A week's worth of family

So, on Wednesday, I will climb onto a plane, and fly back to my hometown. A hometown that, seriously, I don't love so much.

A hometown where two drugged out 'punks' tried to kill a homeless man while he slept in his truck in a Safeway parking lot.
Interestingly, he actually killed one of the kids. He was hurt really badly during the attack, but when he was fighting them off, he knifed one of the kids, and he ended up dying. The courts, of course, said 'self defense', which is probably one of the few things I've ever agreed with that's been handed down by the South Dakota court system.
Weirdly enough, if you google 'South Dakota Serial Killers', you will find that a whole slew of homeless, mostly of Native decent have turned up dead in Rapid City. Mostly during the time that I lived there. Oddly enough, I remember hearing nothing about it on the news.

A hometown where people protest the Planned Parenthood clinic. Fuckers.

A hometown where I was almost arrested on obscenity charges.

A hometown where my first marriage collapsed under the weight of our collective stupidity and carelessness.

Wow! Sounds like fun, you say.

Yeah, I have to say, that I hate my hometown. However, I lurve my family. My brother, my Mom, and the assorted eleventy bazillion cousins, uncles, great aunts and assorted third and fourth, once-removed people that will be there.

Because I'm very closely related to my Mom, I even get to sleep in the house, not, like in a tent out in the yard. Fancy, very Fancy.

So, today, I'm going to see what's what, and maybe, if I'm lucky ship some wine home, and figure out how the fuck I'm going to get Wheelie on the plane.

I'll ignore how much I'm going to miss the Professor, and the cats, and the bird, and the turtle.

I'll ignore the little things that make me crazy...like how nobody recycles, and how most folks don't really even think about the environment.
How, very often rural folks think hugely different things about Katrina, and the survivors, than us blue state folks. (It is scary to think that a huge portion of the U.S. population beleives that 'most Katrina survivors are better off now than they were before the tragedy'.)

And mostly, I'll reacquaint myself with people who really haven't seen me since I was 9 at the youngest, or 18 (gaaah) at the oldest.

Frightening, isn't it?

Wish me luck while I'm there, and keep your fingers crossed that I don't offend anyone.