I should probably defend my ma and pa

April 13, 2005 - 9:33 p.m.

In that last entry I made my parents sound like toothless ignorant hicks who want nothing more than for me to die of Black Lung at the age of 33 so they can inherit my top-shelf liquor and Barry Manilow vinyl collection. It’s hard to describe their behaviors without them sounding like assholes.

In their defense, their beliefs stem from the ideology of the Amish-Mennonite church, which is often viewed as extreme to an outsider. I agree with most of their doctrines, but had to revise them a bit in order to live and function in secular society. Their unorthodox views come from the following rules, which all stem from the bible in one way or another:

1) Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. (i.e., leisure and ease can only lead to trouble).

2) Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world... the world will passeth away, I John 2:15-17. (In other words, don’t get too attached to possessions or ideals, or you’ll lose sight of what’s important, like family and faith.)

3) Education leads to vanity. (True. They’re not stupid, they just think that knowledge should be obtained through life experience, through family, and through reading books at home.)

To summarize: If my parents had offered me the world, and handed me opportunities, I would have grown up to be cultured, educated and well-traveled, and I guess that is a bad thing. Maybe it’s hard for you to understand, but I get it. I would be all of those things, but I would also be a person who had only focused on living for herself at the expense of family. And by “family” I mean “community” or even just humans in general. Your Self never, ever comes before the well-being of your family (the world). When I’m in the presence of these people, the meaning of this becomes crystal clear and makes perfect sense. Everyone’s happy, everyone wins, and their lives run as smooth as a well-oiled machine. And I must admit, I have learned more about the Meaning of Life through them than I ever did in a classroom.

And yes, I realize that this whole theory does not at all jive with most of the stuff that I write here. My immediate, blood family went haywire somehow and the result was that I turned out twisted, like this. Clearly, someone threw a wrench in our cogwheel. I think my parents tried to raise us with these values, but in a mainstream society that wanted nothing to do with our values. This was a tad confusing. Instead of guiding us through this experience, they basically just threw us to the wolves, and those wolves ate the shit out of me, my brother and my sister. Then the wolves threw us up and ate us all over again, only the second time they chewed us much more thoroughly and rolled us around on their tongues a bit. To this day they are still picking pieces of us out of their teeth with a toothpick.

I’m sure my parents’ intentions were good, but as the Christians love to say: THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS.

In other news, some dude was jerking off in the seat next to me during my ride home last night.

Seriously.

He was totally a professional pervert and had the whole thing down to a science.

He held a newspaper up right in front of his face in the most obvious way, and then he would peek at me from behind the paper. It started out with his hand outside of his pants, like the whole “I am simply scratching my upper thigh” and then he reached into his zipper and did the Inner-Pants Masturbation, and then another girl got on the train and sat behind me and that’s when his dick came out.

He had like 15 different stroke techniques going on. His hand was all over the place. I will say that his dick was long, but was semi-limp. (Probably out of fear. Pussy.) He was yanking and stretching it like a rubber band.

Ya know, it’s funny that I can be all “I Heart Dick” when that dick is attached to my beautiful man. But goddamnit all, when you see a random dick out in public, being yanked fiercely by some freak-show dude in a Bill Cosby sweater, suddenly that dick is nothing more than squirmy, dirty vermin and you want to stomp it to its death. Honestly. It reminded me of that thing that hangs from a turkey’s neck.

How dare he soil the pristine conception I have of the penis??

My eyes have been raped.

At first I was just rolling my eyes and thinking "pathetic" but then when I started to *HEAR* the masturbation noises I was like: That’s it! Slurp-slurp, oh hell NO. Luckily, at the next stop my ass was HOME.

I wasn’t threatened by him in a sexual predator sort of way because he was a middle-aged white dude, and boring, with a briefcase. But he had really greasy, longish hair so he may have been a homeless/crazy playing the role of a professional.

So anyway. Yeah. Public display of chicken choking.

This whole phenomenon is really not that unique or interesting to anyone who lives in a city, so I guess I just wrote that for my High Plains Drifters readers.

Also, I found a crack pipe on the sidewalk in Wicker Park. I was fucking giddy with excitement and couldn’t wait to sit down and disassemble the thing, to peer into the mind of a crack head. It was made of copper tubing, cling-wrap, and some other bullshit I couldn’t identify. Right away, Belle and Hardon began yelling at me and made me feel bad for touching the crack pipe. (Assholes). I was like: What? Like this is any more filthy than anything else I touch in this godforsaken city? “Is there AIDS on it? Huh? Ohmigod am I touching AIDS right now?! I have AIDS on my hands! Stupid Crybabies.”

Belle forbade me from getting into his car with the crack pipe so I had no choice but to throw it in a dumpster. But not before I sat on a curb and took pictures of it! Which I don’t have with me at the moment. Yay! Go crack pipe photography!

Maybe this is why my Amish relatives always ask me, “Are you still living in THAT CITY?”

UPDATE: CRACK.

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