a baby out of wedlock! You remember that next time you say you're disappointed in me. I remember my freshman and sophomore years of high school as all the Kirkland kids were heading/dropping out; I did my best to salvage the name--with mine and Casey's work combined, we did what we could.
But with all those numbers, there's some things that are terribly difficult to dodge. Like, if I legitimately killed someone, I think that my crime would override all the out-of-wedlock babies produced, even the ones named after Disney princess characters (i.e. Belle, Jasmine, etc). As for the "gay bomb," if I ever needed to tackle it, I believe that would be one that I could probably maneuver around given the amount of ammunition my family has given me. I mean, the odds would definitely be in my favor, but I would imagine that a meeting with a bomb that size would be very calculated. For instance, I would probably wear a cardigan and some nice jeans... possibly my dark-rimmed glasses. I would bring laminated copies detailing all the things that my generation of family members had done, and I would follow with a finely printed thesis statement containing the heavy news at the very bottom of the page. I would remove all sharp and/or explosive objects, and I would make sure that all hot liquids were out of reach: coffee, boiling water... or gravy, which is why I was so surprised when cousin Matt/Demitrya decided to make his drag debut to our family on Thanksgiving.
And looking back at our family history, this never should have been a giant surprise to anyone. Matt was easily my favorite cousin growing up, taking the number one spot with ease from 1994 all the way to 2007. There was really nothing that he could have told me about himself growing up that would have made him any less in my eyes, but in retrospect, I should have picked up on the tell tale signs that would eventually lead to that plot twist of a Thanksgiving in 2007.
Matt/Demitrya would watch us in the summer when we were younger, probably to make sure we didn't burn the house down (or more accurately because I proved myself unworthy of staying at home because I would repeatedly try and make Casey think I had died by laying the floor and acting unconscious). At times, he would stay with us for an entire week without going home, and it was amazing because it was like having an extra older brother at my disposal. Despite Dad's attempt to involve Matt/Demitrya in other activities like hunting or fishing, our summer activities always returned to watching Spice World at least 25 times or doing an uncomfortable amount of research on Cher. And don't get me wrong, I personally hold strong to the philosophy Every boy, ever girl, spice up your life! but more than anything, I wanted to hang out with him. If he had suggested we go steal a car and go drive off a cliff, I would have emphatically tagged along. After several months of summer research on Cher, we decided that the "piece de resistance" would be seeing her in the last of a string of farewell tours.
If you go back and ask my Dad, who accompanied Matt/Demitrya and I to the concert, his opinion of the affair, he would most likely respond, Cher was sexy as hell, but those women around us sure did have big feet. It took me about three years after the concert to realize that all those women were actually men: men with green tinted hair and giant high heels. Apparently, sans a gay pride parade, there is no larger central location for drag queens than a Cher concert. But with all those subtle nuances, it shouldn't have surprised us when Matt showed up as Demitrya (known to her closest fans as the shortened Demi) for Thanksgiving. Mom had taken me into her bedroom and prepped me on the situation, obviously detecting that one day I would be going into public relations and would probably need to pull out as much charm and fluid communication as possible so that our doublewide didn't explode off the top of Evans Road. So, I waited nervously by the door for his arrival, trying to guess what kind of outfit he would be wearing. Throughout most of high school, Matt was known for fitting into the "Goth" category; for anyone who is not a Generation Y member or an avid fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Goth subset of high school society lent itself to a collection of black clothing, paraphernalia from bands associated with popularized school shootings, and chains.
As the final trimmings were being put on the deviled eggs, Demitrya approached the door in a stunning, yet slightly predictable hybrid of lady's clothing and Goth fashion. A solid play for her first showing. I remember staring at the top, noticing the black wig and subtle (if you can legitimately call any drag make up subtle at a South Knoxville holiday gathering) make up first, then the black cami-style top, which led directly into the black skirt accompanied with fish net stockings. Oh yeah, and there were platform boots; I'm no Anna Wintour, but the outfit definitely made a statement... amateur in comparison to the complex stylings of Demitrya today, but enough to not only drain all the blood from my dad's face only to send even more surging back five minutes later. And the most fantastically awkward part about it was that it was treated with the same social decorum as if someone had farted in the room. And in my world, where I treat everything as if it is a television show... there really couldn't have been a stronger November Sweeps episode that season.
I scoped the immediate location for weapons, and it made me more nervous than if I had closed my eyes and guessed. As my family is a firm believer in second amendment rights, there were at least five guns readily available, as well as all the steak knives, numerous hot liquids for Thanksgiving purposes (namely, the gravy... I kept imagining my dad impulsively grabbing the gravy and just throwing it across the room), and last but not least, an assortment of deer and duck calls on small ropes. My concern for the animal calls was less to do with the call itself and more the durability of the small ropes that could be used for strangling purposes. I was sitting in the middle of the most fabulous game of Clue I had ever seen, and my main suspect was my dad (who bears a striking resemblance to Colonel Mustard). Though we all had taken the advice of the fictional, but still appropriate, Southern Etiquette, it could go down as one of the most awkward Thanksgiving feasts that has ever transpired.
As the years have gone on, Demitrya's talents have become less taboo in the family than they were five years ago. More children have been produced out of wedlock; more people have gone to jail. But like any public relations practitioner, I have my opinion inside the office and outside the office. On that Thanksgiving, all I wanted to do was keep the peace. The last thing I wanted was someone to non-chalantly bring up fish nets, whether it was to do with clothing or the actual art of fishing. However, throughout my college career, I would coerce my friends to go to gay clubs around the area, in hopes that I could spot Demitrya in action... it was like some mystery that I had to solve. I would go to one once a semester looking for him as if he were a rare Pokemon, like a Chancey or a Mew. And like all my pursuits of Pokemon Blue, Green, and Silver, my pursuits came up empty-handed.
Luckily, I've never been compelled to wear women's clothing; actually, considering the Birkenstock Trend Disaster of 2001 when my dad's repeatedly questioned by sexuality based on my desire to fit in and wear the slip on sandal that is probably one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen, I've tried to stay away from any unisexual clothing I can. But, if for any reason I ever did, I appreciate Demitrya taking the inaugural heat on that lone Thanksgiving back when. Luckily, I haven't had to drop any bombs like that yet, but with the cushion that my family has placed under me, the landing is ready in case I ever need to take the fall.

Mean Girls Don't Live in Singlewides

The day that it was announced that I would be valedictorian of my high school graduating class, along with Sarah, I specifically remember Lindsay looking around in astonishment and whispering to the girl next to her But his dad didn't even graduate high school. The secret was announced loudly enough that it seemed to echo across our nearly silent AP English class, and I started watching people turn to me waiting for my reaction. Unsure of what to do, I just kind of sat there... familiar with these kind of statements. I had heard them since I had met Lindsay all the way back in elementary school. Senior year was almost over, and there really wasn't much left to say to anyone in the class: my best friend who transferred in from D.C. wrote in my yearbook, Thank you for making this school bearable and showing me that even in this cesspool of ignorance and inbreeding there is hope of intelligence and kindness. What he didn't understand is that for years on end, I was considered one of the weird sources of ignorance and inbreeding that somehow managed to knife my way in or bought off some of the teachers with some meth we made at home the night before. After all, my dad didn't graduate from high school, and without a high school degree, the only skill you can could lend yourself to is mixing bathroom chemicals together for human consumption. But of course, that would have required my dad to have made meth, or even know where to start. Instead, he just did construction, which seemed a lot safer on the up and up.

Chillin' in the singlewide.

In reality, I had been subjected to Lindsay's snide, yet somehow almost sympathetic, comments for years. When I wasn't throwing up as an elementary school student, I was usually conversing with the teachers. I had some kind of weird connection to adults, and I really liked having conversations with them more than anyone else. In second grade, I was trying desperately to explain to one of the teachers that I was getting ready to move. She asked where I was moving to. No, we're not leaving where I live; we're just changing houses. All of the kids around us seemed to stop; it didn't make sense to them. When my teacher told me that if you don't leave your house, you're not really moving, I knew that I had to explain it all better. No! I am moving. They're taking the house that we have now, the one on wheels, and they're going to roll it into our back yard. Then they're going to bring the new house and put it where the old one was. Then we're going to take our stuff and put it in the new house, then that house will be gone! I was so pleased with myself; I had articulated it perfectly, so there was no reason that they wouldn't accept me. Everyone loved the guy that moved, kind of like how you were guaranteed popularity if you had a cast or got braces. But I was wrong; I immediately became trailer boy, and the one person who would never forget that was Lindsay.

After a while, most people had seemed to forgotten. I attempted to make my way up the ranks of high school, and eventually I found myself in the honors and Advanced Placement classes. In a surprise turn of events, I became a contender for valedictorian. The AP class was comprised mainly of kids from the subdivisions; however, in every class there seemed to be a couple ambassadors of sorts that represented the country side of South Knoxville and the city side. Considering I practically lived in Seymour, I would be the country representative, and Josh Wesley would be the city rep. I'm actually pretty confident Josh lived in a subdivision area, but he was black, so it's only logical to consider him the city representative, right? No one dared draw attention to Josh's race, partly because that kind of language at our high school was asking for a lot of issues we all hoped to keep at bay, and partly because Josh was literally one of the nicest human beings I've ever met in my life. So instead, it made more sense to draw attention to the lesser known prejudice of socio-economic status. While on yearbook staff, my friend Alex told me that I should go and check my GPA with the principal. It seemed really unnecessary, but I knew that the yearbook staff was privy to information the rest of us were not, so I obliged.

There's Wendell. Even with his lack of high school diploma, the
obvious prerequisite for having children, he managed to raise
me without dropping me, beating me, or blowing me up in a meth
lab fire.

After I asked about my GPA, it was noted that one of my AP classes didn't count. After doing the math by hand, I convinced my principal and assistant principal that my GPA that had been sent off to colleges was actually wrong. I would later find out that one of the other girl's contending for valedictorian had her mom call in and demand that AP art not be given the additional credit value. Suddenly, Lindsay's remarks kind of made sense. I'm not saying that Lindsay was the one that requested the class depreciation because most of the girls I was going up against thought with one singular mind; it honestly could have been any of them. But the evidence was clear: having me be valedictorian was akin to having Sarah Palin become our country's president or having Michael Vick represent the ASPCA. There was no room on the graduation stage for such trash, and all Lindsay was guilty of was being a social custodian.

I find it ironic that as I'm writing this, Mean Girls is playing in the background on ABC Family... and not just because there's actual quality programming on ABC Family for once. It's ironic because in retrospect, those kind of people really do exist. On our graduation day, Sarah gave a speech about something... maybe, stars? I couldn't really focus because I was about to give my own speech in front of what seemed like a gajillion people, and I couldn't get past the fact that I looked like a really sketchy looking lamp shade in my graduation gown. After Sarah, I gave my speech to a surprisingly receptive crowd. Lindsay, our salutatorian, would follow. Regardless of what people say or do, I really have no desire to see them fail. Sure, she had said a lot of mean things, but I didn't want to see her go through what happened next. I'll paraphrase:

You know, the next step of our life is going to be more complicated than ever. Decisions aren't just whether you should have Lucky Charms or Cocoa Puffs...

Silence. Come on girl, pull it together.

...Cocoa Puffs... she shuffled her papers. ...and Cocoa Puffs... She was frozen. The girl that had attempted to socially dominate our entire class for years on end had frozen before us; it was my "Regina-gets-hit-by-a-bus-moment," but I couldn't seem to enjoy it. We were all hanging on Cocoa Puffs and years of elitism, and she wasn't giving us any more. After a thirty or forty second Cocoa Puff cliff hanger, she returned and gave what I still believe was an abbreviated version of her speech. We all crossed the stage and eventually threw our hats into the air. Mine landed in the flower arrangement in front of Lindsay and our principal scoffed at her, believing that she was the one that threw up. Afterwards, I quickly picked it up and haven't spoken to Lindsay since.

A lot of my friends are still initially surprised when they come and visit my house because it is in fact, still, a doublewide. Even now, sometimes I try to explain that it doesn't move anymore and if we do in fact want it gone, we'll have to tear it down. I'm not sure what it is that makes people believe that I would live elsewhere, but I've never minded the house I live in or that my dad didn't graduate from high school. Actually, sometimes I miss it because it used to make me feel like I had to overcome an image and work harder than everyone else. As for Lindsay, I imagine that she's somewhere in the world inflicting some kind of hellish elitism over some other trailer kid, and for that kid, I apologize on her behalf. She doesn't mean any harm; her designer clothes are impervious to any kind of sincerity or sympathy and that's simply not her fault. In the end, those kind of things don't matter. I will continue on in search of further education and success, and she will have all the money in the world to buy as many Cocoa Puffs... and Cocoa Puffs... as her heart desires.

Virga

virga (vur-guh) noun: streaks of water drops or ice particles falling out of a cloud and evaporating before reaching the ground


A lot of people died in my life before I could even comprehend what death really was. That's the burden of having parents born to exceptionally older parents. Funerals were nearly commonplace in my life, and even though it hurt to lose people that I had grown up with, I was oddly okay with it all. Everyone that was dying was old. They had lived these event filled lives and had these children and passed on all of these stories they had created. Their funerals were heavily attended, and everyone that was there had some story to tell me about any decade of their life I was curious about. These deaths were not terrible things; they were memorials to people that had an amazing impact on the lives of those blessed to be around them. That's why when my aunt and uncle recently passed away within just a couple months of each other, I didn't think too much about it. They were old and had lived. They generated from this cloud above us, fallen from the heavens, and had splashed onto the ground. We had noticed their descent.

I wasn't surprised or startled by death until I was around nine years old. On a routine Friday night trip to pick up Burger King for our family, we were driving home in some ugly green car that was all of 500 or so dollars. The engine was extremely loud, and it embarrassed me to even be seen it it, but the brakes on my mom's Crown Victoria had gone out. As we were coming up Chapman Highway, we saw one car try to shoot across the traffic as another car crashed into its side. Mom slammed on the brakes, immediately stopping the car. The cars had joined together and starting sliding toward us. The car beside us didn't brake as soon, slamming into the wreck stopping the cars from moving any further. Before the whole event was finished, five cars were in a mound, some turned over. Mom pulled to the side of the road and put the car in park; she looked at me and told me to stay inside and not to look. I watched her run toward the highway, and I couldn't keep my eyes from glancing over. I saw a man about my dad's age hanging out the driver window, bleeding. He was screaming for help, and even at nine years old, I knew that he wasn't going to live. Shortly after, Mom came back to the car and said she couldn't leave me behind like that. We drove home, and I spent two hours on the couch by myself; I didn't even eat Burger King that night. I later heard that two people died in that wreck, and I thought about the man who probably was in his late thirties at the time: virga. And at such a young age, I wondered how it was that we had ended up with a car, just days before, that had brakes. How was it that we stopped before the accident, and who exactly was the man in that vehicle that stopped that screaming mess of jagged metal from sliding into us?

A couple years later, I was sitting on my couch watching The Price is Right. It was the first summer that Casey and I had been allowed to stay home by ourselves. Throughout the summer, I would be picked up by the preacher's wife so that I could hang out at their house with their daughters. In retrospect, there weren't a lot of things that I liked about attending the church that I did. Most of the people there were judgmental and snide. I didn't feel comfortable there, but I did love the preacher. Corey had been the pastor of the church when I decided to publicly confess my love to the Lord. He eventually convinced my dad to let my brother and I have a cat, and after even more work, convinced him to come to church too. Corey was loved in our house; he was so much bigger than I imagined life could be. The day I got the call that the jack his van was on had slipped, I nearly spilled my cereal right in the middle of an installment of "Plinko." If God couldn't protect a preacher, who exactly would he protect? Death had taken on quite the jaded perspective; it seemed to me that there was no explanation or science behind the length of human life. And at times, it seemed to me that maybe there wasn't a God at all.

I hadn't thought much about the wreck or Corey since I was little; as I child, I tended to mull over things longer than other kids my age, and without another answer, I chocked it all up to fate or God's plan or something that was so much out of my control that it was frivolous to try and answer it. Death continued to be kind of commonplace growing up, as I watched more and more people pass away. Always of old age, but pass away nonetheless. I began to count people at funerals that I had never met before. The stories seemed to matter less because what is a life essentially lived the same as all the others? That's not to say that all life isn't important, but on the sound of a tin roof, it's hard to distinguish one drop from the other. They all plink and pop the same way, making this harmonious noise that provide the comfort necessary to rock me gently to sleep at night.

The memory of the wreck had all but faded until about a year ago. On a standard trip to Coulter's Bridge in Maryville, my friends and I had embarked on a swimming day. The air was muggy and thick, and at times, it almost seemed that the water was the only salvation from the thick blanket of air that sequestered us to our air conditioned rooms. Not long after we had arrived, a man asked us if we knew how to swim because they believed another man was drowning in the river. A friend and I dove in, searching the water for some kind of body. We didn't know what we were looking for, and in all honesty, I didn't want to be the one to find him. Eventually, another swimmer found his body, and it was me that drug him from the water onto the bank. No one else was strong enough, and just like that, I found myself in my own mom's position; my brother and I were raised to try and do the best we could for other's. I could carry the most weight, so I drug this rag doll of a man from the depths of the river to the rescue squad that would pronounce him dead at 27. His name was Hanin.

I've lived on the outskirts of Knoxville my entire life, and sometimes, on rainy nights, I go out on our back porch and listen to the rain on our tin roof. As my weeks left in Tennessee wind down, I find myself getting up in the middle of the night on stormy evenings so that I can sneak out and catch every last thunderstorm that East Tennessee has to offer. Most of the time, I smoke a couple cigarettes and watch the smoke float up and around the porch ceiling toward the rain falling down. I like to imagine that it can make it all the way up to the virga: meeting it in the middle before those water droplets dissipate into the atmosphere. And then I think about the man in the car that day, and I think of Hanin. I wonder what their lives would have been like if they had lived on until their droplets found the ground like most of our's eventually will. I've never found virga to be fair because it's as if saying that some droplets are more important or stronger than the rest. All rain should be allowed to fall, but alas, it doesn't. Before I go back inside to climb in bed, I make sure to remind myself that I am indeed mortal. Young people for generations have faced the invincibility complex, oftentimes forgetting that we are subject to be deprived of life at any moment.

And a couple nights ago, as the valley has been getting hit nightly by rain, I think I came to some kind of revelation. I've focused so much on this virga: this overlooked existence that is often forgotten because it never is seen by the eye. I'm guilty of doing the same thing to the drops that hit the ground that others do to the drops that don't. I reached my hand out from under the tin roof, and I caught a couple drops in my palm and thanked whomever is up there for giving them the opportunity to splash onto the Earth.

I would like to dedicate this post to poet, Claudia Emerson, who introduced me to this word that has been on my mind for months. Whether I end up being rain or simply virga, I hope my words inspire as many people as her's have.

Grocery Store Social Hour

Growing up, we had enough to get by, but like most families that lived outside of the subdivisions of South Knoxville, we didn't have a whole lot more than that. It never bothered me growing up because I didn't know any better. We'd make the occasional trip to the movies if we had it extra or maybe a trip to the mall, but I didn't know those things as a regular occurrence until I was older, once Dad stopped working construction and started his own business. In the meantime, our family would fill our Friday nights going to the grocery store or Walmart and mingling with the other families that would frequent the Chapman Highway superstores.
Most nights were pretty basic; Dad would get lost in sporting goods and find some hunting buddy from way back when or just some random guy who seemed to be buying the same box of shotgun shells as he was. Somehow, a conversation about a Remington 12 gauge turned into a two hour conversation, and we weren't sure what time we would get out of Walmart. Momma would get lost in the grocery aisles, and Casey and I would wonder aimlessly around the CDs looking at all the pop artists even though we were only allowed to listen to country for the longest time. The visits were pretty methodic; well, most of them.
I was about fifteen when we walked into the Walmart superstore; I was desperately seeking my way into the popular crowd and was making headway as a freshman, which was quite an accomplishment considering my wardrobe and the thickness of my wire-rimmed glasses. I was riding on a self-deprecating sense of humor and a dashing personality, and all of that had me barely holding on by a thread. Regardless, I was on my way to hanging out with the superior Christians of the high school crowd, and there was nothing that screamed success like hanging out with the elitist Christian crowd. I had met a couple of them from the soccer team I was on; the progress I had made without a pinch of athletic ability was nearly unheard of.
All was going well until that visit. I was never ashamed of my family, but I had heard the kind of conversations my dad would have with the people he met in Walmart. It was essentially like bar talk; nothing was sacred in the aisles of Tide and Nabisco cookies. If there was something to be said, my dad would state it as bluntly as possible, no matter the neighborhood the conversationalist hailed from. So when I saw Elizabeth, a very influential but B-list popular girl, round the corner, I knew that we had to get away as quickly as possible. I made up a crush that I had on Elizabeth so that we could try and avoid her family, but that only fueled by dad's flame. Momma knew the ramifications that could come from such an interaction, but I was too late.
My parents had known Elizabeth's from soccer practice. The discussions there usually revolved around us, or about the team, or who was bringing the Capri Suns for Saturday's game. There was never much concern of any personal details because at that time, they weren't really close enough to disclose that kind of information. It had been a while since soccer season, and Southern white folk like to discuss personal things with people they haven't seen in a while... even if they weren't that close beforehand. I stood there looking at Elizabeth and her family as everyone started to talk. I wasn't sure what was going to come, but I felt in my bones that something terrible was about to happen.
Elizabeth's mom always had something noteworthy going on in her life, and most of the time, it was something absurd. Someone she knew had driven their car into their pool or she witnessed a fight at work and was almost strangled. From the kind of stories she told, it sounded more like she belonged in our neck of the woods instead of the upscale subdivision they lived in. Nothing would top the story she told that day; the story that eventually led to my downfall from the elitist Christians.
When a mishap like this happens, it's hard to blame one individual party. My initial anger stormed toward my dad. He couldn't have turned the candor off for just a second, but eventually, I chocked it up to fate and elitism. It was as if Elizabeth's mom knew that I was gunning for a place in the elitist Christian circle, and as most people know, it's much more difficult to move up in rank than it is to move down. High school was not the place to move upward, and I should have known better. After a little bit of small talk, Elizabeth's mom started,
Well, things have been really difficult lately. I've been having colon problems, and I was actually hospitalized for a couple days. One day I was sitting at the house and then it happened. I felt something weird, and then I started... defecating... out of my mouth. It just backed up, and then I defecated out of my mouth.
There was nothing that could save us. Save her. Save anyone. I looked at my mom, and she gave me these eyes as if she were already apologizing to me. We knew that what come next couldn't be good, so we just waited until my dad responded through broken laughter. I'm sorry, did you just say that you... shit... out your mouth? Mom gently closed her eyes and squeezed my hand as tightly as she could. Elizabeth's mom turned to us, staring blankly as ever, Yes, that's what I said.
As if that wasn't enough, Dad needed clarification, So let me get this straight. You're telling me that you shit... out of your face. Startled, as if Dad had just made some inappropriate joke about cancer or a dead baby, she composed herself and responded, Well, yes. I guess you could put it that way. Dad couldn't stop laughing at everything that had just happened, and if I hadn't had so much shallow hope riding on the situation, I probably would have, too. It's not very often that our Friday nights were so spiced up with fecal stories, so it was an occasion to be had. Of course, Dad didn't think too much of the situation, but I was devastated. I looked at Elizabeth as if it were the last time I would ever see her again, and if I remember correctly, it wasn't long after that I was excommunicated to the other side of the classroom. My chair was gone in class and it was all at the hand of Elizabeth's mommy's potty mouth.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to those Friday nights and remind myself that the people I saw on Friday nights were probably much less important than I ever thought they were. Most of them are married with children now, living just a couple blocks down from the houses they grew up in. When I get lonely in the summers, looking for something to do, I find myself on the Chapman Highway Walmart looking around for another story that could rival some of the golden nuggets that I stumbled upon as a youngster. And in the end, I'm thankful that I never made it in to elitist Christian circle because if I had, I would be a husband, a father, and voting for Mitt Romney, and I'm not ready for any of those things.

Visually Molested in the Walmart Bathroom

I've always believed that private moments are private for a reason, and being the recipient of a guilty conscience, I do all that I can to ensure that my private moments stay as private as possible. I do my damnedest to avoid changing in front of other people, the last thing you'll ever hear from me is that I just got done pooping, and anything that requires a bedroom door to be closed will be secured by at least one, if not more, locking mechanisms (which was apparently lost on my senior year roommate as I saw his girlfriend's vagina too many times for anyone's liking). Secrecy has always been a virtue in the Kirkland house, and as I got older and heard that parents actually showered with their children growing up, I cringed at the thought. We've spent enough time together as a family growing up; there was never any reason for Justin to see Daddy or Mommy's "things" in the shower. Gross.
Along with that secrecy though also comes a heavy feeling of guilt, as I previously mentioned. I'm actually kind of surprised that my family isn't Catholic. I've spent a solid 20 out of my 22 years of life feeling guilty for everything I've ever done. Even at twelve years old, I approached my mom with shaking hands and asked her to accompany me to my bedroom. I sat her on the bed, closed and locked the door, and began to confess my sins. I explained to her that I masturbated, as if it was some kind of pagan'istic ritual that I had concocted on my own. I began to cry, not understanding that pretty much every twelve year old boy in my life had a two year jump on this newfound pleasure activity. I asked Mom if she would pray with me, and I vowed to God that I would never do it again... which lasted for about two weeks. Mom made me promise to never talk to her about masturbating again, and even though I had vowed to God that I would stop such heinous behaviors, that it was kind of a normal thing. I refused to believe her, and it was those strong morals that became the basis for the atrocity that I experienced in the East Town Mall Walmart.
After a grueling breakfast at the International House of Pancakes or IHOP as many of you may know it, my family naturally decided to go to Walmart. Actually, pretty much any outing that I had with my family between the ages of 6-17 involved some frivolous trip to Walmart. Most of the time we didn't buy anything, but apparently there was something soothing about digesting our food in the aisles of America's largest chain store. However, the issue is that there are a handful of restaurants, IHOP being one of those, that sends me into intestinal fits. I always dreaded visiting those places, knowing that Walmart was undoubtedly our next stop. I told my parents to go on through the store without me; I needed to make a brief visit to the restroom.
I hate the concept of the public restroom more than just about any other social norm in life. People were not meant to defecate or urinate in the company of others. As far as I'm concerned, you use the bathroom before you leave the house or you deserve to do it on yourself. However, when I'm in a pinch and am forced to use these stops, I always prefer the handicap stall. It allows for more freedom and mimics a personal bathroom more than any of the other stalls. As I was doing my business that day, I looked over and found a folded up piece of paper. I imagined it was a sale paper or some discarded Christian pamphlet, but no. To my surprise, it was two naked women: one was fixed atop a man (I'll let you draw the details), and the other had apparently placed her chest in his mouth prior to the photo shoot. Uncomfortable and feeling more rushed than usual, I folded it up and replaced it on top of the toilet paper dispenser; someone would have more use for it than myself. I looked at the stall wall and saw a dark circle that looked as if it had been patched up. Something about this bathroom trip seemed unusually discomforting.
IHOP had really taken its toll, and in my boredom, I noticed the man's feet next to me. He had everything pulled down. I haven't studied the art of using the bathroom, but I do know that most people I've spoken with only pull down their lower body clothes far enough to get the job done. No need in pushing your jeans and skivvies down to the floor. The man began moaning, and I was hoping with all my might that maybe he'd just eaten something more potent than IHOP. I focused on getting the job done and stared ahead. No need to browse around the stall anymore. I looked back up to the wall, and like magic the hole was no longer patched. I could see straight through to the other wall. No person was visible, but the feet were still there. I glanced back down to find a man bent over, making repetitive grunting noises, staring into my stall.
I jumped up, covering myself, and ran out of the bathroom. All I could think was I just got spank banked in the Walmart bathroom. I thought I was better than this. I thought I was special. I asked the first customer service person what I should do. He went to get a manager. I waited outside the bathroom, unsure of what I would do if my attacker appea... there he was.

"Dude. What the hell was that in there?"
He looked frazzled, "I didn't touch anyone! I didn't touch anyone!"

He ran into me, nearly knocking me down and bolted down the toy aisle... the least reassuring aisle he could have gone down, in my opinion. I was sixteen at the time and had become a veteran to a slew of Lifetime movies. In some vain attempt to regain my innocence, I stormed after him, still unsure as to why I was doing it or what I would say. I just kept repeating in my head I'm not a victim. I'm not a victim. I finally saw him as he approached the exit of the Walmart, and I told the eighty something year old greeter woman to stop him. Obviously, not the best ally in this situation, but I used what resources I had available. He looked back and saw me, announcing to the valued customers once more, "I didn't touch anyone!" The woman turned to me, angrily, and asked, "What is the issue that made you scream across the store." Without any social decorum, I announced, "Well, the issue is that one of your customers was jacking off to me using the bathroom in the back of the store. That's the issue, m'am." With no defenders and still shaking, I left to find my parents.
I'll never know who my attacker was, but I'll always remember that face that stared at me so wistfully. I would later distract myself with questions like How did that man get so far bent over? That's an unusually low barrier; he must have been missing a rib or something. And to this day, I have never visited another bathroom at a Walmart franchise. I sometimes wonder, one day when I have the funds at hand, if I should hire one of those sketch artists to recreate his face, print it out on numerous fliers and post them around local East Tennessee Walmarts. I bet he's not even sorry about it, and maybe if he had talked with his mom about the guilt of masturbation at twelve years old, he wouldn't be creepin' under stalls checking out minors as he was finishing up a deed of his own.

Reasons I Elected to Find a New Mamaw on Facebook

The last time I visited my mamaw, it was a spur of the moment thing. I was on my way back to school, and I swung by her house, even though it had been ages since I had stopped by. It didn't take long to remember why. I stood in the doorway, unsure as to whether I should sit down or not. I started in about school and everything that was going on that I thought she'd like to know. Soon, we got to the question.
"So, when you going to bring me a girlfriend up here?"
"Oh Mamaw, I've been focusing so much on school and all the stuff I'm involved in that I haven't had time to think of anything like that."
She gave me a look and walked over to the refrigerator and pulled out a cold Natty Ice, Mamaw's drink of choice. She placed it on the counter and announced, "Yeah, you never really were that interested in girls." Bam. There it was. Mamaw was calling my bluff, and I wasn't sure really what to do. She cracked open her brewski, and I could have sworn I was transported. The sound of Christmas past.

All the Christmases that I had at the Kirkland house seemed really forced. I would fight my cousins for a front tree spot, but Maggie was always promised that prime real estate. Casey and I were never really able to force ourselves to the front; we were too small, too mild. We would sit in the back and await our Christmas givings. Even as a child, I like to believe I wasn't too high maintenance, but in comparison to the other cousin's gifts, I couldn't help but feel that maybe... just maybe... there was some underlying message behind the gifts we received. The first gift I remember was a VHS of the musical Annie, which in retrospect could be construed as Mamaw's first passive-aggressive jab at my alleged lifestyle. Nothing could compare to the year that followed. Casey and I unwrapped our presents. The other boys were pulling out pocket knives; the girls were pulling out make-up and Barbies. Casey and I pulled out a miniature can of Beanee Weenees and Spicy Vienna Sausages (respectively), and toboggans. Mine had hair in it. Sweet deal, if I ever saw one. Casey and I traded gifts, mostly because I knew that Casey had this weird thing for Beanee Weenees that I still don't understand. Mamaw asked us how we liked our gifts. Casey and I looked at each other, just a tender 8 and 9 years old, and agreed that the only thing we should do is nod enthusiastically. Mamaw patted me on the head and said, "Good. I know how you guys like to eat." Thanks a heap, Mamaw, for picking up that my favorite hobby was... eating. We attempted to go one more time, but that was the year that the family decided to have Christmas in the rec center behind the flea market. We respectfully declined.
Sometimes I kind of miss Mamaw, but I refresh my memory with all the memories that we've created, and I'm good for at least another 6-18 months. She pops up in the best ways; for instance, the first night that I ever drank, a friend offered me her signature beverage, and being the naive 18 year old I was, I announced to the group, "Oh cool! This is what my mamaw drinks!" She's always had the ability to add a little bit of extra flavor the conversation, even if it is the cheap kind that tastes similar to what I would imagine horse piss tastes like. She's the kind of Mamaw you would take to a kegger... that everyone's already drunk at... as long as there's no homosexuals in attendance. Yeah. That's about right.
Regardless, everyone wants a Mamaw that loves them without inquiring about his sexuality and/or eating habits. That's where Facebook came in. Eventually, I would start sending friend requests to any woman who shared my mamaw's name that could remotely qualify as typical "mamaw age." That's when I found Mamaw Joyce, a 69 year old living down in Alabama. So far, she's been present for my admission to grad school, my birthday, and my college graduation. It's not like she needed me; she has a giant family of her own, or at least what I can see from Facebook. She took me in, all filled with Beanee Weenees and resentment, and treated me as her own.
Even though I don't play baseball like the other Kirklands, nor have any desire to acquire a girlfriend, I consider myself adopted... kind of like a mail order grandson. Mamaw 2.0 seems to be working out fantastically. So, in turn, I just collect my own family. I find them and adopt them as my own, and sometimes, I imagine what it would be like to have them all come together. I like to call it "Fantasy Family," and it works in the same way a fantasy draft would for sports. You go and get them from other walks of real life, and then you keep up with them to see how they're faring. You know that you've won at the end of the day when you realize that picking your own family is a lot more fun than sticking with only the players you were given by chance. And damn it, I made sure that all of them know that I have no preference for canned pork and beans.