In the beginning, God was quite the practical joker...
A few weeks later, the Vikings sailed south from the frigid wastelands of Norway and Denmark and reached the coast of England, planning to conquer it. They stepped off the boat, took a look around, and said to each other, "This weather sucks." They then said forget it, but not before beating up the local yokels and ditching some of their own wimpy warriors, who remained in England, trying to bully the yokels some more. The yokels wised up, however, and learned to tie the wimpy Vikings' shoes together when they weren't looking. This led to the rise of the Anglo-Saxons.Hundreds of years later, the Normans arrived on the shores of England. William the Conqueror stepped off the boat, took a look around, and said to his men, "This weather sucks." But he conquered the island anyway, and he brought his native Norman culture to England, which is why we now have English castles with moats and drawbridges, and we can say things like "I am chivalrous with brunettes" without Bill O'Reilly beating us up.
So the English flourished, building more castles, adopting more French words, fighting tournaments, trying to capture the Holy Land, and bitching nonstop about the weather and how it sucked. Meanwhile, Hungarians and Saxons were off in Eastern Europe, envious, because their weather sucked too but they weren't conquering the known world, but instead running away from Huns and Visigoths. They tried to fight the invaders valiantly, but the invaders only burned their villages and tickled them till they cried and wet their beds. This led to the Crusades.
More hundreds of years passed, until one day, in 1749, a young apprentice journeyman, Donald Long, stepped out of his London flat onto Milk Street, took a look around, and declared, "This weather sucks." He then hopped on a boat and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean so he could be the first person to set foot in the New World. (Long didn't pay much attention to current events, since most newspapers back then used words too big for his shrunken head, and in fact spent most of his time ogling the back page descriptions of nannies available for hire.) This intrepid adventurer, upon reaching America, apprenticed as a book printer, and soon started his own business. The church and local government, however, condemned him as a "printer of lewde ande lasciviouse bookes" which did "challenge and tormente our God-fering peopleses" because of their "graytuitouse sexe scenes" and "excessivee" use of the letter "e," even by eighteenth-century standards. This led to the rise of Doubleday Publishing.
Long was banished, subsequently flipped City Hall the bird and settled in Maryland, where his descendants thrived until some of them got to missing England's sucky weather and migrated to the Midwest. Meanwhile, Eastern Europe was fought over and eventually overrun by Cossacks and other filthy-looking brigadiers. One John Vrabyl, and his wife, Hannah, decided to split before the Soviets came, and head for America. John had previously tried to join the Cossacks, but he failed the entrance test when he was unable to dunk a basketball with just one hand. The loving and devoted couple set up shop in Ohio and took up snuff and making bathtub gin.
In the intervening decades, several big wars were fought, disco made its triumphant arrival, and Kraft Foods, Incorporated raised itself out of the might of artery-clogging cheese and flavored, aromatic tobacco with just the right blend of outdoorsiness and chic urbanity. The giants who ran the corporation decided they needed people to crunch numbers, and hired a boatload of them after agreeing to throw them a party first At this party, one descendant of Donald Long, Stephen, plucked up the requisite courage and started chatting up a descendant of John and Hannah Vrabyl, Patricia Vrabel. The two of them hit it off instantly (or after five or six drinks--records here are spotty) and got married in time to ride the wild roller coaster of bell bottoms and disco fever that was Glenview, Illinois' Seventies Phase.
The loving couple's son was born a few years later, and he stuck around in the Midwest, complaining about the sucky Illinois weather but not having the moxy to leave it, as did his forebears. He met a woman from lands far away, exotic and wild, and took her to the St. Charles Food Court for a first date. She agreed to marry him anyway, and her family wept grievously to hear it. Then she kicked him out of the house for a month and he went to D.C. This led to the rise of this blog.
THE END
From the family scrapbook.
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