Pennsylvania is for lovers

My sister Georgina graduated from Bangor Area High School on Friday and I was not there to hear the woeful guest bloviating of Wilford Ottey who, when I graduated from the very same high school some ten plus years ago, served as the school's superintendent. He now resides in Colorado doing Lord knows what, but whatever it is, I hope it has little to nothing to do with education. Ottey's strength lies in cutting young people down, partly because his embittered faux scholarship won't let him admit to himself that he's a fantastic failure, but mostly because he's just a dick. A sample of his wonderfully trite wit:

MY MOTHER: My son graduated with your daughter Alice. He lives in New York now.

OTTEY: Oh? Does he work in a restaurant? (followed by some tweed covered snort, no doubt)

Go fuck yourself, Ottey. No amount of pretending to fight the good fight for education will cover for the fact that people despise you. I hope you fall down a flight of stairs after tripping over that "Great American Novel" manuscript you've no doubt been working on since the late Italian Renaissance.

Anyway, I may have missed the actual graduation, but I was able to attend the party. I arrived Saturday night and sat on the trampoline watching my brother Gunner take on my youngest sister Gracey in a no-holds-barred wrestling match in which Gunner received a titty-twisted that made him scream not like a girl, surprisingly, but like a 40-something year old adult woman. The aftermath:



As is our custom during family gatherings, my siblings and I hang around each other and run away from other members of the extended family. It's like a game of sorts in which we try to entertain each other at the expense of everyone else. It makes us happy in a totally antisocial way. However, Georgina was in good spirits despite being surrounded by family:



Specifically, being around our sister Gillian:


Gillian, Gracey, Gunner, Georgina, and I then decided to suck all the helium out of the party balloons. This was hilarious only to us.

Also, I met my newest cousin who is adorable. Her name is Brynn and she loves stairs (not the stairs Wilford Ottey is supposed to fall down):


At the end of the day, it occurred to me that I will probably not ever have a need to come back to my home town again, now that my family is moving out to Arizona in a few weeks. I'll miss it. For all its faults, it had a certain simple beauty.