The only time I believe in eugenics is after a phone call from my family. Something in the way our conversations always go makes me wonder if the blood line should end with me. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
There’s nothing quite as hopeless as hearing the same melancholic bullshit that fills your thoughts everyday, come out of the mouth of someone else. And that someone else always happens to be the people who share DNA with you.
I hear it in my Grandma when I show her a video I took of her talking, and she cries because she “just didn’t know she could sound that smart.” Or when after an hour of discussing the worst news items of the day over dishes she lets out a defeated little sigh and says “well, what can you do?”
I hear it in my mother who tells me she could’ve gone to New Mexico for the grad program she was accepted into, but instead chose to drag on the situationship from hell with my father for 13 years.
I see it in my Uncle, once a handsome kid in the navy with many a beautiful lover, now a lonely old man with too many DUIs and kids won’t talk to him anymore. He spends his days drinking everclear because it “gets you drunk cheaper” and watching the same 5 blue ray dvds in the dark because he can’t afford a phone, cable, wifi or lights.
I hear it in my cousin, a beautiful, successful career woman who jumped off a balcony,
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