My parents are Mike Grubb and Harriet Booz. As a kid, I assumed they were a simple electrician and school bus driver. As normal as can be. The only interesting thing about them, I thought, was my dad’s having lost half his foot in some mysterious incident that I hadn’t gotten around to asking about.

Then I started my journey into genealogy.

The Grubbs and the Boozes first met in northern England in 1541. They immediately declared each other witches and each clan blamed the other for their centuries of woe. As they spread out into the Scottish lowlands and Northern Ireland, they left smoldering bodies in their wake. This feud lasted generations and when their descendants moved to the New World, they went to opposite corners to avoid each other.

The Boozes went southeast to the Carolinas and Georgia, where they became Confederate officers because they loved slavery. It wasn’t the racism that appealed to them. They didn’t get out much, so they had no idea the entire political and economic system was based on dehumanizing millions of Black people through torture, rape, and erasure. They just got huge boners from people in chains getting whipped. I dunno, Europeans are weird.

The Grubbs, on the other hand, moved west to the Appalachians. There they clung to their age-old family tradition of poverty and working on some other guy’s farm, eventually finding opportunity and structure fighting for the Union. It’s not that they were anti-slavery. They just got giant boners for blue uniforms, and the police and Kansas City Royals hadn’t been invented yet.

After the war — that is, the Civil War, or the War Between the States, or the War of Northern Aggression, or the War for the Biggest Boners, or the War to Determine Whether the Future of America Belongs to Egalitarianism or Bondage No Not Like That Oh Sorry Mister Booz I Didn’t See You There Yes Exactly Like That….

What? Oh, right.

After the war, the Boozes loaded up the family covered wagon and moved north to escape the shameful memories of defeat. North, away from the plantations and the plaques commemorating those who died in battle. North, where they would never be reminded of the war by statues and monuments. North, to Richmond, Virginia.

The Grubbs, meanwhile, discouraged by the lack of blue uniforms that weren’t full of corpses or gangrene, flitted across Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, looking in vain for some sort of group of blue men. Their patience would pay off in late 1980s New York, but that’s another story.

Eventually, the Grubbs and Boozes settled in Roanoke, Virginia. They soon spotted each other and went right back to a-feudin’.

The records don’t state exactly how many were lost to the families’ crazed killing sprees, but data suggests the stock market is still 14% lower than it would have been otherwise and that they left a small but measurable impact on the climate. Revolvers led to tommy guns. Knives led to buzz saws. Nunchucks led to wrecking balls. Dynamite led to atom bombs.

At last, only two remained: Mike Grubb (who’d had his foot ripped apart by an orangutan that a Booz assassin had fed cocaine-laced whiskey, but judo flipped the ape into his model collection, impaling it on a 1:1000 scale replica of the Eiffel Tower) and Harriet Booz (who was attacked with a poisoned jackhammer by a corporal in the 19th Grubb Irregulars, but wrestled him to the ground and tore his face off with her bare hands).

The last two survivors of a feud spanning four centuries, Mike and Harriet agreed to meet at a Statler Brothers concert for a final showdown. The setting would provide a wide and unusual selection of weaponry, from banjos to mic cables to lighting equipment, and the crowd would ensure collateral damage in case the death match got dull.

When they met, though, things turned out differently. They tried desperately to kill each other, to no avail. Arsenic, drain cleaner, napalm, cheese graters, falling pianos, the frozen vacuum of outer space. Nothing could stop these two killing machines.

After four and a half hours of depraved violence born out of hundreds of years, thousands of gruesome murders, and millions of enormous boners, they tried something else. They tried love.

It was disgusting.

After their torrid affair / marriage, I was born. That was also disgusting, but in a different way. Bred to be a preternatural, almost biblical source of destruction, when I burst out of my mother’s womb, I tore her completely asunder. The doctors had to choose which half of her would die and which half would receive an untested serum concocted from the blood of various amphibians and annelids. They chose the left side and within days Mom was whole again.

From that day forward, my parents vowed that as long as they both drew breath, they would cease their families’ genetic predispositions to violence and work towards a brighter, better world.

Unfortunately, Mom died in 2018, and Dad’s been wreaking havoc across the Midwest ever since.

If you see him in public, stay in your car, lock the doors, and try to get out of sight. He can smell fear, so try and soak yourself in urine to throw him off your trail. Then say your prayers, you poor bastard, not that they’ll do you any good.