2001-04-07 - 11:59 p.m.

Nobody Home

This happens to me a lot. I make specific plans to get things done on a certain day, then something happens to totally derail those plans.

Lily was going to be spending most of the day out of the house, so I thought that it would be a perfect time to finally catch up on my Uberhamster entries.

However, I was only an hour into it when the phone rang. It was my brother Harry, in town for one of his rare visits. He was visiting Dad at Hotel Happy, and was going to be stopping by. Cool! But so much for the online journal entries...

Harry and I spent a good part of the day hanging out. He spent a lot of time talking about his business. Harry is the credit manager from some big company down in New York City. He never really had that good of an opinion of humanity to start with, and since his job is essentially chasing after deadbeats and scumbags it has steadily darkened. Still, Harry is a funny guy, and fun to hang around with.

In some ways I feel a little inferior to him, even though he's my younger brother. He has a real job down in New York City, he has a big house and a nice car and is currently getting into investment properties. Meanwhile, I'm up here moldering in Frown Town, living the life of an overgrown kid.

Actually, that's not being very fair to myself. I really don't envy my brother's life at all. His job is a high-pressure one and he works very hard at it. He doesn’t seem to get much enjoyment out of the money he makes.

A while back he was complaining to me about how hard he was working, getting to work early and stay there late every day. I almost asked him the question: what are you working so hard for? I didn't mean the question in an unkind way but simply to ask, what is the goal of all your hard labor? It didn't seem like he had one; he was really working just for the sake of working and buying things just because he couldn't think of anything else to do with what he was earning.

And as far as adult responsibilities go, neither one of us is married, neither one of us has any kids. What I have going on now with Lily is far more serious than anything Harry's had, as far as I know.

We talked at the Hamster Palace for a while, and then went out to a diner to get something to eat. After that, we stopped at our mother's grave site, in a town to the west of Frown Town.

I don't visit my mother's grave very often. In fact, I only do it when Harry is in town. I don’t really see the point of visiting a grave. My mom isn't really there, it's just a place where an urn with some ashes in it is buried. There's nobody home.

I really believe that when people are dead, they're gone. They're not listening when you talk to them in a cemetery or whatever. The only place that they still exist is inside your head.

So it was kind of awkward standing by Mom's grave. The thing about my brother Harry and me is that when we get uncomfortable, we get silly.

Harry started telling me about his visit with dad at Hotel Happy. Because I see Dad every week I don’t notice the changes much, but for Harry the visits are months apart. Dad's decline has been quite noticeable from his point of view.

Lately whenever we visit him there, he can always be found in the TV room, sound asleep with his chin on his chest. While Harry was there the TV was turned to some infomercial about some exercise machine. One of the people testifying to how wonderful it was a 72-year-old man and his wife. Harry couldn't help but compare the vigorous well-spoken elder on the TV with the confused old man drooling on the sofa. Dad is only five years older.

Harry said: "I felt sorry for the guy on TV because he doesn't know that in five years he's going to look like Dad!"

Not terribly solemn graveside behavior.