I’ve got three days left of phone service unless something changes for the better very quickly.
I do have the option of asking Dad for money. I don’t know that he would go for it but it is an option. I’m trying very hard not to do that. I am already causing greater expense in his budget just by being here.
I’ve been realizing lately just how fucked this whole situation is. I feel like maybe some employers won’t bother with me because I have an Ohio phone number. I can’t see why they can’t just write off phone bills on their taxes, but who knows. But even if I apply for a specific job through Indeed and not through an employer site, which means they could contact me through the Indeed app, that app does not work even when I have a connection (apparently the connection is too weak) and I’ll only know I heard from anyone when I get email notifications. I don’t get those very often at Dad’s house because the signal is so bad. Trying to do anything else by phone is iffy too. If I can’t pick up cell signal I can’t get phone calls.
Landline is not an option. That rotted a long time ago and the phone company did not bother replacing it. I hate this fucking country. Throw everything away, throw people away, then complain no one wants to buy into this shit anymore. Why should we? We’re just thrown away.
I need to draw a sample portrait and advertise for drawing portraits but (1) Dad will probably get on my case about it and (2) probably no one will bite. I’ve been showing off stuff I’ve done and made for fucking months, and no one cares. I’m supposed to follow everyone’s Facebook pages, join everyone’s fucking groups, buy everyone’s stuff, and almost no one will so much as share my shit. But they’ll sit there and tell me they like it. Sometimes. When they’re even paying attention.
I’m going to do it anyway, but I’m fully prepared for my efforts to be for nothing. As they so often are.
I’m so tired.
Aha. Here’s one for ya. If any of you were offended by my Shit Laundry story from a while back, I’ll humiliate myself now. So I woke up this morning with a headache and having to pee, and then realized I had to fart, and you know how you can usually tell whether it’s a dangerous fart and should be held in til you get to a toilet? This one did not feel like that. Until I was already in the middle of it and then thought, Actually, I dunno… It ended without incident… and then I leaked. It wasn’t even a wet fart, it was a dry fart and then a leak.
Air serving as an asshole cork. Who knew?
My period’s been going for two fucking weeks and good thing, too. The pad caught most of my fart aftershock and the little bit that escaped did not soak through. Luckily because I’m on my last pair of clean indoor pants. (Not underwear. American pants.)
I am not sure what’s going on with any of this. I’m going to go with: I have been eating like shit — not eating shit, eating LIKE shit — for two fucking years now. I already wasn’t in the greatest shape from a health standpoint. I’m actively surprised I don’t have twice-weekly migraines, it’s been THAT bad. I suspect I missed out on that only because I started supplementing magnesium. I started supplementing magnesium more than two years ago because after I moved in with Dad in late ’21, I started getting insane muscle cramps. It isn’t the water. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t use water softener since the trailer park went to city water. (That happened back in 2000, another time I was living with him.) It’s all the fucking junk depleting my magnesium. Which I already wasn’t eating enough of in my food. And I’ve got gut stuff going on. I suspect my gallbladder has given up the ghost, just going on symptoms. I also fit the profile. Not that fair, but white and definitely fat and well over forty. My core muscles are fucking trashed. I probably have rosacea. And my knee has been acting up since I fell on concrete at Elizabeth’s place. I can sit on my knees and be no more uncomfortable than usual, I can walk okay, but trying to straighten my left leg from a seated position makes that knee crackle, and sometimes it hurts when I walk. I don’t dare check my blood sugar — the strips are expired anyway but I know I won’t like what I see and I can’t do anything about it. Mister Multiple Decade Diabetic In Kidney Failure refuses to clean up his diet, opting only to eat less of it, and his doctors mislead him on what cleaning it up means in any case. Like, this isn’t 1980 anymore. The science does not agree with you. Quit feeding us bullshit. But him making bad choices means I have to eat bad choices. I’m not the one buying the food. I could be working full-time right now and he’d still fuss at me if I bought the food. I’m supposed to be saving all my money. For retirement, apparently. In something like seventeen years. On shit wages.
I said I was tired, right
Confirmed something I have suspected since I came back here. Deborah is here doing her biweekly cleaning, and she asked me if Dad had ever told Jodi about the leak. Leak? Either the washing machine or the toilet, she says. She can tell it’s been soaking into the floor. I knew the floor was different from when I was last here, but it never occurred to me Dad might not have reported it. Dad had told Deborah a while back when she first alerted him that he would let Jodi know about it and from what it sounds like, the floor’s gotten worse even since then. So I get to go talk with Jodi. Dad isn’t exactly demented, but his thinking’s gone a little funny around the edges (even for Dad) since October, and he will forget things you wouldn’t expect to forget. I’m concerned. I don’t know if Jodi will need us to vacate while this is getting fixed. If the floor still seems solid enough, and it kind of does, maybe she’ll just need to get the leak fixed for now. If she decides to redo the floor too, who knows what’s going to happen.
Won’t fucking happen this week probably. It’s raining to beat the band. There’s some standing water in the trailer park already, and this is just day one. We’re in for at least two or three more days of this nonsense. If it were normal rain, we have skirting and it’d still be dry under the trailer but that’s probably not the case right now.
One thing I absolutely hate about Louisiana or anywhere in the Deep South is the everfucking tree roaches. They at least do not normally take up residence. They just sneak in from outside to look for snacks. But they’re big and they’re horrifying and they give me the heebie-jeebies every time I see one. Well, I’ve seen three in this place since I got here. First one was ON MY BEDROOM WALL. To be fair, I had just moved into the room not a week before, and either it had been in there a bit with no one bothering it and then freaked out when it realized I was there, or it just happened to sneak into the house and that’s where it ended up. Dad keeps roach spray around. The stuff works. I almost feel bad because they don’t die quickly, but I can’t have that running over me when I’m sleeping or crawling onto me in the living room or whatever. It’s irrational but there it is.
We also have mice. I haven’t seen them, but at the same time I was freaking out over Roach One, I could hear movement in my room in the closet area that really couldn’t have been anything else. I think I’ve scared them out of there, but now there are mouseturds in the oven drawer. You know, the one below the actual oven where you keep baking sheets and like that? Yeah. Dad keeps some pots and pans down there and Mousie has taken several dumps in one of the skillets. I have to take everything out of that fucking drawer and set traps if I want this to stop. I have to wash pots now before I use them just to be on the safe side. If they’re pooping, they’re peeing. Unsanitary all around.
I’ve been in sort of a mode of wanting to cry about my general economic situation again. You’ve seen some of that in this post. I know some things I can do to maybe move in the right direction but have been dragging my feet. Here are two things I definitely need to do:
1. Get the goddamn car in to a mechanic. I have the number, Carrie has helped me confirm it is the right one (she’s got his wife in her contact list), and so now I just need to get the ball rolling.
2. Get on a reliable internet connection a lot more often than I do. Whether that is at the Iota library or whether it is at Carrie’s place. Either way. I need to apply to jobs regularly, and I need to hype up my stuff for sale regularly.
I just feel like this is all going to be for nothing.
It’s like I stopped existing and no one’s ever going to see me again.
…
As a weird postscript, yesterday Dad and I did some running around. We stopped at Walmart for some groceries and Dad’s Social Security has already come in, so he did the thing he does sometimes near payday and got a bit generous, and asked me if I still like to read. We were passing the media section. He pointed at the books and suggested I find one or two. At first I wasn’t sure I’d see anything I wanted but as I was walking back to the end of the aisle I had started on, I noticed a new Stephen King novel, Holly (meaning part of the same series and universe as Mr. Mercedes), and Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck. Oh, what the hell. I’m still peeved at King for capitulating to the genderdorks but Dad was paying for it, not me, and I’d gotten Manson’s book at the library ages ago and thought it looked interesting but had never gotten around to finishing it. It seems to contain some useful (and realistic) pointers for reconfiguring my stinkin’ thinkin’, so I picked it up.
King’s an ethical wuss (also probably eating-disordered with some weird prejudices toward meat-eating people, which is odd as I’m pretty sure he’s not vegetarian) but has always been a good storyteller, and I got through Holly in an evening. In one chapter, the wife of a man Holly is interviewing is reading the same Manson book I had just acquired. In another chapter, it is mentioned that Holly owns a Columbus Clippers hat. Columbus as in Ohio. The story does not take place in Ohio. Pretty sure it’s in Illinois. (I’ll look that up one of these days if I’m online and remember.)
So, like, what the fuck was that about. I don’t know why stuff like this happens. It’s not often, but it’s always weird when it does.
I still think my time here’s temporary.
I have no idea what that means yet.