A Memo Concerning: Vengeful Jews, Carl Winslow, and the Ford Focus.

At work several days ago I watched a kid casually, but with vicious intention, spit from an elevated position down on to some younger, unsuspecting children. In those precious moments right before I fall asleep, in times when I make an effort to think about nothing, I can still perfectly see his snot mixed saliva floating through the air, and although I’m not proud of it the image still causes me to laugh uncontrollably. And so we have A Memo Concerning: Vengeful Jews, Carl Winslow, and the Ford Focus.

When I was little my brother and I used to play a game that always ended up with me either getting my ass kicked or swinging a haymaker at his balls. Ok, maybe both happened every time. The game began with us standing directly across from each other. The objective? To see how close we could get to spitting on each other without actually doing it. The bigger the lougee the more points you got. It was basically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict minus the BBC and Stephen Spielberg. But we never kept score. He and I both preferred face-blasting spit on to each other rather than something as abstract as a “score.” I mean who counts anything when they are wiping brain dooky off of their face cheek. Much like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I'm forced to ask what kind of jackasses would create an environment where ass kicking would inevitably happen? I suppose I could blame my parents, but I blame them for everything from my girlish figure to my penchant for pissing off people who love me. But why would I play you ask? I remember my brother easily talking me into playing the game once he noticed I was sick of turning tree branches into swords and beating the shit out of my mom’s tomato plants. Minutes later I’d miss the ooze of tomato juice as he’d smile and tell me he was going to spit first. I can still perfectly see his snot mixed saliva floating through the air and onto some younger, unsuspecting…me.

I have issues, I perfectly understand that. Most people I encounter pick up on this rather quickly. So it should be no surprise that the other day I was driving through a rare and precious Southern California drizzle and began hallucinating with several bumper stickers in front of me. A stick figure family began dancing like a band of gypsies about the back window of an Explorer while a Christian fish started swimming back and forth across a bumper nashing its suddenly appearing teeth. Letters began to dance about in Sesame Street “Today’s show is brought to you by the letter…” fashion. This obviously led to the wheels of a purple Ford Focus turning horizontal like some sort of hovercraft and then flying up and over the flatbed truck in front of it at cosmic speeds—
Ok, I understand this is pretty weird. But you know what’s weird?

Siblings. Siblings are a weird fucking thing. While I know my brother loves me, I have to always wonder if there was one event in our lives that triggered the conflicts and bullshit, contentious games that would inevitably start between us. There has to be one long lost incident that started it all. Right? Everything has a route cause. Like the first event that made the Hindu and Muslim salty on each other. For them I’d like to think it was about hairstyles, fat bellies, face paint and the naked boobie. And what made the Catholic get Inquisitive on the Jew? Maybe someone realized that bitter herb is bitter because nobody likes it so don't ask people to eat it, and conversely that walking on water isn’t as easy as it looks—I mean that hippie could have at least warned us and told us to rock our swimsuit in case we fucked up in the process.

This is the part where I write some naive, idealistic, and softbatch diatribe about how my brother and I found a way to get along so why can’t everybody else in the world. But the truth is I shit purple more often than I talk to my brother and in the rare occasion that we spend more than three days together we both get close to stabbing each other to death with spoons and toothpicks. But I think about Karl Winslow. I think about his patience for Steve Urkell and know that it stems from the fact that they share so many memories with each other. It all becomes very simple at that point. At the end of the day I may swing a haymaker at my brother’s balls but I’m scared shitless of the day when there is no ball-sack to box. The Ford Focus has landed. The Ford Focus has landed.