a_strange_treat

Hmmm ...

So this girl I met, and have been kind of dating ... is rather spectacular, and she snorts when she laughs. Last night she snorted twice ... I feel happy when I am with her.

My poor brother.
Two years ago he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, which they attributed to some strange virus he caught in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War.
He had to leave his job as a CFO of a nonprofit group and go on disability.
On a total whim, while passing through Oklahoma last year on the way home from a funeral in Texas he stopped off and bought a goat farm. He is now a goatherder, and he owns horses, and he has no idea what he is doing and he is broke. He can't pay his mortgage. It kills me that, being a single dad who just spent half my annual salary fighting a (successful) custody battle, I have no money to help him. My mom is in OK with him now. She says he's a total mess.
He doesn't know what to do with himself. He's really becoming unglued. At one point, he asked to move in with our parents in Arizona for 6 months, then he wanted to send his kids there for six months while he found a place to live in Indiana, where he used to live.
I forgot to mention that he is in the middle of a divorce and custody battle. His ex-wife is a filthy vicious animal. She and her new boyfriend hit him in the chest with a baseball bat, right over his pacemaker. Two days later his heart stopped, but he was saved by the implanted defibrillator. My younger brother died in 1991, shot and killed. If that creature took my other brother from me I would hunt them down and make them beg me to let them die. I'd feed them slices of each other ... pardon my brief excursion into absolute hatred.
So now he is down there in the middle of nowhere in a trailer, by himself with two small children and about 100 fucking goats, with no money and a serious heart condition. I wish I could just bring him here or change places with him, take his disease on myself or just make it fucking right. I tried so hard to save my little brother and failed. Now I can't save my big brother. I know; I know ... it's not my fault and not my job to save anyone ... but fuck I want to!
Even worse ... he can't seem to make a decision to help himself. The guy who sold him the land is offering to take it back and finance a different patch of land, smaller, but enough to sustain his animals, that has a house on it, that would be more affordable. He has not accepted the offer.
He also, and this is the kicker, asked my parents to loan him money to go to Nigeria so he can meet the girl he's been talking to online. She "can't get a visa to come here unless he goes there and signs some papers."
Meanwhile, the story goes, her father has a million barrels of oil (in his garage I suppose?) and he will pay my brother a dollar a barrel to sell it. I think he is losing his mind to lonliness and isolation. I want him to cut his losses, dump the goats on a real farmer somewhere and come home where people can take care of him and help him.

Yikes ... sorry about the long ass rant. But so it goes. It's my blog and I'll whine if I want to. Take care of yerselves, me beauties ...