Sunshine on an Open Tomb. Tim Kinsella

the laws of nature.

      The more purified The Bloodline, the more concentrated the totality of its power.

      The effects of inbreeding were very personal to Darwin.

      He married his first cousin.

      They had 10 children, and three died before the age of 10.

      Of the children that survived, six of them had long-term marriages, but three of these produced no children.

      When Darwin first spoke of his ideas re: evolution by natural selection in a letter to his best friend Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, he said that doing so felt like “confessing to a murder.”

      In ancient Egypt you’d ideally marry your sister or halfsister cuz women carried The Bloodline.

      Jean V Armagnac obtained a papal dispensation justifying the three kids he had with his sister Isabelle.

      That was rare among Europeans, but he flaunted his brazen eccentricities.

      Marriages with aunts, nieces, nephews, and cousins were perfectly common among royalty, until finally, the gene pool became so scant, all of European royalty was related to one another.

      Francis II from The House of Hapsburg-Lorraine and his cousin Maria Theresa of Naples had several children with genetic health problems.

      Five of their children died in early childhood, and their daughter Marie Anne was mentally deficient, her face hideously deformed.

      And their son Ferdinand suffered hydrocephalus, aka “Water Head,” which means he had a humongous head and intense mental deficiencies.

      He had daily seizures.

      But of course none of that prohibited him from eventually becoming Emperor.

      When informed of the revolutions of 1848, he responded with true befuddlement, “But are they allowed to do that?”

      The most extreme example of a genetic trait aggravated by royal inbreeding, The Hapsburg Lip, was typical of their bloodline for over 600 years.

      This condition intensified to the point that King Charles II of Spain’s tongue was so gargantuan and his underbite so severe, he couldn’t chew food.

      And no one understood a word he said.

      And he constantly drooled.

      And 300 years later as boys, with a sing-song bite, my brothers would call me “Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing Chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-rrles.”

      My nickname became Chuck, which made mocking me intrinsic to addressing me at all.

      Ultimately, King Charles II’s impotence led to the extinction of the dynasty, which caused the 14-year War of Spanish Succession, in which 500,000 soldiers fought.

       CHAPTER 20 My Ex

      At the very least, until recently, I’d retained my alligator health enough to indulge my mild hedonisms.

      Minor embarrassments surfaced during my divorce: a fling with a woman with hands as big as shoeboxes, a couple cases of itches picked up from professionals.

      What can I say?

      Whether it’s the struggle to see or the struggle to not see, everyone struggles with interiority.

      There’s bound to be some fallout, everyone butting up against each other, each moving thru our own animal fear, lost in that mysterious hole we each find at our own centers.

      A lot of that stuff is simple upkeep.

      My alligator made some decisions as if it was a jellyfish with its unified organ that’s both brain and stomach.

      My ex and I had somehow lost the knowledge of how to even begin to touch each other.

      And you have to keep the spirit moving smoothly thru its pipes somehow.

      I’ve never been the sensualist of The Family.

      But after my divorce, after a year catatonic, I did enjoy a satisfied return to feeling like the Division A state football champions celebrating The Renaissance; The Birth of Venus in shoulder pads calling a flea-flicker play after play; Myth, History, and the invention of Perspective driving down the field, even faking a punt.

      I felt liberated from that dank tomb of King Charles, like an alligator scraping along city streets.

      There are more relevant matters at hand, however, Randy Reader, than the dwindling health of my regal penis.

      True to the institution of divorce, I had very, very little contact with my ex.

      Fundamentally, she mystified me, much stranger than a stranger.

      I remember she liked old-timey female country singers, meeting people, and being seen.

      And she hated how I enjoyed telling The Help to take the afternoon off to go see a movie.

      But who she actually was, and her ways of being, that was all a mystery to me ever since our shared habit of every dayness had been severed.

      We married young, our marriage one more awk result of my brief flirtation with conforming to The Family’s expectations.

      I was rehabilitating from my cool and self-conscious years, obsessed with underground rock legend Cy Franklin.

      It’s basically accurate to say I’m a lifelong bachelor: married at 26, divorced at 29.

      And I don’t blame her.

      She made the decision, and the swiftness and totality of its execution stunned me, but us splitting up didn’t surprise me.

      Mostly, primarily, I remember her as dull.

      But dullness isn’t anything I resent or fear.

      I passively aspire to it, I suppose.

      Most friends I’ve ever had could be described as dull.

      And if anyone leveled that charge against me, I wouldn’t feel obliged to defend myself.

      Yup, common dullness, OK by me.

      My ex and me, however, we exhausted each other with our dullnesses.

      Knowing how I was back then, I can’t regret marrying her.

      How I was thinking, what I thought mattered, pressures put upon me—she was the perfect candidate: pretty hair, slim, smart enough in all the socially acceptable and tasteful ways, but not smart enough to see thru the folly of worrying about social acceptability and taste.

      She’s from Jackson, Wyoming, The Joplin, Missouri of The Open West, with all its nightlife and dazzle.

      And she was on track to become the wife of someone like me.

      And we intersected.

      We had the desire to throw a big party in common.

      Of course, she came with some cha-ching!

      Nothing compared to my own, but enough that she could be accepted as worthy.

      She’s since invested all that money into a system of private prisons that she insists is the future of incarceration.

      It’s worked out well for her.

      Her name was briefly dragged very publicly thru deep mud.

      Isn’t it insane how some Contras slaughter a dozen civilians and some doctors at a healthcare clinic and rape some women while their children watch—horrible stuff, but way across the world—and my ex ends up testifying to Congress?

      Luckily, she was on a first-name basis with half the committee.

      Nowadays, my ultimate romantic goals all involve catching a beautiful woman in