Had an incident today where I got a message from Uber that a customer had complained I’d had someone else deliver to them. I’ve only had one delivery today where, if the delivery called for customer interaction, I handed the food off to an intermediary. That was out in Plain City at some kind of warehouse place where a lot of construction was going on, and the gate I was supposed to go into was coned off and there was no way in. Someone working at that outbuilding offered to take it to him and communicated with him on his radio right in front of me. Part of me wants to be nice and wonder if this was some kind of language barrier, because this guy was some flavor of immigrant Muslim (I could hear his accent over the radio and, well, his first name made it pretty obvious), but mostly I hate dealing with them, people from India, and sometimes people from Asia, not because of their races or ethnicities but because they seem to have this cultural thing going on that tips are stupid (I don’t think he tipped me, not more than fifty cents or so) or should be as minimal as possible and then — and I’ve seen this working at Quantum too — they will also get attitude at the drop of a hat if they don’t understand what’s happening. Especially if a woman is involved.
It wouldn’t be so bad but Uber considers this a strike against me and I have no idea if that’s permanent. I’m debating contesting it, but Uber doesn’t give a shit. I’m replaceable. And before anyone comes at me with “this is what you get for gig work,” nearly all employers are like that. All that posturing they’re doing about needing workers? They don’t fucking need workers. They need to manage their businesses better and they’re already making plans for robots and AI. Hey, this is the world you wanted. Low, low prices and maximum convenience. This is how you get it. Enjoy. And you can watch my life fall to pieces from the comfort of your fucking phone, eating your cheap food, living in your shoddy LuXuRy ApArTmEnT HoMe where the fake hardwood floor’s already peeling up.
Yes?
Oh well.
Mom called, I think two days ago, while I was out driving and I meant to text her back and flaked. She got hold of me again this evening, this time by text and I wish we had kept it at texting, because she’s super hard to understand now. I am not sure what’s going on there. It’s like she had a stroke or something, except I think she’s still “all there” mentally, or as much as she ever was.
And speaking of that. Apparently her sister Norma has dementia and they’re giving her a few weeks to live. Mom says she fell recently and hasn’t been the same since. I don’t know, I just know I’m not equipped to go home about it and Aunt Norma and I were never close anyway. She was godmother to my brother Chan, who might be upset if he misses the funeral, but given that even he couldn’t be arsed to tell me our brother or grandmother had died when they did, I can’t be arsed either. But it’s weird. She and Mom and Ruth and Ricky seem like they’ve been around forever and I suppose on some level I almost thought of them as invincible. But here we go. Norma’s the oldest. It begins.
And speaking of brothers, for some reason Mom wants to send me one of Chaise’s guitars. I don’t know why she still has them; he died at the end of 2010. But she wants to send me the acoustic. I’ll believe it when I see it, but she now has my address here. I just hope that if she does mail it, it gets here before I move out. Coming back to beg for my dead brother’s guitar would be tremendously awkward. Especially if Elizabeth and I never get the electric-bill situation sorted. My one consolation is that even if I don’t get my new address to my mother in time, the postal service will forward parcels for at least thirty days. I might be okay.
“But you don’t play guitar,” you might be thinking. You are correct, but I’ve been wanting to learn for a long time. Self-teach, at least. I had dabbled in it somewhat when I still lived with Matt. I can’t pay for lessons, but there are library books and YouTube videos. I’ll be fine. Or more likely I’ll do like I did with the keyboard: acquire it and then let it collect dust forever. But it’s all good. I lost the blanket his grandmother made me (we were half-siblings, so she wasn’t my grandmother), but maybe I’ll have something else of his now.
That said. One more thing I fret over and I’m not sure what to do. I know full well one of my problems is I have shitty family ties. With all their faults, I was happiest when I actually kind of got along with my family. That I’ve kind of been kicked aside and forgotten has rankled for a long time. Mom forgets about me a lot even when I am in town, sometimes to a very hurtful degree — and this is unrelated to whatever’s going on with her currently; it dates back decades — but I suppose having unreliable people around who I can at least talk with sometimes would be better than the pretty much no one I have now. And Thea has written me off. So there are times I think about going back home.
I am not sure what the point would be, though. I’ve got no one to stay with, my car’s very likely on its last legs (if not last, certainly second-to-last), I have no idea whether I could even get a job when I got there, I’ve got nowhere to stay (if Mom were single, I’d consider asking her — but her husband creeps me out, for some reason), the bugs… don’t even get me started, and I don’t fancy being in Hurricane Alley. I don’t know.
Maybe I’ll figure it out. Probably I won’t. There’s a reason my life’s a mess.