Report from a Boomer Backwater

 

The number of relatives I can count on seeing on special occasions has dwindled as family members have died off or drifted apart, and my principal connection now is a rustic libtard Boomer aunt who lives with her husband, a dog, and sixteen cats on an unmarked road in a nowhere-town several hours from where I live. I recently visited her home for the first time – family gatherings always having taken place at my late grandmother’s house until now – and it was a nightmare. I expected the home to be messy and figured it would have an odor, but I was unprepared for what awaited me. The cat-stench hit first, so acrid I could feel my body being polluted just by breathing the air. Then there were the floors, so thoroughly smutty and encrusted with filth and hair that there was no decent place to walk. Flies were in every room, and cats had the prancing run of the house, putting their asses on everything. I could see hair on my backpack almost as soon as I set it down on the “clean” sheets my aunt claimed she had put on the bed in the guest room. Later, inspecting the bed more closely, she would decide, “These aren’t clean sheets,” giving me some replacement “clean” sheets to put on the bed instead. Cats even lounged on the floor in the bathroom, where the toilet looked like it had never been cleaned, and the sunroom where my aunt grows her plants was the only spot in the house where the animals were not allowed. In this room, which had somewhat fresher air, there was an antique chair in poor condition. It had a collapsed seat, so I had to perch on the edge of it, but it was the only chair in the house that I ever used while was there, since cats presumably never napped on it. Otherwise, even while dejectedly eating the occasional meal in the putrid kitchen, I stood the entirety of the time. I stood forlorn, for instance, while my uncle turned on CNN to “see what’s goin’ on in the world.” What was “goin’ on”, I learned, was an anti-Semitic apocalypse and a crisis of systemic inequality that had an indignant Don Lemon in a fine yellow lather and firing off a volley of tendentious sasses that made my sleepy-eyed uncle give an occasional idiot chuckle. Lining the cluttered shelves and walls of the home were the tell-tale indicators of terminal Boomerism and deep liberal brain-rot: folksy cookbooks, The Mueller Report, a Barack Obama commemorative plate, and a completed puzzle of Abraham Lincoln’s hideous face that had been mounted in a hall. The cognitive decline is sad and real. My aunt, having received a check for a substantial amount of money, promptly spilled pop on it before hiding it from the cats and then forgetting where she had put it. I helped her find it, but nothing will ever restore the sanity of a woman emboldened beyond the sixteen-cats point of no return. The sight of feces on the steps down to her cellar, for instance, never fazed her. Jumbles of books and mouse turds no longer had any capacity to disgust her – nor did she seem all that surprised when I moved a pile of rubbish and found a deposit of droppings with maggots writhing in it. I had to talk her into parting with a pile of soiled books – paperback mystery novels or something – that had some sort of ancient gray dog turds or hairballs stuck to them. “I’m not sure I’ve read them yet,” she objected. The dog, an old-timer, relieved itself on the floor in this room more than once while I was there. No one could ever convince her to part with any animals, though. In fact, she worries about the nearby Baptist church and refuses to let the cats venture out too early on Sundays because she fears the churchgoers might abduct one or more of her precious felines. She has really top-quality cats, she assured me, and lots of people would be happy to steal them. Outside, which was always a welcome reprieve from the shameful hell of the house, she has a chicken coop, and I watched her feed a large slug to her rooster, which failed to get the whole thing into its mouth and was left with a big piece of slug-slime hanging from its beak. Two of the ugly hens had raw, bald patches on their backs, and that, my aunt explained, is because those are the rooster’s favorites. Everything on the place was grotesque, almost as if the property itself was cursed with senility. And yet my aunt had the nerve to complain when we went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant that the curtains in the windows looked dirty. The floor in my aunt’s guest room was so thick with mystery grime and fur that when I took off my clothes at night, I tied my things to the rail at the foot of the bed so as not to allow any garments other than my shoes to touch the ground. There was only one cat hair on the sausage my aunt prepared in the morning, but it got me to thinking morosely about all of the family gatherings where I had unsuspectingly eaten food prepared in this rural biowarfare lab. Another depressing aspect of the visit was the sight of so many of the nice things from my grandmother’s house now reduced to toys for cats to climb on. Most of the family photos, my grandfather’s diplomas, etc., will probably be unsalvageable by the time my aunt dies, infused as everything will be with essence of cat-ass and rodent droppings. I still feel bad about the visit because it was impossible for me to hide my horror at how she lives. I found the stay disturbing, too, on the level of my musing about how many Americans live in such appalling domestic and psychological squalor. Is this really where we are?

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.