SOS Gab &Eti 0.00

 Gabriel introduces his ghostwritten memoir, detailing his family's third-person speaking quirk and ancestor Matthew's chaotic life in the New World. 

Transcript

SOS Gab & Eti 0.00

Wherein Gabriel Lee Orgrease introduces the ghost author of his memoir, trundles around an ancestral root as if it were a toothache and then settles with a floating feeling in the gut.

And as here follows our author…

I cannot exactly say that this is a memoir that follows here in this presentation as it was ghost written. I could say that I am the author and that I like to talk about myself and my family in an omnipresent third person, and have been doing so as a family quirk, or as some say a cursed affliction, for several generations and at the least three centuries, but it would not be quite so of a white lie. I had considered changing my name and publishing under a fashionable pseudonym, but my ancestry would be denied the fruits of their adventurous struggles in my refusal to use the name given me of my birth.

To also ignore the fact that there are a multitude of us in the extended family with the exact same name would defeat the purpose of our family name traditions intended to subvert the thought police, or you, for that matter, from being able to track us as distinct individuals with subjective personalities. We are clones of clowns, sort of like a cluster flutter to clog up the arteries of the bureaucratic clerical savants of the bourgeoisie. We are an International in and of ourselves. Some faux-conservative television pundits even go so far as to say that we have no class. Though our genetic tendency is more to lean toward chaos, madness and the general disorder of a random pile of old books, banned books often, than to hold any class. Whatever the subject that entertains us at the moment.

In such, it was our little known ancestor Matthew (Donkey) P. Orgrease (and it is prudent of polite etiquette that you don't get to know what the P of his middle name spelt) who as a young man green behind the ears, known in that era as a moss-neck, was eruditely passed across the Atlantic from London, having arrived there from Leiden, aboard the square-rigged carrack the Fortune to arrive in the fall of 1621 to the obscure colony at Cape Coriander. As to the Fortune, as a family we always seem to be on the second boat and never of the first, which probably adds up to how we ended in Bullamanka dirt-rich as they say, on farmland that is mostly oddly shaped boulders, glacial till with opulent deposits of iron, that litter the surface of the fields. The fields that themselves are enveloped all around by many acres of kettle swamp. Pretty swamp, yes, very pretty for swamp, but all it grows of any merit is skunk cabbage, voracious pitcher plants, a pretty yellow iris and mosquitoes the size of retail hawks. If you read up on the incident of his immigration to the New World you may note that Matthew P. Orgrease is listed in the roll as an unnamed passenger aboard.

At first Matthew was no more suited for the wild environment of the New World than a stamp peddler on an oxen-drawn subway but with hard work and lust in his blood he soon married and bore issue, then had to marry again and bore more issue, then married in all a total of five times and bore more issue, even six and seven times before he was through with it all, tired of a cycle of groom-to-widower and forced to tend to babies as a single-father having to climb the pious community lard pole each year in order to secure another hefty bridesmaid, and settled out as a reasonably well-off craftsman merchant, though of dubious religious grace and not very profitable in business, a business of hawking of split fence rails before a fallen red oak took him out. On his decease he had thirty-seven children to his name, several not known to be related, and three girls.

So that probably explains everything here that you will need to know other than that the ghost wrote this epistle as if it were a gaggle of unrelated clouds but despite their authorial tendency we had to accept to get from them for what little we were able to pay for their service, much of the text derived from interviews through social media, table tapping, and something of a difficulty of their having English as a second language, or possibly a fourth, I’m not exactly sure… at times it was later obvious to me that when we thought we were communicating that we may have been using the same language with totally different dictionaries. Mine being the fatter, his being the thinner, hers being absent, non-existent, ghostly. Fictionary. A guide to the Great Unknown. Or possibly she used mirrors and mind-altering techniques to enhance her ability to automatically transcribe. Whatever the situation, even though the clouds in the sky may appear rippled, or here and there a wisp that runs off into a rusty orange against a tainted blue in the set of the sun, or billows, or looms, or spouts, or menacing storm fronts lined up along the ridge, contrails of torrential pisses and hail stones the size of pungent cantaloupe, showers of sardines or tree frogs, or at times passages remind me of a milkshake duck, it is a tale all of one sky in one world in one time at our place.