Technology and My Family...

I love having a personal cell phone. It makes my life easier in many ways. I can contact anyone, anywhere, at any time, and I can even go on Facebook when I'm away from my computer! Granted, that last one might become kind of an issue... I'm not saying I have an addiction, but maybe that's not the healthiest use for my phone. "What's happened on Facebook in the past 5 minutes?! A boy's gotta know!"

One crisp, Wednesday afternoon in September, my phone rang. It was 12:30 in the afternoon, and Mommie Dearest was home from work for her lunch hour. The caller ID read: "Mom."

All that went through my head was, "She couldn't have just come down the stairs to talk to me?" We live in a very lazy time.

"Coah," she addressed me in her thick, Boston accent, "come upstairs for a minute!"

So I did.

"What is it, Mum?"

"Coah! Have you been watching the news?"

"...No," I responded, having been holed up in my room for the past two hours writing a long, film studies paper which made me want to pull my hair out. I didn't care about the themes in this particular foreign love story, but I had to make myself care. And really, I just had no tolerance for people bitching about their love lives at that point in my life. Being perpetually single at 19-years old leaves someone... bitter, let's put it that way.

My mother then proceeded to tell me that the local news stations were reporting a homicidal maniac loose on our side of town, about a mile and a half away. Apparently, he had come home at 5 a.m. that day, drunk, and raving about how he wanted to die, but not by his own hand. He preferred that the Cops take care of the job. "Death by Cops," he said he wanted. His wife reported that he had staggered away from the house with a knife and didn't know where he went.

The schools in the north side of town responded by locking all the doors and windows, and keeping the students in their classrooms until parents came to pick them up.

"Lois, where are you going?" my Dad asked.

She looked at me and my father, with a determined look on her face. "I'm going to go pick up the kids! Coah, I locked all the doors, I took the hider keys out of their hiding places, and the dog is with your uncle! No one in or out of the house, do you understand me?!"

I just kind of stared blankly and nodded my head. "Bye, Mom."

She left in a hurry.

A short while later, she returned with my littlest brother, Devin, who was 12 at the time. "I'm going to go get Jonathan! I'll be back!" she announced dramatically as if she were Arnold Schwarzenegger in "The Terminator."

This is when my uncle emerges from the other side of the house and decides that he needs to take matters into his own hands. He needs to protect the household, and OBVIOUSLY the Police can't do it like he can.

"ED!" he screams at my father from right outside my bedroom door. "ED! Do you know how to load Devin's pellet gun?"

"No," Dad responded.

"Oh. Well, if that guy comes into our yard, I wanna shoot him RIGHT IN THE EYE."

He waddled back to his side of the house to arm himself for an assault on the drunken, suicidal maniac who, I must reiterate, was last seen almost two miles away from our house. I thought for a while how plausible his thinking was, that this guy would just happen to show up at our house. Not only was distance a factor, but we live on a dead end street. What would possess this crazy man to just happen down our quiet street and wreak havoc? Pretty unlikely if you ask me.

My uncle and Devin decided that they were going to stake out our front yard in lawn chairs with pellet guns. Reminder: We don't live on a main street.

This went on for an hour, until they determined that this stake out wouldn't be fruitful. So they checked the woods behind the High School near our house. Which is even further away from the suicidal maniac's house. Needless to say, they didn't encounter him there, either.

Meanwhile, Lois drove across the street to the high school to pick up my other brother, the 16-year old. But he wasn't at school. Mommie Dearest had a meltdown. "Where'd he go?!" she came home asking, panicked. Mid-freak out, Jon came through the door, unscathed.

"Jonathan, where were you?!" Mom asked.

"I snuck out of school," he replied.

"WHY?! THERE'S A KILLER OUT THERE!"

"'Cause I'm a G!"

Mind you, my brother is 5'10", skinny, and white.

Back to my uncle's Search Party: They disbanded and came home a while later, around 5:00 p.m. We turned on the news in the living room, which declared that the perpetrator had been located the next street over from his house.

Sadly, this is how my family operates. And I was the only one in the house who felt that my mother's, my uncle's, and my brothers' behavior was abnormal.