Freud Lights His Cigar

Time to stop making little notes on life and go and get the muse that only comes to me at 2:30 in the morning. The little bastard, for that is now his official name, is a night owl. Hell, it’s an out and out insomniac. I have been waging war with it for years. I want my inspirations to come to me during school hours on engraved stationery from the muse Calliope, or, if she’s booked, then Thalia will do. A little flute music and a special cosmic delivery, by previous appointment, about fifteen minutes after I put my kids on the school bus. But no, not for me. Nothing. Bupkus. Instead I get the New York City cabbie of muses. He’ll take me anywhere I want to go, but I better have an idea. And the little bastard only works the night shift.
I retaliate to all of this creative injustice by invoking the tactic that has gotten me where I am today. When in doubt, passive aggress. I flat out refuse to get up and do what the little time challenged creative hack is telling me to do: Get up and write down the best combination of words that the western civilization has ever seen. The count of brilliant combinations lost forever to a ward of sleep is endless. There aren’t enough beads on the abacus. Oh well.
In lieu of pitch darkness, I agree to another form of torture as inspiration. I am at my mother in laws'. She and my husband, her third offspring, together are always a sight to behold. My mother in law is someone I refer to as the toxic avenger when I am feeling benevolent toward her. She is the antichrist when I am not feeling so benevolent. That is usually after an afternoon of ignoring her snipes and barbs. Right now, I am somewhere in between the two. But the damn cabbie/muse is telling me to do my version of caught on tape. “Get this down on paper,” it says to me.
It is probably the best way of working through this frightening scene unfolding before me. In addition to griping her way through life, the old girl is senile. She now either gripes about the same thing over and over (often times, me), or she tells that same story about some transgression that occurred in 1953 ad nauseum. Normally, I would leave the room. But I am transfixed and the little bastard muse is yapping.
My husband, prince of a man that he is, is answering back. They are having a twilight zone discussion of a dialogue. It gives Eric a forum to discuss his political views. For the record, I agree with most of them. It is the vehemence and rabidity that I can’t take. But I know that is borne out of a deep need to be understood and he is attempting to garner some understanding from the one person who has never and will never understand him. That’s right, mumsy. It takes so very little to trigger a rant when he is around her. Freud would love to pop popcorn and watch this one. Any news program will get him rolling and she tumbles right after him until they are splitting hairs on the back of gnat. Gradually the subject matter of these discussions will move toward topics that really make me nervous.
You see, my husband recalls with a great deal of fondness, his father’s philosophy that, when marrying and more specifically, mating, you should always “breed up”. When I met my hubby, in between bouts of incredible romance and some truly grand gestures of love, he would talk admiringly of how my large hips would translate into plenty of womb for his progeny to bloom. And he meant this most sincerely. To this day, he truly believes that he is bestowing the highest compliment he could ever give: that I have been chosen from a large pool of contestants to carry on and contribute to increasing his family’s tree. So, I know what he meant and that he meant it lovingly.
But no matter how you tell it to a woman, any woman, large hips translates immediately in our language into huge ass. Further, this “breeding up” indicates a foreknowledge of every potential candidate’s gene pool. I think they give out grades, my mother in law and my husband. In the eyes of my mother-in-law, I am a C-. I was married before. I have never sought to pursue my rightful position as a member of the Mayflower society; seeking instead to hold to the Groucho Marx maxim of never being a member of any club that would have me. I wear makeup – a travesty in the family creed. I am not Norwegian or even German in my ancestry. I went to a public university. The list is endless. So there they sit. They converse in something that can best be described as prattle, about the state of the world, the liberal media and it’s conspiracies, they move toward congratulating each other on the fine family to which they have contributed DNA.
I grab my pen. The little bastard muse can stand no more.
This is the safest tactic I can take. Anything else could quickly lead to a felony of some sort. What I really want to do is yell, “But I’M a DNA donor too.”
My alcoholic sot of a father and my neurotic, but well-intentioned mother are also branches of the trunk of my tree. Your deceased manic depressive daughter is a knothole on your trunk, lest you forget. Our children, your grandchildren, which you are, quite rightly, admiring are the new trunk of the tree and both of the above branches are providing them shade as they grow. Not to mention an awareness of how life shouldn’t be lived. This is breeding up?
I guess, and I’m feeling benevolent here, I can snicker and smile. But genetics be damned. I don’t want my husband to be sitting in a chair forty years from now, pontificating on the virtues of good genes. There may or may not be good genes, but I know to the core of my being that a lot of it all is karma, environment, and plain old Las Vegas type luck. There were only three guys who had the inside track. Jesus, Moses and Mohammed paid a very high price for their knowledge. I’d rather roll the dice, thank the karmic bank for the deposit I’ve apparently made several past lives ago for allowing my mother in law to have me killed. I also believe I put enough deposits in said bank to yield my husband, three great kids, a couple of good dogs and maybe another horse.
But, if he is still talking about good genetics like he’s some judge of it all forty years hence, I’ll have to kill him. To hell with the karma. But I promise, if this occurs, I’ll write him a great eulogy and give him a proper Irish send off.
As for my mother in law, there is a room in hell for her. If I’m bad, I’ll be locked up with her.
That’s incentive enough to live right.
Somewhere in the universe, Freud is lighting his cigar as their discussion continues.