what's coal?

I'm disappointed in the strip for this quote, but I got tired of trying to find a better one. I've usually been able to find a strip where the quote fits or adds some sort of absurdist humor to the situation, and where the original punchline gives a twist to the quote itself as the title. This one just makes no sense, sorry.

On to the story.

For a few years my family and those of two of my dad's high school buddies would crash my grandparents' vacation home for a week or so. The males would all go fishing balls early, come back smelling of dead shrimp and beer around 1p.m. and take a nap. Then around 5 they'd fire up the pit for dinner and start pounding beers again. I typically spent the day either stretched out on the porch swing reading Louis L'Amour or Douglas Adams or with my mom over at Grandma's.
At least two or three days of the week (often more) the men would curtail the morning fishing and we'd head out to either Sunday Beach on Matagorda Island or Decros Point. Sunday Beach was seeing more traffic and I think we were looking to change things up a little, so this time we went to Decros.
We had the place to ourselves. It was like heaven. Gulf of Mexico rolling in, just enough wave action to body surf a few feet, hot sun, cool wet sand (and scorching hot dry sand further back), and no interlopers. It starts to get close to lunch time, which means that probably 20 beers and two packs of cigarettes had been consumed among my dad and his friends. My dad had been walking the beach looking for rocks or fishing from the beach or something. The rest of us were chilling on lawn chairs waiting for lunch after frolicking in the surf for a couple hours. We saw another boat come up and choose the spot 200 feet from us out of the several miles of open beach available to them.
I think there were three or four people. The guys were wearing cutoffs and baseball caps with motor oil stains on them over their dirty blonde mullets. Shortly after they started unloading their coolers of Natural Light my dad wandered up. "Who are these Seadrift-looking shitheads?" he asked in tone suggesting interlopers were not welcome in his domain. I think either they left or we did shortly thereafter.

As an aside for those who may not be well-apprised of the local bay community hierarchy, Seadrift is a town on the intercoastal waterway much like Port O'Connor, only dirtier and with more Vietnamese immigrants (two unrelated qualities, I'm pretty sure). Now, in full disclosure, most of my knowledge of the hierarchy stems from my cousins based in Port O'Connor. What they tell me is that Port Lavaca fancies itself the top, followed by Seadrift and Port O'Connor in no particular order. Port O'Connor considers itself above Seadrift, and Seadrift seems to disagree. According to them, POC folk are Bay Rats, Port Lavacans are Wharf Rats, and Seadrifters are just Rats. I think this view informed my dad's comment, and, Will Waghorne notwithstanding, I think it's probably correct.

due to my getting pulled to cover stroke last month I haven't completed the post for this week. regular posting to resume next week. because afraidtofail, like jesus, will rise from the dead next week. for now, content yourself with these awesome pictures and imagine the blog posts he'll someday write about me.

THERE is an ultimatum

After I graduated from Baylor and found a job, it didn't take long to realize I was going to end up suicidal if I continued to be a generic drone. I started weighing my options. Fortunately, I had done well in school and still had most higher education doors open to me. I briefly considered law school. I had worked for a pretty cool attorney in Waco and even took the LSAT (cold turkey, with the flu, in a room full of cocksuckers -- miserable experience), but I knew lawyering wasn't my bag.
I then considered healthcare. I was pre-med when I started college but fell off the wagon somewhere along the way. I think it was shortly after my American Romantics course but before I tried to read every word written by Hemingway. It may have coincided with the borderline alcoholism and onset of 6 years of depression wrought by my ex-girlfriend's mind-fucking of me. (Don't blame her, my mind's a slut. It gets fucked by just about anything.)
Now that I had experienced something that made Dilbert real to me, medicine had a brighter appeal. I still thought of the whole medical school bit as a trifle cliche, however, so I was looking for something related but more interesting. I'd always loved genetics. Turns out there is an entire clinical field known as "genetic counseling". I found the American Genetic Counselor's Association website and tracked down some practicing GC's and even got to sit in on a few patient visits. It was very cool, and I was sold.
Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of genetic counseling programs out there. Or at least, there weren't at that time. Most of the programs that are out there only take one to three applicants per year for their two-year program. Wow. I applied to about 15 programs and got two interview offers. I only ended up taking one of them. It was to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Yonkers to be exact. This was the largest and oldest program in the country. I had a decent shot at getting in since they took like 12 applicants per year.
My interview went really well, and I was awaiting my financial aid report from them. I was talking to my dad about my plans. He and my mom, being risk-averse as mentioned before, thought my plan to go off to New York for school was foolish. But they hadn't tasted the pirogi and wine that Summer and I had on my interview trip. I digress.
One of the objections my dad raised to the notion of sending one of his Grays up to the Yankees for a couple years was that he had never even heard of this school. I guess it's not exactly Notre Dame, but Sarah Lawrence is pretty well-known to educated folk. I mean, it got name-dropped by JD Salinger, for Christ's sake. (In Franny and Zooey, I think, but don't hold me to that.)
It became a moot point when I realized I was looking at adding at least $50Grrr in debt to potentially qualify for jobs that paid $35k/yr. Ultimately I am my father's son and I just couldn't pull the trigger on that deal. Which is how I ended up the world's most bitter neurology resident. Maybe if my dad were a bigger Salinger fan none of that would have happened.

More like copper

My dad could be described as financially conservative. If you were trying to win Understatement of the Year. Very averse to risk and debt, he and my mom didn't buy much extra when we were kids. All their friends had boats and nice cars and whatnot, but they didn't care. In fact they scoffed at all these people "living beyond their means".
One time, not too long ago, Ojo asked dad about this philosophy versus the spend-spend-spend philosophy. His question was basically, at what point does denying yourself these things become worth it in comparison to those who were buying things when they wanted them rather than waiting for the time they could afford them. Dad's answer was pretty glum. "If you're us, it never pays off." My dad, Eeyore the mortgage lender.

my brain doesn't mind at all

About a year ago my dad called me. This has happened probably 8 times since I moved out of his house 13 years ago. Anyway, he was calling because he had a medical question. It turns out his doctor had recently started him on a medicine to reduce his cholesterol. Those medicines can potentially damage your liver and doctors usually warn patients about drinking while taking them. So my dad calls and asks how bad it would be. I told him somewhere between no problem and fulminant liver failure where his only hope would be solid organ transplant but that it was probably okay. I mean, millions of people are on these medications and I bet most of them drink a beer every now and then.

You think you're pretty smart

Snake will hopefully fill in some details on this one, because it's a great story when he tells it. Snake was, I'm guessing, a sophomore in high school, probably 5'9", 120. My dad was working on a car, it might even have been the Datsun 280-Z of Farquar fame, and he needed some help. He had to get to a really tight spot underneath the engine to replace something structural on this car. In order to do this he had rigged a chain around the engine, yes the whole engine, that ran through a pulley. The idea was that Snake would lift this 800 pound engine into the air while my dad worked on replacing the part, his head position for certain death should his youngest son prove not up to the task. Anyway, I actually wish I could have seen the expression on Snake's face when he heard dad say, "You hold this engine up ... " I mean, you thought giving him the wrong size socket was a capitol offense? Try death and/or complete cranial dismemberment. At his most bitter moment I think I've heard Snake refer to this as a missed opportunity.

It's nice to see what's going on

After Ojo moved on to college and was out of the house for a few years tensions between dad and him really eased up. They were able to relax a little and share certain joys of life, like cigarettes. One night when Ojo was home visiting he and dad went to the back porch to smoke. Ojo hadn't yet gotten his best Christmas gift ever, or maybe he was just out of Zippo fluid. At any rate, he asked my dad for a match. To which my dad replied, far too quickly, "My ass and your face. That's a match." Ojo was stunned by this middle-school sweet burn.