Oh, I don't know where you came from 'cause I don't know where you've been

[austin_dern]

On the other brother's side, I know I don't visit my niece enough. It's a matter of scheduling, basically; the relative home locations make it most convenient for me to visit after work, but that is also their dinner time and then another hour or so before bed, and while they've never turned me away when I propose coming in that window I do feel like I'm imposing. Weekends offer more time, except they like doing stuff on the weekends so there's no point visiting them if they're off in Baltimore, and I'd like not driving the hour up there and back if I could avoid it.

I'm told by my parents, though, that there's been a perfect little e-mail storm going on around me: my brother and his wife are upset that our sister and her husband don't visit or even ask to visit. Our sister says she used to ask to visit, but after enough times being told ``sorry, we have plans that day'' she doesn't see the point in asking, especially when they do discover on FourSquare that they're near one another but get a ``no'' or no response to proposals to meet up on impulse. And apparently my mother's in on this because she's viewed as not visiting enough either, and she offers similar reasons for not stopping by more.

As I say, while this has been a storm of quarrelsome e-mails between my brother, sister, in-laws, and parents, going on for weeks now, I've been left out of it. (My other brother's been left out too, but he's in Massachusetts so has a good excuse for not visiting more than a couple times per year.) What I conclude from this is, first, apparently I am visiting enough to not give the impression of ignoring my niece (or offering to visit; last week I did invite them to Cinematic Titanic, even though they'd really have to find a sitter or have only one go to the show, and while they said no I was at least offering sincerely), and second, I'm glad I'm not a little bit more accessible online.

Trivia: Brigadier General Zebulon Pike and 51 other Americans were killed, and 180 wounded, in the (accidental?) 27 April 1813 explosion of a York (Toronto) ammunition dump, which served as pretext for the United States's burning of Government House and sacking of the city. Source: Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought The Second War Of Independence, A J Langguth. And yeah, that's Pike's Peak Pike. And, yeah, the burning-of-Toronto that was used to justify burning Washington, DC. Sometimes history is almost as small as fan fiction.

Currently Reading: Yugoslavia: Death Of A Nation, Laura Silber, Allan Little.

Comments

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

Somehow I doubt General Zebulon Pike died in the explosion. Undoubtedly he faked his own death and went to live with the Talosians. Not because he was horribly disfigured and was going to accept the gift of their psychic power to live out the rest of his days in a state of delusional dignity, however. It was simply because with a name like "Zebulon" it's the only place in the galaxy he would fit in.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Zebulon is, indeed, such a troublesome name it's hard to picture anyone actually having it except as an alien.

It's a touch gruesome but I feel like I should point out, apparently Pike was killed not from the explosion directly but from being hit with a slab of stone which had been part of the wall. That's a classic sort of accident to have on TV when you want to fake out the audience about what's happened to your hero, especially when the audience recognizes the stone as styrofoam.