Month: April 2024

Too lazy to write it out again but this was earlier today

-[start Facebook post text]-

Got up later than I wanted, too close to 10am, though I’d been awake for at least an hour. Had heard Dad going to his bed for a nap. Got up and did cooking sorts of things and made him the breakfast he ordered last night.
When I got done I debated with myself, because he usually wakes and wanders out when he smells cooking, but he didn’t this time.

I should wake him, I thought. But he hasn’t been asleep long, I also thought. If he’s sleepy then he needs it, he’s grumpy when he’s tired, and he’s unbearable when he’s grumpy. I don’t want to fucking hear it. I finally compromised with myself that I would wake him when I was done with mine. If it wasn’t warm enough, thirty seconds in the nuker would set it to rights without cooking the egg yolks all the way.

Right when I was finishing, he walked out. His plate was by his chair. He smushed his fingers into the food and snapped, “I’m not hungry. Next time wake me so it’s not ice cold.”

And into the trash he dumped it.

Well, good luck to him. I’m going to get stuff together and go somewhere else for a few hours. If he winds up feeling like shit (well… more shitty) because he’s too good to use a microwave, he did that to himself.

…

I don’t talk about even half his weird shit here because it’d be just like someone local to see it and go tattle to him. I am never safe from this shit. Never. Everyone wants me to be the good little victim because fluffing the egos of assholes (and not just male ones) is more important than me being sane and happy. I don’t know why *I* have to be the scapegoat EVERY FUCKING TIME. They can take care of these jerks themselves.

Well, good thing it’s not up to them whether I let this really get to me. I have already looked Really Bad in the face. I could still wind up meeting it again if he kicks me out of here but I will cope until that happens because none of this shit comes close.

But yeah, Dad has a really weird relationship with food. Kind of tired of it. He was pissy like this the other day at Wendy’s, too, and at the hospital before that, a couple weeks ago. When he cooked his own, it didn’t matter. It’s hard for him to cook now. I should buy him a bunch of Glucerna and stay gone except for bedtime, and serve him right.

-[end Facebook post text]-

Of course, I remembered afterwards that the last time we were at Walmart, he bought one of those dozen-count boxes of breakfast-sausage-and-pancake “corn dogs.” As in it is not really a corn dog but looks like one from the outside. They’re okay but too carby. But they’re also very easy to heat up. If he wants to be an asshole about food all the fucking time, he can heat up his own, at least at breakfast. He compensates for the carb thing anyway by the simple expedient of nearly starving himself. His kidney doctor thinks he has stomach neuropathy now (lack of appetite, among other issues), so he’d probably do that anyway.

So he probably had food today. I am not fussed.

Yesterday I guess you could say there were already signs of weirdness coming on. I’m in my bedroom right now, right? He came in here yesterday, sat on the bed — I think this was about 3pm, not sure — and suggested that I go ahead and set a steak out to thaw if I wanted one for supper instead of waiting until the last minute. I have never in my life complained to this man about how long it takes to thaw a ribeye. That’s because the way I do it takes no more than half an hour. At any rate, he wasn’t done; next it was instructing me on how to prepare it so I wouldn’t have to eat that fatty bit on the small end. The only reason I wouldn’t want to eat the fatty bit on the small end is that the fatty bit on the small end of the thick-cut boneless ribeyes from Lyon’s tastes weird. I like animal fat. Animal fat likes me. I don’t know why this man continues to believe I should be exactly like him. Like, look, I’m clearly his daughter, and I’m weird in some of the ways he’s weird. No problem there, but if he wanted a clone, he went about it entirely the wrong way. I’m not male either, Dad. Guess whose fault that is, Dad. It’s not MY fault, Dad. Not Mom’s either.

P.S. I had said nothing about wanting a steak for supper. Ended up having half the leftover spaghetti. Had the rest of it tonight, too.

I did go to Carrie’s. I was overdue for a visit. I suppose I intended to be something resembling productive but it just did not turn out that way other than getting some Substack essays uploaded. Carrie doesn’t seem to give a toss one way or the other. I suppose she thinks I spend some of that time job-hunting. Sometimes I do put in an application but y’know, there’s just something about ALMOST NEVER GETTING A FUCKING REPLY, not even a “sorry, we have gone with another candidate, thank you for applying.” I got that twice that I can recall, and neither was a local company. The rest of the time? Silence. It’s not the trans thing. Local people might be delighted to know I don’t buy into that shit considering I spent so much time living in Ohio. You know them Yankees and that. I swear it’s the goddamn phone number. I keep meaning to change my service and my number and I never get around to it. Might help if I ever had money. That’s not a common thing anymore.

When I go to Carrie’s I try to ensure that I’m gone before her husband Stanford (nickname: Lala) gets home. Or soon after he arrives. He’s been nice to me, to my face. Important distinction. If he and I are the only ones in the room, he will start trashing someone, and it is usually Brenda, another lady who lives in Dad’s trailer park and who’s known Carrie forever and is always over there because she’s been on supplemental/portable oxygen since she got COVID and now she’s afraid to be alone. Mind you, she pays them a certain amount per month for the use of their food and so on. He still bitches. I’m sure Lala talks shit about me too if he can find the right audience. I’d rather give him as little material as possible. Less selfishly, I don’t want to be all up in his bidness taking his spot on the sofa when he’s had a long day at work, and I just about never go over there on Friday when he’s off work (I think I’ve done that once) because he’s entitled to want some time with his wife, y’know? Up to her what sort of time she wants to spend with him but at least I give them that shot.

I keep feeling like at some point Carrie will expect something from me and I have no idea what it is. I hate situations like this. I get to feeling I’m doing something wrong but that no one will tell me what it is. Nothing keeps happening and I start to relax. Then BAM. I fucked up and didn’t read people’s minds and fix it on my own and now I’m in trouble. It’s not even normal things like throw your trash away if you eat, which I do anyway. It’s they tell you that you are welcome to come over any time and snack on their snacks and not a fucking word about pitching in with money but three months from now it’ll be you are drinking us out of house and home with the Diet Dr. Pepper supply. Or hey can you fork over some of the electric bill. Or hey your dad wants to know why you haven’t found a job yet. Something may be on the way in that vein. I have no idea what. I don’t like not knowing. Thank fuck I found the Jennings library. Their setup is better anyway. Carrie’s one advantage besides (so far) being a friendly face is she’s a lot closer to the house.

Speaking of things on the way. Tax Day has come and gone. I did file in ’22 for the 2021 year, and I got a nice fat little refund for that, but I didn’t file FOR 2022, and now not for last year. I INTEND to. It is a thing that will happen when I can make the thing happen. I am dreading the late fees or whatever they’re called. Nothing for it. It’s like when I used to get calls from creditors after leaving Mike and losing basically everything. Fellas, if I had it, you wouldn’t be calling me. (Or writing to me, if the IRS, which hasn’t happened yet but that’s how they contact you.) I’m fucking tapped. You’d have better luck trying to get blood out of a stone. At least an iron-containing one. At least some semblance of blood, therefore.

Going back to Carrie. I didn’t tell her about Dad’s breakfast grump, or any of his other recent food grumps. I get an idea from the little bit she’s said here and there in response to something I’ve said at the time that there are aspects of his personality she finds upsetting or aggravating, but not enough to write him off as a friend. But I have a feeling that if I did start venting to her, it might fuck things up a lot. That has happened to me before with other people, Matt for instance. People really do get angrier at their friend’s or relative’s being outed for shitty behavior than they are at the friend or relative’s shitty behavior. I do not even want to stir that fucking hornet’s nest. If she ever finds this, that’s on her; I’m not going to bring it into her house and say it to her face. I’m on thin enough ice. If she starts a tirade about him at some point, maybe I’ll chime in with additional info, but not unless. I can’t see her doing that, anyway.

It’s not that I want a trashathon about Dad. It’s that I’m fucking alone and face it, he’s emotionally abusing me and I’ve got nowhere to go and I need to talk about it somewhere. GOD why didn’t I vacate that fucking apartment at the end of November. I should have done. I’d be squeaky clean now and probably not here. I could have gone back to the Delaware shelter, maybe. I certainly could have asked. But here I be. And I can’t even argue with him because he’s a half-deaf jackass. Even when he hears my words properly, it doesn’t mean he groks my point of view. It’s more like most of the time he refuses to grok my point of view, because he thinks I am slow and stupid.

And God, the fucking catch-22s, which are why I got caught up this morning and why now I’m contemplating washing the dishes since he’s now gone to bed but I am probably not going to do it because next thing I know, the asshole will complain about me having a light on or making noise. So I’ll wait til tomorrow, at which point he will bitch at me because I didn’t do them tonight. [screams]

Someone, not me, probably should tell him soon that I’m only here because I had nowhere else to go and if the car hadn’t developed a fault, I wouldn’t have cared about whether I had anywhere to go. I’m not going to tell him. I’m just going to stay the fuck out of his way.

Sigh.

P.S. My foot itches like a motherfucker. I kept forgetting to get antifungal cream when I ran out of mine. I don’t get this very often but when it does, holy shit, and it’s always at night when it’ll keep me awake.

[screams again] FML

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!

I am not sure what’s going on with Dad today, but he’s been sleeping a lot and when he walks, he is more stumbly than usual.

I’m not even sure it’s the drinking. I mean yeah, he’s drinking, but his usual pattern with drinking is that if he finishes, okay, but if not, he goes and takes a nap and then when he gets up, whatever he didn’t finish he dumps down the drain and starts over, which often there’s at least half his glass left. (It’s one of those short glasses… six ounces?) Bourbon and Coke is nasty anyway. Bourbon and Coke is like fifty times as nasty if you let the Coke go flat. End of. But unfortunately, his not finishing drinks makes it more difficult to assess how much booze has gone down his gullet, and I haven’t yet seen how much bourbon he typically adds to these drinks in the first place. I will say he’s acting like he’s gotten more alcohol than usual into himself.

I hope that’s what it is, anyway, because if it’s not then something else has come up and maybe we start in with the hospital festivities again. It would sure explain his nasty mood of two days ago and his nasty reaction to breakfast yesterday because he has a nasty streak already, but it’s much worse when he feels like shit.

For my part, I didn’t sleep well last night and I felt like shit this morning. My fasting sugar was at least better than it was yesterday, though it was still too high, but I actually whole-ass sat here today and wrote out a goodbye letter to my daughter in case something comes up in the future and I croak in my sleep. I cannot shake the idea that I have a heart problem. I’m afraid to inquire about it in the event they tell me Medicaid doesn’t cover whatever test they’d have to run. (For instance, I need a genetic test if they suspect short QT syndrome.) I have also been battling feeling suicidal off and on for two and a half fucking years and I’m at the point that I’d rather just leave it up to fate than keep worrying about it. So whatever happens, at least I have something for her now and I don’t have to panic about being kept alive. It doesn’t matter anymore. If I can get a will written, it will matter less than zero. Looking forward to that, if it happens.

It was a decent goodbye letter, though. I have it in an envelope now in case it’s needed. I need to organize my important paperwork anyway.

Speaking of paperwork. Did you know I have the same file box I got in 1999 when I left Mike? True fucking story. I have used it ALL these years. I’m actually pondering turning it into a product manual file and then getting a fireproof file bag for my important shit. I can’t do it now, but it’s on the mental wish list. As in mind, not as in crazy. It’s not a crazy idea at all. We have no smoke alarms here and I’m mildly suspicious that Dad sometimes smokes in bed. God and Sonny fucking Jesus. (He definitely smokes while he’s taking a crap, so this would not be wholly out of character for him.) I would panic more, but the back door is literally outside my room. If I can’t escape with my life, it was time that life was over. Fuck it.

Have not yet organized the paperwork I mentioned two paragraphs ago, but I did find [dun-dun-DUUUNNNNN] my old journal from that year! I might have mentioned here that I wanted to transcribe it here? Well, I started that process today. I will tell you what, you might think I’m a bad writer now but I was fucking HORRID back then. Who the fuck did I think I was writing for anyway, a fucking agent? Maybe looking for a TV or movie option? Yeah… no. Not even a fucking soap opera.

So I’ll come right out and say it: that shit’s edited for dramatic bullshit. I didn’t want to edit anything at first, but after actually reading it I have now been set on the strait and narrow, THANK YOU JEEBUS. And I am not just irate at my bullshit a quarter century ago. I’m irate that all the bullshit took up extra space that I could have used to cram in more actual information.

Oh well. I like some of what’s there, and I did clear up some things I’d long forgotten but wondered about. And if you are curious about it, O Mysterious Readers Out Dere, just look at the archives widget in the sidebar (or bottom bar, if you are on your phone… scroll down). You should see a 1999 section. There you go. There’s even a smidgen of 1998.

I’m also considering, at some point, transcribing some letters I had sent to Dawn during my marriage and that she later returned to me in a big fat packet. There was some eye-opening shit there, too. If I still have them. We’ll see. Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. I could be dead tomorrow, the way things are going.

I have to think about what I want to happen to my digital shit when I croak. (Always when, never if… none of us live forever.) Right now I’m leaning toward “let Thea take care of it.” I don’t know how that will actually turn out, and this is one more reason to get everything sorted so she isn’t left with a nightmare job cleaning up my clutter. I was OK with letting Matt clean up my physical mess at the red house because Matt is an asshole and it’s his fault I left and God fucking knows I cleaned up after him eleventy billion times and it was always unpleasant. Oh my god, he had to do something besides look at a screen and wank. Fuck him. But I don’t want to do that sort of thing to my daughter. Bad enough her dad made her do some of his work in that regard before.

In the spirit of using up the carbs which I devoutly hope I can somehow avoid replacing (or at least learn to avoid eating… like the everfucking plague), I’m making spaghetti tonight, and I’ll eat mine in front of my laptop because I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I found the DVD section at the Jeff Davis Parish library in Jennings. I’ve already checked out… geez. How many? Four? We’re on five and six now? So that’s been fun. I watched E.T. last night for the first time in PROBABLY DECADES WOW, and was startled to realize that, unusually for films involving aliens vs scientists, these scientists were actually really nice people and the reason they acted all scary was because they had to move fast to prevent potential alien pathogens being spread around — or our germs going to E.T. any more than they had, for that matter. They don’t spell it out as much in the story, but if you consider the precautions they’re taking, that’s exactly what it is. And someone consulted with medical people to do the scientist dialogue. No albumin in E.T.’s body? Cooooool. I feel like he actually played dead to throw the scientists off his trail and await his people’s return, but that’s just me. An alien who could levitate five fucking bicycles at once could probably pull off something like that and make it convincing. (I do think he actually was sick. But I suspect the “death” was an act, is what I’m saying.)

Enjoyed the hell out of it though. I feel like it still holds up and frankly, some of the fucking kids these days could stand to watch it and be traumatized a little because they need to see kids being normal kids. Don’t we all.

Oh, and… if you see it again? Look at big brother’s friends when they’re trying to get E.T. to his ship. Look at the one in the trucker cap. Look familiar? I swear to fucking fuck, Stranger Things based THEIR trucker-cap character on him. Love it.

It’ll be the new Dune tonight — part one, not part two. Not sure the latter’s out on DVD yet. What I’ve seen of the first one, I’ve really liked. The David Lynch version was fucking lame. I put it on par with Kubrick’s The Shining which, by the way, is not a fucking compliment. Quit trying to be fucking artsy and just tell the fucking story. Thank you.

(I am not against artsy films. But if you’re gonna do artsy, do YOUR artsy. Don’t fucking vandalize other people’s stories. P.S. Stephen King still hates the Kubrick film. He just can’t say so anymore in public.)

The other notable one I’ve seen recently has been Coming 2 America — if you have not seen it but want to? DOOOOO EET. It’s FUN. SO many love letters to the fans. I was sad that Madge Sinclair couldn’t be in it, but they found pretty much everybody else. They even managed to make this film before Louie Anderson passed away, so he’s in it too. Is it a work of great cinematic genius? Hell no. This is strictly visual junk food. You will love it anyway.

Unless you’re lame too. I dunno.

Okay, wow, a lot happens in five days.

On the tenth, between 7am and 7:30, I woke to a whole lot of thunderin’ going on. This culminated in a power outage starting at about a quarter after. I had heard some emergency alerts coming from Dad’s phone, but none from mine, so I tried to ignore the whole thing, figuring the power would be back on presently. Then the alert came on my phone around 7:30 and I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I keep my phone on Bedtime Mode until I get up in the morning, so if I’m getting emergency alerts through that, we’re potentially fucked. Tornado warning until 8am, it said.

(I may be misremembering and perhaps it didn’t break through the Bedtime Mode and I just thought to check it since Dad’s was going off. Either way, the times are about right.)

Normally when we get tornado warnings I’m kind of on alert and somewhat worried, but no more than that.

This time I started getting this feeling like something was horribly wrong.

It probably didn’t help that the noises outside were not normal. Usually with tornado warnings the tornado is Somewhere Else and I never sense it at all. I don’t think that was the case this time.

It skipped us, wherever the fuck it touched down, and so we went on to have this fucking power outage for more than twenty-four hours.

Now, the day before the festivities began, whatever was going wrong with the icemaker in Dad’s fridge escalated to problems with the entire beastie. Had to break out the ice chest and go to Rita’s to get bags of ice and try to rescue the food. If the power had not gone out the following day (the fridge fucking up was Tuesday; the power outage started Wednesday), we might have been okay, but no such luck.

I did take advantage, after the power came back on, with all the food gone to finally clean out that fucking fridge. It was dirty the last time I lived here and I honestly think it was the same fucking dirt when I came back. I get that Dad can’t handle it anymore — I’m so out of shape I barely handled it, it’s the moving the shelves in and out that kills me — but he could have asked someone for help. Jesus. But it looks a hell of a lot better now.

Fridge guy came over and thinks that a piece of debris clogged the line or a valve for the icemaker and it cascaded over to icing up the freezer box and preventing cool air getting down into the fridge. We need a replacement part for the icemaker, but the fridge is fine now otherwise. Frankly I don’t care if we never fix the icemaker. We’ve got ice trays. It ain’t rocket surgery. But it also ain’t my fridge (Dad bought it; it did not come with the trailer, which he rents), so we’ll let Dad figure that one out and get on with things.

Yesterday, with all the fuss about the power coming on and all that, Dad and I ended up getting supper from Wendy’s. He’s been curious about their Baconators because they’re a good bit like those bacon cheeseburgers that Burger King offers. Well, structurally they are. Actually, BK’s version is blah by comparison. But we’d had a recent conversation where he asked me what the Wendy’s fries were like, were they skinny like the fries at McDonald’s and I said no, they are bigger. Like steak fries? No. Like normal ones. Well, when we picked up our food, first Dad was pissed because two Baconator singles and two regular fries were $22 and change. Then he looked at the fries and got REALLY pissed. I have been informed that when my father gets fast-food fries, he wants POTATO. Yes, Dad. They are all made of fucking potatoes. That’s what a French fry IS. I didn’t say this to him. When he gets like that I just don’t fucking bother, he’s an ass and he needs to just get it out of his system and feel like a dumbass later, which I’ve noticed does happen, even if he won’t admit why he’s suddenly being all nice and contrite. Fucker.

He did not tell me what he thought of the sandwich, come to think of it. He probably will never admit it’s a superior burger; that would mean giving Yankees a compliment, because he knows they’re based in Ohio. When I lived in Elizabeth’s apartment, in fact, I could have fucking walked to their fucking headquarters. Don’t know if I told him that. (I did tell a new Wendy’s employee that recently. I’m sure she thought I was absolutely cracked.) But anyway. If he’s written them off, more for me. It’s a little piece of Dublin and Columbus when I can’t be there anymore.

He was a shit about the tornado too. I was trying to tell him about feeling it when it went by and he said if I could have felt it I’d be dead. I told him Carrie felt it too (she and I had conversed by text message before this conversation) and he just repeated himself. Then said something about us feeling a wind. I was INSIDE A BUILDING when the fucker passed — what wind? That was all outside. Idiot. Yesterday Jodi, the landlady, told me that she’d felt it too and also, her daughter was driving in the general direction of Carrie’s place when that all came down and she suddenly could not see the road. She tried to drive to Carrie’s to stop until it went past but her visibility was just too shot. And she felt it too. I mean, she was right up ON it. Dad can think whatever he wants.

This is why I don’t talk with him about much. If we have conversations, it’s him leading the conversation and I only answer questions when asked directly and only as much as will satisfy his curiosity. I find I can’t even state a random positive opinion about something without him being a dick, especially if it’s something about animals because like as not he will grumble something about killing them and I’m pretty sure he’s not joking. There’s a son of a farmer for you. They’re not called “salt of the earth” for nothing — what does salt do to the earth? Kills every living thing on it, if you dump out enough. I don’t know how it ever became a compliment unless most human beings are murderously insane. And we probably are. Given all the evidence.

But I think I just have “perpetual victim” on my forehead in ink only assholes can read, because if it’s not someone like my father being a blatant dick, it’s someone talking over me or someone not taking me seriously or someone belittling me or someone ignoring me or whatever. Even Matt constantly tried to one-up me, when he wasn’t blowing me off only to finally take it seriously when he heard it come out of a fucking man’s mouth six months later. Bear in mind he claimed that everything fell apart in ’21 because I kept rolling my eyes at him. Just consider that context. I’m way the fuck over it. If you all don’t want me participating in society, you got what you wanted. I’m done with the whole fucking lot of you unless I need something. You had every chance for anything more. This is what you did with it all. I’ve got better things to do, like play phone games. Fuck you.

Last night he put in his breakfast request. Two sausage and two eggs; I think he wanted two biscuits as well, because what we got at Walmart to replace the zerged fridge supplies was the smaller versions since they fit our breakfast sausage better. I got up today and one of the things he’d gotten at Walmart yesterday was a smaller deep fryer. He had taken it out of its box this morning and set it up on the kitchen island with oil in it, lid off. When I opened the fridge for something, I noticed he’d grabbed one of the packs of hash-brown patties and put it in the fridge to thaw. Ordinarily, I would assume someone doing that wanted hash browns with their breakfast. But if I assume my dad wants some sort of food without prior confirmation, there is a better than eighty percent chance it will turn out he didn’t want it and he’ll throw it away. I elected to cook what he’d already asked me for last night, since there was no note and he was asleep in his chair. He woke up a few minutes after I got it all assembled on his TV tray and I was down the hall and heard him swearing. I went to Jennings a bit later, stayed at the library for hours, and came back and the deep fryer was still there but with the lid on. A little while ago, this evening, he told me he didn’t want any breakfast tomorrow. I am pretty sure he had decided he wanted hash browns for breakfast and was pissed because I didn’t cook them. It fits his general pattern.

“So why not take the chance and just cook them?” Because I am not going to get into this pattern where he gets to expect me to read his mind. That’s why. If he wants something, he needs to start asking. If he doesn’t ask, he’s not going to get. And next he’ll say I’m inconsiderate. It beats the fuck out of being entitled. I don’t play these games. If you want something from me, ask. If you want me to not do something, ask. (Don’t order.) If you want me to be here, ask and if you want me to leave, ask. Enough of the bullshit, the games, and the fucking backstabbing. I have no doubt that’s going on too. I just happened to catch him at it last time I was here by sheer dumb luck.

It’s POSSIBLE he’s just decided no breakfast because he plans to barbecue. If that’s the case and he’s just saving room then okay. But that’d be asking for the best-case scenario and, well, sometimes I get to have those and sometimes I don’t.

P.S. He’s not supposed to be eating potato in the first fucking place. They really do not want him eating a lot of potassium because of his kidney failure. They even told him to stop taking his potassium supplement, and those pills don’t contain a lot in the first place. So we could avoid all this bullshit if he would just do what he’s fucking told. The funny bit is he said the other day that he just does what his doctors tell him, and that was a blatant lie; see also his drinking habit that he refuses to drop. But he also said to someone the other day that he hates wasting food and DO NOT FUCKING GET ME STARTED on that one. Is this man’s default just being a lying sack of shit, and why do I keep being plagued with such people? The only time they decide to “tell it like it is” is when they want to tell me I’m a bad person. And it’s usually bullshit in the first place.

(A few times in my life I’ve done things I was ashamed of. The people who historically have read me the riot act over “being a bad person” are 100% unaware of 90% or more of those things. Those things were one-offs anyway but the point is, I’m getting verbally abused by morons who have no fucking idea about me or my life, because they get off on being abusive and I just happen to be available. One more reason I want to wash my hands of ALL of you.)

(I gave a taste of the current situation on my Facebook and Dawn was like “well thank goodness you aren’t sleeping in your car down there” like it’s okay if someone abuses me as long as they’re helping me, how the fuck did she get into social work again? God, I don’t even know about these people anymore. The whole fucking enterprise is run by fucking clowns who rubberstamp one another’s clownery and people like me just get ground up in the gears. Fuck all y’all.)

(She and I still go way back and I still think of her as “my people,” though sometimes I think that’s an illusion because if I were actually living where she is, none of her friends would touch me with a ten-foot pole and I suspect most of our interaction would still be via Facebook Messenger. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m just a side project and she keeps in touch so she can observe me like a bug under a magnifying glass. I guess we’ll see.)

I applied for another cleaning job the other day and there was this weird message at the end about what email address to write to if we want to know the status of our application, also heavily implying that they would contact us by email as well, and… nothing. It’s been a week now. What the fuck are you fuckers doing out there, just ignoring everyone and crying that you can’t find employees so you can get more federal money? Probably. I heard from more than one source that just that sort of thing’s been going on since 2020. I will remind you, too, that these assholes bend over backwards to hire men who just got out of 20 years in prison for raping a woman but refuse to hire a woman who was 17 years out of the workforce to raise a child. The fucking state of it. Put (male) rapists in the workplace, in women’s public restrooms, in women’s locker rooms, and in women’s prisons, keep women out of the workplace, ban abortion, ban contraception, what the fuck’s next and dear fucking God, WHY. I wish I were twenty years younger and had just won the Powerball. My ass would be in Scotland. I’ve had well past enough of this shit. Scotland is et up wit’ the woman-hating too, but it looks like they’re starting to turn things around for the better.

Speaking of Scotland. I’m just having another I-want-my-big-man sort of evening. Don’t mind me. I wish to fuck he had an unmarried clone somewhere. Also that I did not look like a troll.

Oh yes, that was the other thing. Health stuff.

1. There is a better-than-decent chance that I just get short QT interval on my EKGs but don’t have short QT syndrome. That would be nice, though I should still follow it up. Will I? I don’t know. I don’t think I could handle being told that I don’t matter enough to investigate that possibility. You don’t have to be in love with me, fuckfaces. Just do your fucking job.

I’m pretty much at the point of thinking I probably have never had an “inferior infarction.” But that’s something I need to ask about even more than the short QT interval. And would be even more unbearable if they blew me off.

2. The biopsy result dropped into my MyChart file after I talked with my providers about the results. So this is the one class of results they don’t drop as soon as they’re available. I had wondered about that. Good choice. I would not have liked for my first knowledge of malignant results to come from a website instead of my doctor.

That said. I don’t know even half of everything about medical shit and, accordingly, I did not recognize the diagnosis on the biopsy. I also can’t screenshot anything in that app, which is weird considering it’s my health information so I can do whatever the fuck I like with it, but I could copy and paste it so that’s what I did and then googled it next time I thought about it. So apparently, some of my milk ducts went through a particular age-related change that made them visible on a mammogram. Now if that ain’t some kind of stupid. Ha. There was also inflammation, but I don’t know whether that was from the biopsy process. Doc wasn’t worried about it, so (keeping in mind no one’s yet approached me about the errant EKG mentioned above) I’m not going to worry right now either.

3. I have improved my eating habits SLIGHTLY. Less snacking, and smaller servings at meals since eating too much makes me feel like crap anyway. Right now I’m just trying desperately not to get into more food-related arguments with Dad, who thinks every food-related ill is down only to how much one eats but then, on the other hand, insists on feeding me large amounts of food, and the more junk the better. But the upshot is I’m still very unhappy with my sugar numbers. I at least can get my fasting down to the 140s, but doc says no higher than 130 and that’s still too fucking high. My postprandials are a fucking nightmare. Used to be I almost never saw the 200s and then only after eating sushi, thanks to the rice, and I knew I’d hit them because I could feel it. Now it’s routine, both in number of incidences and in how I feel in that range. No bueno.

I’m also fed up with looking like a troll. I’ve never been a great beauty, but it is DEPRESSING to find photos of me from 2012 looking hella better than I do now. Some of that is age, but not all of it.

I need to go keto again and stay there. I do not know how to do that without Dad starting shit. I had that period of time on my own and maybe I could have managed it when at InTown Suites, but it would have meant eating the exact same things every day and not a wide variety at that, because I had almost no food prep supplies. I will always regret not taking Dad’s Instant Pot when I moved out in ’22, because he wound up getting rid of it anyway. Once I was homeless, keto was out of the question because there was no way to store perishable food. And I’m bullshitting myself because I already didn’t eat a great variety of food and I should have been advocating for myself instead of comfort-eating. I probably should stop fucking whining about it and try to make some sort of plan. I’m not getting any fucking younger.

And finally, I didn’t mention this but I finally bit the bullet and bought a pad of 11×14 drawing paper… drawing PAPER, not Bristol. Have accordingly prepped a grid paper as well. I could have just stuck with the Bristol grid, but this will be easier to shine light through. If I tear it up too fast I can always go back to the Bristol grid. Now to start drawing. That’s the tricky bit. I keep slamming into a mental wall about this. They say that the thing you’re the most scared to do is where you find the greatest power… not sure whether that’s bullshit, but drawing is a thing I know I can do and no two-bit troon-loving woman-hating “employer” can take that away from me. And if I’m not 100% perfect at it, which no one is at drawing, there are no legal ramifications and I will ruin no one’s life. Fucking works for me.

Yeah, I know. It’s not a job. But that’s going nowhere, right? I need something that doesn’t tear up my car, and that is that.

I have mailing tubes too. I’m all set.

Okay. Off to bed. I think I had best work on the potato salad in the morning. I meant to make it this evening when it became apparent that Mr. “I want to make potato salad tonight” wasn’t actually going to, but no real harm done. If I’m early enough it’ll be cold by suppertime. More illicit potato. I’m just about sick of potato. Dad literally is, even if he won’t admit it.

Well, Dad had rallied for a little bit after his most recent hospital stay, but he had a bit of a downturn again. He hasn’t regressed all the way to how he was before he went into that hospital stay, but he’s not at the level he was when I moved here, either.

It’s pretty plain to me what’s the most likely PHYSICAL cause of the problem. When I got here, he hadn’t been drinking in I think a month? It’s possible he was lying to everyone, but I don’t think so. I say that because that’s been the one big difference between then and now. He is supposed to see his kidney doctor this month and possibly one other one and everyone’s saying he doesn’t need more labs, even though they changed his meds in the hospital and gee, it would be nice to track how that’s affecting things. It’s Dad’s own fault, really, because he complains incessantly about what they do to him. He couches it in crude old-man humor, but he also means it, and I’m sure they know that. So they pull their punches — not a good metaphor to use when they’ve literally saved his life about a billion times in the past seven years, but like that — when they ought to intensify the fight a bit instead. Because he hasn’t been declared incompetent and can still say no, and they know that too. So they resign themselves to only doing as much for him as they can get away with, in deference to his complaints.

(I don’t expect them to keep him alive forever, but he could be doing so much better than he is now, for his own comfort and functioning if for no other reason — but he’d rather fuck around and find out, which is sad considering how critical he is of everyone else who does that.)

The irony is that when it’s my turn for all this shit, they’ll probably actually treat me like shit and if I so much as mildly remark about the treating-like-shit, they’ll write me off as a Karen and make things worse. And you wonder why I’m so angry at men anymore. They could change this. They fucking don’t. Let’s defer to the problem men and cause problems for the women. Yay.

Okay. And. I think my being here is also stressing him out. No, I know my being here is stressing him out. He’s said as much, though for once he wasn’t mean about it. Yes, Dad, I know you have lived alone for thirty-plus years. Yes, Dad, I know it’s what you’re used to. Never mind I’ve been keeping up with the kitchen under my own incentive and, if Deborah weren’t cleaning here every few weeks (it hasn’t been every second week in the past couple months — I have no idea what’s going on there), I’d be doing that too — probably for free instead of $140 a month — AND, I’m at his beck and call when he needs to go to town and he doesn’t have to make his business Carrie’s business or the family’s business anymore. There are many more benefits than drawbacks in it for him. He sort of dances around the almost complaining that me having the TV on at night when he’s sleeping bothers him (he is hard of hearing and I never have that thing at even half volume), or me having my bedside lamp on at night (not even the overhead big light in my bedroom) bothers him, but he also rarely sleeps all the way through the night even when I am not doing those things, and I have to hear his fucking westerns at 3am or the fucking early news at 5am. I have two fans in my room now and I run them at night as much to drown out his noise as to keep me cool. In other words, he wasn’t sleeping anyway and I can’t see why the reason matters. And he naps in the daytime regardless. At least once. Usually twice.

I could try to work toward getting my own place. I should do that, probably, for his sanity if for no other reason but another thing that I’ll have to deal with is people giving me stinkeye because I am not there all the time, and if I were to get a place it would likely not be in the trailer park so I would not be RIGHT THERE for an emergency, AND, if we had another episode like last October with his brain bleed, the reason I would not be living with him is I would have a job, so either I’d risk the job being there with him through the crisis or I would not be there with him through the crisis because it conflicts with my work schedule and people would think I was shitty for that. I sound heartless invoking other people’s opinions of me, but think about it. This whole fucking mess I’ve been through with Matt and then the leaving Matt’s house and having to come here since there was nowhere local to go and then the having to live in a weekly-rate motel and then the being homeless: all that shit happened BECAUSE I had offended too many people’s opinions. When no one likes you, you end up on the margins of society and that much closer to premature death. That’s the real reason people care about being liked. It’d be nice if some of you bozos would start noticing.

(Yes, there are people who “like” me online. I’m like a really-badly-written TV show. Believe me, they change the fucking channel. It’s called “scrolling through one’s phone” these days, though.)

And if you were wondering, yes, I fucking hate people for shoving me into this catch-22. They will ignore, of course, that Dad is in his mess by his own design and mistakes. They will not ignore that when I’m seventysomething with fucked-up health, let me tell YOU.

No, I won’t belabor the point. I treated it several paragraphs ago and you can just go read it again if you want.

He seems to like having someone to chat with. Not all the time, but if he’s in a chatty mood, it’s handy having me there. Sometimes I enjoy it, sometimes… well. The repeating stuff he’s already said to me doesn’t bother me; sometimes you just don’t remember you’ve said something before, it’s been more than two years since he said a lot of that shit to me, and now he’s still contending with aftereffects of the brain bleed. (I think it’s even permanently changed his handwriting. It was not an improvement.)

But there are times he verbally contends with me and his reasoning is like, what the actual fuck, Dad? And the brain bleed might be to blame for some of that, but it isn’t to blame for all of it because I ran into this with him sometimes before last October, too.

A recent example. We were talking about term-of-service discharges from the military. I think that’s what they’re called. I forget now and I can’t google it as I’m writing this. But what I’m talking about is when you have been in the same pay grade for longer than regulations permit. They have a maximum time you can serve in each pay grade and then, if you haven’t gotten promoted, they kick you out.

It’s not a big deal when you are lower enlisted, because for E-1 through E-4 your promotion is automatic. It’s a problem when you go to E-5 and up. That is a whole complicated process where maybe you have to go to a month-long training somewhere, and you definitely have to go before a promotion board, and you have to do a little of this and a bit of that to make your record look better for said promotion board.

AND… [drumroll]… there have to be enough slots for your target pay grade in your job specialty.

Probably their way of avoiding the “too many chiefs and not enough Indians” problem.

Dad contended that if you were really good at your job then you would win out over people in your pay grade and job who weren’t as good at the job and so of course you would always be promoted.

I tried to explain to him about the number of slots available in a specialty. He bulldozed over that and repeated that it doesn’t matter because if you’re good enough at your job they will have a space for you.

I gave up. But no, Dad, and I don’t care if you were a senior chief petty officer. You weren’t paying attention on that one or you have long forgotten it. Or shit started working differently after you retired. Whatever.

I could have told him the tale of how I got a letter when I was an E-4 stating that there weren’t a lot of promotion slots in my medical admin specialty and suggesting that I reclassify into something like fuel specialist instead, because they had plenty of openings for promotion. I did mention my wasband Mike’s little issue with not having much of a future as a parachute rigger with nine years as an E-4 so having to reclassify as a Special Forces medic so he’d have half a prayer of making E-5. I think the limit for E-4 was ten years. It’s been too long to remember now and (again) I can’t google it. Besides, that number might have changed since the nineties. But even that Dad bulldozed over. Dude… whatever. I was there. Don’t tell me what I know. I didn’t say that part out loud, but it’s that thing where if I go quiet, you have not won the argument. I’ve given up on you. It is not a compliment.

We’ve had similar arguments (not quite but to the point he gets contentious) about food, nutrition, and weight gain. That’s a subject I try to avoid even joking about now because he gets insulting. Dude, you got your kidney failure with a fucking fork every bit as much as I got the equivalent of a second me stuck to my body with a fucking fork. And then you want to cook me ten tons of food. Oh my god. Just stop.

—

I ran to Rita’s to get two bags of ice for Dad and saw Rafael’s wife (I have forgotten her name again) standing outside with him and her dog, a little black Chihuahua. Doggo was very excite when he saw me standing at my car and started barking, “Hey! Hey! You! Who you???” so I went over to say hi. His name is Odie, and he is always nervous around new people but eventually he settled down a lot.

Mrs. Rafael and I got around to talking about the feral cat infestation in the trailer park. I love cats, but I will be the first to tell you keep your goddamn cat inside. If they were just in danger from cars and big wildlife, that’d be awful and I’d be sad but they’re going around killing birds. Not fucking okay.

I wish I could do something about it. I’m good with cats. I just don’t know if it would be better to TNR the whole lot of them and let them live out their natural lives or to just take them in to walk their last mile, so to speak. I am not against euthanasia for companion animals. It beats the hell out of them staying in shelters or being feral their whole lives. But admittedly, if I got rid of all these cats, we’d probably end up with a hellacious rat problem or something, because birds aren’t the only critter cats hunt. And some yo-yo will always be dumping off cats and kittens near us. It’s a whole thing.

Bit of a joke to talk about which option I’d pick. I’m too poor for any of them.

—

Anyway, this is the second time I’ve been at Rita’s… I want to say this month? I don’t think it was still March last time I went. Same old guy was there, and this time he told me a couple Boudreaux & Thibodeaux jokes. I hadn’t heard any of those in years. Maybe I should put a section here on the website for them. We’ll see.

Guys like that remind me of Pawpaw but, ironically, he’ll be in my dad’s generation or not very far from it. Dresses more like Dad’s dad, though.

—

It looks like Dad’s icemaker is kaput. He speaks, if I understood him correctly, of acquiring a new fridge. My god, man, you’ve got ice trays. I never liked icemakers anyway. I don’t trust them to stay clean in the tubing and that’s just what I need, a nice bout of Legionnaire’s disease. But at least that would not be an issue with a brand-new fridge, I hope. We’ll see what he does. I washed the trays because they’ll have sat out in the cigarette smoke and I’ll set all that shit up for him tomorrow. The cooler is pretty good at preserving bags of ice and I figure he’ll have enough in there through tomorrow night at least. I’ll be making ice for him by then.

One more thing he doesn’t have to struggle with, but I’m annoying. Thanks?

He and Matt should be besties. Matt thought I was worthless too.

On my Substack I’ve been writing about various things, and I have this pattern for constructing the titles of essays where I talk about autobiographical stuff. Stole said pattern straight out of the Friends playbook, so those essay titles start with “The one where”. It’s kind of silly but I figure most Gen Xers will get the reference and that’ll likely be a good chunk of my miniscule reader population.

So I just did one about “The one where I got my husband arrested.” I write these things offline, but it’s ready to go.

So now I’m a bit wrung out and not inclined to be wordy or eloquent here. But some highlights:

1. Have now made my third-ever batch of potato salad, possibly fourth, and all since I got back here last December. Dad has pronounced my efforts “real good,” which is high praise in Southern American English.

2. Yesterday I fried my first pork chops. I have cooked pork chops before, but not breaded and deep-fried. Result also pronounced “real good.” I devoutly hope the flavor and general texture translate well to a keto air fryer recipe, because that’s one I’d miss if I ever get back on it. In the meantime, I suppose there’s the pseudo-old-fashioned way. I say “pseudo” because if this fucking nest of clowns thinks Crisco soybean oil is “traditional,” have I got a beach in Arizona to sell them. But Dad thinks animal fats are “grease” and “more messy” and pretty much everyone is captured by the fake nutrition lobby. What can you do.

(People think this being captured by gender identity thing is new and unusual. And I’ve also got a bridge in Brooklyn on offer at tremendous discount. It’s yuge!)

3. GEICO has not yet tried to charge my account only to be turned down. The payment was supposed to be due on the fifth. Apparently my coverage is still active. I have no idea how we have come to this pass. The due date has not changed in the system. I didn’t realize this was a problem until after I got home from visiting Carrie yesterday and shit, I’m lucky if I can make a phone call here. Can’t really investigate the other very effectively. Hope nothing weird’s going on there.

4. Dad made some remark about all my appointments lately as he’s noticed I have one Monday, so I went ahead and told him about the tit biopsy. Might as well. That could have gone either way because I probably could have just mumbled it off, but fuck it. Not that Monday’s thing is about the biopsy. Me telling him was just an explanation for extra appointments in March.

I tried to get a hold of the office yesterday to double-check that my appointment is fasting but wouldn’t you know it, they close at noon on Fridays. They were open today but I forgot about that until now. I’m not used to a doctor’s office open on Saturdays, even for a half-day, and anyway I think they are going to remove Saturday from their operating hours later this year, so it probably doesn’t matter. But I guess I will just assume it’s fasting and go in hungry, or water only. I could have sworn they told me to do that. 1:15pm is just a weird time of day for fasting labs.

Oh well. And that reminds me. Note to self: Ask for a glucose meter prescription. If they aren’t willing to do that or if Medicaid has some weird rule, I’m gonna be irritated.

5. Dad for his part has good days and bad days. The hospital visit last week was me letting a bad day go on for too long so I’m hoping this is a transient thing. He IS due to see his kidney doctor this month, so if he lasts until then before something gets really weird (for him), I suppose that’s something but if he’s taking a nose dive then we’re gonna have a talk. I’ll take him food in the hospital if it’ll help. This is ridiculous.

But the way today went, I may be barbecuing tomorrow. I am not opposed to that. It is a skill I should learn. If something happens and I’m still here, I’m inheriting the fucking grill, after all. It would be weird if I didn’t. What’s Doug going to do, have it shipped to Oregon? Un-fucking-likely.

—

Additional note: I’ve been back and forth about applying to Local Grocery Chain in Crowley. The most recent day we went, I noticed everyone had their store uniform shirt tucked into their pants (trousers). I hate wearing shirts that way. On the other hand, what a dumb reason not to try to get a job. I dunno. We’ll see.

Okay. Am tired go boom. I didn’t sleep quite enough last night, NOT THAT THAT IS A BAD THING. I need to push my wakeup time back a bit. ‘Later.

Got a call from the clinic and then a page from the Crowley hospital within probably half an hour of one another. Phone calls at home are unreliable and it’s one thing when it’s your brother and you can just text him to go “hey, the call dropped” and quite another when you are waiting to hear, from someone probably on a landline switchboard, whether you have a sick tit.

I wanted to get online anyway, so I came to Jennings (I am here right now) and called my clinic from the library parking lot. Not long after that talk, the hospital called me.

Good news. It’s benign. I have to go back in six months and do this fucking song and dance again, but they just want to watch it. I have a Mass of Unusual Size somewhere in there (I would not have felt it on a self-exam — it’s pretty deep) and a few other problem-child spots and they just want to make sure nothing gets any ideas. Fine by me. Long as I don’t have to keep getting stabbed in the tit every time as well.

I never told Dad about any of this and I won’t unless the mass changes. We can’t even have an intelligent conversation about nutrition and weight; I’m not going to burden him with worrying about my stupid tits when there’s nothing to worry about. If it’d been malignant I’d have had to say something, but only because you can’t hide tit removal and chemo hair loss. If it had been something treatable with pills and wholly invisible to him I’d have said nothing. I already haven’t told him I have a diabetes diagnosis. What does it profit? Nothing. I am not going to have a fucking fifty-five-year-long alcoholic who smokes and hates broccoli lecture me on “healthy lifestyle” any more than he already does. This is not open to debate. Even when he does bring it up I just let him talk because I know he’s full of shit and he isn’t going to convince me of anything on that subject, and it’s too late to convince him.

(Side note: There isn’t anything particularly healthy about broccoli. It is useful when you need fiber and certain vitamins IF the vitamins aren’t cooked or aged out, but it also contains antinutrients, particularly working against the thyroid so really, ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances. But most people associate it with healthy eating, and he sure fucking does. So.)

And let that be a lesson to the rest of you. If I don’t engage you in debate AT ALL, not even to offer words of agreement or encouragement, I have decided you are a fucking idiot — on the subject in question, minimum — and that there is no hope for you. You have not won. You are not better than me. It is not a fucking compliment. You have fucking failed. I argue when I think you are intelligent enough to understand and have the moral fiber to accept being disagreed with or even accept being wrong, if that’s the case. (Just because I take a stance on something does not mean I am always right. YOU HEARD IT HERE, FOLKS) If you WANT me to respect you and if you WANT me to stick around, you do not want me going quiet. Even if it means I’m no longer swearing. Swearing means hope. No swearing because no talking means doom.

I am pretty sure it works this way for most other people, which is why the biggest assholes of my life tend to go quiet sooner or later. To be fair, had I submitted to their bullshit and let them get away with it and therefore was still allowed in their lives, I’d have just been miserable anyway. It worked out for the best.

One exception to the above is if we have an audience. If we have an audience I might well argue with someone I find hopeless, because it might educate someone else. I still think you’re an idiot, but you’ve become a useful one. Yay?

Anyway, the other reason I might not bother arguing is if the subject is not important to me (probably also true of most other people). I will usually make it clear in some way if that is the case. I can, believe it or not, be diplomatic. But nutrition has played a major role in my current health miseries so this is not one of those unimportant topics. NO, Dad, eating less crap is not better than eating more crap. Eating crap is bad. Period.

(I don’t mean morally bad, I mean if you eat crap it will hurt you. Bad in that way. Speaking as someone who keeps eating crap. I know what it’s doing.)

I should write a Substack essay about that. I am brainstorming topics that are not gender identity so I don’t become a one-trick pony.

And speaking of nutrition, I finally got on a multivitamin again. I had been thinking about it anyway but what really decided me was recently flossing my teeth only to have the gumline around one of my fronts go a gusher. I will get minor gum bleed from time to time because I am not my own best friend, but it does not do that. I thought, well, maybe I don’t need to eat grapes at every fucking meal but I sure haven’t tried to get enough vitamin C, and that decided it. I don’t need to have scurvy on top of everything else. That was a few days ago, and already the situation has improved because that wasn’t the only time I’d had an impressive gum bleed lately and now it’s not doing that anymore. I can take a hint. It might take being scared a couple times before it sinks in, but I get there eventually.

It’s One-A-Day which is marginally better than Centrum, but at some point when I’m somehow earning regularly (however that happens), I’d like to go back to my old multi. That fucker was AWESOME, and it is still on the market. Hallelujah.

I’m looking back at what I’ve written and I want to clarify. I can think someone ain’t too bright and still like or respect them. That’s the case maybe about half the time but, say we’re talking about family, you can’t pick your family. So if a lot of them are being stupid it is just something you have to live with. The alternative is walking away from your family. I may yet do that after my dad passes, because no one’s given me any compelling reasons not to, such as regular and positive social interaction. My walking away won’t be because I hate them, though I may be disgusted by a handful of them. It’ll be because it’s a waste of energy to chase something that isn’t there. Blood kin should matter, but all too often blood kin don’t matter and the ones who treat you the least like you matter are the ones yelling loudest about blood being thicker than water. I’m over it, really. But no, I’m not saying I’ve given up arguing with Dad about nutrition because I 100% disrespect him. Certainly me thinking he’s a doofus about biology isn’t respectful, but it also isn’t untrue. Guess what: Lying to or about someone isn’t respectful either. I’m not going to call him a genius about the human body when he plainly isn’t.

It’s weird, because I sense that he is quite smart about some things. I think a lot of times he chooses not to use it. Probably why he used to get so pissed off about my grades and is currently pissed off at me for not being a millionaire. He thinks if he bullies me then I won’t turn out like he did. Because he could have done better with the brain he was given than he actually did, and he knows it.

Just don’t ask him about what vitamins do. That’s best.

Also, for the record, bullying don’t accomplish jack shit. What it does is traumatize the bullying target and mess up her brain so she’s actually LESS capable of stuff. We thrive, as a species, on solving problems. The only way to solve a bully is to kill him. The only other option is if he solves himself and stops being an asshole. Most of them won’t because duh, they’re bullies. Most of us don’t want to commit homicide. The bully therefore becomes an unsolvable problem because most of us are not bullies. And that’s why bullying isn’t a “what doesn’t kill us” that “makes us stronger.” It’s more like termites or rust.

I thought I wanted to write more for today but my brain is scattered. I see my most recent job application is still hanging in limbo. Meh. I gotta pee, then home I go.

Huh. I thought I had a lot more entries to catch up with than I do. This is just the third one I need to put online. I must have been thinking about my Substack essays and got my wires crossed.

I went to the library in Jennings yesterday and spent some time. I wanted to get some money onto my Chime to pay hosting, I wanted to get a better pill organizer for Dad, and I wanted to get ahead on Substack a bit because I was starting to fall behind.

Anyway, because I had a decent internet connection for it, I checked to see if my biopsy results are back. They are not. I’ve begun making Very Secret Diary jokes about it. Day eight: Still no biopsy results.

I also took another look at my EKG summary and the specific numbers mentioned in the results. I can’t read EKGs — it was never a skill required of patient admin specialists in the Army, even though we filed them in medical records (not really a discrepancy, I’m just saying we did encounter those squiggly-line printouts) — but the results were Englishy enough and the four items of (my) interest were Google-able. I can’t see where they got “inferior infarct” from. Doesn’t mean anything, I just can’t see it. I took some comfort from the language indicating they only suspect it. We’ll see how that goes.

However, my QT interval was interesting. It does not fall within normal range for a woman. I googled that one and turns out it does fall within range for short QT syndrome, which apparently is genetically inherited.

It is not something I have ever talked about because I assumed it was all just me being inactive and out of shape, but I have definitely had dizzy spells and similar all through my life. I wasn’t one of those stereotypical Southern belles fainting onto couches and needing smelling salts. It would just hit me at inconvenient moments just when I needed to have my shit together and an operational spine. And it was just a feeling, not a faint.

It wasn’t anything severe, though. Like, I could run two or three or five miles back in the Army and actually make it back upright and alive. But there didn’t seem to be any real pattern to the episodes other than I think getting overheated made them more likely to come on. Even then it wasn’t every time. Probably not even most times.

(Although it got worse somehow in the few months after I caught COVID. That seems to have improved, though.)

But the thing that really tugs at me is how I used to react to fruity alcoholic beverages back in the 1990s. Random, right? Seems to have been daquiris and wine coolers. It wasn’t every time and I never figured out the pattern other than those broad categories of trigger; it didn’t help that most of the time it was drinking out somewhere and I wasn’t the one who mixed the drink. But what would happen is I’d get this uncomfortable feeling in my chest. I don’t mean my tits, which are a different body part. I mean the actual area around my heart. It wasn’t heartburn, because I’ve had heartburn. I just know it scared me, and I’d sometimes have to go outside and catch my breath for a bit to feel better. I think it happened maybe two or three times that I can recall. I wasn’t a big drinker in the first place, but that shit put me right off wine coolers and most daquiris. (I don’t think I ever had a problem with the strawberry ones.)

So, I mean, I guess I’ll ask about it. I am pessimistic. I’m on Medicaid, and in my experience no one gives two shits about people on Medicaid. No one gives two shits about middle-aged women in any case, but if no one is being paid to give a shit it just makes everything worse. Medicaid has, I heard, the lowest payout of any of the insurance plans in the United States, public or private. No bueno. The ONLY reason I am on it is I need medical care and don’t need to be in medical debt for the rest of my life. I’m so poor I wouldn’t even be fined for not being insured, so it’s not that. But I was thinking. Maybe if I tell my medical people I want to start exercising but want to make sure there isn’t anything serious to the EKG result first, they might take ME more seriously. It would make them look good if I lost weight and improved my health markers instead of dying young, right?

I dunno. There are no maps for me anymore. I get why so many women want a man in charge. I get why I so often defer to men. It’s just easier. It’s not because they’re actually smarter.

[waves arms around at the general state of everything]

What’s the point of having gone to the moon when rhinos are going extinct, amirite?

“Can’t we go to the moon and also save the rhinos?”

Not with men in charge, apparently. If you can think of some other reason we haven’t done both, I’m all fucking ears. Plus you aren’t answering why we need to save the rhinos in the first fucking place. Where the fuck did they all go?

Right. Moving on now…

Oh no, wait. I should add. When was it? Yesterday? Probably. So I’m driving to Jennings one day recently, whenever it was, and I coughed.

It was productive. (I coughed up goop.)

I am not sick!

Particularly troublesome was the fact the goop had a color. I had to open the tissue back up that I used to catch it, after I got where I was going, and look at it again to ease my mind that my lungs weren’t bleeding.

If the color looked like anything, it sort of reminded me of that sticky crap that gets all over the walls with Dad smoking. Depressing to think he’s fucking up my lungs already, but that’s probably what it is.

I realized a while back that when medical types ask adult patients about general habits and addictions, they never ask if there is a smoker in the house. Well, ain’t THAT a gigantic fucking oversight. You don’t even get the filtered smoke that a smoker gets. If they’re smoking, you’re smoking. Just the way it is.

Nothing I can do about it. Like so much else.

Pity that I won’t be able to play the but-I’m-old card if by some miracle I live as long as he has.

Fucking men.

That said. I got on Amazon while we were in town today (he had an appointment with his nurse practitioner, which was the reason he got the labs last week in the first place) and did some pricing. I am still figuring out the portrait-drawing thing because my speed in all matters must be fucking glacial, and I wanted to see if it made more sense to get stiff mailers for my Bristol board or to get real drawing paper the same size and then get mailing tubes that would fit it, being that I only had about seventeen bucks in my PayPal to spend on it. If I had bought a pack of mailing tubes it would have made more sense to get the stiff mailers, but I bought a pack of two. I suppose that’s fair. There is no use amassing a gigantic mailing-tube collection until I know if I can make a go of this. Just selling one portrait would leave me the money to buy tubes and then some. I’m not fussed.

So that gets here Friday. I’m anticipating being bitched at for buying something off Amazon. If the universe loves me, it’ll get here while he’s napping. The universe probably doesn’t love me, but we’ll see.

I may set aside a couple days a week and just go do it at the library. I haven’t decided yet. I CAN do it in my room on the little card table — even an 11″x14″ will fit on that table — but I have to juggle the lighting, and if I’m working from a source image on my computer, that adds to the surface space I need. 99.9% chance I will be working from a source image on my computer. And hey, you never know. The right person might stumble across me while I’m drawing at the library. Making art where one is visible in public tends to bring more art business. It is what it is. But dumb reasons for me to do it all at home are sure to develop. Welcome to my life.