we are gathered here today

God, tumblr is like a wake right now.

No, I mean German-Czech-Polish-influenced wakes in Central Texas.

You know: funeral, everyone brings casseroles and barbecue and sausage back to the house and cries, beer starts at two (because barbecue), subtle margarita transition by three, and then everyone's like fuck it and the cases of Wild Turkey and Crown Royal come out, triple strength margaritas are mixed, and the Great Aunts and Weird Cousin unpack the equivalent of two liquor cabinets from the back of the truck.

Ten minutes in: everyone talks about the shitty church hat Aunt F wore with a segue into how she banged Uncle F's brother and the deceased who is totally a saint except actually what did happen with his first wife in California? Related SomefuckingHow J goes off on everyone but in Czech, one to three grandmothers tell their husbands they're shitty lays and always have been, Great Great Great Aunt who still speaks fluent German drags out eight decades of family warfare, and if the original participants are dead, their kids, grandkids and great-grandkids pick up the standard, and you find out your first cousin's biological father may now be something of a question mark. Also, Mom and Aunt hate each other and express it with broken glasses after two shots but six shots later are sobbing their apologies into each other's arms.

Four fights between married couples, four to eight cases of dramatically ugly crying (half will be men), and by nine, all the women eighteen and older are in the backyard with giant sour pickles on sticks waving them in the faces of men who may or may not be passed out, there's no way to tell. Police stop by at ten-thirty and ten minutes before midnight, then everyone takes a breather before a quick liquor run, craps, and poker until four, and hugs it out before going home.

(God, I miss those days; it was great. )

Yeah, that's tumblr right now.

Personal Note: I always looked forward to the day I'd be grown up enough to get drunk and tell Aunt B exactly what I knew about why she took that job in my parent's bar and also, i know she stole my good calligraphy paper when I was twelve and I would never, ever be over it. But no: in these degenerate days, everyone talks quietly and respectfully, leaves a casserole or platter from Chick-Fil-A, and then goes home to Netflix. It's bullshit.

Personal Note #2: ...the pickles, yeah.

This isn't actually as random as it sounds; throw a stone at a rural Texas bar, and you'll hit an industrial size glass jar of giant pickles. I do know where these came from: my parents bought gigantic jars of super-size sour pickles, pickled pigs feet, and pickled eggs in bulk for their bar because that's the preferred meal of drunk farmers, so on a guess, they were in the trunk of the car.

...what I don't know is the exact series of events that led to fifteen women to twenty women between the ages of eighteen and ninety putting giant pickles on sticks and running around the backyard or what it meant (though considering the size of those pickles, I have some theories). Being the second youngest of the teen group (fifteen), I just followed the lead of the others as we watched our direct ancestors be crazy and contemplate the existential horror of our collective future. (I was a very dramatic child.)

However, to clarify: the pickle thing wasn't standard for funerals, it came out of nowhere.

I feel like I lost the thread of this entry somehow, but I'm not sure exactly where.

Comments

[raine]

but it's such a great analogy for what's happening with Tumblr!

[seperis]

I was reading down my dash kind of enjoying the combination of grief and anger and serious psas and fuck it wondering why it made me feel so nostalgic.

[raine]

I've never been to a funeral like that but I can imagine them. :-)

[seperis]

I'm probably not going to be seeing their like again in my lifetime. On a guess, you need a combination of serious repression, at least two people who lived through the Great Depression, four separate wars worth of veterans with undiagnosed PTSD, and a lot of first-gen and second-gen immigrant angst.

And be at most only two generations out from Germany; it may be a stereotype, but if my grandmother's generation and older wanted to get drunk, that shit took effort. They didn't fuck around with mixes or shot glasses; they each got a bottle of whiskey or tequila and went to work, it was wild.

[raine]

*nods* I can see that - or a family full of secrets.

[ironyoxide]

I don't know you, and I just randomly wandered in here, but, every little bit of this is absolutely my family, and my life growing up with them, and...I'm now realizing, it's not just me, it's not just them, it was the entire culture, and that entire era. Thank you?

And yes, it *does* pretty much feel like what's happening on Tumblr right now.

[toujours_nigel]

aw damn, that's... perfectly how it is right now.

[seperis]

I was going to say 'all that's missing is creepily situational appropriate country music' but nope, that was covered.

[harpers_child]

I've never been to that kind of wake, but I've been to proper Irish ones with 2 booze runs. 4am sounds about right for a wake to break up.

I've also been to a Welsh funeral where 3 bottles of crown were killed before we got to the gravesite.

(These are Americanized funerals. With a heavy dose of Yat Catholicism.)

[seperis]

I've never been to that kind of wake, but I've been to proper Irish ones with 2 booze runs. 4am sounds about right for a wake to break up.

As it should be.

I've also been to a Welsh funeral where 3 bottles of crown were killed before we got to the gravesite.

(These are Americanized funerals. With a heavy dose of Yat Catholicism.)

I feel like I'm coming home in this comment, though Protestant Lutheran.

[out_there]

But no: in these degenerate days, everyone talks quietly and respectfully, leaves a casserole or platter from Chick-Fil-A, and then goes home to Netflix.

Yeah, see, I come from Scottish stock as filtered through Australia -- everyone talks quietly and respectfully, there is a soul-crushing amount of small talk and everyone catching up as if this is a family reunion, and the hosts smile tensely, carrying nibbles around for everyone to pick at and beers that barely get touched, and everyone pretends not to notice if people have to go hide in a bedroom or a bathroom and come out red-eyed with make-up refreshed.

It lasts for 2-3 hours and then everyone flees home and gets to breathe freely again. (This is why Mum's specifically asked not to have a funeral or a wake, and I have standing permission not to tell the rest of the family, but to bury her, get on a cruise ship for two weeks, and deal with everyone else's reactions afterwards.)

Extended family is so much easier when you have permission to pretend they don't exist.

[monanotlisa]

"I feel like I lost the thread of this entry somehow, but I'm not sure exactly where."

Neither are we, but we love it anyway?

[mezzo_cammin]

Dear Lord.

Are we...related?

[seperis]

*hysterical giggling*

[sara]

When I was in my early twenties, one of my cousins leaned over towards me at a family event and said, "Isn't it easier now that we can drink, too?"

Now that I've quit drinking, I have to say, it's even easier than that...mostly because everyone knows I've been sober for close to a decade, so when I say, "Oh HELL no, Jake, give me the keys, there's no way you're taking the pickup up there," I get the keys and then I drive them off to whatever jackass thing they're going to do.

(Last family wedding, my cousin and his wife got thrown out of the country club...and then they snuck back in....)

[jamethiel]

I... my family wakes (Serious Catholics in that we're all hardened sinners but secure in our Catholicism that means we're going to heaven whatever the fuck we do) are different in that they generally START OUT with whisky and usually degenerate into an all out shitfight over What Happened To Auntie Olive's Silver Teapot, No, She Left It To Cheryl And We Don't Care That Cheryl Has Six Silver Teapots Already, It's The Principle Of THe Thing. There's usually singing. Sometimes you get Malcolm, who has a voice that would make angels weep singing "The Auld Triangle", sometimes it is unfortunately Uncle Kevin pole-dancing.

[seperis]

I feel robbed; we had my aunt who actually had vocal training and was part of a band that toured parts of the country and kept her voice well into her forties, but damn it, no pole-dancing Uncle Kevin.

[kass]

<3 <3 <3

[archaeologist_d]

LOL. I have never been to a funeral like that. Sounds like great fun!