So, if you render this date in Uneducated American Style, it comes out to be 04-14-24, which is actually pretty cool. Take that, UK snobs. Mwah.
Fun fact: when I write these entries, I write them as plain text files, adding in HTML tags where I want things like italics because I know I can just copy-paste the text into WordPress (I use WordPress in plain text mode too) and it’ll render correctly. (Unlike Substack, which I cannot set to plain text mode, which means I have to scan the text after I paste it in and remove tags and add text decoration in their place. Kind of a pain in the ass.) But that wasn’t the point of this fun fact. The point of this fun fact is that I save the file with a filename of the date in international mode. So today’s filename is 20240414. Borrrrring. But! If I have multiple entries to put in my blog the next time I’m on the internet, they’re in order in the folder. Very convenient. Not to mention I don’t have to think up a title every single fucking time.
I also delete the text files after I’ve posted them, and I’ve been debating the wisdom of that. What I may start doing is exporting a backup file every time I update the blog and, after the first time, replacing the old backup with the updated one. If I ever finish the job of condensing all my old journals into the one blog, what will happen is I’ll wind up with one gigantic backup file instead of eleventy billion smaller files. It will actually be readable without any special software, too. Even Chrome will “read” it and, in turn, you’d be able to read it too. Continuing that theme from yesterday of what happens if I croak.
It’ll be a pain in the ass to read so, if you ever happen to get a hold of it, I recommend doing a WordPress install somewhere out of the way and importing the backup file there. The blog software will break it up into chunks and then it won’t melt your eyeballs trying to get through it all.
(Note to self: Write a readme file to store with the backup file to explain this whole process.)
Do I think anyone will get anything useful out of this? Nah, but if they’re curious about me as a person, this is one way to pursue that curiosity, I suppose. It’s also consistent with people’s general trend of not giving a fuck about me until I’m long gone, so there’s that.
I guess I am mostly doing this for my kids, and they won’t give a shit either. I’m a bit too burnt out to care.
That sounds heartless. I suppose it is, in a way, but not the Born-Heartless-And-Evil sort of heartlessness, more like My Heart Got Burnt Out Of Me And Doesn’t Work Anymore. It isn’t even mostly my kids’ fault, though some parts of the process had to do with them. Unfortunately, they’re going to have to deal with the fallout, because the most-responsible parties are gutless chickenshits. About me. Of all people. 90% talk and almost no bite. Fucking idiots. Didja enjoy hurting my kids just to prove a point, assholes? Yeah. You sit over there in your wrongness and be fucking wrong. Shame I won’t hear what bullshit you spin for them to excuse yourselves. They’re both smart. They’ll see through it eventually.
I’m not in a terribly good mood lately. Bet you can’t tell.
So when Dad was last in the hospital, they gave him this plastic tub crammed with personal care products. Hospital-branded, but meant to make the patient more comfortable — stuff like soap and shampoo and deodorant, and even these weird glycerin swabs which are meant to moisten the mouth, and I can’t imagine what those are for because if a patient can move around enough to apply them, the patient can probably drink. Point is, Dad did what most of us do in motels and claimed the swag for himself and had me dump it in his bag for him. When I got it home, most of it went into the medicine cabinet.
So he decided, yesterday I guess, to rearrange his going-to-hospital bag and add new underwear and shorts and that kind of thing. In that process he took a lot of the hospital swag out of the medicine cabinet and dumped it into said bag.
I figured this out when I realized one of my sample tubes of Lume in the medicine cabinet was gone.
What I can’t figure out is whether he threw it away or he stuck it in his bag. (I know where the bag is, but I’m not checking until he’s asleep.) Either way, I’m irate because I had two of those tubes and one of them was close to empty but not there yet. The normal-sized tubes are fourteen fucking bucks and I’m gonna get everything I can out of the samples, because damn. So to have him making that decision for me in the context of his having been a dick over the past three days was galling. I doubt he even knew what it was. Possibly thought it was hospital swag. He’s only seen the TV ads about fifteen billion times but if it doesn’t interest him, in one brain cell and out the other. That’s just Dad. Not even a new thing.
It’s only a couple bucks to replace it and it’s the used one that’s gone. It’s just the principle of the thing. This is the same guy who offered me a bar of his Dial soap if I “didn’t like” my Dove as a way of telling me I stink. Hi, I’m doing something about the problem, fuck off, okay?
(Fair do’s, I did smell at the time. It wasn’t extreme but apparently Dad developed his sense of smell to make up for his derpy ears. You’re not supposed to use pit deodorant, particularly not the antiperspirant, anywhere but in your pits so I found a better solution. And yes, I switched to the fucking Dial too.)
He seems to think I want the glycerin swabs, though. I dunno. I just live here.
He probably doesn’t like that, either. Last night it was can you please clean up the kitchen because I’m going to bed soon and I don’t want to hear the noise. I clean up the kitchen most nights. There wasn’t actually a whole lot to clean up BECAUSE I generally keep up with it. Aaand… I got it done and guess what? He didn’t go to bed. He stayed the fuck up making fucking noise and leaving the lights on to all hours. I run the fans (there are two now) in my room when I’m sleeping as much to dampen his fucking racket as to cool me off.
I think I am a fairly self-centered person. It doesn’t help that I was forced to be alone (sometimes because others pushed me, other times for my own sanity’s sake) rather than other people sort their shit the fuck out, so some of this is just not being able to be any other way anymore because I’ve got no one left to center on instead, but I am anyway. But he puts me to shame. That fucking ego, my God. And if anyone called him out on it, he’d just say he’s too old to change. My fat white butt. I probably won’t be the one to call him out. I wish his sisters would. Hell, for all I know they did already and that’s why he doesn’t like them. Not even Emily, clearly, since he wanted to play that mean anniversary prank on her.
Well, we’re at the four-month mark, more or less, and that’s how long I lasted last time before he started grumbling that he wanted to kick me out. I imagine that’ll start soon.
I’ll put it off as long as I can. I have an idea — it’s not sure yet — that I may just spend my workdays from here on out NOT at the trailer unless Dad has an appointment. I need to just go do delivery for a while and be done with it. I did sell that bracelet not long ago, but what happens when I sell things like that is the money goes right back out the door again. If they’re not going to buy from me more often, all that will ever be is chump change from a hobby. It’s too soon to make that declaration, of course; I haven’t been working consistently enough on it. But I need money NOW. I have Uber’s debit card for its drivers so that I don’t have to pay 85 cents per instant deposit anymore. I think it will even get me discounts on gas, depending on the gas station. I know I read something to the effect that the Upside app also deposits there. Come ON.
It’ll be awful if the car dies, but I can also point to that and go “See? SEE? I WAS OUT THERE MAKING MONEY AND LOOK.” Next time don’t be so eager to rush me out the door, DAD.
But anyway, if I’m out doing that then I can hardly be home getting on his nerves. If he still starts grumbling about kicking me out, that’s on him. No one will defend me from him, of course. They never defend me from anyone, because apparently I am evil incarnate.
(Doug comes closest, but Doug wants something, and I just haven’t figured out what it is yet. I have an idea.)
Health notes:
1. Experimentally, since Dad no longer seems interested in breakfast (at least for the next two or three days, after which he faints on the way to the living room and then realizes duh, his blood sugar’s been too low), I cooked three eggs and three breakfast-sausage patties for breakfast for myself this morning. I wanted to see if it helped my blood sugar any.
Well, you tell me. Fasting: 160 mg/dl. Two-hour postprandial: 145 mg/dl.
My fasting is never good anymore but if I don’t eat like a moron the night prior, it is often in the 140s range when I wake up. This is too high. The 130 cutoff my PCP set for me is also too fucking high, but going beyond that is just insane. I ate like a moron last night (spaghetti; apparently, adding more meat didn’t help anything), thus being nearly twenty points higher than my “better” current fasting range. Some of that was also dawn phenomenon, which I’ve had for years now. I don’t actually know when I crossed the line into diabetes. I know things haven’t been good since at least 2021. Some of that was stress. Some of that was poverty and crap food. COVID in ’22 may have even played a role. I’ve heard it can.
But I was always on the way there if I didn’t clean up my act. I knew that. I own it. I need to grow a fucking spine and stop going along with Dad’s quests for crap food.
The postprandial after breakfast wasn’t good either, though. The one good thing about it was my sugar dropped fifteen points. That’s better than the going up forty to eighty points thing it was doing before.
I honestly think that if I go keto it’ll get even better. I think I still have time for that. I don’t think I’m too far gone yet.
2. What the fuck is up with my left shin? I don’t move around enough to get shin splints and anyway, I walk just fine. Walking doesn’t even hurt. But there’s this one area, and it’s always the same area… maybe about the surface area of one side of a quarter? That hurts. It’s not a bad hurt and it isn’t quite constant, and it feels near the surface. The quality of the pain is something like burning, but really mild. But the point is I shouldn’t be feeling any pain at all if I haven’t hit my leg on something — and this has been going on for months. I think I even had it in Ohio.
Speaking of Ohio, it’s the same leg as the knee I banged up when I fell on Elizabeth’s fucking concrete out in front of the apartment house. That knee gets a little tricksy now and again since the accident, though it’s improved a lot. I don’t think I had the shin pain before then, though. So I wonder if it’s connected somehow.
Let me get my ladybits figured out before I go asking about this. That will also give it additional time to sort itself out.
Worst-case scenario’s a blood clot. (Cancer is slower and more treatable.) Hope not. Those fuckers break off and MOVE. If I got a pulmonary embolism, there’s nothing Dad could do. Well, maybe trigger his Life Alert, but I wonder what the rules are on that. And as slow as he is — and not just physically — I might be dead already by the time he figures out I’m not being lazy.
“Well, go look at it first then!” Nah. I feel the same about this as I do about the prospect of heart issues. If it takes me, it takes me. Part of me doesn’t want that to happen. Part of me is tired of ALL this shit. I haven’t decided which wolf’s gonna win yet. It’s not the medical stuff, which I actually don’t mind. It’s life in general.
[Later]
Dad finally said more than five words to me — nice tone of voice as usual after being in Grouch Mode. Wanted me to do a vice run. My words, not his. He was down to one unopened pack of Marlboros and didn’t have a booze reserve anymore. Okay, fine, I’ll go right out and get that.
Before I left he obsessed about his Wendy’s experience again. This time he didn’t like the burger either because there was “too much” ketchup on it. I’m over it. My one question is why they charged the same for a Baconator single as for a double, but there’s nothing we can do about that now; all I can do is just make damn sure I never take him anywhere near Wendy’s again. (He often calls it Dave’s, which is unintentionally hilarious.) Fine by me. It’s my link to Ohio and he doesn’t give two shits about Ohio.
Apparently he got the hash browns out for me, too, and he insists they were in a refrigerator case when he bought them, not in the freezer section. Bullshit. I’ll try to remember to look next time I go — I should have looked today, but it didn’t occur to me — but I am about 90 percent sure we got that shit out of a freezer display of some sort. I have only ever seen one potato product (as opposed to raw potato by itself) being displayed in a refrigerated section and that was his bagged shredded hash browns. The loose ones, not the patties.
The reason that even mattered was he was saying there’s no need to put something in a freezer if you didn’t buy it from a freezer. Dude, you got two packs of those and if I eat them all the time you’ll call me a pig again. He never comes out and says that explicitly but you can see it’s what he means.
Anyway. He forgot to give me enough money for two cartons of smokes but I had enough for one and for the bourbon. Apparently I was supposed to get myself some fast food too. I didn’t. I didn’t have as much change as he thought I would, I’m tired of eating that crap, and I wanted to hold on to as much money as I could because I have a special domain name this month that I want to make absolutely sure I can renew. (Mwah, big man.) Or if I need it for gas, it’s there for that too.
And then when I got home he asked me if I would help him cook his supper around 3pm. Sure, no problem. Honestly, I don’t mind. I know everything is tricksy for him now. But a little while later he walked past my door and said never mind on the cooking supper, he was going to bed. So he’s not out of whatever it was. He still feels like shit.
I kind of wonder if they’re going to find that another of his heart valves has gone funky. It was a bit like this for him when the last one got fucked up. He hates hospitals but he felt so much better after his first valve replacement that if he was facing that again, I have a feeling he’d bite the bullet and go along with it. No one LIKES to feel like shit. Not even him.
…
Two final points.
1. Found the missing tube of Lume while he napped in the living room. It was in his hospital bag, all right. He didn’t even look at it, just took a bunch of shit off one of my medicine-cabinet shelves and dumped it in. So he won’t notice it’s missing. Just in case, I put the new one behind my can of Aqua Net, where it is completely hidden, and put the used one out on the shelf. That’s the one he took, by the way. So, some consolation if I had not found it. He would have been awfully confused the first time he tried to use it, though.
2. I just checked the label on our disputed hash-brown patties (tattie scones to any Scots happening by). “Keep frozen. Do not thaw.” You fuckin’ moron…
If there’s a hell I’m probably going. But honest to god, how fucking hard is it to read a fucking label before calling your daughter an idiot without actually calling her an idiot. Again.
Okay. Stuff to do. Laundry. Organizing more personal papers. (Part of my foul mood was opening the folder with all my Sean-custody-adoption-related stuff.) Probably transcribing more of that journal. And whatever new drama Dad cooks up. Whee!