So, while I don’t quite have a firm date yet, I have pretty much settled upon taking a bus all the way to the Left Coast unless something weird happens. Like, I’ll probably get a few more of those Bayou State scratch cards and see if I win that $4k after all. I doubt it will happen, but if it does, my ass is flying out. L, my strongly prospective housemate, advised me on how to get to Crescent City by airline instead of having to catch a bus in Medford. And I wouldn’t mind catching a bus in Medford, but if all planes is faster then let’s do that instead. This just isn’t terribly likely. I suspect my first two wins were a fluke. Even with much better odds than the Powerball.
Really, I don’t mind long road trips but if it’s a crowded bus or fuckery happens it could get unpleasant. I will do it anyway in the service of saving money, especially if I get fucked on the car. If a diabetic man twenty-two years older than me (Dad) can survive riding a bus from south Louisiana to central Ohio and then out to southern Oregon and then BACK to fucking Montana, I can do this. Come on.
I think I have some wiggle room on when to leave, because Carrie has invited me to stay over to avoid future angry interactions (she has known Dad something like thirty-five years; she knows how he is) and I am going to take her up on it just to make things easier, and I also want to see more of her before I go. But I need to get the car sold this week, so I absolutely must get rid of everything I am absolutely not going to be mailing or carrying over there. Goodwill’s going to fucking love me again. It’s all good. I thought about selling my sewing machine and keyboard, but… I am just so fucking sick and tired of dealing with people. They can’t even handle a simple thing like defining woman and man, they flake out on or dramatize the simplest personal interactions, and back when I offered things on Freecycle I got no-shows a lot and that shit was literally free. And that’s if I don’t get robbed. Might as well stay out of trouble, keep my stress in check, and do some good for humanity. I know Goodwill has issues, but they also employ people and help the disabled. It’s not all bad.
I need to get the car sold this week because I need some lead time to get the Greyhound ticket. I cannot fuck around with that and I also need to get luggage (no more carrying my clothes in bags!) and also ship my stuff off.
If I sound confident, it’s not on purpose. Part of me is screaming WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? YOU DON’T KNOW THESE PEOPLE IN MEATSPACE! YOU HAVE GONE MOST OF YOUR LIFE WITH NO CAR AND IT FUCKED YOU! But I’m living with someone I don’t know NOW and he’s got a little bit of a lying problem and a drinking problem and also a cruelty problem, and you can get just as fucked owning a car as you can going without one. I’ll be a mile from town and I need exercise. If I get enough money for the car, I’ll have enough left over to keep me for a bit after I get there. I will have internet at home, I will have desk space to work, I won’t have to travel all over creation just to get the simplest things done. And my roomie will not be constantly up my ass to entertain her somehow. Yes, please.
(The dogs may be up my ass to entertain them once they get used to me, but I may be able to head that off at the pass when I’m not in the mood for it by the simple expedient of closing my bedroom door. I have a feeling I may not be doing that a whole lot, though.)
I’m pissed. I thought I had $30 in the Uber account but it was more like $20. I don’t think this is anything shady on Uber’s part. I think I just glitched. I still have a decent amount of gas in the car and I shouldn’t need to tank up again before going to Lake Charles to sell it. I don’t want to do any more Ubering. Every time I drive those horrid roads I feel the car rattling apart just a little bit more — the suspension has been grumpy for a while. I know I have been paranoid about that for two and a half years, but you have to figure my paranoia will be justified eventually. So I am not sure what I will do for money if something comes up. Being this low on money will likely push me to Carrie’s sooner because I can’t just keep buying Atkins shakes. They are cheap meals (a four-pack is seven bucks and some change, five bucks and some change if I get the Walmart brand, and I drink two per meal because I’m too low-calorie as it is) but duh, every time I buy them I am spending money I need to keep. It’s going to get untenable if I don’t get out of this house soon. Eating the food in the house would push me into Dad’s path and we are just not going there. If he wanted a relationship with me, he should have quit fucking biting my head off.
I just remembered I’ve got something like $35 left in potential Walmart gift-card balance. Well, that’s good. That needs to be spent before I leave the state anyway because as soon as I cross that state line I don’t have Medicaid anymore until I apply for it again. Whose bright idea was it to have state-based public health insurance? I wanna slap ’em. But that’s my answer to needing noms until the car’s sold. More tape and boxes, definitely, if needed.
I am getting my shit sorted today — well, I got a start on it. I’m on hold right now because Dad was asleep when I got home and the one roll of packaging tape I have is NOISY when I try to unroll a piece. I know a lot of those brands make racket, but the one I just used up wasn’t like that. Duck brand I think? Small green dispenser. I don’t want to go all the way the fuck back to Jennings to get more Duck, and I can’t this time of night anyway. I’ll wait until he’s awake to make tape noises. He might still complain but at least it won’t be because I woke him up.
(I actually just got an idea to make it quieter… let me see about that first.)
I am aiming for what I tried to do when I left Matt’s house and not take things with me I can’t replace later, keeping in mind that if things go the way I hope they will go, I will have some money to buy a few things. I won’t want to go crazy with it but, for instance, the paper I want to use for portraits is less than five bucks a pad on Amazon. I’ll keep my pencils at least. That won’t be a problem. There is no way in hell I can take my fixatives with me — they are in aerosol cans and USPS would shit and I doubt Greyhound would like them either — but a can of that shouldn’t be more than another ten bucks. The thing with pencil portraits is the work you put into them. The raw materials are not a big fucking deal.
Oh shit, I’ll need a ruler too. AGAIN. Sigh.
At least this time I don’t have to worry about some idiot mailing me shit I don’t need. Matt got in his yuks two and a half years ago sending me boxes full of literal trash. Moving on now.
I just really hate having to get rid of things. I feel like I should change my name to Inanna.
Spent some time with Carrie today. Mostly it was just visiting (and I showed her a couple more Gary Meikle comedy reels… she couldn’t always understand him, but she definitely laughed in the right places), but we also talked some about my situation. She’s pissed at Dad. Understand that I have NOT been after her like “omg my dad is such a monster, please hate him” or any bullshit like that. They will remain friends unless he REALLY fucks up. I am completely fine with that. I have expressed my ire, absolutely, but I also tell her — and this is the truth — that I do get where he’s coming from. There is nothing actually wrong with him wanting me to be employed. It is not the premise I have an issue with, it is how he looks at it and responds to it. He does not have the answers to my problems that I actually need, especially when no one will fucking hire me and even if they did, there’s no way I can earn enough to be safe in retirement in just the next seventeen years, so he might as well calm the fuck down and let me figure it out because I literally have nothing left to lose. He doesn’t even know what the fuck is going on in most areas of my life but BOY DOES HE FEEL FREE TO JUDGE. Carrie places most of the blame on his drinking. I just mentioned above that they’ve been friends for thirty-five years. She knows how he is on the booze. She’s actually fussed at him about it and told him she can’t be around him when he’s drinking because of his behavior. He’s been in love with her for decades (she’s never felt the same about him, though she loves him as a friend and sort of a bonus brother, and she told him so) and if even her declared boundary hasn’t put him on the strait and narrow, well, don’t fucking blame me for the outcomes of his life because he doesn’t give two shits whether I’m around or not so what influence was I supposed to have, exactly?
She and Doug have talked about things too and while Doug has not been talking with me directly since I told him what is now going on, he’s also pissed at Dad because Dad directly broke a promise made to him when they were discussing me coming back down. So let’s piss off the favorite child too. Great going, Dad. Doug and I have had our shit in the past and I have no idea what’s coming up, especially with me living a whole lot closer to him before much longer, but he really went to bat for me on this one and Dad was totally unfair to him. I hope Doug’s not expecting a sudden epiphany. It’s not going to fucking happen. Dad is Dad. The end.
I’m glitching again but the tired kind of glitch. Let me see if I can grab a couple more things out of the front cabinet. I think I have two more boxes and the sewing machine there. And then maybe figure out getting my ass into bed. It’s way too hot here right now and I was uncomfortable last night, but maybe tonight will be better. At least it won’t be hot like this on the northern California coast. I never wanted to move to CA, but there are worse places. Opelousas, for instance. Rafah, definitely. [flips both middle fingers AND both middle toes in the general direction of Israel]
‘Later.