Oh, Marvelous Illusion. Oh, Terrible Surprise.

For ardent G&S schdorks who got here by Googling the title of this post (yes, it is a line from the Act I Finale of "The Sorcerer") keep your proverbial Gilbertian dick in your pants. This isn't an Anglophiliac, Victorian operetta appreciation post. This is a post about how my family is falling apart, and how its pieces are descending slowly but methodically to Hell.

Sorry about that.

On Saturday night, while my wife and I were cleaning up after making fresh lemon bread (really, it's more like cake-- I'll give you the recipe, if you want it. It culminates in drizzling lemon juice and sugar all over the top of the loaf, if that's any indicator of its awesomeness) my cellphone rang. It was my father. I was to call him, "you know, Mummy-- later. Whenever. When you are... relaxed."

When I'm relaxed, I thought. What a strange thing to say. I am never relaxed, except post coitally, or post poo, and neither of those situations seemed like an entirely appropriate time to be phoning my father. So I said to my wife, "Let's get whatever bullshit this is over with so we can go watch COPS," and I dialed his number. It was 7:40pm. I let the phone drop on the floor at 8:45.

"Mummy, I just wanted to let you know," he said at the beginning, "that your sister put an offer in on a house across the street from you, and the offer was accepted, and so she is going to live there, with her son and her husband, and her husband's other son. Together. Across the street from you."

What followed was one of the longest silences I've ever endured in my life. A silence fraught with tension, where I could actually feel my blood pressure rising. My back began to sweat. My eyes darted over to my wife, who was busying herself wiping down the gold-flecked Formica countertop. He said nothing, and neither did I-- because that's what a silence is.

(Just ask Pinter.)

Finally, he broke it by saying my name with that "Are you still there/breathing" inquisitiveness. I responded with such a timeworn cliche, such a patently ridiculous, sitcom response-- but it was absolutely the only single thing I could even think of to say, the only thing I could possibly say to that unbelievably painful, awkward, unfortunate, searingly terrible statement of my father's. I said the only words that would trickle down the synapses from my brain along my nerves down to my lips.

"Is this a joke?"

It was not. And while I'm usually pretty good at sniffing out humor, or attempts at levity, or horrendously misguided jokes about severed babies or drunk-driving crashes or old ladies having sex with voles, I have to admit that the possibility that my father was serious about my sister moving quite literally across the street from me and my wife was really a very distant possibility in my mind when compared to the likelihood that this was some sort of inept Israeli attempt at a joke.

But it was no joke.

My sister, who routinely discusses openly her utter contempt for her husband, or talks of divorcing him "as soon as our kid's five-- I'm just using him for childcare," my sister-- who has never lifted a finger in her life to help someone else, my sister-- who uses my father and my mother for childcare, who uses our oldest sister as some kind of mix between a personal assistant and a slave, my sister, who text-messages me complicated coffee orders that I am to order and pay for and bring to her hand when I come visit her, my sister is going to be my neighbor.

"Everybody Loves Raymond" without the laugh-track.

What ensued, after the distinct dearth of humor was realized on the phone, was the most painful hour I have ever spent talking to anybody in my life. My father, who has created an insulated fantasy world for himself, where his sole mission in his life is to save my self-centered, misanthropic sister, and the innocent child she created with this unfortunate lummox, spent an hour listening to nothing that I said.

And I said a lot. And I said it loudly. And passionately.

But it didn't matter.

Today, there's a house inspection. Yesterday, there were papers signed. One step closer. Howdy-doodly, Neighbor.

I am absolutely crushed. It's not that I don't want the absolute best for my nephew. Of course I do-- but that would start with different parents for him, which I cannot arrange. It's just that I don't want the absolute best for my sister. Why? Because she doesn't deserve it. She isn't nice. She isn't a good person. And it kills me to say that, it makes me want to spew hot vomit across the room and throw myself down the stairs for thinking and believing that about my own flesh and blood-- but it's true. Since she had this child that my parents take care of more than she does, they have aged exponentially. My mother is falling apart. My father is driving himself insane trying to dump water out of the boat that contains his daughter's marriage-- the boat that bears a gaping hole. Everyone is scrambling to save it-- everybody but my sister and her husband.

They kind of just don't seem to give a damn.

And, on a hot, selfish, dastardly level: I'm disgusted at the mere thought that they get to have a child-- a miracle-- that they don't appreciate, while we remain childless-- and on top of that, they're going to get a house in the suburbs that they won't appreciate either, and that poor man is marked for divorce in T-minus a couple years, and he doesn't even know it. And now I get a front-row seat to our family's own personal, private Hindenburg. The whole thing is just one marvelous illusion and, for me, a very terrible surprise.

Though I guess it shouldn't be. It's just what it always was with her-- the world kowtowing to her every whim and order-- only the stakes are so much higher now.

Don't Wanna

Someone once told me, as I was complaining endlessly about an unpleasant task I had set up for myself to do one day, "Don't do it-- we spend so much of our lives doing things that we don't want to do-- paying bills, visiting our inlaws, wiping our asses, getting the car inspected-- why should you have to endure one more annoying thing that you don't want to do-- just because you think you should? Fuck that."

Just. Don't. Do it.

Hmpf. Pretty revolutionary, don't you think? As advice goes, anyway.

Trouble is, nobody actually said that to me. It's just sage-like advice that I pulled out of my ass (after wiping, of course). I do this sometimes-- give myself advice, like an old friend might, if I ever asked an old friend for advice. Which I don't, which is a shame, because that's essentially what old friends are for, and I do have a couple left. But I'm far too busy with my spinning little life to pay them much heed. You know, there are bills to pay and cars to get inspected.

Anyway, I give myself advice every now and then, and, invariably, I heed it not. At least I don't pay some clipboard-toting shyster to give me advice that I will then ignore. Of course, good therapists don't give advice. I learned that in college, and not much else, I'm embarrassed to say.

Yesterday, after a thoroughly annoying day of working with some of society's less fortunate, less desirable, and less assimilated beings, I got to fight through forty minutes of just-out-of-school traffic only to arrive at the doorstep of my middle sister's shabby apartment on the outskirts of the city. Broken red moulding disgraced the threshold and, as I leaned back against the wooden railing propping up her doorstep, it bent unceremoniously and threatened to cave beneath my not-very-impressive weight. I texted her, as she requests, probably because her doorbell is broken.

"I'm here."

My sister, who has had her iPhone surgically implanted up her ass, usually texts back in under two seconds flat. After four minutes of freezing my tibbles off in the cold rain, I called.

"Hi. I'm here."

"You're where?" she asked.

"I'm at your doorstep. Can you let me in, please?"

"What are you doing here?" she asked, obviously put out.

"Well, I was supposed to see you last Monday, and you postponed until this Monday. And now, it's this Monday."

There was a brief pause.

"Oh," she replied with customary eloquence, "well, I thought you were going to, like, confirm."

Like, confirm, huh? What is this, like, a doctor's office?

Instead of that biting little remark, I said nothing, determined to be a good boy.

"Well," she said, "it's too cold to go take the baby to Starbucks."

"Um, I know-- I don't care about going anywhere, I can just come up and say 'hi.'"

"Oh, yeah, sure, we'll come let you in."

And so began what was one of the more traditionally awkward twenty-six minutes of my life: meeting with my sister, on her turf. Where my mother and eldest sister are not around to conduct air puff residue tests on all of the baby's toys and sanitize his every corner. This apartment is not the happy medium I hope for my nephew. He toddles and doddles around the living room happily, putting discarded Starbucks coffee cups into his mouth that have been lying around on the floor, he gleefully chases a yellow, plastic ball that goes careening towards the vast tangle of wires and cords connected to her modem. There is shit. Everywhere. And she puts on some sort of digitized bastardization of Mickey Mouse that he pays attention to for sixteen seconds, and then wanders off in search of other stimulation-- I don't know, like, where it's supposed to come from.

And neither does he.

And neither does she.

Maybe he'll pick up some wisdom from the pithy quote on the side of the Starbucks cup, if they're still doing that-- but I doubt it. He is, after all, fourteen months old.

I'm tired of doing things I don't want to do. I just want to take my nephew away, to a diner somewhere, for bacon, eggs, and well-done hashbrowns-- like my father did with me-- once the kid's old enough.