Day:309

 

 

 We had a wind storm midweek. The airport recorded 71mph winds. One of the Expo 74 butterflies broke loose its mount and was laid in a tangled heap on the ground. That thing was rated to withstand 100mph winds.

It was recently rehabbed and they did it wrong, or the age still caused it to fail, or we actually had an effin hurricane here.

https://images.app.goo.gl/eEPxeABTY33444B58

I sat on the couch and watched the one tree in the yard I would never have worried about flail and list toward the road. I stared out the front window at the tree for 17 years and now it’s a goner. The time out chair flew across the yard in the wee hours of the morning. Wu and I left it there until today. Why fight Mama nature? It’s going to be okay but it suffered its 2nd weather incurred indignity within 10 months.

Anyway…

Booked my next 3 months’ worth of excluded escapes so I can knuckle down and get some of the final touches on my last 3 years of Go Mad scribbles.

Something has to get this stuff moving forward. 

**********************Slushpile*****************************

Free Range Human

Chapter #3

Mother’s day

5/12/2019 Sunday

 

Obie Texted me in the morning before I was even out of bed. This is an interesting surprise. The gesture is simple but I don’t remember such a thing ever happening when our parents walked the earth. There’s only wide-open space between us now. Our lives are different. I have become the matriarch of both the _____ and the_______ family bloodlines. What the hell does that mean? It’s the universe opening the door, almost all the doors, and saying to me specifically “your move”. That’s one way to look at it.

Hubbin and I are tired and need showers. We load up the RV, turn off the water, and head home. Hubbin tries to contact Man pup but there’s no response. By evening we’re starting to get worried. Is he still sleeping? Mother’s Day has mostly come and gone by the time he finally calls me and says he’s got to go someplace far away to clean floors and he’s too tired to visit his parents.

It really is okay if he is busy. I don’t see the significance to the day that some others seem to see. I can’t condone in enforced date to feel heartache at being ignored just because a greeting card company needs profits. Anna Jarvis wouldn’t approve. All I need to know is the boy is okay. Wu didn’t know it was Mother’s Day when he gave me a hug upon our return home. He was just happy to see me.

Now that is a gift.

Originally in the great history of Mother’s Day, the holiday was co-opted to be an antiwar protest. There is very little need, and it would be highly inappropriate, to start a war with one’s own children for the modern version just because I didn’t get a cluster of flowers or a trip to a crowded restaurant for a slushy Sunday morning of mimosas.

Bobo texted me in the evening just as I was ready to call it a done deal for the night. The youngest brother surprises me even more. Is this some kind of collusion? I’d much rather see it as a happy coincidence. Take it as a sign that something and someone is working goodness in my life. That’s what I want for him.

It’s not really about what I want. It’s about what he wants. You can’t really give people what they want you can only allow them to find it. Most importantly you should never try to tell people what they should want. Our mother was really bad in this regard. That’s an interesting wrinkle given she was always so resentful of the notion that her mother or just about anyone else might tell her what should be done or what should be her business. Much of her misdirected aggression seemed to be rooted in the inability to accept her own state of free will. If someone allowed her a free hand it had to be some kind of trick. I have had to unlearn her way of conspiracies. My brains not wired for it. If I’m a bit of a fool when it comes to the motives of others around me I can endure it.

Let the whammy happen and deal with it when or if it does. What I won’t do is wait for, or stress over, a thing that isn’t going to happen.

One thing at a time. There is no conspiracy. Be happy let others find happiness. The trip is different for everyone. When someone tries to tell me something I try to listen harder. It makes me really sad if they get interfered with or cut off before they get to the meat of the thing.

My brother took his wife’s name when he entered into his first marriage. He erased any trace of who he once was. When the marriage ended it was the friendliest divorce anyone could hope for. That’s his story and he’s sticking to it. He kept the Lovejoy’s last name just to spite the in-laws. Everyone seems to have moved on to a happier space. For all appearances, he’s in love again. It will be interesting to see what he calls himself in the future.

********** Monday I hurt. One thing I know about is hurt. If I can get myself to get up and move it gets better. My father and I went in circles about this.

‘It hurts so I can’t” he would say.

“If you just do a little it gets better” I would tell him.

Pain and I are on deeply intimate terms. He could not be convinced. At my age, he was still standing on concrete floors all day. I’m pretty sure I can’t do that anymore. We share the Teutonic predisposition toward a specific set of physical complaints. We never were in the same camp when it came to dealing with such problems.

Monday I hurt.

Delfyna and I have a lunch meet up. Wu is in town for school from 10 to 3 on Monday. I choose to take this as a social day.

“Gonna take a lap, one walk with me or I can pick you up on the way back” I text her as I leave the house.

“I’ll walk” she shoots back at me seconds later.

Good choice.

Her house is on the road to the cemetery. When we get there the weather is gorgeous, not hot or chilly, and we can first through the mile so our pace is perfect. We are mindless of the distance as we watch tankers leave the Air Force base in a perfectly spaced straight line. “Hello” to Father then.

Still no marker for father so I will be back next week.

We climb back into the PT cruiser (a.k.a. the Deer Slayer) and it flips me an engine warning light as we had for the cemetery gates.

“Come on! Enough of this mechanical ambivalence shenanigans bull shite!” I pull back into the parking space and checked the oil. It’s fine. How about the radiator? That’s okay too

Reporting all is well to my companion I turn the ignition and the engine light persists dinging!

“Here’s what I report propose, if it’s going to do something bad we’d be better off at the casino on the edge of town and out in the wildlife refuge.”

Delfyna concedes to my logic and she likes the casino anyway. The food is good, inexpensive and it’s geared to an older crowd so quieter than the bigger casino which sprawls on the other side of town. Not a big fan of casinos, I always feel stupid if I play the games but it was such a struggle for the Spokane tribe to get so much as a gas station built after the other tribe hijacked the business that used to draw folks out to the river miles away. I can’t begrudge them anything. I’m always for the scrappy underdog particularly if the street tacos and crème brûlée are good, which they were.

Dropping Delfyna back home I drive back toward town and it suddenly occurs to me that the Deer Slayer has a quirk. Loose gas cap equals engine light. How soon we forget. We are new to each other again.

New? The odometer says we’re close to 200,000 miles. It’s a nostalgic reunion with an ominous ending. Spoiler alert, not long too long ago I went through all of this with the green Ford Aerostar called “Big Broken Pants”. That space between 200,000 and 300,000 miles can be thought of as a painfully long goodbye or a challenge. I prefer the latter but we don’t always get things our way.

Thinking back to why I bought this car there are flashbacks of cold mornings in the dark employees’ parking lot at the airport. Trying not to fall back to sleep in the warm Cutlass Sierra whose selling point was the stereo that I had installed so that it would be utterly bored on the long rise from home to work each day I’d wait until I absolutely had to make the bone-chilling trek to the airport and start the 4 AM chaos. I passed PT cruisers on the rental car lot and would think  “If I could just have that one car I chose for myself.” Hubbin had bought the old ladies car with the pinhole cigarette burns in the headliner and modified suicide seatbelts that tangled you up as you tried to get out of the car. It was yet another gunmetal gray car, our fourth, and I was consistently getting pulled over because the local cops mistook me for someone else with a similar car. That car got me where I had to go but a dismal car taking me to a dismal job many wish for something just a little more whimsical. If I had to spend two hours a day in the car at least I could enjoy it feel like it was something that spoke to me. It was vanity but if you’re going to waste two hours of your life just cruising back and forth for the almighty dollar couldn’t you at least have a little fun?

 

One Sunday there was a big sale at a car lot on the edge of town. A salesman from Portland Oregon had been brought in to deal with the big deals. In a test drive, I drove a used PT cruiser for the first time. It was fun and cool. I asked for a price. The salesman came out of the manager’s office with a number I could live with. Hubbin and I could check the finances and maybe even pay cash.

As I’m thanking the imported salesman, and turning to go make a report to Hubbin patiently waiting outside, the sales manager steps out of his office “that’s -previously quoted number- plus $500!” he calls from behind the guy who almost had made a deal.

” You’ll really have to wrestle with me for that $500″ he adds.

FUCK you! Fuck you, you deal screwing Bastard. Fuck your $500. Take that stripped-down no-frills repo and spin it up your poop shoot sideways! That’s what’s banging in my head as I actually say “I work to get my money, not to give it away” as I walk away suddenly firmly decided I don’t need that car. I despise car salesmen who think the way to seal a deal is to insult you or make you feel like they are somehow doing you a favor by taking their abuse.

“Well come back when you’re serious”he calls after me. No, I will not come back you despicable tool. I was serious. You screwed over the guy who was about to make a sale. Years later when the dealership went tits up I would always feel glee that it was replaced by a farm implement dealer.

There was a better deal on a better car from a private seller two weeks later.

 

********

5/14/2019

 

The cow was dead for months before Hubbin pulled the last gift back from the bottom of the freezer. How could a palm-size piece of meat tastes so good and make you so miserable less than eight hours later? I woke up sweating. Something very wrong was leaving my body through my skin. A good steak is always a crapshoot. My body doesn’t like antibiotics. This been on antibiotics in cattle is that it is now carefully used and in order to ensure a safe her food supply. Since 2017 the veteran your use of antibiotics is more strictly restrained and supervised than ever. The likelihood of having an allergic reaction after eating a feedlot medicated bovine should be pretty rare.

Tell that to my insides.

My beef-eating days are over. One night feeling my fellows manly meats and sleeping on the firm new mattress from the big box store and I’m a mess of aches and discomforts.

In civilization and in pain I need to get things done at home. My mind longs for the RV and the train and things I can do when left to myself but my gut literally tells me to do my best while I’m within the confines of sticks and bricks.

My office is a nightmare. Every loose and neglected thing left for my parents or my former work life has crowded into a space meant for my dreams. I can’t work the paper shredder fast enough. Wu has been cleaning his room for a year now and we’ve still got the wall unpainted before we can pull up the carpet and relocate the master or mistress of the household rightfully to the “master bedroom”. There’s a lot of work to do but for my 55th birthday, another reason to sweat.

Sitting down to watch the evening news I get a call from the Oracle’s office. He’s taking a sick day. Good news. Bad news. Now I can carry on with the usual plan to go get allergy shots and I can call my friend Erda for a coffee/lunch date. It’s good not to isolate. We both need to work on that. Opposite of the upside, it’s very rare to have the Oracle beg off for a sick day. We’ve got enough invested in him that we as a family actually care about his well being. A lesser concern, more of a tactical issue than a real problem, I’m not taking so much as an allergy pill in anticipation of having my brain performed under normal circumstances. It’s been an achy day so it’s easy to obsess over already limited options I’m putting on a side rail until the quantitative EEG is completed. Remember to keep your eyes closed when told to do so I think to myself.

I had a hard time following that simple instruction last time. One of Dr. Oracle’s favorite activities has to be playing with the machinery that allows them to peek into the mechanics of how other humans work. Sometimes he makes comments to himself or talks to the laptop and I forget that I been given specific instruction. It’s important to me to get a faithful picture of where I am now as possible. Choices will be made based on what I’ve accomplished in the last two years at some point I have to put myself back into the world. When I expressed concerns about this he told me it will be different because my circumstances are different.

That’s when I wonder about the reality of financing my future adventures and whether graduate school could really offer me anything useful. He suggests my passion for becoming a business could provide income and make graduate studies a business expense. This sounds both illogical and alluring. When I’m doing my windshield time an hour later with a cheeseburger in the uptown library parking lot my voice of reason and my inner five-year-old are kickboxing in a mad dispute over the prior practicalities of real success in the idea that great things have been achieved by setting one’s sights on the impossible.

And those two selves are always swatting and spitting at each other. I consider the summer sessions of graduate studies. Ten days wandering into the streets of town next to where I grew up seems kind of ironic after all that I have seen, done, and been. I used to sneak in the basement of that college and play with the computers(they had punched tapes to run in those days) but I never did become like Bill Gates. After all those muddy football games where I play drums in the rain during high school, I might’ve held out for a useful application of my music skills if I could’ve known the drummer in my favorite band would go home to install vinyl siding until cancer took him early. Retrospective opportunities that just went work meant for me. I graduated high school early and join the military to get the hell away from that place. Now it really be an attractive option to upgrade my scribbling skills?

Many years I considered there three weeks in Colorado sitting seiza and bull shading about experimental prose had appealed for years but the school never seem to have its act together and now my knees are kind of bad. Doubtful Kerouac would’ve bothered himself with any of that.

Wednesday 5/15/2019

Erda sits across the table negotiating for a trip again. She’s feeling neglected after her first and second round of bedbugs. Her friends are very cautious. She proceeds to tell me there’s a cure which involves copious quantities of rubbing alcohol. I explained again, that none of her friends can afford the thousands of dollars that it would cost to get rid of anything that follows us home if the $10 fix proves ineffective. I empathize. The whole honesty thing is heart-wrenching. The problem is she could fix the issue by moving but she demands everything be her way, her terms, she wants a house she cannot afford. She doesn’t want to live in a clean remodeled rent-subsidized apartment. There are rules. She says she won’t live where “the old people live”. But she’s circling 70 and it costs her a lot to live in a place where one drop off the broken front step could put her in the street or a long-term care facility. She means she wants to make the rules. People build the cages in which they trap themselves.

Her landlord doesn’t fix anything. He won’t treat for bedbugs. He doesn’t pay for the water and garbage until the shut-off notice appears. Now I’m warned away from the overground tangle of dandelions because the guy won’t mow the lawn and it’s full of hidden doggy bombs no one bothers to clear. He’s lost his job due to showing up drunk. Erda tells me she’s actually afraid of him because when he’s drunk he’s mean and threatening. He doesn’t care anymore even about the place he lives. She can’t complain because all that would do is leave her homeless. She laments the isolation this has caused her. Her friends have given up trying to reason with her. I’ve given up on sugar coatings. I miss her. I miss the person who wouldn’t settle for any of this. On the way home from lunch she tells me she’s buying her son a new PlayStation. She needs a computer so she can find work, but first, a game system for her son. He’s in his 40s. If she had money for a computer she could work from home or she could at the very least look for a job of some kind. I helped her by a computer once 10 years ago but it aged out while she watched cable TV,  and smoked pot, and played online games that infected it with viruses. I’ve never spent my money or time on any of those things. She’s not getting my help with another computer.

The hardest thing in the world is not pick up a hammer and help someone build furniture for their cage.

Meanwhile, Hubbin off to our oldest sons to replace the garage door. Son’s house is a cage we own and have some responsibility to maintain. My parents lived in that house for 18 years. They complained about it most of the time. “you can move if you would like”we offered but they never did. Now my son in that same place still odiferous with the fumery and fartations of the now-moved-beyond-it old feller tells me”you don’t understand”when we attempt to present options that would lead him to egress.

Loyalty is one slippery lodestone. At some point, a person starts to realize treading water is a tiring process even for one. There might be one thing I could let go of to stay close to where there is breathable air. I’m not ready to let go of that one last pretty rock with an L painted on its face, not even as the collective dampness in my scrabbling hands starts to rub the markings away. Loyalty might fade to a thinner view of the mythos of who I am to these people I care about but I’m not sure what is left if I cave in and help them fill their cages with fine feathery things or let go and bobbed to the surface safe but solitary.