(My father, who never calls me unless there's something up with Bro, called me a couple of weeks ago. "Heard anything from the homefront?" he asked, which is code for "Heard anything from your brother, who I still desperately want to shape in my own image?" I said, "No." He said, "Well, he showed up for Father's Day, and Ex-Fiancee was with him." I've also, much to my dismay, heard their sordid-night-of-accidental-passion story from my mother, which was really just too hard for me to handle.)

Now, my brother is one of those youngest sibling types, a wayward and generally irresponsible � if well-meaning � soul whose problems with clincal depression have occasionally caused him to drop out of life for awhile.

He'd be a good kid, except he's always fucking it up. He just seems to fuck it up artfully, and just the most climactic moment � the moment in dramatic movies when the hero rises to the occasion just as the music swells, against all odds that have been building against him ... that's when, so close to the goal, my brother manages to fuck up royally, again and again.

He got into a prestigious undergrad preprofessional program to study to be a veterinarian (which is evidently a competitive major), then failed every last one of his classes his first quarter because he was smoking too much opium (um ... I assume that's what you do with opium). Struggling through his first year, with frequent checks from Pop (who, incidentally, refused to pay for my college education), he managed to pull a C or D average.

Then he moved downstate to live with the buddies in his rock band. There, he turned to pot, opium being unique to his former campus. After not paying the electric bill in his name for several months and using his roommates' utility money to buy weed, he asked for my mother's credit card number to buy a book for a class and charged $1,100 in overdue gas and electric bills to her Visa.

When his roommates then booted him out, and my father got a call from his new landlord that Bro hadn't paid his rent in four months, Dad went down and rescued him. Threw him the truck, brought him back home, and Bro's college career was over.

So, what does a young, directionless fellow do in cases like this? Join the military of course. Bro supposedly tested really high on this test for the Air Force and was going to enter the service to train as a computer specialist of some kind. And two weeks before boot camp, he totaled the company truck belonging to the utility he was working for, broke his collarbone in three places, and ended up not being eligible for military duty.

These stories go on and on, and I could really go on with this all night, but I'll wrap it up by explaining that he and Ex-F lived together for a couple of years, were planning to get married last September, and called it off suddenly and violently in July (after which we heard countless stories about how she stifled him and wouldn't let him live his life the way he wanted to, etc.)

Now, they're back together, and "he couldn't be happier" (according to his IM). Of course, she could have been standing over his shoulder at the time.

Ex-F is the kind of girl who, at age 26, still collects Whinnie-the-Pooh stuff and talks to her mother about five times a day on the phone. It took me awhile to warm up to her. And then, I was loving her for Bro's sake.

Then, I hated her for Bro's sake.

Now, I'm supposed to love her again.

I just hope to God they never procreate.