it's all becoming clear to me.

looking back, it's no wonder i am the way i am.
crazy that is.

i've told tales before of life with Crazy Auntie Kay. how she would tell me that if i would just press against my two front teeth, they would straighten out nicely and i would have no need for braces. my teeth would look just like hers.

and i did that, faithfully...for a few months. then i found out something.

Auntie Kay wore dentures. of course her teeth were perfect.

it's crap like that that stays with you for a long, long time.

take, for example, Exhibit A.

this morning, i was driving to work, when i passed a box on the side of the road. nothing unusual in that, except that immediately i heard Auntie Kay.

"when you start driving," (said when i was a teenager, before my license) "and you see a box in the road, don't you EVER drive over it."

ok, i'll bite. why?

"because people will put their unwanted babies in the box and leave it in the road so someone will drive over it and kill their baby."

OMG. you SO did not just say that.
wait...rerun tape...oh yeah, you DID just say that.

and she really did believe that. just as she believed that my mom could not willingly have sex as an unmarried woman. she HAD to have been raped.

oh yeah. she did. to the day she died, she was convinced my mom had been forced upon.

and so, some 30 years later, i see a box in the road and freak out...before i remember that the odds of that happening are as good as us winning the lotto.

the lotto, however, while it would still freak me out, would be FAR more FUN than...well, you know.

tune in next week for the newest episode of "It's Not My Parents That Screwed Me Up, It Was the Other Members of My Family."

presented without commercial interruption!