NEWS FLASH...I HATE MY IN-LAWS

Vomit.

I dunno ... I just always wanted to start an entry like that. Not that vomit is involved anywhere in this entry other than that first line. But I'm just getting tired of "Hello" and foreign variations on the word.

So "Vomit", it is.

Take it or leave it, Buckwheat.

Hey! I forgot to tell you guys just how much my mother-in-law pissed me off on Friday.

It was about 8 a.m. and she was over here watching Andrew as I was about to leave. She was talking to Andrew and saying "What should we watch on TV, Andrew?"

Okay.

Susie and I had been talking the night before that maybe we should expose Andrew to "Sesame Street". He has a few Sesame Street toys and ... you know...now that you've got the merchandise, why not watch the show, right?

So I say "Well...Sesame Street just started."

She says "Well, we're not watching Sesame Street."

Awwww hell.

Now usually, I don't backtalk my mother-in-law. I know that through this diary, you must think that she and I go round after round after round.

Not true.

She will argue until her face turns blue and quite frankly, I can't stand the sound of her voice. So if she says something, I usually keep quiet and don't respond because that means she's going to say something ELSE and then it will barrel straight into a full-blown conversation.

So I usually keep quiet.

NOT this time.

When she said that, I pretty much knew that somehow she was going to try and convince me that Sesame Street was a communist plot(oh...like the communist Cuban refugee living in your house, Grandma?).

Still, I decided to speak.

"Well, he's got so many Sesame Street toys," I said, waving my arms around the den in a gesture that said "Look around". "And we just thought he could start watching it now."

"Sesame Street is a show developed by bleeding heart liberals," she said, spewing word for word whatever the hell it was that her hero Rush Limbaugh must have said at one time or another because he had nobody else to pick on.

You know what? I don't give a flying FUCK who develops shows? I don't. Doesn't phase me one bit. If I like the show, I don't care if my damned mother-in-law developed it or God himself developed it. I'm going to watch it because I like it, NOT because some deaf talk show host wants to see how far his legions of idiots will take his ignorant messages.

I was pissed on the inside, but calm on the outside as I grabbed the remote control from the table next to her.

"Let's just give it a try," I said, as I switched the station over to PBS and put Andrew down in front of the television.

They were talking about the letter "G".

And Andrew was delighted.

While Grandma stewed.

Andy clapped his hands and stared at the screen as Big Bird came on.

Grandma scowled.

And I left.

Now I KNOW that the channel was changed as soon as I left the house. There's no way in hell this woman would let her son-in-law get the last word in.

Still, I proved my point ... Andy liked the show.

What little of it he saw.

Friday night, I get home about 5:25. Grandma and Andy are playing.

Susie had called me about an hour beforehand to ask if she could take me out to dinner. I was going to make her beg, but decided to let her off the hook and have her take me out for a juicy 5 oz. Filet Mignon.

Susie gets home RIGHT after me at 5:30, which is very early for her. She got home early because she was STARVING and wanted to get out there and get to a restaurant before the Friday Night Waits started.

So we thank Grandma for watching Andy, hand her her purse and start pushing her out the door.

Hold on just a minute.

My good-for-nothing, $6,000-owing, wifebeaters wearing, bald and goateed brother-in-law has her car because his truck is broken down. So we have to wait for him to get off work to come pick her up.

"It's okay," she said. "He should be here any minute."

Thirty minutes later at 6 p.m., he calls.

"He's running late," she says. "He had to do something at work. He should be here any minute."

ONE MOTHERFUCKING HOUR LATER ... still no asshole brother-in-law.

Just as I'm about to say to my mother-in-law "I hate you, I hate your family, I hate your ancestors and I'm starving" the phone rings.

Brother-in-law.

Ha ha. Time got away from him. Ha ha. He'll be there in a little bit.

We sit here and we wait with Grandma as she keeps prattling on and on and on about when her children were all children.

This is what she does. She's almost 70. She sits and talks about the past and what all her kids did when they were younger.

She always conveniently forgets the stories where my good-for-nothing asshole brother-in-law would come home after getting stoned at school. And I'm not talking about smoking dope. I'm talking about having rocks thrown at him by his classmates for being such a huge fucking nerd. While everyone stood outside after school and waited for the bus, other kids would pass the time by picking up rocks and throwing them at my loser brother-in-law's head.

I'll tell ya what ... if I went to school with him, you can bet your sweet ass I'd be lobbing a couple of boulders at him myself.

At 7:25, he calls again and says he's on his way.

By this point, I'm furious. Every restaurant in town is now going to have a line, which is no fun to wait in when you have a year-old baby in your arms who wants to get down and crawl.

Then, the most amazing revelation takes place.

"You guys just go ahead and go, and I'll stay here and wait for my loser son," Grandma says.

Alright, now it's my own fault for not even THINKING about doing such a thing.

I got pissed at myself for not thinking at 6 ... "Well Granny, you stay here, we're going to go eat steak. Bye".

I mean...how hard a concept was THAT?

So as soon as she said that, 60 seconds later, we were all strapped tight in the van as I bitched and bitched and bitched about Susie's dumbass brother.

The only place in town with no line at this hour on a Friday night is Chili's. I like Chili's just fine, but nobody ever goes there. Susie was a bartender and an assistant manager there for several years, so she's always happy to go there.

When she worked there, a guy killed himself in the parking lot. He was dating a waitress and she broke up with him. He came to the restaurant and asked her to come outside with him for a minute. She said no...she was working. So he went outside in the parking lot in broad daylight where she could see him, pulled out a gun and shot himself dead in the head.

The management had to comp a LOT of meals that day. People didn't really wanna pay for their meals after witnessing that bizarre form of dining entertainment.

I'm pretty sure that once that happened is when the restaurant stopped having a long waiting line.

So we got home close to 10:00 (had to stop and get groceries after dinner), which really threw Andy off his schedule.

G-damned asshole brother-in-law.

I'm going to write a poem about him someday.

I swear I am.

Saturday...Alabama beat Auburn in our state's biggest football rivalry.

This means that every single redneck in the state is going to show up to work today with some stupid t-shirt proclaiming them to be great and their football team even greater.

They play for "bragging rights". Since Alabama ain't got shit else to brag about, we pick colleges to pin all our hopes and dreams on so that every November when the two colleges play on the gridiron, you root for your team to win. That way you can say "We may have the poorest people in the country with the least amount of education living in this state...but by God...OUR TEAM WON!!!"

I don't get into the whole "bragging rights" thing. I like Auburn over Alabama, but Tennessee over both of them.

So I'm what is known as a "goddamned idiot" to the people of Alabama.

Fine.

Whatever.

My sister came and visited for a few hours on Saturday.

She's starting to get pretty hot and heavy with this new lawyer beau of hers. She said that he told her that within five years, he plans to be making $300,000 a year.

I told her to marry him. If she didn't, I would.

We'll see.

Yesterday was boring. We had a Fellowship dinner at church last night...Thanksgiving theme.

I decided to screw the diet for one night and have some sweet stuff. So I tried some weird looking sweet potatoes.

They were really good.

So I got seconds of the really weird looking sweet potatoes.

Afterwards, Susie tells me that those weren't weird looking sweet potatoes...those were candied carrots.

Ahhhhh.

Well don't that just kick my ass and call me Henry?

They were still pretty tasty.

But had I known they were candied carrots, I probably woulda passed.

People need to label their weird looking shit at potluck dinners.

That's what I'm sayin'.

Alright, I've gotta get into gear.

Peace out.

Gawd...I am SO looking forward to having a short week this week.

And I'm PRAYING that my days off aren't spent with my goofy fucking in-laws.

P-R-A-Y-I-N-G, I'm a tellin' ya.