Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.
As long as I can remember, my dad has gone through what I like to call phases. Like the time he went all Catholic and bought a little wooden saint with peeling paint and no hands. Then one day he up and decided that was idolatry and threw it down the incinerator chute in his building on Pelham Parkway. The “phase” he happened to be going through when I was eight resulted in my being baptized a Methodist, a religion about which I still know next to nothing, because he lost interest within a year and so we never went back.
Then I’m 12 and he has his Whitley Streiber phase. Whitley Streiber is this guy who wrote some novels — including Wolfen, which, if memory serves, was made into a movie. Then he writes the first in a series of ostensibly autobiographical books describing his encounters with and abductions by alien visitors. The cover art was a close up of a visitor from the shoulders up. (See above.) South Park later used the same basic depiction of "Greys" to depict the aliens that give Cartman an anal probe. Dad really digs this book, and totally encourages me read it. Then, as now, I will read anything, and I have a weakness for stupid supernatural shit like vampires and space aliens and schools for the gifted in outer space. We both read the books, and conduct many in-depth discussions about them. Mostly, I just listen. Lo and behold, I start having nightmares, and he’s all, oh! She was totally abducted by aliens! And this proves it!
My dad is a very post hoc ergo propter hoc kind of guy. I won't be offended if you feel the need to roll your eyes at him.
Now we come to the really funny part. He hasn’t said anything to anyone of us about this in oh, 15 years at least. Then last year my dad and my brother are on some road trip and end up in a redneck bar somewhere in bumblefuck western New York. After a few beers, Dad says to Bro, oh, you know your sister was abducted by aliens? Don’t you remember those nightmares she used to have? It so totally never occurs to him that the books were perhaps the CAUSE of the nightmares. But what really gets me is that this is still something he thinks about, even after all these years. It's one of the many absurdly untrue things he believes about me.
I wish I could make up stories like that. Instead, I just get to live them.
2 comments:
This is Maria's brother. The bumblefuck bar incident was really an eye opener. It was actually a bar in Phoenicia NY, which is in the Catskill mountains, where we went because the river tubing place where we were headed was closed when we arrived. At that time I had already come to believe that reality is little more that a story that we agree to believe. One this day I learned that some people don't need anyone to agree with them to experience a certain reality.
un saluto da scorzè, vicino a Venezia, ciao
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