So, my cousin Sally, who is awesome, is getting a new kidney. Couple things about that…
1) I’m not sure she’s actually my cousin. I use the term loosely, like when Big Big says Eve and Kayla are her “cousins” but she actually means “cousin’s children”, or when my mother says Alan is her “cousin” but she actually means “husband”.
2)This new kidney is coming from some chick I’ve never heard of. This is not out of necessity, since when I heard about Sally needing a new kidney; I immediately offered her one… of Big Big’s, since I’m 95% certain she was bread for spare parts.
I only met Sally a couple of years ago, since she is part of that elusive group of family members I someday hope to join the ranks of, whose names are never spoken aloud for fear of their evil power… kind of like Voldemort. Everyone was scared of Sally because she’s brilliant (i.e., went to med school, works in a think-tank and never got married).
Just to give you an inkling of how far away I am from gaining this kind of family infamy, I spent a stoned afternoon with Muffin and Alabaster just trying to figure out what a think-tank IS. Alabaster said it was some sort of large water filled tank that you float around in with other smart people, sipping cocktails and thinking. I said it was more like a giant, zero gravity tank where you float around with a bunch of other smart people, and the tank does the thinking for you. Muffin said it wasn’t either of those, and she wanted to go shoe shopping.
Looks like if I want to be in the dare-not-speak-their-name category, I’m going to have to aspire more towards my other “cousin” in the category, Cousin Dickey.
Cousin Dickey doesn’t get mentioned for a whole other reason. I never even knew he existed until I met him at a family party in Boston when I was about 11 or 12. I liked him instantly. He was the only relative who didn’t speak to me like I was retarded.
I later discovered that Dickey had spent the majority of his adult life in prison for theft and sex crimes… although he didn’t mention any of that during our conversation. I imagine my parents would have prevented me from speaking to him at all had it not been for their strict no-allowing-pedophiles-near-the-children-unless-preventing-it-would-in-some-way-inhibit-our-appetizer-consumption rule.
Regardless, Dickey soon went back to prison after that night, and despite having broken out of lower security places in the past, this one seems to beholding him pretty effectively.
The tragedy of all this, of course, is that were my family to function in the one way that makes the family structure useful rather than just restrictive, Sally and Dickey would know each other, and she wouldn’t have to have waited more than a weekend to get a new kidney. Give him $500 and a three hours, and Dickey probably could have gotten her a kidney, a liver AND an ounce of Meth.
But Alas, it wasn’t meant to be…
