Friday, March 17, 2006

It's Time for a Revival!

Okay, here is the cast of today's post:
  • My grandmother (you all know how crazy she is from previous posts)
  • Uncle Kip (my mother's brother and grandmother's second child; recovering and sometimes stumbling drug and alcohol addict)
  • Uncle Roy (Grandmother's brother-in-law; pastor, right-wing idiot)
  • Sylvia (my sister with red hair, named for the matron of this saga of weird)
  • Me (brilliant, handsome, and witty teller of this tale)


So Kip is living with this flake Sally. Sweet girl, from the two times I've met her. Apparently she has boku pets, so many that if the authorities found out she'd be in a heap of trouble... Kip is a moron. Ever seen that show "The Osborne's"? Ozzy is my uncle Kip, but slight, slightly not as bad. So last week my mother gets a call from Sally (who Mom has also only met once or twice) to tell her that Kip is abusing her. Okay...

So my mother counsels Sally the best way she knows how... tells her that if she is getting abused, she should leave, she should report him, yadda yadda yadda... But Sally can't bear to leave all her animals in Kip's care and claim Kip has killed at least one of them...

So then Kip calls my mom, and gives her his side of the story (and trust me, between Kip and Sally, they could talk the leg off a mule...) So mom counsels him, tells him he shouldn't hit, this and that... she didn't know who to believe, and frankly, I wouldn't have known either and would have liked to just forget they exist, but ... whatever...

Enter today. Now we all know how my grandmother can't bear to part with the 10 cents it costs to call someone long-distance. So, she calls my sister Sylvia (one of the only persons brave enough to stay within the local calling zone of grandmom's house), and tells Sylvia to call my mom and tell her that Uncle Roy has "saved" Sally, but that she (Grandmom) doesn't believe it...

God, I know, there are so many things wrong with that sentence, but I'm just here to tell the facts.

Now, you have to know Uncle Roy. He ruined my grandfathers funeral, with the blessing of my grandmother, by using it as a sermon-time instead of a remebrance time... he also has the ugliest mug this side of the Mississippi... and he also claimed to "save" my gay uncle Tim, all his kids girl- and boyfriends during any given month, and so on and so forth; a real holy-roller.

Okay, so here's the apparent "salvation" of the situation: Sally is "saved," so apparently this must mean that Kip won't beat her (if he was beating her) because god will protect her; Kip, having probably been "saved" by Uncle Roy and various others throughout his life, is still living in sin with Sally (as she is a live-in girlfriend, not his third wife) but maybe they'll think about their "sinful" lifestyle; Grandmom still thinks she knows better than god (even though she's been proven wrong by Fate, Destiny, 2 marriages, 3 kids, 11 grandkids, Death, Taxes, and her God) and thinks she's judge and jury on someone's apparent "salvation" by Jesus Christ; Mom is worried that Grandmom doesn't have enough faith (which generally I agree with) in her life, but has always struggled in her relationship with her mother anyway, and only death will change that; and I heard it all through the grapevine!


Now for my unfettered opinion about the whole thing:

This whole concept of salvation being the end all/be all I think is a load of hokey, as many of my millions of fans know by now. Not only does it go against the American spirit of Individualism (Can-Do-ism, if you will), the whole concept of a god who says you must feel like crap about yourself and your "sinful" life which you were born into through no fault of your own before he deems you worthy of escaping the flames of hell just disagrees with me to my very core. Of course, most of the precepts like these held by Christians in general were set forth by Paul, who I feel doesn't even deserve to be in the bible, much less listened to (I mean, come on, how many times have wacko's claimed to "hear the voice of God telling him what to do" after falling off his horse like a drunken idiot?). But I'll digress before my mother calls me in a panic about my "salvation" in general...


In other news, the green font is only for today in honor of my Irish heritage form my mother's and father's families (though it is by no means pure), and you can expect vanilla white to return when I next have something to either gripe about, think about, or care about.

Have a good one!

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