On Cannibalism and Friendship

Some people are nervous when they meet Daniel for the first time, and rightfully so. In addition to eating all of your candy, grilling you like Torquemada about your religious inclinations, and snatching your newborn baby out of your arms and tossing it into the air, Daniel may simply not like you. It doesn't happen often, but when he decides that you are not his cup of tea, nothing can deter him, and every encounter with him will begin with something along the lines of "Are you my wicked Aunt Lori?" (if you are my Aunt Lori), or "Are you one of Satan's warriors?" (if you are my best friend, Cade Ekblad-Frank). At first you think to yourself, "What do I care if a psychotic three hundred pound five year old thinks I'm nice or not?". But then you realize that Daniel, like most astute dogs and cats, is a remarkable people barometer. So, if he thinks you're an asshole, chances are you're probably an asshole. Chances are people who you think like you actually think you're an asshole. If Daniel doesn't like you, someone, somewhere, might be putting a hit out on you.
Therefore: Those who are concerned that my retarded little brother might decide on a whim that you are a gigantic dick would do well to follow this procedure:
Step One: Upon hearing from me that we will be stopping by my parents' house for the evening, or that my family is in town and you are invited to join us for a meal, immediately acquire two (2) pieces of white bread and one (1) Ziploc baggie. Do not, under anycircumstances use the end pieces of the loaf of bread in question. If end pieces are all you have in your house, go to the store and buy a new loaf of bread.
Step Two: Place the two pieces of bread in the Ziploc baggie, and put the baggie in a safe place onyour person, where squishing will be minimal.
Step Three: Within the first five to ten minutes of encountering my brother, take the bread from out its hiding place. Surreptitiously place your own hand between the two pieces of bread - if you have to excuse yourself for a moment, to maintain the element of surprise, do so.
Step Four: Present your hand, nestled between the two pieces of bread, to my brother. Daniel will at first begin giggling softly. He will then take your "hand sandwich" and tenatively nibble into it. Do not be alarmed. He will not bite you or hurt you in anyway. After a brief bout of love bites, he will then return your hand to you unharmed and laughing uncontrollably.
Step Five: Bask in the knowledge that you have made an ally for life. At the Ragnarok, when Daniel reveals himself to have been Odin in disguise, complete with eye-patch and pet raven, you will be recognized as one of the Chosen. You will be whisked away to Valhalla, where alcohol, sex, and Pac-Man machines are abundant, and where the same delicious suckling pig is eaten every night and resurrected every morning.
In the twenty four years I have known Daniel Sutherlin Boyce, I have not been able to decipher why the "Hand Sandwich" is so effective a tool for endearing oneself to my brother. I think, in essence, it is a trust exercise. Being acquainted with that boy is indeed a wild ride. Perhaps, he's thinking to himself, "if this idiot is willing to lose his hand to my ravenous and weird appetite, he's up for anything." Or maybe its just really funny.

On Mortality

Daniel seems pretty confused about what makes people die and what doesn't. I have mentioned before that he believes that vegetables and fish will make him die. Yet he continues to subsist on a steady diet of hot dogs and Wolf Brand Chili without qualm or worry. Once, I took Daniel to a Shoney's Breakfast Buffet. I suppose I was too wrapped up in the existential/erectile woes of a teenage boy to notice that he had bacon for his main course, with a side of bacon, and, for dessert, more bacon. When we got home, Mom asked him what he had eaten for breakfast.
"Bacon," he said.
"And...?"
"Just bacon."
"Did he just bacon, John-Ross?"
"I dunno, Ma, I'm busy."
"Daniel, how many pieces of bacon did you have?"
"About a million."
In addition to being fearless against the clogged arteries, constipation, or greasy skin that an all-pork diet portends, Daniel also does not have a full grasp of physics. He has stepped in front of a moving school bus before. As a toddler, while preparing for a CAT scan, he made a power play over my parents and the doctor by grabbing a security guard's firearm, proclaiming, "Gimme that my gun!" Conversely, Daniel believes that our dog, a ten-year old Scottish Terrier over whom he towers like Godzilla, is constantly concocting elaborate plans to bite him.
Daniel still only understands electrocution in terms of "making the bones show". One time, he flipped a switch while my father was on a ladder messing around with some of the wiring in overhead light.
"Daniel, don't do that! You electrocuted me!"
My brother met these admonitions with a blank stare. Dad amended his earlier statement.
"...You made my bones show."
Which sent Daniel into a giggling fit.
Although Daniel has historically proven to not be so keen vis-a-vis the things that make a person die, he does seem to understand the permanency of death, as illustrated by a recent comment about Seventies pop duo and variety show co-hosts, Sonny and Cher.
"A lot of people want Sonny and Cher to shut up. Sonny's shut up. But not Cher."
It's a start.

On The True Spirit of Christmas

Many times I have to filter the life and opinions of my brother, Daniel Sutherlin Boyce, through my personal vocabulary and sense of syntax, quite inferior when it comes to accurately documenting my baby bro's genius. However, once in a blue moon, I get lucky. Here is Daniel's Christmas letter to Santa Claus, December of 2006. Dictated, not read.

Dear Santa Claus~

How have you been? Did you have a nice summer vacation? How are your two best elves? Well, in the past I have been a good boy so instead of toys, I just want cool stuff. I want a lunch box that looks just like a cooler so I can take frozen dinners to lunch at work, cause I did a great job at VARC. I want a portable CD player with headphones. A Disney’s Icabod and Mister Toad DVD. A Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People (his 8th book). And a bag of pizza flavored Goldfish crackers. A box of those caffeine-free Pepsi cans, full cans, so I can take them in my lunch. I will always be a good boy cause I am going to be baptized when my big brother comes home. And most of all, I want the Gerald McBoing, Boing book. It’s there, cause I saw it! It’s in Book World. I am going to be a good guy from now on, so Merry Christmas!

love,

Daniel Sutherlin Boyce

PS…I know my brother and sister always look up to me.

On Privacy

In a fun twist that could only be provided by a grand old Jehovah with a sick sense of humor, Daniel began experiencing puberty. I remember being five years old, well before The Age of Unwarranted Boners, and still feeling the unrelenting urge to whip my dick out during Magic Carpet Story Time and poke people in their privates. I'm not sure if this is common behavior or just a sort of deviancy isolated to the Boyce clan. However, the fact remains that the sweaty smelly hormones of a teenager combined with the cognitive capacity of a kindergartner make for perverse roller coaster. While I was in Italy, Daniel grabbed the same girl's ass twice in one week. It was my favorite news from home.
It would be very long post if I attempted to document all the particulars of Daniel's descent in human sexuality. So many thinly veiled ruminations of Lil' Kim's blatant lack of modesty. So many times I caught Daniel watching the DVD extras of "X-Men", where they're in the process of painting a very nude Rebecca Romijn. But my favorite story of Daniel "discovering himself" involved my good friend David Moore.
David Moore came to live at my parents' house during the summer of 2004. My parents took an immediate liking to him. He was the polite, piano playing boy of efficient metabolism that I think they had always secretly wanted. He soon became more than a house guest, accompanying my mother on thrift store excursions and affectionately referring to my father as "Mister Charlie", a nickname I had suggested when I was fourteen, which was swiftly shut down.
One day, The Old Man, David, and I all decided to call in sick to our respective jobs, order some pizzas, and watch all three installments of Robert Rodriguez's Mexcio Trilogy. We camped out in the den upstairs, unbuckled our belts and let our eyes glaze in the glamorous glow of machismo, vendetta, and violence.
Also, dirty sex. There is a pretty amazing scene in "Desparado" where Salma Hayek - the whitest Mexican girl alive - bangs Antonio Banderas in a way that you would normally only see if Cirque De Sole performers were down on their luck and were willing to do anything for some quick cash. It was transfixing - the tractor beam of softcore pornography. And so we didn't notice that while Salma and Antonio were in the throes of some impossible upside-down affair, Daniel had wandered into the den.
"Daniel! Big kids movies! Get out!" we all cried. Daniel plodded his way out of the room, but he seemed even slower than usual. "Oh. Okay" he mumbled.
A few days later, David was looking for a book he was reading. Assuming that he left it in the den, he was surprised to discover Daniel sitting three inches away from the big screen TV as he navigated the scene selection menu of "Desparado".
"Daniel?'
"David I need to be alone right now!"
David pretty quickly figured the score. "Um...alright..I just need to get my book. Is that okay?"
Daniel became as cordial and as hurried as a concierge with explosive diarrhea. He guided David, hand on his lower back, to the corner where his book lay and back out the door. "Sure, David. Sure. You can get your book. But I need to be alone right now."
And he shut the door to the den in David's face.

On Chickens

Daniel's first job was at the Outdoor Learning Center, a sort of children's museum behind the Katy High School. Ostensibly it was designed to teach students about the early settler's of east Texas and what life was like in the early 19th century. In reality it was a form of all-encompassing punishment. If your class was good that year, you took a field trip to the Imax in downtown Houston and watched a two hour movie about volcanoes. If your class was bad, you had to listen to an eighty-year old woman jaw on about bee-keeping and gourd-painting. For two hours.
Daniel's primary duty was to collect eggs in the hen house. To this day I have no idea how he handled it - hanging out in a rancid chicken coop all afternoon and putting his hand in the bathing suit area of hundreds of squawking, disgusting chickens to collect their admittedly tasty menstruations. This is a person who used to run out of the room terrified whenever the Noid came on television. But somehow Daniel and his fine-feathered charges eventually formed a bond that manifested itself in an unexpected way.
"Mom - I will no longer eat chickens, please."
My mother initially stood her ground. "This is not a restaurant. I am not a chef. This kitchen is a dictatorship, and I'm Pol Pot, and you are a boy who is eating his chicken ala king."
"But I can't eat chickens because they are my friends. I collect their eggs and they love me."
Even Pol Pot couldn't withstand that. So for about a year and a half Daniel was officially exempt from all poultry consumption.
Then on Christmas Eve we decided to revive an old family tradition. When my parents were first married they were gloriously poor. The swankiest Christmas Dinner fare possible was Long John Silver's. For our family, eating deep fried fish and chips from the dirtiest fast food joint in West Houston was akin to a Passover Seder. "We eat these hushpuppies to remind us that, many times, dog meat was right around the corner."
The only snafu: Fish ranks number three on the list of foods that will make Daniel die, right after all vegetables and all fruits. This was a time of grave decision making. On the one hand, Daniel had a moral obligation to not eat any poultry. On the other hand, fish swim in their own toilet water and will make Daniel keel over dead within the first bite. Furthermore, there were no chickens in sight, no hens or roosters in our kitchen to witness Daniel breaking his solemn dietary code and report back to his beloved charges at the Outdoor Learning Center. How would they ever find out that Daniel ate chicken, just this once, under extreme Yuletide duress? They wouldn't. Daniel took three pieces of chicken and put them on his plate.
My mother whipped out a camera. "Oh, really?" she asked.
You know those scenes on the news, where a celebrity has been caught peeing on a fourteen year old girl or drinking half a slurpee they found on a bus station bench? And the paparazzi are swarming like locusts around the guilty party, who is vainly attempting to conceal his identity by burying his face in his hands? That's what Daniel looked like, bits of white meat and breading spewing forth from his mouth, panicked, as he waved his hand in front of the camera lens and begged my mother to not tell his chickens about the awful thing he was doing.

On Face Theory

"If you are handsome, you have handsomeness. If you are hideous, you have hideosity."

On Fathers and Mothers and Sons

While riding in the car with Mom and The Old Man, Daniel was scolded about something. No one can remember what it was exactly, but after a few minutes of smoldering in the back seat of the van Daniel asked, "Dad? We can't call our fathers old windbags, can we?"
Silence. Daniel keeps the conversation flowing.
"Mom? We can't call our mothers old hags, can we?"
Mom deigns to not respond. The Old Man asked, "Daniel? We can't call our sons fat tubs of lard, can we?"
"No," Daniel responds gravely. "No, we can't."