CRANKY OLD FART #287
leftovers & links
Sunday, March 12, 2023

Last Saturday's breakfast with the family was most peculiar. I have a new job, which is good news, but I didn't and don't want to share the good news at breakfast. So I didn't.

Do I need to explain why? Guess so, because I'm weird and so's the family dynamic, but it's a long story...

Any time I tell my mother anything about my life, she finds a way to weaponize it, turning it into something unpleasant, like the last time I told her I'd found a job. She wants to know everything about what's going on in my life, but anything she knows she throws back at me, and after a lifetime of that, I try to say as little as possible about my life.

It's an un-fun game we both play. She asks the same questions over and over, and I sidestep them almost every time.

Many years ago, before I moved away, Mom used to call me at work far too often — often enough that the boss complained, and Mom's calls became an office joke. "It's your Mom again, on line two." And sometimes she'd surprise me by showing up at my workplace just to talk, or take me to lunch.

Maybe normal moms do that. I wouldn't know about normal, but I hated it, and asked her not to call so often, not to pop into the office unexpected. Asking was a waste of breath, so I stopped giving Mom my work number, or telling her where I worked.

Mom's resourceful, though. She was able to ferret my work number from friends or other family members, and still called too often at work. At two different jobs, when I hadn't even told her where I work, she came to my workplace. "Uh, Doug, your mother is at the reception desk."

Coincidentally, I later moved to California, and letting my mother know where I was slipped my mind.

I prefer choosing what she knows about me, so last Saturday at breakfast, instead of telling her about my new job on Millionaires' Island, I told her what I hadn't told her a month ago — that I'd been hired at the Post Office.

It was slightly surreal, answering her barrage of questions about that job — a job I quit after only a few days — as if that was the new job I'd just started, instead of saying anything about the job I'm actually working.

I wrote the above, about last Saturday's breakfast, just before going to this week's breakfast, so I showed up in a bad mood.

Exasperating me further, before she'd even sat down at the table, Mom pulled two stapled pieces of paper out of her purse and handed them to me. It was the police report from when I was "found."

Guess I gotta go into the backstory of that. Sigh.

For many years I was intentionally out of touch with the family. Mom had filed a missing persons report on me, which came up blank.

By the 2010s I was living in Wisconsin with my wife, and when I was involved in a minor fender-bender, the police officer ran my driver's license through their enormous Orwellian database. My name popped up as a missing person, and the cop told me they'd be reporting my whereabouts — name, address, phone number, the works — to my mother.

My wife and I tried to talk the cop out of ratting on me, but he said it was the law, which still seems wildly wrongheaded to me.

So the police notified my mother, and she called, and we had a nice conversation on the phone.

And then she called again, and called over and over again. When I asked her to call maybe once a week instead of twice daily, she left at least twenty messages on my answering machine in one afternoon. That's when I turned the answering machine off, and the ringer.

My phone still doesn't ring, but now we're back in touch, and I like having Mom and the family in my life again. Honest, I do. Pretty sure I would've chosen it, and eventually reconnected with the Hollands on my own — but being fingered by the government angered me when it happened, and still angers me now.

What if you're an abused wife, or an escaped cultist? What if you're on the run from someone truly dangerous, not merely annoying like my mom can be? You run, they file a missing persons report, and when you pop onto the radar anywhere in America, the cops immediately tell your address and everything else to anyone who's asked?

Mom says the same things at breakfast every Saturday that she said the previous Saturday, and one of her recurring riffs is that I was missing for so many years (though the number of years varies from week to week — last week it was 13 years, today it was 17).

She loves telling me how the cops contacted her several times, sending pictures of unidentified corpses that fit my general description, and she'd say no, that's not my boy Douggie. And a few months later they'd contact her about some other corpse.

Having heard this a hundred times, I understand that it wasn't fun for her. Hearing about it isn't fun for me, but she tells me about it every Saturday at breakfast.

So that's the backstory, and then yesterday Mom plopped that old paperwork in front of me — the report from the Missing Persons Bureau telling her I'd been found, and listing everything from my address to my license plate number — like, oh, this will be fun to talk about over breakfast.

She was visibly disappointed when I only glanced at the paper long enough to see what it was, then pushed it back at her and said, "I don't care about that." Another lie, of course — I do care — I'm still pissed off about being ratted out by the cops.

"I thought you'd be interested," she said, and again started telling me the story of the ☐ 11 ☐ 13 ☐ 15 ☑ 17 years when I was "lost."

"Well, he said he isn't interested," my sister Katrina said, and from her tone I knew that they'd already talked about the police report, and that Katrina had tried and failed to convince Mom not to bring it, and not to bring it up at breakfast.

Instead, we mostly talked about my new job at the Post Office, which I quit a month ago, and which in another month or so I'll tell her I quit.

News you need,
whether you know it or not

• Biden administration wants a trillion dollars for war

• Telehealth startup Cerebral shared millions of patients’ data with advertisers

• Silicon Valley Bank CEO sold $3.6-million in stock days before bank's failure

• BBC will not broadcast Attenborough episode over fear of "right-wing backlash"

• Arctic river channels changing due to climate change

• Study shows the potential consequences of climate change for the ocean food web

• How climate change is making allergy season worse

• Autopsy reveals anti-'Cop City' activist's hands were raised when shot and killed

• Charges for 11 Ohio cops filmed beating suspects and destroying evidence

• Jury awards $375,000 to protester shot in the face by LAPD

• A Louisville police officer let his dog attack a 14-year-old Black child who was not resisting. As the dog 'gnawed' on the child's arm, the officer said 'stop fighting my dog,' DOJ said

• Republicans are trying to roll back child labor regulations

• Republican-controlled Kentucky Senate passes bill to limit drag shows

• Three Texas women are sued for wrongful death after allegedly helping friend obtain abortion medication

• Ex-intern sues Idaho lawmakers for harassing her after rape

• Former Trump lawyer admits false statements, is censured by judge, then gets upset because people are calling her a liar

Mystery links
There's no knowing where you're going

• Click

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My browser history
without the porn

• Western media dumps stories on Nord Stream sabotage shifting blame from US

• The scale of local news destruction in Gannett's markets is astonishing

• Waiting for Brando: The epic saga of a disastrous 1961 film production of the Iliad

♫♬ It don't mean a thing ♫
if it don't have that swing

• Calling out My Name - Del Shannon

• Everyday People — Joan Jett & the Blackhearts

• If I Can Dream — Elvis Presley

• My Only Offer — Mates of State

• 25 or 6 to 4 — Chicago

Eventually, everyone
leaves the building

• Jesús Alou

• Raphael Mechoulam

• Napoleon XIV

• Rick Scheckman

3/12/2023

Tip 'o the hat to ye olde AVA, BoingBoing, Breakfast at Ralf's, CaptCreate's Log, Harm City Hearld, Looking for My Perfect Sandwich, One Finger Medical, Two Finger Magical, Miss Miriam's Mirror, Nebulously Burnished, RanPrieur.com, Voenix Rising, and anywhere else I've stolen links, illustrations, or inspiration.

Special thanks to Linden Arden, Becky Jo, Wynn Bruce, Joey Jo Jo, John the Basket, Dave S, Name Withheld, and always extra special thanks to my lovely late Stephanie, who gave me 21 years and proved that the world isn't always shitty.