Hello again, gang.I'm taking a little side-step away from this story just a bit, as I have some other interesting relatives, and oddly enough, they are on my side of the family. I have a few older brothers, and for those of you who know my first name, you might be shocked to discover that I have an older brother named....you guessed it....Larry. I'm dead serious.I have three older brothers, actually. Jeff, Larry, and Richard. I am in constant contact with Ric (whom I affectionately call 'ponytail boy', because he's had a ponytail since....30 years ago?), but I don't speak to Jeff or Larry, and haven't talked to them since the death of my father in 2003. Why don't I talk to my two oldest brothers, Jeff and Larry?Because they fucking scare me. Perhaps a bit of background might be necessary to explain how I have a brother named Larry (with my name being Larry in addition, and no, my name isn't 'Larry in addition'....anyway, you get the point), before I go on.My father married a shitload of women. He was married nine times, if I recall correctly. He produced two sons with his first wife, Jeff and Larry. However, since he was a shiftless bum who did nothing but screw people over to make money, she took the two kids and vanished to somewhere in Alabama, and due to it being impossible to find someone if they truly wished to vanish in the 1960's, my father eventually wrote his first two sons off, never expecting to see them again. He married again, and produced my brother Richard, and a sister (unnamed). And to make matters worse, I also have another sister who was born exactly a month after my brother was hatched, her mother being an on-the-side girlfriend who's been in the picture, off and on, from 1969 until just a few years ago, when she died. So far as the timing goes....I'll let you do the math. Well, that marriage lasted about two years....and then my mother popped into the picture. She was depressed about having to give up her first child to adoption, and she made an easy target for my scummy father. Since the first Larry was long gone, and my father wished to have another namesake floating around (I'm Larry II), I was christened the "Larry Elliott Van Zandt II", had a wine bottle broken over my head, and shoved out into the bay.To make a short story long, 20-something years passed by, and my auntie (father's sister) actually found my two oldest brothers....and they were living up in Seattle. This was around Christmas 1994.She arranged a meeting, and they drove down to the town in Oregon in which we were living at the time to meet all of us (I was working for my father at the time), and my brother Richard and I were invited to go target-shooting with Larry and Jeff at a local outdoor gun range we knew of.We got along rather well; Larry was a fairly extroverted guy (imagine that), but Jeff was rather quiet and reserved. One thing was for certain, however; They only spent maybe a few hours with our father, but they already knew that the guy was a bullshit artist....as Richard and I already knew, lol. When Jeff opened the trunk of his car....I almost crapped my pants.He had two AR15's, one Mini 14, one semi-auto MAC10, and several handguns.....and a few thousand rounds of ammunition sitting in there, sitting on custom-built racks built into the floor of his trunk.And my brother Richard and I got to shoot every one of those guns, dozens of times. We probably vaporized a few hundred bucks worth of ammo that day....and Jeff didn't have a problem staying out there and letting us shoot more, but it was getting dark, and we had had several visits by concerned neighbors when it sounded like World War III was erupting from the gravel pit we were shooting at.I didn't see a problem at the time, to be honest.The visit went well, and a month later, everything took a shit between my father and I, as he sold off his businesses, and left the area, leaving me stranded high and dry. No job, no money, nothing. My wife and two kids at the time went to my granny's house in Portland, and after contacting my brother Larry in Seattle, he oddly enough had a great-paying job offer for me up there with a prominent upholstery shop. And I mean prominent.I wasn't aware just how prominent it was, until I was asked by musician Kenny G. to help pull the rear seats out of his Suburban, or talking to Bill Gates about how much longer his Porsche would be in the shop. Two guys from Soundgarden dropped by twice, followed by Eddie Vetter from Pearl Jam, all checking on projects in this shop. There were others that did business with the shop owner, and to be honest, I enjoyed working there to a point; there was no way in hell that it would ever pay enough for me to live in Seattle.While I was in Seattle, I lived with my brother Larry. It was hilarious, really. My father, Larry, was a slob....and my brother, Larry, was obsessive-compulsive about keeping his house clean. In fact, I think he is obsessive-compulsive, as we got into a few arguments about my 'housecleaning' (I left a towel folded on my bathroom counter....it wasn't folded 'correctly'), but it was a screaming match between him and I concerning the 'Dixie Mafia' (my brother Larry apparently was a drug runner of sorts who supposedly passed through Oklahoma and Arkansas all the time during the same time I was living in Oklahoma) that made me realize that he was nucking futs. I was calmly pointing out that the drug trade in Oklahoma and Arkansas was in the major leagues, and he was screaming at me, telling me I was stupid, and that there was no such drug trade going on in my area. I knew better. Every summer, when the local Weed crops were about to be harvested, almost all branches of the U.S. Military (including FBI and DEA, accompanied by Oklahoma National Guard) would descend on my particular county, and do county-wide searches for crops. One of the most blatant seizures involved a farm that had tractors and implements harvesting the buds....but this ended when an ONG Humvee (Oklahoma National Guard), carrying 5 drunk occupants, ran a stop sign, striking another car, killing 3 or 4 of the Humvee occupants, and making vegetables out of the rest. According to my brother Larry, this was all bullshit. Couldn't happen, nope. I was politely trying to refute his stance....and he kept going more and more overboard, so at one point, I simply threw up my hands, and said, "you know, you're absolutely right", following that comment, I got up and went to sleep. I left Seattle the next day, quitting my job, and I went to my granny's house, to where my wife and two kids were living. Seattle simply wasn't going to work out for me, because due to the insane cost of living expenses, I was never going to be able to rent or buy a house, and to be honest with you, after spending two weeks with my older brother Larry....something was beginning to bug me about him.Jeff, however, was somebody who was really beginning to bug the hell out of me. Jeff is, or was, a writer.He wrote a book, and actually sold it. Made $40-$50K out of it, supposedly. However, his book apparently got him some public attention....and he couldn't stand it. Keep in mind, that I have no idea what the name of the book is, or if he actually wrote it. However, he spent a hell of a lot of time speaking intelligently about the pitfalls of being a public figure. In fact, that's about all we spoke about. This is the first major clue I had that something was wrong; you get published, yet you don't want anyone to read your book? I think the problem here is that Jeff didn't want any scrutiny on him or his activities....I'll point out what that was later.There's an author whose work I enjoy reading, a guy by the name of Raymond E. Feist. His sci-fi works involve Elf characters, and with his 'elf' race, they aren't given to 'idle chatter' like Humans are. Jeff was like that. You couldn't have a normal conversation with him. If you did discuss something with him, it had to be something he felt worthy of true discussion, and only then would you get an earful. The guy is intelligent, incredibly intelligent. The problem is that the more I got to know him, the more he began to 'weird' me out. He has one son. I didn't get to meet the son until after I arrived in Seattle, on the initial visit when I took my wife and two kids up there to 'check it out'. Keep in mind that Jeff and I have different mothers....His son and my next-oldest son are twins. I'm freaking serious....they had the same haircuts and everything....and I was honestly having some serious difficulty telling them apart. Same height, same build, same facial expressions, same skin tones, same eye color, similar voice, I was seriously tempted to grab my family and run, because it really freaked my wife and I out.We don't know how in the hell they were so alike, especially considering that we didn't even know of their existence until just a couple of weeks prior to meeting them.

Paragraphs are your friend

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all i got to say is..holy fuck.

It's like that scene in the Matrix.

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My eyes just cummed.

lmfaooooooooooooooooooooooo

I laughed my ass off when I saw this.
loooooooooooooooooooooooooool ahhahahahahahaha

It went downhill from there.If I take a look at what's happened during all of this, I can only think of one thing; Jeff was grooming me for a project of his.You see, Jeff has started a religion. His religion. After I left Seattle....he took a second wife. He left Seattle, too, and now lives in a compound somewhere up in Northeastern Washington. I don't know where, and he wouldn't tell me....and to be honest, I don't want to know.Fast-forward 9 years or so, to 2003. My father had just died, and I was speaking to Jeff again over the phone.This time, Jeff was trying to break me down psychologically, and make me a follower of his new religion. Larry? My obsessive-compulsive other brother? He's now Jeff's right-hand-man in Jeff's new religious order. In fact, Larry is the guy working himself to death to provide the funds for the religious compound, where Larry's wife, Jeff's wives, and their children live. Larry drives a delivery truck coast-to-coast, delivering jet engines back and forth for a major company. With all that time on the road, you need something to listen to, right? Enter Father Jeff, and his Bible On Tape.That's right, Larry listens to Jeff's preachings while out on the road. And according to Larry, who's now completely changed (seriously), I really need to consider listening to Jeff, as he truly has all of the answers. His life is now so much better, since he's accepted Jeff into his life, and golly gee, I should just give Jeff a chance.This was the period right before the funeral of my father, by the way. I'm not sure if Jeff was hoping to play upon the grief caused by the passing of my father (The only thing I was actually 'grieved' about was my damn phone bill, I was actually happy the guy was now dead), but Jeff spent several hours over the phone trying to get me to convert. He built me up, he tore me down. He intelligently pointed out several things that I could improve about my personal life, if I would but only take the few first steps. Jeff had matured as a motivational speaker. The guy is good. Good and fucking scary.Jeff's problem, however, was in assuming that I was an easily-swayed idiot who might succumb to his preachings. We didn't talk over the phone, he preached to me. I wasn't really sucked into what he was saying, I was instead fascinated with the amazing clarity of just how sure he was about what he believed. This was only part of the problem, however. You see, he also mentioned the End Of The World, and how he was going to be ready for it, and how I needed to be part of his answer to it. I mean, in an 'armed conflict' sense. I then remembered the trunk full of guns and ammunition, and how my brother and I left a large pile of shell casings on the ground behind us, on that cold December day in 1994. I quit talking to him after that phone call. In fact, I called my phone service provider within a minute of that last phone call, and had my goddamned phone number changed.It was clear to me, at that point in 2003, that my brother Jeff is insane. And he had spent a considerable amount of time trying to groom me for the cause....the problem is that the 'cause' is bullshit. I grew up around one of the best Bullshit con artists that ever lived. Jeff, like so many others who've come before him, and will come after him, he thinks that others are too stupid to see what's really going on behind the curtain. The fault I'm guilty of is that while I knew that something was wrong with the guy from almost the first day I met him, the issue is that I didn't piece together what he was truly about until that last conversation. I knew that Jeff was bullshitting me about something, the problem was I simply didn't know what he was bullshitting me about.What makes Jeff so dangerous? He actually believes it. More later.

longcat is looooooooooooooooooooooooooong