Two Days later - The Alien Zombie!

As you might image, Thanksgiving at our house was totally insane. We didn't have any rattlesnake escapes or rooster attacks, just the noise of 195 people crammed into the 5 rooms of our downstairs. We really didn't have 195 people there -  it just sounded like the cacophony of one hundred and ninety-five very loud and rambunctious people.  With Nana, Aunt Mary, Walter Daniels, all the hippies who live in our house and Pinky and Kleghorn and Mario and Red and Primo and Chewy and last minutes stragglers brought home by my dad - like Roy Spenjamin - plus a couple weirdos like Jim Andel (who was a Lennon Sister stalker) and the guy with the funny voice everyone called "The Quaker" our large house was packed. Add in all the older boys girlfriends it was probably in the neighborhood of 60 plus people at our feast-turned-circus-event.

Dining room




























(Nana in chair and Harry, "The Quaker" very back center - be sure to check out the TV with rabbit ear antennae)

Some of the Lennons, Blasers and other neighbors came by in a long standing tradition just to gape open-mouthed at the lunacy of it all. This allowed them to be on the fringe of our neurotic madness and then escape back to normalcy of the plain-wrapped life.

(Pat Lennon and Bruce Grant to the Right)





                   




  (Left- Dad "Mr. D" partying)

We did not disappoint. Just after dinner, Dooh-Dooh Pants "cut the cheese" with the nastiest silent-but-deadly ever recorded in history and crop-dusted the entire living room in a fashion that he had become notorious for. I was caught in the middle and barely made it to the bathroom before puking up all the turkey and mash potatoes I had gorged myself with when playful rough-housing ensued because of the gas attack.

To stir things up even more like striking a hornets nest with a stick, Donny Blaser got his hands on a loaded Daisy BB gun and began to open fire. Puke Breath ran upstairs and came back armed with his Red Rider repeater and war broke out.

One of the returning Vietnam Vets began having a PTSD flashback. He took cover under a folding table where he loudly cursed and started calling everyone "Charlie."  

Donny shot a hole in our large front picture window and nobody seemed to care. I did. I knew dad would be upset or that he should be upset - other parents would have been mad, but he was too busy horse-playing like a teenager and engaged in the ruckus to notice.

My mom tried to calm down the reckless folly by screaming the, "Under-Pain-Of-Mortal-Sin" clause but since it failed to make a dent in the din she parted the Red Sea of bodies, went up stairs and locked herself in her bedroom.

"How convenient" I thought with prophetic utterance knowing exactly what this meant. It meant that Pinky and I would have to spend the next two days cleaning up the aftermath of this colossal mess and towering stacks of dirty dishes. Chewbacca and the older boys felt I deserved it, since they had blessed me with an extra two days off of school by covering my body in a thousand red marker pockmarks.

Every year they had always managed to come up with some lame excuse that meant I had to clean up the mess. Mostly, it was because they didn't seem to mind the clutter and it was my job to hold back the second law of thermodynamics: increasing degree of chaos. No one cared how dirty our house was by me. The older boys weren't even embarrassed to have their girlfriends over to see the pigsty. I couldn't stand it. I felt to me like the dark Paranormal Ooze was winning and cleaning was the only way to hold the demonic substance at bay.

I put up a fight to make them feel good - they liked a good fight(like I did with the hamper trap Hamper Trap ), but cleaning up after everyone was more than a duty it was my cause. I didn't really feel a part of this family, but felt as if I had been sent to them from another planet to save them and dug deep into my superpowers to wash the one hundred billion dirty dishes. Like a robot drone, I stood next to Pinky who was still in his pajamas and washed one dish after another and daydreamed of what it might feel like to love and be loved. Then and only then would I know what it was like to be human, until that time I would walk among them - alone and distant like a lost, orphaned Zombie that needed to be saved more then them all.