rant · moment 15 of 27
Getting Ditched for a Stranger's Pool and Cutting Off the Family
from 157 - Cancel Your Family · #157
6 min
Tim describes his dad and stepmother repeatedly blowing him off in favor of visiting friends with a pool, leading him to formally cut them off, then reminisces about his family's Irish holiday debauchery and its collapse into divorce and addiction.
- Tim admits he used to steal from family at parties, running through aunts' and uncles' pockets for drug money.
- Irish families start with promise and excitement but end in divorce, bankruptcy, addiction, and mental illness.
- Growing up in California steamrolled his Italian and Lebanese heritage; he feels like just an American with no strong ethnic identity.
- One cousin is brilliant but barely speaks—Tim suspects he's disgusted that a gay clown is the family's only successful member not under indictment.
- Tim notes his generation of cousins all had issues and are white-knuckling through life, wishing they could go back to getting drunk together.
- Some corners of the world don't let you go; damage from certain life decisions doesn't reverse itself.
- Tim envies people who've never stolen money from their family or invented fake school trips to fund drugs.
- Growing up around heavy partying, Tim's generation internalized that as the way to have fun, so they started using at thirteen or fourteen.
- Drinking looks bad after thirty, then distinguished again around sixty in a nice suit with a cocktail in a bar.