Tales From The Lebowskis - Diane Thirty: Unscripted

I've been blessed with two terrific parents. It's a corny thing to say, yes, but true nonetheless. There is much I've learned from each of them, and much I could say about each of them as well. Today though, I'd like to take a moment to talk about one of the traits that runs on the Lebowski side of the family: a quick wit. All of the children of the Lebowski-Jerboa union share this trait to a greater or lesser degree, and most of the grandchildren as well (I flatter myself amongst the grandchildren of wit). While she may not be as much of a natural spotlight-magnet as her younger siblings Hulka and Patty, my mother possesses the gift of a quick wit in spades. She is less of a storyteller, her gift is in her ability to play along with a situation or mutter a quick retort. Here are a collection of some of my favorite Diane Thirty off-the-cuff witticisms.

At a birthday dinner for Holly Lebowski (Hulka's beloved wife), we were all seated around a table in a restaurant. My mother is very particular about certain foods, and insists on only ever using REAL butter for her bread/rolls, not margarine. So when the basket of rolls arrived to the table with a mix of butter and margarine packets, she was nervous. The basket was going the wrong way around the table from her, and she was carefully watching as the stock of real butters gradually depleted. Eventually, the basket reached the diner directly to her right, her brother David "Blaze" Lebowski, with only 1 real butter left. Now, David is a scheming sort of guy, always up to do something to get a rise out of someone (another trait that runs in the family), so I can't say I blame my mother 100% for the preemptive strike she was about to launch, but it seemed harsh nonetheless.

As soon as the basket of rolls reached David's hands, it was slapped out of them, onto the table as my mother warned him, without a hint of warmth in her voice, "Don't even think about it, fuckhead." [alternative heard as "don't even think about it, dickhead."] She quickly snatched the last butter out of the basket and turned back to her conversation with my father, leaving David with his jaw on the table and only margarine for his roll. Now, I realize that wasn't a particularly "witty" comment to lead the tales of wit, but it was hilarious, fuckhead.

One Christmas in our old house, probably when I was about 13, 14 or so my mother had ordered a large leather recliner for my father for Christmas. It was a warm Christmas Eve that year, with very little, if any, snow on the ground. I recall being sent out onto the deck at some point in the morning with a bag of stale Rice Krispies to throw out to the birds. The house was built into a hillside, and the deck wrapped around from the side of the house where it was just a few steps up from the driveway to the back of the house where it stood above the slider doors to the finished part of the basement. I was feeling particularly lazy, and didn't feel like throwing handful after handful of cereal out onto the lawn proper, so I stood at the deck railing in the rear of the house and just upended the bag, dumping a pile of cereal down 1 story to the ground below where it remained.

Later that day, Dad's new chair arrived. My mother guided the deliverymen down from the driveway to the backyard and around to the basement doors to bring the chair in. She then noticed that to do so, they'd have to walk through a pile of Rice Krispies. Thinking quickly of a way to save face, she let the delivery man know that she'd asked her son to feed the birds that morning. But her son, she claimed, had Down's Syndrome, and didn't understand the task. How do I know she said this? After they left, she came upstairs and told me so. Angrily. As if it were my fault she lied and said I had Down's Syndrome.

Now, my cousin, Derek Dynamo, does in fact have Down's Syndrome, and he is one of the kindest-hearted young men you'd ever hope to meet, a real sensitive guy who loves his family and loves to make people laugh. One day my mother was sitting with her sisters, Susan (Derek's mother), and Patty chatting with their mother, Nonnie, and HER sister, Aunt Claire Philbert. Aunt Claire sometimes has a funky thought process, and doesn't quite follow exactly what's going on (but she is a very sweet and good person). At this particular time, Susan was talking about the accommodations Derek gets at school, including a dedicated para-educator. However, Aunt Claire didn't hear para-educator. Instead, she looked confused and asked my mother to clarify for her sister, just exactly, "what does the parrot do?". Now, my mother could've explained that Derek did not, in fact, have a parrot educator, but instead opted to tell her that the parrot uses its claws and beak to sharpen Derek's pencils. Aunt Claire looked not at all less confused by this, but blinked, nodded her acceptance, and sat back in her chair. To my knowledge, she has not, to this day, been corrected.

The final moment of unscripted, muttered wit I'll share today happened during a family game of Monopoly Junior. Monopoly Junior is like regular monopoly, but with fewer properties, set in an amusement park, and with the dollar values greatly reduced, usually by a factor of $100 or so. Also, the man currently officially known as Mr. Monopoly featured more prominently in the various cards and properties. However, Mr. Monopoly went by a different name back then. Back then, he was Rich Uncle Pennybags.

It was a typical family board game, the type pictured in print ads for the very same board games. All four members of the Thirty family were sitting on the living room rug, Steven and Diane Thirty patiently playing this childrens' game with Meghan and I. Mom was not winning though, and was becoming mildly annoyed with her poor luck. She rolled, and landed on one of the card drawing spaces, taking a card. She grumbled about how she had to pay back a $3 loan to her rich uncle. However, her description of this was "Oh, damn it, fine, pay $3 to Uncle Peniswhistle." Meghan and I laughed so hard we couldn't finish the game.

Uncle Peniswhistle.

Hahahahaha, it's still funny.

Formative Years Fiction - Evil Robots

Sorry it took me so long to post the next one. There's a lot of scanning, etc. involved in doing these and I wasn't sure if it would be easier to try to make a .pdf, especially for one down the line that lacks illustrations and is long (for a kid's story). Anyway, at least for now we'll stick with the multiple images format.

So here is the next installment of my Formative Years Fiction feature. This story is from the 3rd grade (as will be the next one). It is an action-adventure story written in the first person. What kid doesn't dream about taking on hordes of evil foes and winning? Because each page is more self contained than in the previous story I'll be posting commentary after each page instead of just one block of text at the end. Without further ado, enjoy Evil Robots! (As always, you can click each image to see it full-sized)



As you can see, the cover sets the tone for what is sure to be an exciting romp in the world of robotics. Now, you may already be wondering how a robot, a mechanical construct without free will could possibly be considered "evil". Eat my butt.



Oh good, for those who somehow started reading this but somehow missed the cover with crazy robots all over it.



There was no particular reason why this book was dedicated to my cousin, Brett Pallos. I just thought he would enjoy a story about evil robots.



I didn't actually own a plunger dart gun as a kid. I desperately wanted one. So in my story, I got to have one. But it betrayed me! I liked using quoted speech and onomatopoeia in this story, apparently. Also, I would still find those fridge contents very disappointing today, except maybe some veggies. Meghan is my sister, Meghan Thirty, with whom I had a tumultuous relationship as a child. Yowsa? Really? I wrote "yowsa"?

Regarding the illustration, I like the random broken roller skate that has no purpose. I also like how badly 2D the fridge is, especially its bizarre face. And good lord, I hope nobody attempts to use those flimsy handles on the fridge doors.



Fridge, you dick! Those ice cubes look painful, and check out the massive flaming lump they left on my head! I was a big fan of the eye-pop-out effect for shocked cartoon characters at that point, it found its way into a lot of my drawings at that age.

"Too" not "to", young me. Also, poor Meghan, getting blamed for everything.



OK, so a steady diet of cartoons had taught me, by this point, that water is very bad for electronic devices, such as robots. Of course, if anything mechanical breaks, it must explode. That's just how those things work. I like the impossible angle on the dart shot in this picture. Also, it's weird but something about the face on this drawing of me reminds my of my cousin Sarah Thirty's long-term boyfriend Donnie Dunder. (He is much better looking than this drawing though, don't worry. He's also not a 3rd grader who fights evil robots.)



That first line is quite the rhyme. I like that the car needed no impetus to come to life, but turning the key will shut it off. Our house really was on a hillside, that angle is only a slight exaggeration of our driveway at the time. I like that I was so surprised by the car that I jumped two stories, had my Walkman fly off my head onto the roof, my eyes bugged out, my tongue went crazy, and I said "Aooga" with no exclamation point. As if I were calmly stating it. Also, I like that the car just has the word "Varoom" over it him.



Well, yeah, I'd say that's suspicious. I remember being super proud of Roboland's security system when I drew it. Thieves are brought to the roof and tied to a post. A robotic punching glove then punches them, post and all, onto the adjacent roof, into a cage that apparently has a poker game and a TV inside. Ray's Chopping Block was a real store in my town, and spelled their actual sign correctly. There was also a Citgo in the center of town, but the sign was not that big. Apparently in my story they borrowed the sign from near Fenway Park in Boston. And made it all lower-case.



Alright, shitty fiction trick #58: conveniently mention something had been true all along, right when it's necessary. However, this is really a borderline example. It wasn't as though I hadn't explained how I became soaking wet, I just hadn't explained it in a way that made any logical sense whatsoever. You see, the ice cubes that struck me in the back of the head when I was fighting the fridge were made of water. Clearly that brief contact with the ice cubes was enough for me to become soaking wet and remain that way for several minutes if not hours. I like the final robot ominously sitting in its display case, and I like that the case's upper left corner is shaped just perfectly to let the explosion not touch it.



And here it is, the big daddy of them all, the Spider-Snake-Dragon-Robot. I'd be a goner if that fancy water fountain didn't have a "Blast" option for just such an occasion.

And that's the end. No explanation of why the robots came to life. No explanation of what their purpose was. There are way too many questions left unanswered here... tell me this story continues!



Thank. God. If we read the whole series, everything will be explained! Also, there will be evil creatures, evil people, and... uhhh... evil minerals. Great. The evil people are the only ones who won't be in all caps, for some reason. Unfortunately, I never actually wrote these sequels. The unanswered questions will remain unanswered for all time. But here's what those sequels might have looked like in a parallel universe where I made them.



Evil Creatures is full of shout-outs to a favorite recurring conversation I have with my friends Josh Stryker and Marco Agrocrag about deadly animal hybrids. There's a Snawk, a Bat o' War Jellyfish (a thing of NIGHTMARES), an Alligator Snapping Tulverine, a Wolfornet, and a starfish holding an assault rifle (not a hybrid). I went with the JRR Tolkien "In a bind? Giant eagles, for the win!" idea too.

One of the shadowy figures in Evil People should be instantly recognizable to folks who have known me long enough. Enjoy!

Tales From The Lebowskis - Can't Say That Anymore

Around 1999-2000, my immediate family was in the process of moving from our old house to our new house. Because the old house was sold about a year before the new house was finally done being built, we had to make certain arrangements to have living space in the meanwhile. Luckily, my maternal grandparents, David (aka Jaja) and Mary (aka Nonnie) Lebowski kindly and generously let us share their house until ours was finished. I got to live in my uncle's old room in the basement (David "Blaze" Lebowski, Jr., not Stephen "Hulka" Lebowski), which was pretty sweet, while my parents and my sister, Meghan, occupied spare bedrooms on the main floor. There were aspects that took getting used to, and it was probably easier on me than others since Nonnie treated me like gold and I was in the basement, removed from most of the drama anyway, but all in all, it worked out really well.

One evening, all six of us were seated around the kitchen table eating dinner. I forget what we were talking about specifically, but I guess it came out that my father, Steven Thirty, had done something helpful or kind. Nonnie, wishing to show her appreciation for my father's good deed, told him:

"Well, that was awfully white of you, Steven."

Normally Meghan and I were pretty good about not actually laughing out loud and embarassing our elders for a remark like that. But this time the defenses were down, and we both nearly choked laughing at Nonnie's politically incorrect remark. My mother just looked embarassed. Jaja kept eating, absolutely unfazed. Nonnie, meanwhile, looked confused and a little hurt, and couldn't understand what was so funny. My father, with trademark patience, explained to her the racial connotations of her statement.

Nonnie was shocked. Surely we understood she meant white as in pure, like snow. His soul was glowing white, and this had nothing to do at all with skin color. My father continued explaining that today, a comment like that would be taken as having a racist meaning, even if she didn't mean it that way. Perturbed, but determined to salvage the conversation, Nonnie switched topics and started telling us about her latest night shift at the local convalescent home she worked at part time. It was pretty standard for the most part. But then, she started telling us about an orderly who she spotted catching a nap in a side room. This orderly was a big black man. She told how how:

"I walked right over to that big jungle bunny and told him 'quick, wake up before the supervisor sees you!'"

Again, Meghan and I couldn't hold back our laughter. My mother was laughing too this time. Jaja, still, continued eating without missing a beat. Again, Nonnie looked confused and hurt. While my father explained that "jungle bunny" was considered a racist term now, she explained how she was trying to help him out by waking him up before the supervisor could catch him. Surely we didn't think she was racist or disliked this man because he was black. My father (who, by the way, Nonnie adored. If she thought me golden, he was platinum) told her that he knew she was just trying to help, and that it was only the choice of words that was an issue. He told her he was sure the orderly appreciated her helping him not get caught. Finally Jaja spoke.

"He probably thought it was awfully white of you."