The Unimportance Of Family.

I think that you have been fed a lie. 

I think that I have been fed a lie as well. Luckily my weak stomach caused me to regurgitate it before it could do any real damage. 

I think you've been told that family is the most important thing in the world. That without family, you have nothing. That at the end of the day, all you have is your family. 

I guess this information sounds good and looks pretty when knitted into fabrics or painted onto signs and hung up around the house. 

But what about the people who have shitty families. What about the kid with a crack head mom and a sociopathic brother with a tail and a dad who moonlights as a transvestite prostitute. 

Telling a kid with a bad family that family is the most important thing in the world is like telling someone with lactose-intolerance that milk is the meaning of life. At the end of the day, you can always come home to a nice glass of milk, and then painful bouts of diarrhea. 

Now, you're probably thinking that I must have a real shitty family to be writing all of this, but that's not the case. Besides the fact that most of my extended family are about as useful to me as a broken refrigerator, my immediate family + a few others are great. 

It doesn't matter to me that 

my dad killed a goose with a pitchfork

or that my mom screams "WHORE" at burnt pork roasts

or that my brother eats peanut butter in the bathtub

or that my sister shaves her knuckles. (just kidding)

There's no hidden Scarlet Letter message in this blog that's trying to convey hatred for my own family.  

But I do think that's it's unfair to generalize family as "the most important thing in the world," when really there's a lot of kids out there who don't come home to nice, stable, loving people. 

Don't tell a diabetic that chocolate will be there for them at the end of the day

Don't tell an amputee that the only thing they can count on is their legs.  

Don't tell someone who is family-intolernt that family is the most important part of life. 

Cause maybe what's most important to a someone is their dog

or work

or a garden

or a doll collection

or rock collection

or stamp collection

or toenail collection.

And for the people who don't understand, they may think that a family of collectables is a materialistic filler for the immaterial family a person missing. But as for the collectors, they may think that family is an immaterial filler for the materialistic family of dolls and rocks and stamps and toenails that the family man is missing. 

At the end of the day, all you need is yourself for substance, maybe another good guy for company and a weird hobby for entertainment. And for some people, this is family.