Uncle Jeff

My father was the lead singer/vihuelist of a Norwegian mariachi band and my mother was a Mormon who is famous for her research of the slow loris. She discovered that the slow loris´ lungs, like those of a bird, actually have openings on each end and are lined with tiny air sacs that allow the slow loris to easily respirate at altitudes higher than 1500 meters. But she was later proven wrong so I guess you can´t really call it a discovery. My father and mother met at one of my father´s gigs at a dwarf throwing competition in a small Pyreneese town called Solafera in the tiny country of Andorra, where my mother was on a mission. Apparently everyone who saw my father´s band became instantly enamored with the sextet´s whirwind of skin-tickling orchestration. I recall my mother telling me that one time in Belfast my father´s group belted out those Nordino ballads so magically that they coaxed a swath of hostile Catholics and Protestants into locking arms and hightstepping in a figure eight of brotherly madness. Later that night I was conceived in the women´s bathroom of a rowdy pub. It was called the Whistling Lemur. There was actually a black and white ring-tailed lemur who whistled at the top of every hour from the basket of a paper mache hot air balloon that hung above the bar. (I actually visited this bar about five years ago and the whistling lemur was still there but by that time he was hanging stuffed from the wall next to a self portrait by the bassist from The Cranberries. (Little known fact-The cranberry is in the same plant family as the rhododendron.)) Anyways, I was born and raised on an orangutan farm on the island of Tuvalu. It was a ranch that was, on a typical day, exactly 12,131 steps from the capital city of Funafuti. We bred the orangutans for their hair because there were no toupee shops in the regional Isles that stocked red-haired wigs, and my father, a redhead, hated the constriction of caps as well as the feminine scent of sunscreen, so toupees were the only remedy to prevent his mostly-bald head from burning up under the unforgiving Funafutian celestial human-baker. You´d think he´d only need one toupee but orangutan hair is extremely flammable and my father used to be a pyromaniacal masochist. So we needed a whole farm. I miss those orangs, especially Talang, an orphaned female who I taught to crochet. So now I´m in Seattle where I intend to create and market fruit flavored mouthguards. Well that´s enough about me.