[YO: I know this post is long. People (friends, mainly) have been complaining about the long posts. I don't like my friends. The only reason I'm warning you is that I'd hate for you, like my friends, to have to enjoy this entire post only to realize at the end that you've spent whole minutes on it when you could have been off reading fifty-thousand screwball posts from Scoble and the like. Either read and enjoy, or complain and get a speech about not casting pearls before swine or something like that.

Now, enjoy these pearls...]

My grandmother died. A couple weeks ago. Almost exactly a year after my other grandmother died.

Thanks, universe. Fantastic timing.

I hadn't written anything about it until now. I'm not especially ready for this. In my head, she's still at home, and I imagine things will remain that way until I figure out how to deal. I'm scared that accepting her death right now would mean the end of what's been the most drug-free and depression-free two months of my life.

I have this bad habit of plunging into great depressions. Everything's cool, and then my brain starts spilling chemicals all over the floor of my thinkmeat's kitchen, screwing everything up. It doesn't take a whole lot for that to happen. I'm way good at it. It's almost a talent.

Like, if I were in an interview and someone axed me what I felt my greatest strengths were, I'd say:

I'm detail oriented and I plunge into great depressions.

I'd be lying, though. I'm not detail oriented. Don't come crying to me about having lost your finger. When your head falls off, we'll talk. Your finger's just a detail. Your head's a big picture thing.

Protect your head. It's the war. Your finger is just a battle.

What the hell was I talking about?

Dealing.

I don't get it. I have these expectations of myself for a situation for which it's ridiculous to have expectations. As I learned last year, losing my grandmother was something for which I could never have prepared. Her last couple days were painful. She was scared, her lungs were filling with fluid, and she wanted to die. She sometimes sat up in bed, grabbed my arm, and asked me to kill her.

You can't prepare for that. We had discussed her death for a couple years before it happened. We thought we had it all figured out, but we both got our asses kicked by the process.

With my grandmother who died a couple weeks ago, it was very different. I found out rather late, and I wasn't there with her through the end. I went to see her, and things were very peaceful, but that's all I know. All I want to know as well. I'd like to think that she went quietly and without suffering.

I'm writing this now because I'm going to her memorial on Saturday. As with everything else, I'm not ready.

I was close to her. Not as close as I was to my other grandmother, but still close. Close enough that I had no problem with opening the door to her house, entering, going to the pantry, and helping myself to a bunch of graham crackers. I think that indicates a level of familiarity into which you have to be born. If I found someone helping himself to my graham crackers, I would politely ask him to spit whatever's left in his mouth back in the box, and then to help himself to the door through which he could then help himself to the rest of his life without eating my graham crackers.

My graham cracker thievery was only one of many freedoms I enjoyed thanks to the familial bond. I also ate rice crackers, my grandfather's cough drops, and, back when they had dogs, a little dog food now and then.

Cat food is way better. That's all you need to know.

The familiarity, aside from being genetic, was developed out of my grandmother having been there from my harmless and immobile years when I was swaddled and imprisoned inside my blanket chrysalis, all the way up to The Basket Case Years.

The Basket Case Years are still going on. If you want to get close and make a documentary about this action to see what it's all about, then call my agent.

If you don't care about The Basket Case Years, and if you don't want to make a hardcore awesome documentary about my life (as though there could be any other kind of documentary about me), then stop wasting my time. You'll never work in this town again.

OK - WAIT - EVERYBODY STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING - I HAVE AN ANNOUNCEMENT.

I ate about five pounds of rocky road ice-cream tonight, and I have this taste in my mouth that is in every way evocative of cod liver oil. When I'm done here, I'm going to go see if cod liver is on the ingredients list for my bucket of rocky road ice-cream.

It was on sale.

CONTINUE PLEASE THANKS.

As I was saying, my grandmother was there.

Like in early days when I defied every adult in at the grandparent's house by chasing my "100% Pure Fiber" cereal with a can of Coke at 6:00 AM. I was five. And I was in the mood for a digestive. I wouldn't have been so excited about a digestive had I known what "100% Pure Fiber" meant, but I did what I did. And, anyway, Coke's just as poisonous at 6:00 PM as it is at 6:00 AM. I'm just a go-getter. I like to get poisoning myself out of the way so that I can enjoy the rest of the morning.

As I got older, it got harder to be the rebel. When I was five, I could get away with stuff like hiding where nobody could find me and shooting down cargo planes, but by the time I was eighteen, everybody was getting a little tired of having to put me out with the fire extinguisher and pay off my gambling debts.

Around that time, grandma no longer invited me to see her. She didn't suggest that I do so. Nor did she tell me how awesome it would be if we had a chat.

Around that time, grandma started to summon me. She would appear in the hallway looking sweet as always. She wouldn't say a word. She just stared through my eyes and right into my soul, which was really hard to find since years of debauched living has turned my soul into a sort of spiritual raisin. In cahoots with the stare, I'd feel her mind control operate my feet against my will and guide me toward The Greenhouse. It was done slowly so I'd have enough time to consider how in the wrong I was when I drank that Coke that one time.

When finally in The Greenhouse, grandma wasn't quite as foreboding. She used those meetings to show me things she was working on, her orchids, and beads she had been collecting with which she was making bracelets.

That's the kind of woman she was. She meant absolutely no harm, but there was a protocol to be followed within the family, and it included communicating with each other. Since my father, my sister, my mother, and I are all emotionally retarded, the compulsory meetings were a good thing. We all would have visited with her on our own, but the four of us - separate or together - are about as organized as a thousand burning squirrels on meth trying to fly a 747 to the moon.

In recent years, visits to The Greenhouse became more than chit-chat.

It turns out that my grandmother, when not making bracelets or attending to her orchids, was a ruthless investor. This quiet, kind woman who, for all we know, was Miss Manners, spent her days having a little bite to eat and then terrorizing the world economy. She held the fate of multinationals hostage beneath the threat of a click from her mouse. She had what I think was a second generation iMac. It was cute. And in her hands, it was the financial Death Star.

It never went to her head, but I'm pretty sure she lost a little perspective along the way. This is how talks in The Greenhouse have been since about 2001:

"Well, Rory, I want to talk to you about something. There's a stock I found that I really like."

"Oh, yeah? Huh."

(I never knew what to say. I'm a money-idiot.)

"It's a company called We Make Fake Logs. They make fake logs."

"Ah."

"They have a huge project on the way, and I think the stock is going to go way up. It's selling at $29.00 a share right now."

"Oh? That's not bad."

(Again, I didn't know what to say, so I simply tried to be positive.)

"This new project is in Europe. It turns out the French love Eurodisney so much that they're building another one. They're going to need a lot of fake loggery for the rides decorated with logs."

"Oh? Oh. That's neat. Huh. Makes sense."

"And I think you should buy 40,000 shares."

(I didn't know what to say before, but here, I was useless. I always felt so inadequate at this point that I was hoping aliens might invade and give me a graceful way to get out of explaining my lack of means to be able to drop over a million dollars on the fake log company.)

"Um."

"Don't you have any savings?"

"Uh... yeah. I have a little in the bank and my retirement."

"What are you doing with it?"

"I'm sitting on it for now. Eventually, I thought I might be able to liquidate my assets to buy a ticket for the new Eurodisney."

"How much money do you have, Rory?"

(Looking down - avoiding all eye-contact.)

"$14.00."

This is mostly true. The only seriously questionable detail (I'm detail oriented!) is my bank balance. It was inspired by my real balance, except that my real balance has a bunch more zeros after it. What's weird is that there's also this symbol thing ("-") to the left of the dollar sign whenever I check my account (like: "-$14,811.73"). If somebody knows what that thing is, then call me. I think it means I won a prize, but I don't know how to claim it.

Long before her financial suggestions made me feel like I had walked out of a Dickens novel, she was interacting with her own children. One of my favorite stories involves my dad when he was about five or six. He decided he was going to run away from home. I don't remember why, but he had some super important reason. It may have been to take over the universe, or, much more likely, to get his head stuck in a fence. His head was huge. When he was that young, it wasn't uncommon for him to fall over mid-step because the moon's gravitational effect on large objects sucked his head to the ground and pinned him there. When my grandparents inevitably found him, he'd be spinning in circles around his head on his side, as though the melon was nailed to the ground. There was nothing my grandparents could do, of course. Gravity kind of had everybody beat, so they'd go home, relax, and check the tide tables. Neap tide was always best; its neutrality allowed the family to set my dad upright again without significantly disturbing the moon's orbit.

Hey, HEY! Again, I don't know what I'm talking about.

Please, continue.

Oh, thank you.

Think nothing of it. Tah.

So, my dad was lookin' to emancipate himself from his parents so he could go get his head stuck in the fence.

My grandmother dealt with this by telling him that she thought it was a good idea. She put him in his little Sunday suit, packed him a sack of dental hygiene utilities, foodstuffs for the voyage, a few other knick-knacks he might need (probably like a passport and currency from a thousand countries should he need to bribe anyone), and then sent him on his way, waving as he walked off. The cool part is that I don't think it was reverse-psychology.

She wished him luck and said she hoped he'd find a good job. She may also have told him to buy 40,000 shares in the fake log company. We just don't know. My dad was there, but because the mass of his head forms a funnel-shaped rift in space and time, all the oxygen around him had been sucked out and blasted into a parallel universe, leaving a vacuum around his person through which no sound could travel. If stock was discussed, all he heard was the whooshing of atmosphere getting chucked down the rift.

After all this, I still don't know how to deal with things. I feel like I should be flipping out, but I'm not. I cry a couple times a day, but it feels right. Not too much, and not too little.

She had a huge influence on everyone. I think that helps. Though we resisted, she brought civilization to a family that, at least where my immediate crew is concerned, probably would have otherwise turned out to be a tribe of illiterate cannibals.

My sister got her eyebrows and nose. I can see a little bit of my grandmother in her.

My dad got half of himself from over there yonder. And I don't even need to see him to be reminded of who he is. I can just look up in the sky on a clear night and observe the lensing effect on the light from distant stars as it's redirected into the spacehole gouged out of the fabric of the cosmos by his noggin.

And me? Well, aside from being highly intelligent, grandma was also a model back in the day. When I look in the mirror, I see beauty genes staring right back at me. I may not have the dough to invest the way she could, but there's one thing in the universe so constant that it seems almost to have existed before time, and that thing is this:

No matter where I am, what I'm doing, who's employed me, who hates me, who wants to sue me, who runs into my car, what Hummer-driving ape-man wants to punch me in my effeminate mouth, whether I might get fired for writing something nice about the competition, or if I'm just sitting at home typing a post so long my friends are going to disown me, it is my pleasure and honor to know in the deeps of my bosom that without any shadow of a doubt whatsoever...

...my hair always looks fabulous.

Thank you very much.

Don't touch the hair.

Good night.