Tusks everywhere Camano Island Roasters is doing gift boxes. So I decide I'm getting my dad coffee for christmas. Question is, which house gets packages better? I shipped him some colossal prawns about ten years back and they were straight up stolen by the post office. So I call him. He picks up the phone and immediately hangs it up again, his signal for "I'm taking a nap fuck off". yes he has Caller ID. So I call my sister to get an answer. Turns out power's out at my childhood home, land of tusks. Apparently my dad's solution to GR is to make it harder to squat. But now of course we've got a house in a mountain town in November with no power under the tender care of a chronically depressed 79 year old alcoholic. So we come up with a plan - her husband's a contractor and we're going to take the temperature to see about him going out and assessing what its' going to take to get 40 years of garbage out of the place, rehab it and get it ready for tenants. 'cuz fuck, a better solution to "your rogue common-law-stepson is cooking meth in the kitchen" is "make it not his kitchen" not "make him bring a putt putt." I'm unsure why this assessment was mine to make. No I'm not. I cope by remembering. My sister copes by forgetting. It's all so annoyingly academic, though. NM is a common-law state, which means the stepmom gets everything, unless my dad wrote a will saying she doesn't, in which case there's a will, which I've been previously requested not to contest. So really I'm attempting to protect assets that aren't mine, be a good neighbor to people I will never interact with, attempt to do the civil thing for a town that actively hunted me like a criminal because of an old Mormon's grudge. So I'm grappling with the instincts to "be a good son" to people who were never good parents and aren't particularly remorseful about it. My mother sent me a two page memoir of her mother. It contained a number of facts that do not jive with what I heard from multiple relatives growing up. She attached a note asking if I wanted to read more. I answered in the affirmative and my mother told me she wasn't going to write it anymore because it was too upsetting. Then she called me up on my birthday to accuse me of editing this document to reflect that my grandmother had been caught in flagrante dilecto with her anthropology professor. She was quite accusatory and angry and didn't humor the notion that I am incapable of editing a document on her computer. A week later she called again and asked me to send the document on to my sister "without the edits". She can't send it herself because when she opens her computer it's full of strange marks all over the page. "show edit marks" within Word was broached but that clearly wasn't the problem. So she's still angry at me. Meanwhile my father is taking a nap every time I call. Phone goes up, phone goes down, dial tone. I sent him fuckin' coffee anyway.
Friends of mine already received a $2m settlement from the corrupt police department. It's already abundantly clear that GR is an informant for at least one PD. This is also a county that attempted to pass a law limiting back yards to 5lbs of dogshit each, attempted to pass a law requiring cats to be on leashes and passed a law limiting weeds to 16" height and less than 25% of anyone's property. That law was vacated after nine months when the county attempted to crack down on someone who successfully argued that there was no distinction between "weed" and "native planting" and that Los Alamos National Laboratories had recently spent approximately $4m on "native plantings" that, by law, would have to be removed. Besides which, the tusks were already confiscated. GR is back out again. And, by law of civil forfeiture, should GR be busted cooking meth in my childhood home, my childhood home becomes government property. No recourse. For most of his life, my sister's ex-boyfriend enjoyed protection by the police. That was good for at least one murder and a good eight year run as a cocaine dealer. At some point the protection wasn't enough as they found his head in a ditch next to I-40 somewhere west of Amarillo. Three police officers that I know of died in training accidents on the range when live ammo was used where blanks were called for. '91, '95, '97. The town has already threatened to impound the house because my dad isn't fond of gardening. It had a lawn when I was growing up; now it has a forest.