Month: October 2023

Started unusually early with the driving and got over $100 today. That’s more like it, though I won’t be able to save all of that aside. Need food, need gas. Same old grind.

On the way back from Delaware(!), I nabbed a Tanuki run that was going down into Dublin just because it was seven more bucks and why not. Doug calls me not long after. I think, oh shit, and I was just north of Seldom Seen when that came in so I stopped at that Sheetz and canceled the Tanuki run. Doug was calm but quavery and quite unhappy. Dad was this close to going into a normal hospital room earlier today, and they took their eyes off him for like two seconds while they were processing all that and they turned back around and his eyes were rolling up in his head and then he was unresponsive. He’s still with us, but we don’t know how much of him is still with us or if he will wake up. Aunt Matilda is freaking out and Doug’s been the one talking with her, so he got to be the scapegoat.

See, he was supposed to go visit Dad with his kids back in June. His youngest has a different mother than his two older ones, who are from his former (and only) marriage. Emma, the youngest, was staying with her mom and then her mom decided to keep her an extra day… which happened to be the day Emma and Doug were supposed to leave for Louisiana. Doug had bought tickets for everyone to go, so for four people and two originating in Oregon and two others from Tennessee. Lots of money on the line. I think he’d already had to reschedule the trip once, so having to cancel again meant he lost all that money. He had seriously considered going anyway, without Emma, but Emma already knew the trip was planned and wouldn’t have understood.

Well, apparently Dad told Matilda about the cancellation but we’re not sure he told her why it happened. So Matilda threw that back in Doug’s face today. (Possibly again. I want to say she jumped his shit about it the day Dad had the seizure, too.) She’s not the only one jumping his shit; his two older kids, who aren’t kids anymore (Lexi, the younger one, is 23 this year!), are now not speaking to him again over the failed trip. He’s not having a good time this year at all.

I understand being aggravated with him. He’s been a flake all his life and he abused me when we were kids, and I don’t know what he got up to in his relationships and it could be he was an ass then too (though Moriah, his ex-wife, gave as good as she got; I was staying with them when they had one of their fights and she was raising her voice and being aggressive right along with him, and then her mother called and here come the waterworks. I couldn’t believe it — some kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing). But anyone can have bad luck, and just because you’re a flake or you do something wrong doesn’t mean someone else can’t be a flake or wrong you too. It doesn’t seem to be in human nature to take matters on a case-by-case basis but honestly, I think we’d be a lot happier if we learned how.

So anyway he’s beating himself up a lot. He’s also in therapy, has been for years, and he said he had a breakthrough with that recently where his therapist said to him, “You know you and your sister were abandoned children, right?” I thought that was a bit harsh to be aimed at Dad, who was in the military and couldn’t choose to be home more, but Doug pointed out that when he went to live with our father after his parents split, Dad was mostly gone because he worked for the oil industry or related industries that required him to be gone something like two or three weeks for every week home. It’s true that he didn’t have to do that. He was retired from the Navy and got a monthly check and it would have gone a lot farther in south Louisiana back then, so he wouldn’t have had to maximize any work wages; also, as a custodial parent and Doug still a minor, he could have pressed for child support had he wished. Only problem with that was the divorce wasn’t final until 1998, when Doug turned twenty, but Dad could have set that ball rolling too. Nah, he’d rather go away for weeks at a time with a(n at the time) minor child at home. So Doug got abandoned worse than I did, if that’s possible. I mean, we both got left to our own devices and not properly parented lots when the family was still “intact” (if you can call your dad’s second marriage an “intact family” — but from Doug’s point of view it would have seemed that way) as it was. So, us being a mess was probably always going to happen. But of course somehow when you hit the magical age of 18 your brain is supposed to reset and make you behave exactly as if you had been properly parented the prior 18 years. And of course if it doesn’t and you’re disordered because of how your childhood shaped you and other people react to you weirdly because you’re not following their script, that’s your fault too and you should just get over it.

Well, I’m over it, but maybe not the way everyone hoped. This is what you do when one of your own is faltering, folks. Have fun living with yourselves. I shan’t be bothering.

I haven’t asked Doug whether he’s told Thea about Dad. I sent Thea a message about the situation a couple days ago through one of her art accounts on Instagram, but she hasn’t updated that in a long time and she may have abandoned it. The way she’s behaved thus far, anyway, like as not even if she got the message she wouldn’t reply. When your social-worker best friend observes that your child has written you off and she’s never even met the kid, that’s saying something. Dawn’s on her main Instagram, too. We both theorized that Thea overlooked her, but Thea is not stupid (ignorant about some things, but still a pretty sharp young person). My personal theory, one I haven’t suggested to Dawn, is that Thea knows she’s there and this is a loophole for Thea’s “no contact” thing. This way I can still get news sometimes without Thea telling me directly. Thea’s account has not blocked me, either (I thought for a while that she had, but apparently not), so if she reads Dawn’s posts then sometimes she sees me comment, and she can come look at me too. It’s a whole potential thing. Sooooo… Dawn has shown she will not act as a go-between, and Dawn never told me they actually moved to Colorado, so unless Thea only told Doug that by direct message and hasn’t mentioned it on her Instagram openly, Dawn’s known all this time. So I’m thinking that at some point Thea said some stupid fucking thing about Crys being her mother now. Bet me. And Dawn saw it and didn’t want to upset me or get personally involved in the drama. It would be weird for Dawn to just randomly decide my kid has written me off with no evidence to back it up. Her go-to would be “well, there’s a lot of anger between you and she probably just feels better not talking with you right now.” That would be the usual social-worker explanation. Something in that vein. If she’s saying “written off,” she knows something.

I’m not angry at her about it. Given what happens when people I’ve known try to be go-betweens, how much shit gets lost in translation or misinterpreted or whatever, I would just as soon she not stick her nose in. There is nothing I can do in any case. It’s not like I can pull up stakes, go to Colorado, and kick Crys’s ass. Much as I might like to. I can’t fight worth a fuck anyway. So I’d rather Dawn stayed neutral even if it means I miss important information. And whatever the fuck Crys gets up to in order to mess with my kid’s head — before I had even left Ohio two years ago, she had suggested to Matt that she talk with Thea about knowing what it’s like to be abandoned by your mother, and I wanted to kick her ass then because she was a BIG reason I was leaving — my kid isn’t really a kid anymore, it’s not going to stick as hard, and at some point the spell will break. I don’t know what the breaking point will be, but my kid has already shown she doesn’t take kindly to being (or perceiving that she is being) fucked with. Age 25, in a few more years, her brain fully matures. With enough life experience and maybe therapy (if they stop pandering to her bullshit), she might start wising up. It will not be pretty when that happens. Pass the popcorn.

That’ll mean, of course, that she’ll still have reasons to be pissed off at me, but the gender thing and the my leaving thing will not be among them. And she won’t be seeing Crys and Matt as the Good Guys™ anymore, either. Fine by me.

It hit me sometime yesterday that everything feels different knowing they’re gone. I had spent two years afraid of running into her and upsetting her, or of having her be nasty to me openly. I wasn’t sure what I would say if I ran into Mr. or Mrs. Asshole, either. The anxiety around these possibilities was so powerful that I deliberately avoided the segment of major road they lived on; this situation has even affected my delivery-driver patterns all this time. Now? Now I feel like I could go anywhere or do anything around here. It’s like this great festering boil was lanced and shit’s starting to heal.

It’s terrible feeling that way about your kid. You cannot know how awful it was being in that house not being able to open my mouth because the most innocuous phrasing could send my child into a tailspin, and no one would run interference for me. Everyone was my enemy. My whole life was a fucking minefield. It was sickening. Literally sickening: I felt physically ill and suffered frequent bouts of insomnia for something like a year before I left and it got much worse in the final two or three months. They would mock me behind my back. “Mom’s stress-cleaning again,” because I had been awake all night and was cleaning in order to keep myself awake so I could reset my circadian clock. Oh ha ha, Mom’s stress-cleaning. Yeah. Your fucking mess because you’d rather spend all your time telling your fucking deviantART friends what a bigot you’ve got for a mom than picking up your fucking room. Brat. And your dad with his little online love affair that he had planned to spring on me all unawares had I not caught on to his weird behavior and called him out early. He would have brought that bitch right through the door, “I got married, here’s my wife.” He would have. I barely escaped with my sanity. I was cleaning his fucking neglect-messes too.

Well rid. I want a relationship with my daughter again one day, but that graying rotten haggis on legs can get run over by a bus right fucking now. I’m game.

You will notice I did not wish for his wife to get hit by that bus. I want her to watch, and then I want her to know what it’s like to lose everything. Enjoy.

You want to know what’s sad? I had a few Possibles over the years that I sort of pursued. I did. And I didn’t talk with him about them. The reason I didn’t talk with him about them was I didn’t know how things were going to go and I didn’t want to get him riled up over nothing. The one time I thought it was going somewhere because Craig was trolling me, though, I did tell Matt about that. Out and out wrote him a long email about it. Said I wanted to marry the guy and everything. I don’t know why Matt goes around acting like I have double standards about this. Wait, yes I do know. Same reason he’s had all along. He can’t be the good guy if he tells everyone how it actually was, so he has to make shit up.

The thing is, I don’t care about being the good guy. What angers me is that everyone made a bad guy into a good guy and they’re punishing me for basically nothing. I don’t have to be the good guy, but I’m NOT the fucking monster. I should have had real help the first time he went bad on me like this, and not from my fucking ex-mother-in-law, either. I thought I had friends. Where the fuck were they? Feeling sorry for people who had an easy out of the situation and who, let’s be frank, created the fucking situation in the first place. I was FINE in that stupid relationship until they started treating me like the fucking Handmaid. Do they even comprehend how fucking gross they are? Will they ever understand how fucking wrong they went where I was concerned? Nah. That’s why we had a problem at all. You can’t fix stupid. Or hateful, either.

I have a theory — here we go again with my theories — because when I got involved with Matt, he was still married to Vivien and they had been trying to have a baby. First weekend he and I met in person I had told him, “I want a baby.” I missed my son like crazy and I wanted a second child anyhow. So what if — here goes my theory — Matt thought about knocking me up, then taking the baby away and having Viv adopt it? The way he’s behaved all along it’s like he hated my guts but wanted to manipulate me — and yes, men will get boners for women they hate, and have all sorts of sexyfuntimes with them. It sounds incredibly paranoid, but it fits the pattern because otherwise there was a lot of shit he did and said that made no sense whatsoever. It would have been easy to take the baby, too. Matt could have shown I had lost one child to grandparent adoption already and that I was too poor to raise another one. With a halfway decent lawyer he could have fucking killed me. Bet me. The way he flitted off to Colorado with my daughter without so much as a by-your-leave fits the pattern too.

So, yeah. Whatever he says to anyone ever about how he supposedly felt about me, I haven’t bought it in years and I never will again. He fucked up big time.

He also doesn’t care, so I suppose I can consider that chapter of my life closed. If Thea comes back to me in any sense, great. But I also need to prepare for the possibility that she won’t.

…

I was also going to mention I have a job interview of sorts coming up Monday. It’s one of those temp agencies that places in distribution centers and we’ve got the holiday season coming up. I haven’t burnt this particular bridge yet. The “interview” will probably be pretty much them figuring out where to put me. If I told you the name of the corporation owning the distribution center you would recognize it immediately. It’s New Albany again. It should be fairly close to I-270 or to Dublin-Granville Road, so I’m going to look into that one apartment community I’ve been looking into in that area and if they’re a go, fantastic and if not, I can still do that other one in north Clintonville as long as they’ve got a unit available. If both of those fall through, there’s also an extended-stay hotel in New Albany in the same general area. I’ll be okay.

I wanted to do Major Department Store near Sawmill and Bethel, but they may only have part-time hours. If things look bleak I’ll try anyway, but I want to see how this goes first. It won’t be the $19 or $20 an hour that some DCs pay, but it’ll be pretty good and the apartment communities I am looking at have offerings for under $700 a month. Doable.

Ooh. I still need to look into the utilities situation. Not here. The situation with AEP and Columbia Gas from 2009. If there is no situation, fine. If there is a situation, I need to find out how to fix that situation. I would probably be a lot better off facing that drama than chewing my own foot off about things I can’t change at all.

There won’t even be a proper funeral for my dad, mind you. He’s donating his body to science, then they’ll cremate whatever’s left and the Navy will dump it at sea.

Abandoned again. Moving on now, I suppose.

I’ve taken another day off because after yesterday’s fail parade, I was pretty keyed up and couldn’t sleep. Or I’d start falling asleep and then get angry and wake back up. Or a little of both. I don’t really know. Point is, I woke up tired. If I had to drive to a workplace and then stay there working for eight hours like this, I would do it, but having to drive around TO work is another matter.

Plus there were a lot of people on the lot today and I just didn’t feel like trying to maneuver through all that. I actually put off going out and getting food (I am not certain of the safety of what’s left in my fridge and freezer after yesterday’s shenanigans) just because I didn’t want to deal with them. Even in passing.

I really don’t know if I’m going to make the full $1000 this month. It’s the 11th already and I’ve barely got anything. That’s somewhat my fault, a little bit not (several factors went into this situation), at least as far as my post-employment life is concerned. Obviously, the quitting the job was 100% my fault. Anyway. I’m working on securing employment but we’ll just have to see how things go. A couple things I thought were leads are actually not that great. I do see a couple other things that are kind of in line with what I had in mind, though. They’ve got weekly pay so maybe I still have a chance.

(I even discovered I have options for stopping my stupid period and that I’ll be able to enact either of two of them without setting foot in a doctor’s office if it comes down to that. If it even works at my weight, but it should at least quiet things down a lot. I don’t care if I still have a period if it happens to just get a lot lighter instead of stopping. That’s still a win.)

But if stuff doesn’t work out then it doesn’t work out. I already don’t trust Elizabeth’s claim that she’d be a reference for me with a future landlord. I could barely get her to deal with the paperwork Molly sent her. For all I know, she could be worse after Pat dies. I understand why, but my understanding won’t improve the situation one bit. That’s pretty much a dead end. I will make plans as best I can and try to mitigate any damage — I don’t need to lose something important again because I had to hightail it out of here before she locks my shit down. Pretty sad that I have to think like that but that’s my life anymore.

I did email Molly today to ask if I was still in the program. I literally have not heard from her since July and that by text message. Last email from her was June. I remember signing a document that stated I have to participate in the rehousing program in order to stay in the program, but no one told me what that meant and I’ve had zero feedback on whether I’m properly participating since. If I’m still in it I’ll update her on what’s happening. If I’m not, at least I’ll know I’m not. If she ever answers — and hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t. It would be par for the course. The Salvation Army did a lot for me and I’ll never say otherwise, but they treated me pretty shabbily in some ways too. Which seems to be the story of my fucking life, and I wish I knew why.

I have not tried to contact anyone to ask about Dad. I went to him two years ago with my heart broken and not sure where to turn next and all I got was lectures. Everyone wants me to be this soft cuddly lovable comforting presence and what the fuck, I never had that. Closest I got was Matt and he was fucking lying to my fucking face. I don’t know how I survived childhood, much less anything else. Life’s hard, huh? Have fun experiencing your own theories, old man. Amazingly, with as big of an asshole as he often is, he still has people there for him. I’ll never have that again — and I only ever had it because I was a kid and it was kind of mandatory. I don’t have it now. Just games and bullshit and everyone going “what’s in it for me”. I’VE GOT NOTHING. I’M FUCKING TAPPED. EXPLOIT SOMEONE ELSE.

Okay. I need to see if I can be productive at all today. It won’t be driving, but I’m kind of dancing around something and I need to do more of it. Later.

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY FUCKING DAY

So. Turns out yesterday my landlady had tried to get a hold of me (I think it was yesterday…) because she wanted to explain why the dogs would be barking a lot. She’d had them in the garage because there were lots of people over because… Pat went into hospice. I had wondered if he was going to do at-home hospice or facility hospice but had been surprised he wasn’t there already (unless it was at-home, in which case never mind). But I guess they didn’t have things set up for at-home hospice and then he needed the ambulance again recently — I already told you about that. And a lot of this is me filling in blanks because I just know the bare facts that there was an ambulance here the other day and now Pat’s in hospice. But I had been all paranoid about what she wanted to say to me, basically for nothing.

But today the power was out in my apartment. It wasn’t out in the entire building because we still had water (we’re on a well system) and also hot water, and it wasn’t out on the entire lot for similar reasons, also one of the wifi routers was still up and running. I spent most of the day angry, convinced she’d shut off my power even though she never gave me the electric bill nor even told me the amount (though I still would have wanted to see the bill). It was a bad day. I spent most of it gone because I couldn’t get anything done here anyway; I showered in the dark as it was.

First I went to Meijer and got a bottle of Seafoam, two bottles of motor oil, and a few other bits and bobs. The car had been sounding a little bad. I feel like it sounds better now (I only used one bottle of the motor oil, but I have one in reserve just in case), but that could just be wishful thinking. I don’t think it’s wishful thinking, but I’m probably wrong. I also had to top up the tires because the temp’s been dropped long enough outside that basically the air in them shrank. I hate this time of year. ANYWAY…

Then I went to IHOP. I had been meaning to go and I just wanted some fucking breakfast and a nice sit-down. The prices are pretty good. The only fly in the ointment was literal (fruit) flies; I got the strawberry-banana pancakes to go with my meal (I had eggs and the whole bit) and I had this sinking feeling they had accompanied the fruit. I didn’t see any obvious bugs in my pancakes and I decided not to make a big deal out of it. I feel like I can’t make a big deal out of anything. Everyone thinks I’m a fucking monster and it ruins everything. I also can’t say things nicely because people go “oh look, a sucker” and don’t listen to me. I don’t know how I deal with all that. There’s no way to go with it to actually get the problem solved. People wonder why I’m angry, but it’s been like that all along. Would you be happy? You know you wouldn’t. Fuck off.

(If Matt has told you he was scared of me, he wasn’t fucking scared of me, he just hated me and liked to see me hopeless. Wouldn’t listen if I was nice, stonewalled me if I got pissed off. That’s who you picked as your friend, morons. Enjoy.)

After that I went to the library, which wasn’t much farther up the road. I wanted to make jewelry but something happened when I got there that completely threw me off my feed.

Brother was trying to get hold of me. I texted back and forth with him but he asked for a phone call, so we chatted. My dad has had a brain bleed. It first manifested as a seizure in Carrie’s SUV when she was taking him to a doctor’s appointment. (He hasn’t had a license in years.) She took him to American Legion in Jennings where they diagnosed the bleed and then he got sent to Lake Charles. He’s supposed to have surgery tomorrow. She gave me the general number to the hospital but I doubt I’d have much of a conversation with him if at all, and I don’t want to hear it. I know. I’m an asshole. But he’s just had a brain event and he was an asshole himself before then. Pass. If he comes out of surgery okay, we’ll see.

The other thing I learned from Doug is that he’s in touch with Thea. They talk on Instagram, apparently. Doug is calling her by her ridiculous* transname “Quill” but says he doesn’t understand what all else is going on. I’ll write to him at some point and give my side of it. He at least seems willing to listen. I am fine with him talking with her. He’s her uncle, for fuck’s sake, and he’s in fucking Oregon and usually too broke to travel and she’s still living with her dad. Whatever. And she ought to be in touch with someone from my side of the family, considering.

The other OTHER thing I learned from Doug is that she really is in Colorado. I don’t know when this happened, but I had been keeping half an eye on the Zillow thing for their house here and had seen no signs that it had recently been sold. Zillow has listings whether something is for sale or not, far as I can tell, so that in itself was no indication. But yes, the house was sold last month. And wouldn’t you know it, the piece of shit renovated it to sell it. Couldn’t make it nice while we were living in it, no. My one consolation was that the assessed value dropped by one-quarter this year, probably because the assessor actually got a look inside [shudder], and serves the asshole right. I’m betting he took a loss. My only question at this point is why Colorado. Crys is homesick for California. Completely different state. But, that’s their thing. I’ll probably never know. After all, he could not be bothered to tell me they were leaving. I will probably keel over in shock if I ever hear from him again.

Or tell him to go fuck himself.

And it’s about equal likelihood either way.

I did finally finish two stretch bracelets and then got McDonald’s in case the power was not back on (I would have gotten groceries instead had it been on and I’d known it) and then came back here. Power still wasn’t on but there was this huge-ass pickup truck in the parking lot (there is a small parking lot) and some guy I didn’t recognize. As I was parking, he went up toward the chicken coop with a woman I also didn’t recognize and they were carrying what looked like a big black box and maybe some other things. I went inside, puttered around a bit…

BEEEEEP

…and the power came back on. So that’s what they were doing.

So, whatever had been going on, Elizabeth hadn’t known about it because undoubtedly she was at hospice with Pat. I should have said something when we texted, but as I didn’t know whether she had done it on purpose, I didn’t want to potentially start an argument or fight. But now it’s all sorted, so whatever.

I wish the rest of my life were, but one day at a time, I guess.

—–
*I don’t actually think it is all that ridiculous, upon further reflection. It’s fine, and if she’d just wanted to change her name to change her name, and had come up with some other reason than “I’m not Grandma Althea” — what the fuck? — then I probably would have been okay with it. But it was like this big repudiation of her entire childhood and her parents, especially me. No. I’m not going to simp for that. She can deal.

And while we’re on the subject. How come these gender assholes can’t pick actually growing the fuck up as a way of distancing themselves from childhood? Because that’s not at all what they’re doing.

And finally: Yes, I did call my daughter an asshole. She is a great big stinky one. That’s her choice. I will be happy to stop seeing her as one when she stops being one.

I did not say I wasn’t one. But she definitely is one. The end.

Today was an off day. Remember me complaining about Shark Week not having begun yet? Well, it’s here. First few days are usually the worst. I’ve got pads, I’ve got wipes, I’ve got some food (trying not to go too crazy, I’m behind already for my final rent payment)… brangit.

I did sleep in late. Not sure what that was about other than the temps are dropping and maybe that’s making me extra-sleepy. No idea. It was close to 2pm when I finally got up and it wasn’t lounge around in bed for hours and then go “oh shit,” it was flat-out sleeping. It’s not like I have curtains on the bedroom window. Probably the cloudiness outside didn’t help. I don’t get the sun through my bedroom window til later in the day since it is west-facing, but even around noon I start noticing it if I’m not up already.

I was going to mention a critter count yesterday and then I didn’t even post. I saw a groundhog RIGHT next to the road at one point. Then later on I was in a neighborhood and had to slow down and almost stop because — of all things — a squirrel decided to stop in the middle of the street FOR A SCRATCH. What the hell, little tree rat. You trying to die? But the person behind me wasn’t all that close and had time to see what was up.

Did I mention the squirrels I had seen some time back — a few weeks ago, maybe? Had to be a mom and baby pair crossing the road. The second one was noticeably smaller than the first one. Little’un panicked about halfway across, froze, then ran back the way it had come. There was oncoming traffic, but they saw it in time, so it got lucky. Damn.

If they would just sit still and I could go over with them between my tires it would be one thing; they’re small enough to miss. The problem is they always manage to panic just when you are deciding to do this and then you end up clipping a leg, clipping a tail, or worse. The ONE time I got caught by this, the poor little guy went into spasms on the side of the road, just flipping around. Spinal damage. Fatal. I felt horrible. No doubt little squirrel felt far worse. That was more than 20 years ago and I still haven’t forgotten. I don’t care how little they are, hurt is hurt. I’d rather not. I wish more drivers felt like I do. So many fursplats on the side of the road this time of year testify otherwise.

Anyway.

Had an incident recently where an ambulance showed up on the lot and the EMT came knocking on my door. Did you call an ambulance? says he. No, I says. What’s your house number? says he, and I tell him. Oh, that’s not it, says he. What number did they give when they called? says I. He tells me, and it’s the landlord’s house across the driveway, so I redirect him.

The ambulance did not turn its siren back on when they finally left, so I reasoned either Landlord had had an accident or a spell and had needed medical attention but not hospitalization, or else the end had come and they were taking him away. No one said anything to me over the next day or so, so I started thinking it was more the former than the latter.

Then yesterday or the day before, not sure which, I was driving back from somewhere and it was dark or nearly so, so I could glance through their front windows on the way back to my driveway and I saw his hospital bed and him in it. So that answered that question. With his end-stage prostate cancer and the fact he’s outlived his prognosis by at least several months, it could go either way really. And most of the time prostate cancer is a chronic condition that older men just live with. He should have played the Powerball.

Speaking of which. I was in the Saturday drawing. First time in my life I’ve ever bought a ticket for a number draw; I’ve had them bought for me once or twice before now but never done it myself. I thought: worst-case scenario, I’m out two bucks. I’ve wasted money on worse. The weird thing is the numbers were very close to the ones I paid for. As if I were about five books down on the library shelf or something. Like the universe taunting me.

I will tell you what. Unless I get into a better place in life all on my own, this won’t be the only time I play it. I will likely only play when the jackpot goes over a billion; I only waited as long as I did this time because I didn’t know it had already. But when it gets that high it becomes stupid not to play. There is near certainty you won’t win if you play but if you don’t play, there is absolute certainty. If I have to live on the margins anyway, let me camp out on that one too.

And if I ever win I am not telling you fuckers. Well. I might tell YOU. There are people I know who won’t find out, though, at least not directly from me. If you only like me when I have money, then you don’t like me and you don’t get any. I will make exceptions for my kids. Only because they didn’t ask to be here, and they still won’t know until I kick off. I won’t even leave them a note. Just whatever property I willed them and then the money. Let them draw their own conclusions. I won’t have to suffer anymore wondering what those are.

But of course this is never going to be an issue. You know this. I know this. Moving on now.

Nobody won it Saturday, either; I wasn’t the only one disappointed. I’m debating whether I want to throw another $2 away or just wait and see what happens. Given my current state of affairs, I am probably better off playing. But always one ticket at a time. I am only desperate. I am not stupid.

Well. Not entirely stupid. I’m taking days off again, but it’s that stupid Shark Week. I can’t function at my best when I don’t know when (not if) I’m going to have a bloody accident right out there in public. I am honestly not sure what’s going to happen with my working life, either. I can put things off for a bit now that it’s gone and happened because it’s still pretty reliably happening every 30 to 34 days, but at some point pretty soon I’m going to have to shut that shit down one way or another. Surgery is likely out of the question due to the recovery time I will need, even if I got insurance tomorrow, and I almost could. That leaves me going back on the Pill for the first time in more than two decades. I don’t want to shut my cycle down but honestly, what good is it doing me at this point when I wind up bleeding like a stuck pig. If I do get insurance none of it should, in theory, cost me anything; if I can’t get insurance for some reason, I have certain telemedicine options now which didn’t exist 20 years ago and which shouldn’t set me back too much. One example I looked at charges $25 for the consult which includes followups for a whole year. I’m pretty sure it’s that $25 that one time for the whole year, but even $25 monthly would be a bargain. And the prescription itself can be as low as $15 for the cash pay option. We’ll see.

I also worry about my car. When am I not worrying about my car. I need some Seafoam soon to sort of clean up the fuel system a bit and I think I want to add a few quarts of oil. Not to the fuel system, obviously. (I have to specify this explicitly, otherwise someone out there’s gonna be an asshole.) It’s maybe 3k miles since the last oil change, but I was advised at some point that my car’s an oil-burner, so it needs topped up now and again. Can do. Not a problem. I just don’t like the way it sounds. Better safe than sorry. I do see a huge difference, even on a long day driving, in my mileage compared to when I was staying in Whitehall. So I’m still at an advantage being in Dublin rather than having to commute here. Can’t hate that.

But I still have to watch out. So I’m thinking give it another day or so and then apply at Big Retail Store. Actually two different ones along that same corridor. If worse came to worst I could walk to the one or bus-commute to the other and it wouldn’t be a fucking crisis. We’re going into the holiday season and it would be weird if they both said no. I mean, they could, but it’d be weird. If they’re paying at least $15 an hour and I have time to delivery-drive I will probably be okay until I get November’s rent sorted. After that, it’s whatever. I’m already mostly resigned to going back to ITS again. At least the one in that general area is in okay shape. At least, the room I stayed in was. Except the bathroom door, but it’s just going to be me and I am not particularly worried about the bathroom door.

I want to talk about other stuff but you don’t want to know how long it took me just to get this out. Also I faked the time stamp because I started writing after midnight… this is just silly. It’s okay. I’m not a news reporting service. But I really should get to bed soon. Maybe I’ll talk about that other shit later.

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.

So, yesterday I was out doing deliveries and Uber does this thing where depending on where you start and which first few jobs you accept, they seem to want to keep sending you out to the same general area — and so I wound up going to Plain City like three times. Twice to the actual town itself. It was so weird.

Well, the second time I went out there I saw this thing in the road on 161 and it looked like a little pile of fabric. Just the same, I couldn’t tell what it was and I couldn’t swerve it so I centered the car over it and cringed. I was right to cringe. THUNKTHUNKTHUNK. And then it was in the other lane and I was past it. I spent the rest of the day terrified that I had broken something important on my car. I’m still not sure I didn’t.

Then today I had to have my headlights on because it was raining and noticed that I had one of the mains out AGAIN as I sat at a red light behind another vehicle. Thank fuck I had another good bulb in the glove compartment. Replaced it. I don’t think it’s at the proper angle because driving in the dark was a little weird, but the main reason I replaced it even knowing I wouldn’t be able to adjust the angle was because I wanted other drivers to see me properly. Now I know they can do that. It is what it is. I’ll cope.

I am so torn about which way I want to take things in the next few months.

I would stay here in Dublin if I could. It isn’t a status thing, even though I’m gonna get mileage out of “I once lived on [rich people road] for six months” for fucking years, especially if I ever speak again to anyone I used to know from this area before my life here went to shit. It’s just that I got my second Ohio job in Dublin (I can’t remember where the first one was, but it looks like it was in Westerville), I used to catch the bus to and from work in the same area of the Meijer parking lot that I now sit waiting for Uber calls (that bus stop is long gone now — the city killed the line not long after I quit), I used to visit here all the time to go to my favorite stores, I used to bring Thea here for bookstores and the cat shelter, we used to go to the Carriage Place movie theater just down at Sawmill and Bethel for most of our movies… So much of my life has been here. It feels like “me.” Even with all the crazy changes over twenty years (Bridge Park! North Market Dublin! All the everfucking cheaply-built “luxury” apartment communities everywhere!). It’s just… too fucking pricey. There are a few places I could maybe get in, but then most of the jobs here that I would even qualify for don’t pay enough, and I’m fucking fed up with call centers, which are the one well-paying option I had a prayer of getting — and did, before I walked out.

Delaware is another option. There are a few Job Possibles up there — most notably, Major Grocery Store Chain’s got a distribution center and I’ve been their employee before and left on sort of good terms. (That was when I got Mike arrested for B&E and grand larceny of U.S. Army property and then never went back to the house, and they wouldn’t lock him up or confine him to barracks so… it was no longer safe for me to go to work. I did advise my supervisor of the situation. I did that much. And that was in 1999, so.) If I got that one I know for a fact there are apartments up there I could afford on that pay. We’ll see. I still need to inquire into that.

Then there’s New Albany. There’s a Job Possible there I want to also inquire into and if I were to get it, even though it’s through an agency, there’s a fair chance they’d be looking to hire from temp. If I did get that, there’s at least one place in the general area with apartments under $700 a month. It’d be a studio but I’d have more space than I had at InTown Suites, it’d be just a little over half what I spent per month at InTown Suites, I’d be on a lease, and I don’t have much personal stuff anyway so who the fuck cares. It is so fucking far from Dublin — but Delaware is like two minutes farther away than New Albany is, just north instead of east. Whatever. I could hang out in Dublin on my days off. If I ever left the fucking apartment on my days off. I don’t have a great track record for that.

I’ll come right out with it: I don’t want a job at all, and as it is I’ll have to wait until Shark Week comes and goes (and if that doesn’t start happening soon I’m gonna be real fucking irritated — I need to get on with things) so that I can make sure there won’t be any issues. It’s not the work I fear, though I am not fond of coming off my work shift feeling like I went ten rounds with Mike Tyson and that without him dropping trou and coming after me that way. It’s the feeling like I have no freedom. It’s the having to do things I do not give one single tin shit in a gold mine about. (Why do they keep calling shitty jobs “careers”? Buddy, you tell me with a straight face that you always wanted to be a gas-station night manager ever since you were little and I will call you out for the fucking liar you are. Not that that’s any of my Job Possibles. I am just illustrating the issue.) It’s the having to deal with irrational people and stupid rules. I have absolutely no power or authority, I don’t want authority anyway, everyone probably picks all that up from me like it’s a fucking pheromone, and the end result is I’m miserable. If I didn’t NEED the money I would not fucking bother. And I have ways to earn money at home but shifting gears is really hard for me, I’ve got next to no furniture much less to do work at, and it would take time to get my income up anyway. And when you get right down to it I just want to make sure a prospective landlord would say yes. Whatever comes after that is whatever comes after that.

I spend so much time being fretful and indecisive and then wind up in trouble because I never made up my mind. Over and over. It gets old.

Oh, speaking of Uber sending me wherever, I wound up in Delaware today. Right schmackity in the middle of the town itself. Right around the corner from the homeless shelter. So I thought, fuck it, passing the shelter’s the quickest way back to William so I can turn down Liberty. Okay, so guess who was out there on the porch? Enrique. I almost stopped to say hi. I almost did, but I needed to keep picking up jobs. I cannot believe that man is still there. And Lumpy, the other guy who actually was at the InTown Suites in Dublin for five years and then wound up homeless, he was there for a long time after I left too. He didn’t get housed til August. I am so pissed. No one told me there was any chance I could stick around for longer. I probably wouldn’t have wanted to, but basically I got admitted to the shelter, given the bare outline sketch of a plan to deal with my situation, and then got zero guidance from my case worker other than a couple of minor time extensions because first she was “sick” and then I don’t know what the fuck was up and then I find out she’s being given the directorship of another of their locations just opening, at that time, in Marysville. I got neglected for someone’s fucking career advancement. I cannot fucking even. I wanted to like her, too. I don’t really know how to feel about her at this point. I could have spared myself living in the fucking car again and also at the motel in Marysville and also the Dublin InTown Suites had I had that information. Whatever. I may drop by there soon and say hi if Enrique’s around. I know he works, or anyway he was employed when I was there, and I don’t know his hours but what the hell, we’ll see. He might like seeing a familiar face.

I could stand that myself, but most of mine hate me now. And for the dumbest reason possible. I still can’t believe it.

Oh, don’t roll your fucking eyes at me. Look at the thumbnail. GO LISTEN.

Oh, and here are the lyrics. I did not expect… that.

Rent paid.

I have one more rent payment to go here and then I’m done. There was brief word of possibly renewing but after that, I was informed that she’d like to move a relative in here. She did not give me a timeframe — she could mean in December, she could mean in the spring; she never specified — but I’m not going to force her to give me one. Along with earning for the November rent I’ll be spending the next couple of months getting this place nicer as sort of a thank-you. Things weren’t exactly clean when I moved in. I’ll be able to get them clean. CleanER, anyway.

But that’s all I’m doing. And I have a feeling I will not be getting the deposit back because all this time she’s been talking about getting the electric bill to me but has not done so. I will be telling her when I move out that if she wants to pay my part off with the deposit she is perfectly within her rights to do so but that if the amount is more than $1000 for the six months, I will need documentation before she gets any more out of me. That’ll be in writing, too. Might as well cover my tracks.

(From what I understand, electric utility rates have really skyrocketed since 2009, the last time I had an electric bill to pay. If that’s true, surely I ran up more than $1000 in those six months. She will have had literally six months to get that information to me and I’m literally across the driveway from her. It is not at all difficult to reach me and she can tell when I’m home. I have no sympathy whatsoever. If people want medals for helping me, they need to actually help, not add drama where previously there wasn’t any. I’m done with that bullshit.)

I’ve been reading the Baggage Reclaim blog a little bit again. Have loved that blog for years and at some point would like to buy at least some of her books to thank her for putting all that out here where I could find it. Today it was an article about stonewalling. Now, the thing with Matt two years ago was not a breakup. I do understand that, but aside from that he pretty much fit the pattern of letting me think things were one way and then suddenly yanking the rug out from under me, then refusing to discuss it. Something was going on there and the only question is which possibility it was:

– He knew suddenly changing the situation would piss me off, and if I got pissed off I would rant, and he would automatically become the Good Guy as a result

– We already had a rapidly destabilizing situation thanks to what was going on with Thea and he didn’t want things to go to complete shambles before he had time to move Crys here

It was one or the other. It’s easy to beat myself up because if it’s the first option then I played right into his hands, but at this point all I can do is look back at the situation and all the people who went silent and think, Wow, are you ever fucking gullible. Why do I care about the opinions of stupid, mean people? Because they are stupid, mean people, or else they would have asked me for my side of the story and not been so quick to turn their backs. It seems facile looking at it that way, it seems childish, and I suppose it’s possible I’m just making excuses but given the facts of the case, what the fuck else would you call it. All along I was willing to explain my side to anyone who would listen. I have never said otherwise. If someone offers you something and you turn away, that’s on you. They tried to meet in the middle. You would not even budge.

So… No great loss, I guess.

And actually it could have been both options, come to think of it. I’m never going to know, of course. He once mentioned he wanted to write me something about the whole situation and his perspective but I told him I knew he wouldn’t do it; he is very fond of promising me reasonable things and then not fucking bothering since he’s “busy.” Over-promise, under-deliver. I do not know why he still has any friends.

And that made me think of something else. “People care more about how you make them feel” probably applies to this too. As in, “People care more about how you make them feel than about how many promises you keep.” If you can make them feel good about you lying to them, they’ll forgive anything, I guess.

But again… No great loss. I don’t even want to be friends with people like that. They prove unreliable and untrustworthy. It’s not because I think friends are a Resource To Get Things Out Of, either. It’s because no one can go it 100% alone in life and we’re supposed to help one another. “Help,” of course, NOT meaning turning people who are supposed to be your friends and support circle into your own personal servant class who does nothing but worship you. Because apparently that needs pointed out. For some reason.

Ugh. Anyway. Getting laundry done. Need to do sheets too — that’s laundry but when I say “laundry” I usually mean “clothes and towels.” I don’t like my chances of finding another apartment with an in-unit washer and dryer, damn it. I don’t mind laundromats, but these days with bed bugs becoming such a problem I do worry somewhat. I wish renting houses weren’t so fucking prohibitive. It is just an apartment not stuck to another apartment. What the hell? But here we are. I will just have to adjust.

It’s all academic if I don’t find a job and therefore I wind up at Weekly-Rate Suites again, which is highly likely. Or if I do find a job and it doesn’t pay enough and I end up there anyway. I suppose the good news is I won’t owe utilities on top of that, and this time I’ll be somewhere walkable. I did a little research into Chain Discount Store where I worked more than 20 years ago and it turns out their rehire policy will work very much in my favor. And there’s one right there across the road. So in a pinch, especially with the holidays coming on, there’s that. I’ll hate it, but I won’t hate having money. And the stakes are not as high as they were at Quantum.

It’s October and I’m going to miss Inktober again. I hate those challenges anyway because I run out of things to draw. But it’s no fun drawing half the time because it feels like standing alone in the middle of an empty room with no windows or doors, babbling at myself. I don’t need validation — I know who I am and I know what I can do — but for me to get along in humanity, somebody’s got to actually notice I’m here. And they usually don’t, and didn’t even before the current mess started. You lose heart after a while. It’s been a long process for me. I need to turn it around and reclaim, and I don’t even know where to begin.

Elizabeth wants to talk again. Am pretending I did not see it. I will give her thirty days’ notice at the end of the month and that’s the best she’s going to get. If she happens to catch me out between now and then, great. If not, oh fucking well. “I’ve got connections”… “I can help you find something”… “I’ll get you the electric bill”… “You can renew the lease.” Pull the other one. It’s got bells on. One more disappointment in a long line of them. This one doesn’t sting as much, or really at all, at least.

Have not paid the rent yet — will get a postal money order tomorrow; I’m not late til the third anyway — but did get a little driving in, so have food for a bit. Will not be doing jack squat tomorrow other than housework because I am just about out of t-shirts and my trousers could use some washing.

(I am not being pretentious. I don’t know how else to put this so I’ll just say it outright: I never know who’s reading this thing. I prefer to write for clarity where I can, and people in one country know what I mean when I say trousers and people in another country will be brought up short if I say pants when I mean trousers. So I went with Trouser Nation on this one.)

And because I need a fucking break, so there’s that. I was only close to six hundred yesterday. I crossed over today. Six hundred in a week! Jesus.

I did work out I can do this with more breathing room if I do a similar amount daily but for five days a week. I just wound up crammed at the last minute because I was stupid and rested on the $500 laurel in my savings account most of the month. Big mistake. Will I make that big mistake again? Probably. I am not my own best friend.

I am going to keep it up like this until I’m on the other side of the heaviest days in my Shark Week, and then probably look at that flex gig app again — the only one I currently have active with work somewhat near me where I can still request shifts, now that I’ve screwed that up too — and see if “we have worked out the bugs” means it has stopped asking me to resubmit my I-9 and identity documents. If so, I have additional options to what I’m doing now. I dread the changeover to night shift, but I would be able to point to that as proof of a job, especially if I grabbed a longer-term block of shifts instead of doing it piecemeal one day at a time. Fudge things, you know? If I go with something with low enough rent it won’t matter anyway.

I also still — STILL, since I left Matt’s house two years ago — have some things I’ve been meaning to sell, so I really should start taking a hard look at that. I am still not selling my Big Man collection. Not yet. But other things are viable candidates and have been. I’ve just been putting it off.

I think I want to get a post office box before trying that, because I need a consistent address for when I get out of here. I very much doubt I will still be here come December first. Lease ends 30 November. I’d rather go with a UPS box because they’ll accept more types of shipments, like FedEx if need be, but the post office is cheaper. The only question is where to rent a box. I am inclined to just stay in Dublin as my home base. I miss Clintonville, but I feel so unwelcome there now. Although if I can get that apartment I had looked at there (or an apartment in the same community — I would imagine the specific one I saw has been leased by now), I’ll go ahead and get a box there too. Big “if,” but we’ll see. I have the entire month of November to work that out.

This month I absolutely must check my account status with AEP and Columbia Gas. It’s been so long I’ll be surprised if they even still have any records of me, but I have to know. Can’t play around with this. I will not be allowed onto a lease if I can’t turn the utilities on.

This month also has a Friday the 13th. October is my favorite month for this. All I need is to meet a black cat, and month fucking made.

Other plotting and scheming going on. No energy to talk about any of it. The last two years have absolutely done my head in, and I’m nowhere near out of the woods yet.