KouramBadAss

Allow me to explain to you why my cousin is a genius.

My Uncle has four children, three of which I see on a regular basis at family functions and visits to Palm Springs. The other daughter is lost to us, spends her time with her mother who is estranged from our family and is, by all accounts, insane. As I've mentioned before, and recently, the three remaining children, who are all quite young, are joys to behold and have only grown moreso as they get older. Palmer, the oldest and perhaps most unfortunately-named offspring, is my only male cousin, and as such I treasure him as Dr. Jones Sr. treasured the Holy Fucking Grail. The kid is my legacy.

So I've been doing my best for him as my Uncle, his father, did for me, which is to allow him the influence of someone who will have no financial or moral responsibility to him once said influence begins to take effect in the manifested form of antisocial behavior and the general jackassery that makes me so wonderfully me. I have passed my torch on to him, and somewhere between the influence of my very, very affected family, my Uncle's unique style of parenting/education/life, and my own personal dash of eccentricity, the boy has turned out just as haphazard and enjoyable as humanly possible. True, he may have started out a bit wild, a bit of the jungle in his eye, but since the coming of the sisters and the relative maturity of a nine-year-old (or however old he is now... twelve? Does it matter before they're eighteen?) he has calmed down in the obnoxious and difficult department while running the furnace at full blast in the "Just Crazy Enough to be a Total Fucking Genius" department.

How do I know this, you ask?

For this Christmas, my cousin made me a sword.



This is perhaps my favorite Christmas present of them all. He found a piece of bamboo, lovingly shaped it's already somewhat conducive form into a workable handle and blade. Notice the clear separation of the hilt and tang. Notice the carefully placed fingerguard cleverly disguised as a particularly knotty outgrowth. He fashioned this weapon, and the decided, "You know, that kooky cousin of mine that shows up every now and then likes swords, and he works as a knight now. He might need a sword." He then told his father that he'd like to give it to me for Christmas, put a bow and a gift tag on the thing, and gave it to me. He's, like, three years old or something.

When I was that age, the family car was mine as far as I was concerned. I was not thinking of giving anyone anything. This child is beyond his years, people.

"But, Deadums, that doesn't really look like much of a sword."

Fuck you. Allow me to complete the illusion:



BOOYAKASHA! Imagine that thing cleaving into your helmet from horseback, blood spurting from the wounded steel, your family weeping over your stricken frame. Imagine lightning in the background.

It's as if I'm some kind of panda headless horseman. Headless horsepanda.

Look... just...

Picture a panda riding a horse, will you?

...

So yes. Those kids are my pride and joy, and I take full credit for any positive traits they've managed to harvest from during my sporatic and unannounced visits. I have a Greater Theory of Artisans of which I believe the boy will become the eventual progenitor. I think that all the raw talent someone gets exposed to coagulates within them and is passed down to whoever they happen to influence at a young age, and so on and so forth down the artistic evolutionary line until eventually you reach a point of creative critical mass and a true artist is born. It begins with my grandfather and his nebulous ability to play any instrument without instruction and any song without practice, and that filters down to his son, my Uncle, with his pending PhD in Norse Literature, his novels, and his general justified pedantry, who in turn influenced me, with my uncontrollable personality disorders and rampant intellectualism. All of these things feed each other and, eventually, when given a fresh young mind, feed the new vessel until you end up with Palmer, who will become a true savant. He will be the acme of our cumulative creative evolution. He will be the sapiens sapiens of our developmental line. He will succeed where we all have failed, for he stands on the shouders of short, hairy giants.

Christmas this year centered around buying presents two days before the holiday itself and cooking. Between those two activities and working, I was happy to get anything done at all. Fortunately, I got both the Eve and the Day off of work, and was able to spend time with my family which I sorely missed after having been absent on Thanksgiving (riding horses, slaying dragons... etc.).

For some reason, we had an extra turkey from somewhere. I think my mother spotted a sale, and my mom around a sale is like a panda around a horse. He's not just going to stand there and let the thing go to waste. No, he's going to make use of the damn thing.

So we had a turkey, and I had a father who didn't want to bother cooking another turkey after the marathon that is a Greek Thanksgiving, so the task fell to me. Hey, Dead, could you cook the turkey?



Evidently, yes. Yes I can.

Fuck yes I can cook a turkey. I can cook the hell out of a turkey. And I dare say the fowl was fucking delicious.

But the culinary saga does not end there. While looking through our cooking supplies and unearthing long-forgotten plate-packaging and ancient menorah candles (from... back when we were Jews... I guess) I found a book of Greek recipes and, flipping through it, saw something that I thought would be neat to make for the family Christmas party. I have them every year at the Greek festival, they're something of a mainstay in Greek cookie cuisine, and apart from the fact that I had to replace Mastiha with almond liquer and brandy (mastiha, apparently, is only made on the small island of Chios in some distant part of the Greek archipelago... or the 'Greekapeligo' as I've come to call it just now) I straight up made kourambiedes from scratch.



These are what's left over at my house, let alone the plate that I took to the family's dinner. Suffice to say, they went over quite well. The anglicized name for the Greek 'kourambiede' is "Butter Cookies with Confectioner's Sugar" which, while a filthy exeno expression, is wholly accurate. They are essentially a buttery conveyance for large amounts of piled-up powdered sugar, which has a tendency to choke you to death if you breath wrong while eating one. Mine, however, were light and creamy, and with just enough powdered sugar to pay homage to the classic recipe without turning each individual pastry into a scale-model recreation of the Swiss Alps. Again, and I can't stress this enough, delicious.

The recipe yielded enough cookies to feed all of Lionidas' 300, which was slightly more than I expected, but was tons of fun to make between the scouring of the county in an attempt to track down the right liquor and the kneading of the dough to form the tasty treats. I cooked, I bought people presents, and I got myself a bad-ass Kenneth Cole dress shirt for the party. This was, essentially, the extent of my involvement with the yuletide season this year.

As for my haul, I made out pretty alright. The stand-out offerings, apart from the superlative bamboo sword, were a bottle of wine from the master horse trainer at the Times, a DVD of the second season of Black Books, a miniature accordion of the exact same manufacture as the one on which I originally composed the shanty "I'm Like the Sea," and a nice pair of gloves from Nordstrom which are so fine, so dextrous, that I can literally play the guitar flawlessly while wearing them. It's like you're not wearing gloves at all. Beautiful.

Not to mention the extremely expensive, high-end electronics I have coming in the post. But that's a whole other... thing. Isn't it.

It was great to see my family. I miss them terribly, and jump at the chance to get to spend time with them. This particular get-together was especially eventful as it was announced, reluctantly and with a bit of clairvoyance to anyone within earshot of my loud and chatty father, that my cousin is getting married to her boyfriend-cum-fiance'. My Uncle, in a shocking play of thunder-stealing, also made his announcement that he and his live-in Mormon would be tying the knot. Everyone's getting married, everyone's smiling and laughing and drinking champagne. I didn't have any. For some reason.

My cousin looked so happy. I talked to the beau, who's a good Greek boy that's been skulking around the family do's for a couple years now, and finally got some one-on-one time with him, really felt him out. I wasn't letting my cousin marry just any old Greeky-come-lately. Turns out, he's an alright dude, and we got along famously left to our own devices. There's so much to look forward to, it's easier not to dwell on the fact that the holiday's already over. I'm actually looking forward to the wedding. It might be in Greece. I can't wait. I'll need to bake some cookies.

I'll need to buy another shirt.

---

I swear to Christ I found this after I wrote this entry. O Internet, is there anything you don't have some cockamamie representation of?

Morning, and Too Early

WHEW! Up at the crack of 9:30 in the morning and on the road with brother in tow. I never wake up this early, I just don't have the stomach for it, but we're heading down the 91 and into Long Beach. We'd been talking about taking this trip for a while, and finally decided that we'd up and do it, now that we both had the time and inclination. Not too long ago I would have kept putting this off, knowing in my heart that "putting it off" was the same as "not doing the fucking thing," but things were different this morning.

I had to go see a dead man.


He was in Long Beach, from what I'd read, and I even knew his plot number. I knew the space. I'd never really been to a cemetary before, and wasn't sure what the proper etiquette would be. Still, I didn't think he'd be all too impressed if I dressed up just to go look at the ground that covered him up, so I didn't bother getting duded up. We just headed out, painfully early, and were clipping along the freeway and toward our grim destination soon enough.

We were within the city limits, well outside of our element, and looking for the lush, green, marble-speckled expanse that would denote the receptacle for this world's dead. I kept mistaking places for what I expected to be a cemetery. A park, a golf course, the large knoll of an office building. Everything was a graveyard.

Finally, we pulled onto the right street with its huge, rolling deadlands and turned into the driveway. Huge, this place was. I brought a beer with me, in the cup holder unopened, and when I asked the guard at the gate how I'd find someone he said

"Well, I'll tell you if you give me that beer!"

You have to be a little off to work at a cemetery. Here's this guy at such an ungodly hour in the morning, guard of the deceased, and acting like a really pleasant and friendly dude. After we worked through the confusion of our not being there for any services, he told us how we would go to the double-doors, to the information desk and tell the lady the name. We pulled around the building and started looking for a parking spot, my brother frantically trying to keep me from parking in a reserved space ("Are you 'reserved,' homie?), and saw a man up the hill in another lot waving to us animatedly. He was waving us up, telling us where we could park, so we wound our way up the one-way ramps and gulleys that would lead us from each little billabong of estacioning to the next and, finally, reached him in the small lot at the top, where we were blocked in by one-way ramps and a hearse. As we approached him, I rolled down the window.

"Are you here for the services?"

"No."

"Oh. Sorry."




We headed back down to the main building, and parked wherever the hell I wanted to. We went inside, and I asked the girl at the desk, a big black chick, if she was Amy. I remembered the guard telling us her name would be Amy, my brother corrected me and said he'd told us Kay. The girl at the desk was neither, but she'd help us. She was kind, and helpful, and asked me to write the name of the person I wanted to see on a notepad she handed me. I wrote his full name, and smiled because I knew it.

"Ah... the famous guy. Our only famous guy."

"Yeah. Do you guys get a lot of people looking for him?"

"Oh yeah. At least two a month. They come from Europe."

She took out a xeroxed map and highlighted in orange the area he'd be in, as well as the best ways to get there. There are streets in a cemetery. She wrote his name, plot number, and space at the bottom of the map, so we'd be able to look it up if we forgot who we came to see. She spelled his name wrong.




It was hot, and we weren't sure where in the orange area he actually was, the place being kind of big and we not knowing how to navigate the thing (the directions, in the end, were not all that helpful). We got in the car, drove up a ways, and parked along the curb in the general area where we would look for him. Oceanview. Where the hell was any ocean?


We got out and started looking. We must have walked around the entire damn space. At one point, I had to steer us away from the supremely creepy "Babyland" plots, and throught the "Police and Firemen" areas to get back to the street. We tried to stay on the path in the beginning, hoping the little spraypainted numbers on the curb would eventually lead us to him, but they hardly helped at all, and eventually we had to walk across the grass to get to the other side of the space. The tombstones, set into the ground like placemats, were set pretty close together and you can't really get around walking over them. Tough. It was getting really warm, and when I looked up, there were four buzzards circling. For us or for them, I didn't know.

We were heading back to the car, unable to figure out what to do next, when a greenskeeper came rolling by in a little electric cart. He could tell we were lost, looking for someone. We walked over to him.

"Mmmpomeguy?"

"Sorry?"

"You lookin' for the poem guy?"

"Yeah."

"He's around the corner. I'll find him for you."

He drove on ahead, we headed off after him, and found him standing among the graves when we caught up. He asked us the plot number, and we told him, and he pointed it out to us. I asked him how he could tell where anything was. He kicked at one of the many little metal plugs in the ground, each with numbers on them showing where you were.

And there it was. There he was, down a ways. Right in front of me.




Two little pink flowers. Dried out. I put the beer I'd brought in my pocket nearby. I had been concerned, when deciding to bring booze, if what we had was shitty enough for him. I suppose he wouldn't care. On the little metal plug next to his stone, someone had stuck a couple of entrance stickers from the Huntington Botanical Gardens. I thought of her, then, for the first time that morning, and the twinge was worse through the fatigue. I wondered what my brother would do if I started to cry.


So we sat for a while, and talked about things. After a bit, and after taking some pictures, we decided to leave, and I got about fourteen feet away from the thing when I had to go back and look at it again. He was down there. Or the stuff that had held him was down there. All that meat that had turned his food and wine and smoke into those beautiful words, that wonderful, terrible machine, was down there. Just down there, alone. I was standing directly over it.

We discussed possible pouring a little beer for him, and whether or not he'd be bothered by it. I always thought the best way to get on Bukowski's good side was to give him booze and walk away. My brother:

"Well... maybe we can pour a little bit."

We both poured some. I knocked on the grave and asked him to open up, but he didn't. The man's dead.