It all started with my mom's obsessive desire to listen to this online seminar thingy... so I installed RealPlayer on Evilcompaq (the Pentium 166 tower) a couple days ago, and expected that to work fine come time for her to listen to her damned online hokum. Little did I know my dad was going to come around and install Turbotax on it, after I already told him about a dozen times not to screw around with it (and require me to do any last-minute work to fix it). He dismissed it as me being paranoid and somehow obnoxious. Well, then I come back and find it unable to boot Windows, with his OBNOXIOUS visage sitting before the screen. Two hours later, I determine it's going to need a complete format c: and reinstall routine. This would have all been just fine if not for the fact that my obsessive damned mother decided to issue an ultimatum; if I couldn't get that computer up before her seminar thing in eight hours, she was going to kick my dad out of the house. rm -rf *. Phooooooooo. She claimed it's been a behavioral pattern ever since she met her; that he tends to always go in and SABOTAGE things at the absolute last minute. He sat there the whole time with this dumbfounded grin..... and I remembered I had a nice Pentium III-500 tower in the workroom, dual boot Windows 98 SE/Redhat 6. So I bring it out.... it was fully operational when I last had it up about a month ago (before the great workroom cleanup), plug it in, and nearly defenestrate it when it issues three long error-code beeps. None of the bicolor diagnostic LEDs on the back of the motherboard were even lit. I go in there and start unplugging everything and plugging it back in, drives, memory (DIMM sockets are freaking evil!), the processor, PCI cards.... Eventually, I come across a little tiny macaroni-noodle of metal sitting on the motherboard. "Odd", I say to myself. Then I find more little chips and shavings. In fact, this thing's got more crap in it than a metal-shop lathe. Nobody seems to admit to doing anything involving the mass flinging of bits of metal next to its open case in the workroom, of course. (Insert little Family Circus "NOT ME" character here.) Mass screaming commences when I report what I've found. At that point, I'm at about 99.95% stress capacity and the proverbial final output transistors in my brain are already losing their Magic Smoke. And to top it all off, Sam (my little brother) has just hurled a book at Evilcompaq while I was working on it. I issue a "QUCK THIS, I GIVE UP". My dad complains that I didn't finish his "work order" to get the machine working. "WORK ORDER". He actually used those words. I started sifting through my memory banks to see if I remembered any nice looking campgrounds that I could easily get to by Tri-Rail (of course, I'm the kind of person who keeps a dome tent and camping gear ready in the closet, for that rare occasion, maybe once in four years or so, when I actually get a chance to use it). After I give up, the barrages of stupid questions immediately begin. AND MY MOM STARTS TRYING TO REINSTALL WINDOWS ON EVILCOMPAQ. If I had been in a better mood, I would have found that hilarious... I tell my dad he can now officially take his office computer as well and shove it. My mom tells him to pack up his stuff...

I suddenly remember that there's a K6 tower in the office closet that has Windows ME on it, and that it doesn't have a modem, so I go to remove the Lucent PCI modem from Spork (which is why I'm writing this on Mell). I find it in the closet, sitting underneath, ironically enough, "Red Hat Linux 6 For Dummies", pick up the book off of it, suffer a mental segmentation fault, and beat the CRAP out of the poor tower with the book. (Both survived undamaged.) My mind had chosen at just that moment to recall a dream I had when I was back in second grade....

It was just after I had finished getting over, for the most part, a childhood obsession with washing machines. I used to always look at the "yakanatees" in the Sears, JC Penney, etc... ads in the Sunday papers... and in this dream, my mom had just gotten a new one. It was a suspiciously huge machine, front-loading, and an ugly tan color. My mom had loaded a bunch of laundry in, run it, and the stuff all mysteriously disappeared. So she sent my dad in to investigate, and I walked in... The machine had generated a massive cloud of detergent foam, which was gleefully exuding all over the floor... inside of which my dad was attempting to find the lost articles. Just as he pulled a single lone green sock from the mass, the machine mysteriously sucked him and the lather into its drum. The detergent crap vanished down a grille in the back, and a bunch of wierd rusty whirling metal parts in the back silently ground to a halt. I started ripping various bits of the machine out and flinging them aside... until I finally got to the transmission and motor... which was when I realized he was no longer in there. He had, undoubtedly, been dumped, undoubtedly also in a couple hundred pieces, into the sewer. No sooner than I had ripped its sentient little motor out with my bare hands, my mom came in... with another guy in tow... clean-shaven, wearing a business suit (of all things)... who completely and totally freaked me out. She then proceeded to try to convince me that he was my father......

Ten years later, it all makes sense...

The Aureal Vortex 8820 crackles to life, and Realplayer croons solemnly through the empty (at my request, so I didn't wind up killing anyone) room...

My mom got her damned seminar. I got the satisfaction of knowing my totally qucked up family is on the verge of total disintegration.

And as Mell's elegant black form quietly whirrs on, I look over a brochure from Stevens Institute Of Technology.... Hoboken, New Jersey... yep. that's far enough.