|
|
Dear Judy,
I started talking about Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing to my girlfriend last night while we were sitting at the dinner table. Dinner was delicious — mashed potatoes topped with chicken breast, broccoli, onions, and parmesan slivers — and I was expressing my displeasure at feeling pretty blocked with what to write about this one. I read it in about an hour and a half on Thursday morning, set it down on the side table next to our couch, and forgot about it immediately.
This isn’t to say it’s forgettable, Judy! Not at all. Quite the contrary, I learned, as my dinnertime conversation devolved into me screaming, “He ate the turtle! He just ate it! He just swallowed his brother’s turtle and no one cared. It was all ‘Poor Fudge!’ and ‘We have to save Fudge!’ and no concern that this sociopathic animal child just ate his brother’s pet!” I could say it’s unlike me to dissolve into outraged screams over fiction, but it’s really, really not.
I recounted Fudge’s many and sundry sins to my girlfriend as we were finishing up our meal and grew more and more outraged by the utterly dreadful parenting going on around these kids. They are so permissive of Fudge’s abominable behavior that it ends with him eating an animal alive! I wish you could hear me screaming through the internet, Judy, because I am that outraged. And then, once the drama of Fudge passing the turtle through his digestive tract has ceased, these atrocious parents buy the kid a puppy and joke that they made sure it would get too big for Fudge to eat.
Judy, can we stop and address the absolute terror you’ve inflicted on the world here? Fudge eats his brother’s pet! A tiny, helpless, living creature with whom his big brother Peter has formed a bond and with whom Fudge has been told time and time again not to touch. I am so traumatized!
I’ve never been a parent and, barring a large seismic shift in the universe, will never be, but even all other behavior aside, I can assure you that if my three-year-old ate someone’s pet, I’d at least be taking him in for psychiatric observation. This is not a cricket or a caterpillar or dirt. This is someone’s beloved companion. This will be the only thing I ever think about ever again in my life.
I am going to be screaming about this turtle being eaten by a three-year-old until I die. My last words are going to be, “He was just a little turtle! How could you?! How could you?!” and then I’ll expire in a great gust of breath and unanswered questions.
Judy, I love you, but gawd save you. Gawd save us all.
– Ash
P.S. RIP DRIBBLE
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
I live in North Dakota now! It’s weird!
I’ve been here for about a month and a half and it’s starting to feel like “home” even though I’m having a hard time calling it that?! Like, every time we’re out somewhere I say, “Are we heading back to the house now?” or whatever and if I talk about L.A. I say “home” — so that’s a thing.
But regardless of what I call it, the house is very comfortable and we have furniture and stuff put away and we’ve been unpacked for almost a month and just bought the last piece of furniture we needed for our living room, so that’s wonderful. We still need to buy a bed/frame and boxspring, but that’ll happen eventually and until then I guess we’ll continue to survive with a mattress on the floor like some sad college sophomore that lives with eleven other guys. 27 is too old to get up from THE FLOOR every morning! The noises my joints make! YOU WOULD FIND THEM ALARMING.
North Dakota is weird and very small (comparatively) and there are SO MANY grasshoppers/katydids/cricket creatures EVERYWHERE which are the kind of bug I am the most afraid of so that’s been great. Also, our neighbors are pretty rude?! So that North Dakota nice thing seems like a lie. Although everyone kind of waves at each other when we pass on dirt roads, so… I don’t even know where to go with it. The lesson, I think, is that there are some nice people and some shitheads everywhere, no matter what. People are terrible! Shocker.
Other Things: no one has backyard fences, construction sites are just littered with totally theftable shit at all hours whether people are there or not and there is never security, oil drilling in the Bakken produces a LARGE byproduct of natural gas, but there’s only so much that can be harvested/contained so all the oil sites have these things called flares which are either large holes in the ground or giant potbelly stove looking things that are just ON FIRE all the time, there are dirt roads that you just have to drive on to get to places sometimes, almost no one is from here and the people who are don’t seem all that enthused about the people who aren’t, food is EXPENSIVE, there are almost no chains whatsoever for anything including food and consumer goods, Hardee’s is NOT like Carl’s Jr. no matter what anyone tells you, Pita Palace is the bomb, milk tastes better here just like it did in Kansas City, most stretches of the “freeway” (it’s… not… a… freeway…) are only 2-4 lanes total, we pick up our mail from one of the local radio stations, Frank’s/3 Amigos is also The Bomb, there is only one theater in town and it’s not a chain, Canada is REALLY close, and nobody can drive worth a shit.
WHEW let me tell you it’s been a weird month. » more: welcome to nodak
So, last year my girlfriend tricked me into watching Face Off with her by going, “No, it’s not like a normal reality competition, it’s about MOVIE MAKE-UP” which is trickery because I LOVE stage make-up and learned how to do the at-home, Halloween-y stuff when I was a wee tween and I’m constantly talking about it in movies because I’m a pain in the ass about absolutely everything I love regardless of how little interest the people around me have in it. SORRY.
So this year, apparently, I’m going to recap/make fun of Face Off episodes because I need a project to distract me from the fact that I live in North Dakota now. (More on that later. Really. I swear.)
Here we go?! Spoilers, duh.
Also, just to clarify, this is not the 1997 action movie starring Nicolas Cage and John Travolta. This is a television show on the SyFy (Dear God, I miss SciFi) network. Sorry if I got your hopes up inadvertently. I’d never tease you like that on purpose.
» more: face off, “a force to be reckoned with”
Here’s something most people I know wouldn’t expect of me: at 12:01am on Friday June 29, my butt was firmly planted in a seat at our local AMC, ready to watch Magic Mike. And I was EXCITED. And a little drunk. But REALLY EXCITED, primarily, with or without the booze. Spoilers!
» more: movie monday — magic mike
So. My parents move to North Dakota on Saturday morning.
Wait. Go up there, back to the beginning, and read that again, please. And again. And again. And again. And again. And over and over again until it’s the only thing you can hear inside your head or feel under your skin or understand. Read it until it’s ringing around in your bones like a tiny forgotten windchime hanging in the breezeway of a house where no one has lived for a long time. And then maybe you’ll understand, like, a tenth of what I’m feeling over here in my real life.
Isn’t that ridiculous? Isn’t that the most intense/tragic/pathetic thing you’ve EVER read regarding someone’s totally alive and healthy and communicative and loving parents? It’s SO ridiculous. But that doesn’t make it not true! ALL THIS SADNESS IS DOWN INSIDE MY BONE MARROW.
» more: goodbye momma, goodbye poppa
|
|
