Holiday Letter to Family and Friends

Dear Family and Friends,

It has been another crazy kooky, cracked out year at our house.

Once again we thank you for all the cards and letters to the Governor on Cesar's behalf. Thank God for DNA testing is all I have to say! Whoo!

It was an exciting year for the whole family. Uncle Grady discovered an alternative life style, Cousin Andrew came home from the Gulf, little Timmy lost his job and started hanging out with prostitutes and an infestation of Elizabethans took over the house for a couple of months.

Who can keep all the craziness straight? I know I can't! Maybe if I stopped doing all those whip-its in the lunch room.

The year started off fine. Sister Tracy was living in New York persuing her love of younger men and dramaturgy. When all of a sudden some foreigners started terrorizing her. They burnt down her apartment, and then she was on the run in a flash with this guy with a skin condition, her new teenage boyfriend and Uncle Grady. Grady as I mentioned has found a new lifestyle and is now working at a drag club in Manhattan. Don't worry it is one of those nice places with the drinks with umbrellas that the midwesterners "accidentally" wander into when they are looking for a pay phone. Well long story short, the foreigners hunt them all down at Coney Island and there was some violence. Sister Tracy is alright but there were some deaths.

Cousin Andrew came home from the war this year. It was a long time coming, considering he was coming home from the First Gulf War. His wife Gabi was having terrible dreams and he was having a hard time re-adjusting to civilian life. Poor Andrew! I am pretty sure Gabi was having an affair with someone very high up in the world and was flirting with their teenaged neighbor a little too much. Seems to be a trend these days older women and much younger men. I blame the schools!

As for Brother Timmy, he was living in NYC. I think he was a couple of blocks down from where Tracy was staying. He lost his job, his wife and his sense of purpose and ended up hanging around with one of New York's, well let's just say, ladies of the evening. His wife Jjana was doing the same thing with a mysterious homeless man and she too was having strange dreams. She seemed like such a nice girl. I am not sure what the problem was really, something about her foster mother and fear of leaving the City.

Finally there were a bunch of Elizabethans infesting the house. We tried to set traps but they weren't falling for the bait we were using. We tried everything; beer, lurid poetic images, bloody tragedies and baudy comedies. They were running around naked and bleeding all over everything. I consulted with a lot of experts and it turns out the best way to get rid of Elizabethans is to throw soap and water at them. They can't stand being clean.

And as the year closes I have some sad news. We are leaving our home of the last 6 years. We had some good time and some bad times, but I think in the end it is time to move on. I know that I for one am looking forward to the future and every opportunity it will bring.

Happy Holidays,
The Mad Blogger What Blogs at Midnight

Requisite Rorschach Family Holiday News Letter

Dear Friends, Family and those on our Enemies List:

Happy Winter Solstice everyone! Time for Demeter to say goodbye to Persephone and for all good pagans everywhere to bang pots to make sure the sun comes up in the morning. If that Reference is too literary for you dear friends, you should check out the new web site everyone is talking about Google. It has stuff about everything.

This has been a busy year for our family here at Rorschach. The year started out like it did the year before with Uncle Scott stalking another woman. He had just gotten over his break-up with Aunt Rahaleh last February and seemed to be having a good time working on his model boats, when all of a sudden he started wearing a Japanese Samurai outfit, waving a sword around and saying he was the dread Lord Morataka. He got himself a job watching over some sorority house and started writing some pretty awful poetry. All of this would have been fine if he hadn’t gone on a rampage in downtown Tokyo for 3 nights and destroyed at least thirty blocks of the city. He promises that this year will be different and he is thinking about working on his novel.

Spring came and Brother Grady and Cousin Lindsay had some problems with an apartment they had rented. It was a sweet place, fireplace, high ceilings and a hard wood floor. The only problem was the neighborhood. There were a lot of street gangs running around with thick guttural accents wearing brown shirts. They beat the crap out of Grady and he decided to hightail it out of there. He asked Lindsay to come with him but she just couldn’t bring herself to leave, the view of the Reichstag was just too good and the rent was cheap. She figures once the expensive condos go up next store the rougher elements of the neighborhood will go up. Gentrification is taking over everywhere I guess.

Summer came and Mom (Jenny) and Cousin Tim decided to build themselves a two story addition to the house. It was so cool, with ramps instead of stairs, a cage for dancing and just being alone and lots of black and orange surfaces. The only problem is these squatters moved in right away and started screwing with the place. One of the women started living in the second floor bed room with a friend and for some reason refused to wear clothes. There were a few complaints but Mom kept insisting it was artfully done. They broke the water pipes and elevator. Put a desert in one of the hallways and in a weird twist of whatchacallit, one of the girls murdered her boyfriend. The strangest thing was the whole building disappeared in about a month and the only thing left was a key chain.

Dad (Randy) married Deb this summer, which I suppose makes her Step-Mom. The ceremony was fantastic and everyone had a great time. The only bit of strangeness that marred an otherwise fantastic wedding was when Deb constructed a garter belt out of cellophane and made Dad put it on her. I am a traditionalist and think garters should be made out of wax paper and in extreme cases aluminum foil, I don’t hold with these new fangled cellophane garter belts the kids are using. These kids today with their M&Ms, IMing and blogs, make me long for the days when kids would stretch a piece of string between two tin cans and try and here one another from six feet away. Those things always worked, you could always here who ever it was yelling really loud into the tin can. As long as you had your tetanus shots up to date and didn’t mind a couple of cuts when you put your ear up to the can you were fine.

The year ended with Dad leading a weird cult of death worshipers in a bizarre ritual to reanimate the dead. These Goth kids running around in their eye make-up, their black coats, flying their kites and reanimating the dead, really took things to the extreme edge of sanity. It was almost like watching some kind of late night horror show hosted by Count Gore Dival. I think it reached its most ridiculous level of absurdity when Uncle Jason began wandering around looking for somewhere to bury the family cat.

Well with 2006 behind us and all the fun of 2007 yet to come, all I wanted to say is Merry Holidays to one and all and be prepared for your stocking beatings because they are a comin’

Warmest Regards,
The Mad Blogger What Blogs at Midnight

100th Post Holiday Edition

Dear Friends, Family, and Yet To Be Determined,

I hope this posting finds you well during this ____________(Insert Appropriate Holiday Here) Season. This year it's my turn to do the family newsletter and I have embraced it with all of the joy and hope a single man in his early 30s can muster for a holiday newsletter (If we were to be putting it on some sort of scale it would be somewhere between Cleaning my Shower and ordering Chinese Delivery, again.) It has been quite a year at the Rorschach Family Ranch.

After Uncle Scott and Aunt Rahaleh split-up at the beginning of the year, things were pretty rocky. See Aunt Rahaleh moved to Boston and started sleeping with this Minister, nine months later little Liz came into the world, all red hair and attitude. The town was scandalized and threatened some sort of long term imprisonment, you know how Puritanical those New Englanders can be. Uncle Scott started stalking Aunt Rahaleh and her new boyfriend and eventually he drove the poor guy crazy. The boyfriend died of some sort of chest infection.

Cousin Timmy moved back from Chicago last spring just in time to hit the road again for beautiful Baja California. Seems he, brother Grady, and that neighbor boy Jason (you know the one with all of the hipster internet friends) all got involved with some kind of religious pilgrimage (a little too much of the funny kool aid if you ask me) and started the road trip from hell. The good news is that everything turned out well and Timmy asked Liz out on an ice cream date.

Brother Grady has started writing plays. He teamed up with some kid he met down at the theater, Eric something or another, and they have been putting on these whacked out shows about wars, cannibalism and incest. I know, pretty crazy stuff. I don't think people go to the theater to be scarred and scared, I think they want to be entertained. They like musicals about baseball teams and nannies who marry their bosses, not rapes and murder. They want good old fashioned stories about people falling in love and settling down, not stories of bi-polar princes living in castles in lower Scandinavia worrying about whether they should or shouldn't kill their Uncle. But boys will be boys I suppose. I hear they are working on a comedy next. Hopefully it will be better than their last comedy, the one with all of the spousal abuse.

And that brings us to today. We are now hip deep in another family crisis. Uncle Scott is stalking another woman, who has absolutely no interest in him at all. So apparently he has staged some sort of frame up to get her, her boyfriend and their two best friends into some legal trouble so they will be put to death. Apparently pre-marital sex is grounds for the death penalty in some places. I can only assume that it is Texas or Florida. He won't give me all of the details but he says everything should be falling into place in mid-January, stay tuned we will have updates.

So other than the whole Uncle Scott creepiness its been a great year. And so from all of the Rorschachs we wish you the holiday greeting most appropriate to your ethnic, religious and socio-economic persuasion.

Happy Holidays,
The Mad Blogger what Blogs at Midnight