So, I heard somebody talking about crappy relatives. They were complaining about how their in-laws were, uh, real annoying. I couldn't believe the things that I was hearing. These people were tortured beyond all belief and deserved much better. The in-laws were making insane demands...   They wanted to see the grandkids at least once every two years. They wanted to eat the holiday dinner fifteen minutes later than usual after having had to drive six hours through a blizzard in order to get to the holiday celebration. The nutzo relatives requested insane stuff like courteous grandkids, response to letters, and repayment of long deliquent loans. Isn't that awful?   Whatever happened to the drunker-than-crap second cousin that always manages to show up naked on the front lawn on Christmas eve begging to borrow your car and $200.00 for a hot date with his boss' ex-wife? I mean this is my kind of dysfunctional relative. This is the kind of relative that I have had to deal with all of my life.   I had an opportunity at some point in my life to marry into a set of in-laws that are infinitely better than my own family. Needless to say, I took advantage of this opportunity when it arose. Unfortunately, getting a set of in-laws infinitely better than my family is equivalent to joy that comes from knowing that eating a crap sandwich is infinitely better that death by Brady Bunch.   My family could inspire a devotion to self induced mortality that would make Jonestown look like a Monkees Fan Club riot. My in-laws can only wreak enough havoc to bring a small portion of the Heaven's Gate cult to, well, Heaven's Gate. What really kills me is that my in-laws still manage to make other families' shortcomings appear to be nothing more than a case of mild acne.   -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- Scenario 1: My father in-law died about three years after we got married. He was 52. He died of a heart attack after 40 pack years of smoking and eating pure hog grease for breakfast lunch and dinner every day. He kept absolutely everything to himself, he never displayed a single emotion in front of others. In other words, he was a heart attack waiting to happen.     My father-in-law was an OK guy but he had little use for someone like me. He thought I was wimpy since I did not shoot stuff or fix cars or build gas stations or much of anything else of a "manly" nature. Of course, he had no idea that I worked on flight decks, dealt daily with violent people, and singlehandedly ran "gangstas" out of my hotel in the middle of the night without a second thought.   Anyway, he died.   A couple of months after my father-in-law moved on, my mother-in-law called my wife and me over to her house to announce that my father-in-law died angry at us. She finished her claim by stating, " And you know how bad his heart was."   In other words: We KILLED him.   What kind of mother say this to her kid under ANY circumstances? Why was it important to tell us this? Why would someone insinuate that their kid killed his or her father? I thought that this was sick and made some arrangements. A while later we moved out of town.   -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- Scenario 2: After moving to Denver, we heard nothing from the in-laws for something like six months. We gave the in-laws our address and phone number but heard nothing from them at all.     Suddenly we started getting hang up calls. The caller would hold on long enough to hear us pick up the phone and then hang up. These calls were happening at all times of day. After a while we were having to get up in the middle of the night to answer the hang-up calls. We finally started screening our calls and only answering the phone if we knew who was calling.   A lot of the hang-ups wound up on tape. When listening to the tapes as super high volume, we could hear bowlers in the background doing their thing. The only person that we know that bowls on a regular basis is you-know-who... We were pretty sure that that it was Insane Grandma up to her standard level of crappiness.   So we changed our number. And we didn't tell anyone.   So... Insane-Grandma shows up on our doorstep (she had to drive 300 miles to get to our house) and starts screaming at us about changing our phone number without telling her. When confronted on the hang-up calls, she stated "I don't talk to answering machines!"   OK, Ms. Loony, I have two questions for you... 1. What about all the other times we picked up the phone and you just refused to talk to us?   2. WHY THE FUCK DO YOU HAVE AN ANSWERING MACHINE YOURSELF?!?!?     -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- Scenario 3: (This is long...) My sister-in-law is a parrot that does all of mom's dirty work. Any time Grandma doesn't feel like doing her own shit-work, she gets my sister-in-law to do it for her. For instance, if Grandma doesn't feel like accusing someone of being a pedophile, Debbie will call them and say something like, "Why do you like porking all those little kids in the butt?" and, BING, Grandma gets exactly what she wants without having to take any responsibility for her actions. I used to drive a truck. Then I quit driving a truck. I asked Kathy to pick me up in Dallas. She did. Kathy talked to Grandma before driving out to Dallas to let Grandma that she was going to be out of town for a while. Just before Kathy left, Debbie calls our house and says, "I don't know why he can't just take a bus, he's a big boy." Kathy chewed out Debbie and told Debbie to get stuffed.       In my in-laws family, it is a sin to yell at Debbie. Debbie is special since she is handicapped (one leg is shorter than the other). Debbie maximizes this by being terrible to family and then grinning as if she has no idea of what she has done wrong. This is how Debbie does Grandma's dirty work.   So yelling at the one-legged sister is the worst thing you can do in my wife's family. And the arguing started. Then Kathy ended it. She refused all mail and hung up on all phone calls. After a few months, all communication stopped. A year after the incident, Grandma shows up on the doorstep, barges into the house, and starts screaming at Kathy. She accuses Kathy of being insane and needing professional help for her "psychosis." She yells at Kathy in front of my kids and of course my kids start crying. She goes damn near postal, we shove her out the door, and she goes the hell home.   All this because I asked Kathy to pick me up in Dallas.   To answer this insanity, we sold our house a month later and moved without leaving a forwarding address.   It sure has been a nice couple of years since we moved.   What's the point of this? I have no idea. We are looking at our third Xmas without Grandma and life is good.   Normally, I would worry about these idiots seeing this page but, then again, they can all burn in Hell.   Copyright 2002 by Frank Emsley