Boondock Ramblings

My brother has a way of taking an otherwise normal conversation into a very bizarre direction. The most simple, straight-forward statement can end up on a very twisted path to absolute nonsense when talking to him.

Take for instance one night last week.

He calls while I’m making dinner to tell me I’m No. 18 on Humor Blogs.

I tell him I’m worried about my post entitled “My Son Ain’t Wearing Pink” and how it brought 213 people to my blog in one day and how I think it might be because people think my husband really is homophobic, when he isn’t, and how I’m worried members of GLAD might start picketing my house, thinking I’m mocking gay people when I’m really not and … (I ramble, hence the title of this blog).

My brother says he doesn’t think anyone would be offended, but then he turns that around and says I’m on a roll with offending people. This is a good thing, he thinks, because it is drawing more people to my blog. I’m becoming controversial or something. I don’t know.

First, there is a possibility I offended Catholics, then there were my other fellow Christians, and then the gays, and now maybe I could also offend another group, he suggests.

“Who else can you slam?” he asks, a question that should have remained rhetorical, but didn’t because, as he often does, he answered his own question.

“Maybe black people.”

I know he doesn’t really want me to offend black people, nor would he want to do so either. Our family isn’t like that and “us kids” weren’t raised to discriminate any group — black, white, gay, whatever. (We do it anyhow, but we weren’t raised that way…I’m kidding!!!!)

I go along with the silliness of my brother’s line of thinking anyhow.

“But I don’t know any black people,” I say as a representative (albeit it reluctantly) of a predominately white town in the middle of Nowhere Northeast.

“See, and that would offend people.”

I decline the suggestion to offend black people and follow up suggestions of other ethnic or religious groups I could offend, such as the Native Americans.

I stir my instant sweet potatoes (yes, I am both that poor and that lazy that I make potatoes from a box). I see tiny flecks of black in what should be orange sweet potatoes. This pot has been chipping paint for awhile now and I’ve been nervous that I might be feeding my family lead-based paint chips for dinner.

I stupidly tell Brother Dear about my pot crisis.

I say stupidly because in Brother Dear’s usual tendency to turn normal into bizarre, as well as not to listen to an entire sentence, all he hears are the words “pot” and “eat.”

“What?” he cries. “You’re eating pot? Why would you want to eat pot?”

Yes, the woman raised by two complete prohibitionist, anti-drug parents — one of which once got “drunk” off two tablespoons of Nyquil.

Eating it, mind you. He asked why I was eating it, not smoking it.

At this point in the conversation I started to wonder if Brother has been smoking it, or eating it, or snorting it or somehow ingesting it.

I wonder this quite often after talking to Brother actually. Read his blog and you will too.

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Read other blogs, some written by those smoking “something”, but most written by “normal folks” like you and me, at Humor-Blogs.