Plastic Tampon Applicators as Toothbrush Holders, Etc: More Loony Relative Stories

In my dad's family, there is a tradition among the women: they marry men who are batshit crazy. This occurs almost without exception. Sometimes the women who marry the batshit crazy men are also missing more than a few marbles. In other cases, they lose those marbles after marrying the men who are sanity- or reality-challenged. Either way, almost any child born to any of these couples ends up with two psychos for parents.

My dad's niece, who would therefore be my cousin, married a man who by many accounts was sane until at some point in his mission, when he started embracing aspects of the LDS gospel a bit too literally. We're all lucky he didn't become a polygamist, I suppose. What he does, instead of marrying women at will, is to communicate with God through Blogspot. I would love to post a link, but my mother says it's not kind to have fun at the expense of the mentally ill. All I can do instead is describe it to you.

My cousin's husband has a Blogspot site where he posts his prayers. I'm not supposed to visit it because some of his prayers are too intimate and too graphic for someone too young to watch R-rated movies to read. His blogged prayers describe every aspect of his life, every single desire, and every fantasy. His fantasies aren't as pure as what most would detail in a prayer.

An odd byproduct of my cousin's husband's blogspot fixation is that he believes that God communicates back to him through the blog. Anonymous messages left to him are either "divine" or "of the devil." He reserves the right to decide which ones belong to which categories.

One of the funniest facets of his blogspot fixation is, to me at least, his belief that the Lord speaks to him through the text one has to type to verify that one is not a spammer. He faithfully keeps each one in one of those black-and-white printed cardboard-covered notebooks. He records each as it comes, then prays over it later, attempting to determine its significance. His three children are nakmed Extila, Rewarm, and Fniatl courtesy of Blogspot's anti-spam feature.

I personally don't think this behavior is significantly more lucid than wearing an aluminim foil hat to protect one's brain from thought invasion. If we exchange Christmas gifts with this family this year, I'll send them a set of specially-handcrafted foi hats, then take bets as to whether or not they'll wear them. The sad thing is the hats would be more practical and worth more than anything anyone in their extended family would ever give to my family, unless you count the crocheted toothbrush holder with [presumably unused] plastic tampon applicators that we were supposed to nail to the bathroom wall that had space for just three toothbrushes. We have four people in our family. I wonder which member of our family they meant to skip. Hmmmm. Could it be . . . . . . Alexis? Which is fine with me, as I'm perfectly happy not to hang my toothbrush in a plastic tampon applicator, even if it is unused.