In post 4490, Hectic wrote:Why'd your grandfather hate the masons so much?
Let's start with Cliff first; how would you like to be killed, Cliff? Make it something strange so we can add you to the list.
I'm glad you asked. I'll give you the condensed version instead of scumhunting.
It all began back in the good old days where you could start a secret society and actually get tax breaks for it. Now those were the days. You used to be able to walk down the street and nod knowingly at people in the windows and a good half of them would jump out thinking they'd been caught. You might think it was a struggle wading through the bodies, the coffin sellers being on strike what with Thatcher and everything, but it was surprising easy when you got the hang of back flipping over them. My grandfather was an exceptional back flipper. I'm not sure if he learnt his skills walking down the street, in the war on drugs, or the war on eyes. He always just told me he learnt it in a 'cruel senseless war'. Whenever I tried to get more out of him he locked me in the broom closet until I could break out. Good man, but he wasn't good with money. Spent a fortune on doors. I always used to think it must have been the war on eyes, that's the cruelest and most senseless war I could think of (although I can't think about it too long since it really doesn't make sense and my head starts hurting and then I start making bad decisions like lynching anyone except Elements day one). He also had a blind army buddy, so either that was from the war or he was pulling a Hectic and pretending he was blind to get people to townread him. In the end it didn't really matter how he got them. He'd back flip over twenty corpses with ease and if he landed on anyone and squashed them he could just claim he was trying to back flip over twenty one corpses. All things considered it was pretty much the perfect crime.
It might sound like I'm getting away from my point, but I feel like whenever I fail to establish my grandfather's skillset at the start of the story then the whole thing just falls flat. The important takeaway from my story is that my grandfather had an impressive set of skills. It's like granny always said, 'he doesn't mean what he says when he's on the hooch laddy, the south willne rise again'. I think she was usually drinking at the time too since she didn't have the accent at the start of the sentence. You're also probably thinking that doesn't sound like it did much to establish his skillset. Well let's just say you weren't there to see how much hooch the man could put away. Never told me what hooch is and I never asked and I think we're all a lot happier that way.
Unfortunately he couldn't live a quiet life caring for his family, consuming excessive carbs, and paying what he thought was his fair share of taxes. As was the fate of all non scrounging commie dumpling crungers at the time, in the end he had to get a job. After all, he had a wife, kids, and a serious cocaine habit to support. Nothing serious, he just got an odd thrill from squirting it on the cat. As were most government jobs at the time, it turned out to be a pretty secret job, they wouldn't even tell him what he was supposed to be doing for the first two years. Turns out some of the paperwork went missing which pretty much sums up the government for you. Made him feel a lot more justified about not paying his taxes, not that I'm entirely sure he knew what taxes were. Always made a fuss about paying 'old uncle sam' which never made much sense to me what with us being British, his not having an uncle, and aunt Matilda being the one who had all of the pictures. He always paid her mind you and it was money well spent. Much better than getting a couple of pencil plodders to sent a very skilled man after the latest in a wave of secret organizations who just wanted to impress daddy Khrushchev.
You're probably wondering at this point where this is going. You'll want to reread the last couple of sentences and realize you've missed some brilliant foreshadowing. I'll wait a minute or two for you to pick yourself off the floor, stop typing for a while and let you recover. If you didn't fall off your chair then I'd advise taking a quick break here anyway since otherwise you lose the director's intent for the pacing and the whole thing just falls apart really and then you've got nobody to blame but yourself, Jack Aubrey, and I guess Stalin. I'll trust you've taken the break now and we'll get back to the main story. In case any of you didn't get it, the skilled man was my grandfather and that secret organization was the masons.
Being part of the uninformed majority he'd quite naturally held a hatred of informed minorities all his life. We prefer to avoid talking about his thoughts on affirmative action that turned out to be the obvious extension of this. We prefer to talk about how he lived and died a hero and how we changed his first name to we just before he died and we changed his last name to died a hero just to make it difficult to say he was pretty damn racist without also making we died a hero sound like a hero. He was a hero, but that was beside the point, unless you're after my original point about the masons, if you're still reading this I love you, which I feel I should get back to. Quite naturally the group drew his ire, and when they were finished they wade a sketch of his lyre which he got for a discount of ten lire after he'd lyer a particular turkish gentleman who prefered to be a lier to a stander and who'd called him a liar twelve years prior in the war on ears and subsequently recognized in a bar. Don't ask why he'd lyer him in the bar because the government couldn't either at the time.
My grandfather of course decided he'd infiltrate the masons. He had the perfect plan. He'd join up with a local recruiter, learn about the organization, make his way up the food chain, grow to love the organization and his new brothers, accept it into his heart, become one with it's teachings, start to grow bitter about the newer younger members who were starting to take his place and quit in disgust. All things considered he'd definitely taken a realistic view of how easy it is to get sucked into a cult. Remember, if they're not feeding you enough and they're keeping you tired and they keep insisting you can leave whenever you want but it's a thirty mile walk to the nearest town and the car always happens to be out of gas whenever you feel like leaving then you might be in a cult. Looking at you here Aaron Frost, you'll thank me when you're older.
Like most plans, it didn't survive first contact with the enemy. My grandfather went into the recruiting station just like he planned, but the moment he saw the smug little mason rat girl recruiter at the desk he flew into a rage and burned the place to the ground. Over the next thirty years, and my details get a bit shaky here since gran always made me leave the room when he really got into it, he systematically killed every mason man he could. He left the women alive, but I later discovered he was just leaving them alive so they could have more mason children so that he could kill the children. I'm not defending eugenics and forced breeding programs here or anything, I'm just saying you need to walk a few miles in his shoes before you could understand exactly how deep his hatred of the masons ran. He saw things in those years and they changed him. Who can say if he'd been changed for the better, certainly not Galinda.
Sadly as time passed by my grandfather grew older and had grandchildren of his own. The government decided to slash his department's budget, needing the money of course to bribe every single person in the department into never telling anyone what their job had involved, plus a few extra bribes to cover up the fact they were bribing people then a few bribes to cover up those bribes and then it just kind of snowballed and people have to pretend we don't know why we've got such a huge national debt. He was never the same after they told him he couldn't hunt down masons any more. He retired, and this modern day Cincinnati returned to his family, his cocaine habit, and his oldest and truest love of putting together really badly planned sessions of alcoholics anonymous.
He turned in his gun and badge and I think they recognized he was a broken man at the time since they didn't even ask where he'd got the gun or the badge. I never saw him smile again apart from when he took those long walks and came back covered in red paint. Gran would always ask him where he'd been and he claimed he'd been having an affair and the woman just liked throwing red paint over him, but I think from the way she smiled Gran always knew the truth.
As he grew even older, towards the final days of his life, he did grow to accept that not all masons were evil, in fact not even all of them were bad people. Over the years he'd met thousands of the vermin. In that time he noticed one quality in particular that stood out. He told me in fact, that every mason with this quality turned out to be a good person. He theorized that without this one particular quality, no mason could be good. 'The only good mason', he whispered to me and only me with a smile that spilled out memories of a life well spent me and as he lay on his deathbed, 'is a dead mason'.
Hopkirk "Hop" Hopkirk
There's no reaching. I've become enlightened.
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