Last Saturday, the weather was sunny and 70, so my brother Corey met up at Jefferson Memorial to take some pictures. We saw a wedding ceremony which we desperately wanted to crash, and we also broke up a couple’s romantic interlude near the pond we chose as our location.

The pond is my favorite area of this cemetery, but it also happens to be near the scene of one of my most traumatic childhood memories. I was eight or so, and was with my mother and younger brother Ryan. I don’t know if we were visiting some dead relative or just poking around, but I remember we were all out of the car and it was getting close to dusk. Because my mom enjoyed inflicting psychological trauma on her children even back then, she decided to lock me out of the car. Here is where I will state that my mom to this day insists (through streaming tears of laughter and delight) that this even never occurred and that I dreamt it all up, that I always had an overactive imagination. But that’s only because she doesn’t want me to get to the climax of the story, which is where she would only let me back into the saftey of her Blazer if I read her three names off the mausoleum wall.

This is fact; it happened.

Conversely, my mother likes to make up her own memories, like the one where I pushed my brother Ryan down the attic steps. She still swears that this happened, and I know that I was an evil witch of a child, but I never pushed that kid down the attic steps, I’m sorry. Not even after he drove his twenty-wheeled remote control car in my mid-back lengthed hair which subsequently resulted in my mother doing one hell of a number on my pretty blond locks with shearers. Not even after he caused me to suffer through years of inadequacy issues and brutal, bloody competition. (I was the better tennis player, but  my family never came to any of my matches so they wouldn’t know.)

Fuck, I hate my family. (Not you, Corey. You’re safe from my voodoo doll army.)

Wow, thank you Random Picture Sunday. I feel much better now.