my boring life story

I have posts to add here but I need to get out the door and suddenly it just all seems too much. I’m sure you are all heartbroken. 🙄

So I have those lined up and I will upload them, probably tomorrow. Right now I have to go save a website. EEP.

(Love ya, big man.)

Today’s realization that yesterday was International Pothead Day makes my delivery outcome all the more confusing. Where were all the people with the munchies? Goddamn.

I had gaps where I had to sit and wait for calls. In one case, I was in the parking lot of National Grocer at the intersection of Camellia (sp?) and whatever that other road is and, with the app still searching for gigs, had time to get out of my car, turn on my phone camera, and take a photo of the statue of General Lafayette that was right next door. On a Saturday. That was also 4/20.

[sigh]

Now, I did make it. I got enough together to pay the fucking insurance. Happy enough about that. But in the process I ended up going to Abbeville, and then going to Rayne (to a distant subdivision that wasn’t even in Acadia Parish! And then hardly got tipped), and… I dunno. I was all over the place. But it was getting late and even though I probably could have gone another couple hours, Dad wanted to cook sausage and rice for supper and I didn’t know how he was feeling (he will get weak — er — if he goes too long without eating), and I decided to split the difference. Because the other thing I needed to pay for was Rory’s fan domain, and I thought I had until the 23rd on that one.

Guess what.

I was at Aunt Emily’s today because she had a huge shin-dig for her birthday and Uncle Abbie (brother, not husband) cooked his fried chicken which is UH MAZE ING, and there was a bit of a lull in social interaction for me so I was checking my email, and that’s when I got the notice about the domain expiring TODAY.

Y’all, I could have sworn I had until the 23rd. Something is rotten in the land of wherever the fuck the hosting service is located. Probably related to their sneaky rate increases over the past two years. Y’all are not giving me thirty-five a month’s worth of services. You just fucking aren’t.

(They did email me earlier this month and they probably did say it was the 21st but my brain was set a certain way and I didn’t notice. But there has to be a reason I was fixated on the 23rd. Has to be.)

I tried to get it all together today. I just barely squeaked by between my Chime balance, the two bucks I moved over from PayPal (all I had, and a few cents), the four dollars in quarters, and the five dollars in bills. And I drove to Jennings on not enough gas, and Walgreens told me they don’t take less than twenty for a Chime deposit.

[screams]

So it’ll be go back to Jennings tomorrow, get some gas in the tank, get my ass to Lafayette, and pray. I do not have enough gas left to get to Lafayette and THEN earn the rest of the domain name’s twenty and THEN earn enough for gas. But if I start out with whatever I can put of my current money into my tank, it will not matter whether I put twenty into Rory’s fan domain immediately upon earning it or whether I get another ten to twenty in gas first and THEN put twenty into the domain. Shit, I don’t even know if I’ll earn twenty. Or thirty. Or forty. The day could be a complete fucking dud. But if it’s not a dud, I need twenty and twenty from Uber tomorrow. I would settle for twenty and ten. Ten would at least get me home.

I’m so sick of this shit.

Emily’s party was nice, though. I think my dad’s family may be starting to relax about me sticking around. I cannot predict the future and I know what I’d rather do, but that is based on my experiences up til now and what I think I want, and that could change. Meanwhile, Aunt Matilda is actually telling me she’s glad I’m living with Dad. I don’t think I am out of the woods with her, but we’ll see, I guess. And Aunt Emily chatted me up a bit. And my cousin Erin asked me about my art again and spoke of what she does and of maybe asking me for help coming up with designs now and again. That one may actually lead to some work. I do not know at this point what that’s going to mean, but it is definitely a welcome potential opportunity. I do not know where my arty thing came from. I always thought Mom because she draws, but Erin’s on my dad’s side. Now, my paternal grandmother was a bit of a putterer and crafter. That alone could explain it. Who knows. But anyway, Erin does a lot of graphic-design stuff, including laser-engraving on wood and other things. And back when she was a baby I had drawn a portrait of her, and she still has it, thirtysome years on. Up on her living-room wall, apparently. And now she wants me to do a portrait of her (wife’s? girlfriend’s?) granddaughter, and she wants to possibly collaborate on other stuff. This could be a lot of fun.

I did warn her I’m slow. She said she doesn’t care about speed. That’s a plus.

I have to say, anyway, that it’s kind of cool the way Dad’s family always bring up my portraits sooner or later. I mean, I did Erin’s, and I also did my cousin Amanda with her brother Garrett when she was a little’un and he was a baby. I wouldn’t have been remembered for that sort of thing in Columbus. It’s too easy to get lost in a big city that bases a big chunk of its identity on the arts, I guess, and the more pretentious bullshit the better. Especially when they’re using pseudoscience and woman-hating to weed people out of even being in the running for making a living. I doubt I will be facing much of that nonsense around here. I mean, okay… Catholics. They have their own peculiar brand of woman-hating, but I’m very probably not of reproductive age anymore and I probably can dance around that, just out of reach. And I wonder how devout Erin is anyway, given her romantic tendencies. I won’t ask. If it comes up in conversation, we’ll see. I wouldn’t base my collaboration decisions on her faith or lack thereof, anyway. Long as she didn’t make it a problem for me. I’m not terribly picky at this point. When you know hell is made up, you don’t give a shit anymore whether anyone thinks you are headed there. Santa doesn’t give me bags of coal either, y’all. Never has.

We have cool weather just lately after the rain yesterday and now apparently the mosquitoes have decided it’s Party Time. Fuckers. I thought they’d found something else to do. I’m glad I don’t itch from them as badly as I did when I moved in with Dad in ’21. Possibly related to no longer living in a house full of cats. The thought that I might have a cat-dander allergy is LAME, though, and so I will not yet entertain it.

Got mail from the local hospital system who is collaborating with Humana, my Medicaid provider, for a program to help people with high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. I don’t know if I have an official hypertension diagnosis, but I’ve logged high values enough times in that hospital system that obviously they’re concerned. I will get a fat-girl blood-pressure cuff and a CGM(!) that both talk to my phone, though, and my Medicaid will cover them, so I’m happy. I know I already have a prescription for the glucose strips, but that should not be a problem because you’re supposed to use your strip meter to double-check your CGM occasionally anyway. All that, and I’m supposed to voice-chat with someone in the program this coming week. Have an appointment and everything. This after discovering that gee whiz, if I move around more, my fasting sugar actually gets close to target range. I don’t LIKE the upper end of target range, but it’s a start. So this all may get terribly exciting in the near future.

Update on the dental shit: Turns out it was actually pain in the GUM and it seems to have transferred to my molar a little bit. After I posted about the molar in a semi-panic, the next day the culprit was more obviously the gum, and even more so the day after that, et cetera, and today the pain is pretty much gone. Whatever it was, I guess I scared it off. I still want to work out the whole dental-health issue though. One thing at a time.

Okay. I need to fix food and plan tomorrow and do other stuff. I mean to stop in at the library, so I might actually get this shit uploaded. Shocking, I know.

(I’ve been thinking for weeks about installing the WordPress app on my phone. I am curious, once I get it set up with the server configurations for my various sites, whether I could write posts there even if I’m offline. Only one way to find out.)

I do believe we have had a breakthrough.

Dad was up when I got up this morning, despite my best efforts to wait him out. I was expecting some weird kind of shitstorm. He was actually in a good mood, though. Said he had chatted with Aunt Matilda yesterday, apparently about me, and I have no idea what about or why but apparently they were discussing ways I could get assistance, which is a conversation she’s been involved in before. (I have seen what passes for assistance around here and, with the possible exception of housing if I could even get it, all it will do is make my life worse so, unless I’m about to literally starve to death because Dad’s dead and I can’t drive anymore, that’s not bloody likely.)

Dad asked me where I was yesterday and I said I was delivery-driving, so we got into that and long story short, he now thinks I’m employed. I have said all along that this is something like a job, except obviously I’m a contractor and not an employee, but him thinking his daughter Has A Real Job is not a bad thing. It means he now officially gets off my ass.

Best part? He has volunteered to cover my fuel costs.

That is a HUGE load off my mind.

It’s not just about me. Him keeping my tank topped up means we have a means of escape during hurricane season, which is getting to being a bigger and bigger deal thanks to all you yoyos not doing anything about climate change, and I don’t fucking mean electric cars. I won’t get into that here, just wanted to throw in that dig. You now think I’m a moron, so let’s move on. Point is there are multiple reasons for him to do it and in the final tally it will be a huge help to me. I can dig it. Let’s go.

So we ran to Jennings to do a couple errands for him and he filled up my gas tank and then I took him home and then I went to Lafayette. It was not as good a day as yesterday. I got a little over $50 yesterday and then I got a little over $40 today. I have maintained for a while that Fridays are weird; the evenings are usually pretty good but lunchtime is unpredictable. If you’re lucky you get the “holy shit this week has been hell LET’S GET LUNCH” orders, but often you don’t. I may have had some late tips coming in that I won’t know about until tomorrow, but the good news is I did hit today’s goal even if not, so I’m glad. If I get at least $41 tomorrow, I’m in the clear for the auto insurance. I will try really hard to go farther than that without staying in Lafe until nightfall, because that city is crazy and I’m not comfortable enough to drive it in the dark yet. I’m hoping for $60ish so I can have the roughly $20 to go ahead and get Rory’s fan domain out of the way. That’s coming up due on the 23rd. (I had bought it the day before his fiftieth birthday.) But if I don’t get Rory’s bit all the way done tomorrow, I still have Monday.

I still think it’s a good idea to do this every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday but instead of hustling for $40 or $60, aim for $20 every time, at least after I get this month’s bills in the bag. Hang on, this will make sense in a minute. If I get the $20 all three days, that’s $60 a week. That makes $240 in a month. I wanted $200 to cover my have-to-pay bills. Phone is a little over $43 a month so let’s say $45. Hosting is $35 (and I’m thinking more and more that I might want to change hosting services… if I can trust a cheaper one. I moved to this one because the previous one allowed hackers to change my shit). Insurance is $112. That’s $192 total. Close enough. That other $48 can be random other shit that comes up once in a while. I just opened a PayPal savings account where the interest rate is between 4 and 5 percent(!) and no fees, so I’ll just chuck it in there until I need something.

That’s my stopgap to keep things going. I can do other things to try to increase income when I’m not driving in Lafe.

Enough of this feast-or-famine panic bullshit.

I wish we had figured this out last time I was here. Honestly Dad should have backed the fuck off knowing I was still getting $600 a month from Matt, and then I could have conserved my car. I am so tired of people not respecting me where I am and always wanting me somewhere else NOW whether I am ready for it or not. This isn’t their fucking life, it’s MY fucking life, and I AM THE ONE WHO SUFFERS IF SHIT GOES WRONG. I’m still pissed off at Elizabeth telling me my actions “affect other people” as she was kicking me out to live in my car again. I will never deny she had the right to ask me to leave, but that remark was hypocritical as hell. YOU ALL AFFECT OTHER PEOPLE. I am a people too. You also affect ME, so how about recognizing that finally? But I can’t have a say in my own damn life unless it’s a say YOU agree with. Fuck off.

(Speaking of which. I still don’t wholly regret going back to Ohio two years ago. One, I love Ohio. It’s home unless I get to visit Scotland and find I love Scotland too, and that’s never going to happen because Poor, so there you go. Two, if I hadn’t gone back, Matt would have dicked me around instead of keeping the paperwork current on the car and then signing it over properly. I like to think he lived in terror of me coming by the house and screaming at him if he didn’t stop dicking me around, because I hate that motherfucker and I wish he were scared of me. The past 21.5 years would have gone one fuck of a lot differently if he had been. For one, when I got fed up with his and his people’s bullshit and dumped him the first time, he’d have fucking stayed gone and I’d have been better off.)

(I was not in the habit of going to the house and screaming at him. We had a few arguments over twenty years where I did anything close to screaming at him, and I was already in the house with him, and I literally mean I could count those specific arguments on one hand, but somewhere down in between his three brain cells he decided it would work in his favor if he pretended I was this habitually screaming harpy, and clearly it worked because everyone we had as mutual friends has shitcanned me, because clearly me swearing on a blog is exactly the same as me throwing a brick through his front window, and I’ve never done the latter either. I don’t know who the fuck everyone thinks I am, but you’re way off the fucking beam. That’s okay. You get to find out what it’s like to believe him on no evidence when he gets bored with you. Do not come crying to me when, not if, he makes that happen to you. You will not like my reaction.)

I know. I still live too much in the past. It’s hard to let go of it when I’m still mired in the immediate consequences of it. This stage of my life is about building a new Present for which I get to have different consequences in the Future. I just haven’t figured out what the fuck that looks like yet when I’m still living in the blast zone of my past fuckups. Bear with me.

—

Well, anyway. So after I got done driving delivery (and I now sort of know where Carencro is, and it was Breaux Bridge yesterday), I stopped in Crowley to go to Walmart. I still have gift-card balance and, dig this? I had over a hundred bucks in rewards points in my Humana app. What??? I have no idea where it came from. I am not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. So, not remembering how much I had left on the most recent card (they only let you make cards worth up to $25, in $5 increments), I pulled out another $25. The reason I went to the Crowley Walmart store specifically, okay, there were two reasons. One, I didn’t plan on going to Jennings and then going home from that direction. It would have just added too much distance to the trip and I was tired. Two, I’ve been working on a crocheted twin-size blanket sporadically since I was in the shelter last year. I no longer like to leave projects unfinished, even if it takes me fucking forever to get them done. Problem was I had just about used up the Soft Navy and Black yarn colors (Red Heart Super Saver). Jennings Walmart had both colors, but in the large skeins and I only wanted the regular-size ones because I don’t know how much more yarn I need, and I didn’t want to wind up with a huge amount of leftovers. I knew Crowley had both colors in the regular skeins. So I’ve got those now, and I needed a few other things, and it ended up being just a smidgen over $18 for the whole shebang, and most of that was on the old card and only a literal few cents off the new one, so I was fairly pleased with myself.

I haven’t decided what to actually do with the blanket when it’s done. When I began it I was thinking “give this to the shelter” as a thank-you for taking me in. I might yet do that, but if Dad sees it finished and claims it, he gets first dibs. I picked the colors I did (the other one is some kind of gray… charcoal?) because I thought perhaps the shelter had an excess of so-called “feminine” blanket colors and I wanted to do something nice in blue and gray. So there you go. They’re also the sorts of colors Dad likes, so there’s that.

That reminds me. I am losing two domains this month because Poor. I MAY be able to rescue the second one but I’m pretty sure the first one is a lost cause. That’s the bistitchuality.com domain. And I have thought it over and I want to say, and this completely doesn’t matter to anyone else but I am just sharing, that I have no problem with bisexual people (except when they’re homophobic… sometimes they are) or with the LGB community — I should think fucking not, I spend half my time calling out homophobia from the genderdorks these days — but the idea of having a domain and yarny-stuff online store with a name that sounds anything like that community just doesn’t sit well with me anymore. It’s not a moral thing, it’s political anger about what far too many of them are allowing to happen in their name. But I still wanted to have a site about knitting and crochet, so the name question vexed me. Seems like all the good names were taken years ago.

But! I have now come up with a brilliant idea and I need to whois it to make sure it’s available and I will be THRILLED AS FUCK if it is. I will say no more than that in case an asshole is reading this. Let’s just say it is not likely to be something someone else has thought of, and it has heart connections for me. And that is not a clue to the name. That is very broad and vague and there are no clues in it at all. When I reveal the name — if I get this done; knowing me, I’ll fucking forget for like five years or something — any of you who knew me in my old life would understand what I meant.

Which, none of you did because you’re all fucking bots. You know it. I know it. Moving the fuck on now.

—

SOOOOO… My last real period was in February. The… sixth? I think? And I think I had some spotting later that month and possibly in early March, but nothing to write home about, and it just kept getting lighter and lighter every time it happened.

I have been afraid to get my hopes up because the last time I lived here, I’m gonna say that between January and March I had no period either, and I got my hopes up then, and then it cranked right back the fuck up a couple months into my being back in Ohio and was interfering with my fucking job search, so… thanks? So I’m worried something like that will happen again. But so far, no dice, and this has gone longer than it did last time. Yay? I hope?

However. I noticed something interesting, and here’s where I get into TMI so if you are a family member, I recommend you just stop reading here. If you don’t, that’s on you and I don’t want to hear it later. Ever.

Okay. They gone? Who cares. Moving on now. So, probably about once a month, and probably while I was ovulating, I’d get frisky and then do something about it. Not WITH anyone, but if you thought that at fifty I don’t know how my bits work well enough to benefit from it, boy do you ever not know how the world works.

So normally I’d do that thing about once a month, and then, here’s the interesting bit I noticed… I would spot the next day and then start my period not long after. But there were times I would get Extra Friskies at other times in the month, not real often but now and again, and I’d still get the spotting if not the period. Probably the stupid fibroids. Fuckers. But none of that’s happening now. It’s awesome.

No wait, that was one part of the interesting bit because we haven’t gotten to the other part of the current situation. I hadn’t gotten any fun in a while, if self-serve, so I did it again recently and not only did I not have spotting the next day, I also did not have spotting the day after the next time I did it and, unusually for me, this was twice in one week.

Bonus: The rousing conclusion felt different, too. Better. More… intense. More like it used to feel back before my reproductive system went into a complete fucking tailspin.

Legend has it that fibroids shrink as a sufferer goes into menopause. Hormonal changes. Oh man, I fucking hope that’s what it is. I missed Fun Me. Looks like she’s starting to come (ahem) back.

But that’s another reason I’m hopeful that this is finally it. My poor fun park. If she doesn’t get to party anymore (is a party by yourself really a party?), at least she gets a well-deserved retirement. Respect.

—

This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be up for fun times with a buddy if I ever got the chance again with someone actually worth it. (In theory. In practice, I look like a fucking nightmare with my clothes off so honey, it’s not you, it really is me.)

It does, however, mean I don’t have to worry about certain potential consequences anymore. WOOHOO

…

Okay. Off to bed, to dream of large men. Mmmmm. Big man. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Got Ubering done today. Did not get to $70. It is not as bad as it sounds because just getting an average of $40 before gas (so, an average of $60 for the day, if $20 to gas) would get me to $120 and I need $112. It’s Thursday and I need to keep in mind that was never a hugely busy day in Columbus — not even in Dublin, where I had some of my best income. We’ll see what tomorrow and Saturday bring. I may wind up working after sunset if shit gets stupid. But today wasn’t horrible. I did have one two-dollar run but for the most part either the whole run was $5 or more or the tip took it to $5 or more. Mostly.

It was a bit over $50 today — enough of a bit that I actually did get $50 — and so there’s $30 sitting in the Credit Builder now waiting for its friends. So I need $82, minimum, over the next couple days. So that’s $61 a day for the next two days. I don’t like my fuel level, and I’m pissed off at the Murphy’s people because I was going to put $30 in the tank because I had a $10 bill. “We don’t split tender.” Well tell that to everyfuckingone else on the fucking planet, sweetheart, because just about all of them do. It wasn’t her fault, unless she was wrong about policy and needs more training. Anyway, that $10 bill went to my supper, so it wasn’t a total waste, and I got to sit and screw around on Facebook for a bit while I ate, ditto. But I’m still freaking out because I don’t know if I CAN get to $81 both days. This wouldn’t be so bad if I hadn’t glitched and assumed the 21st was on Monday there for a while. It’s on Sunday. I have to get this done by 11:59 that night. If I have to ask Dad for money, I have to get it into my Chime account well before then.

This could get Interesting. Honestly I should just do this every Thursday through Saturday and then stop at $40 total per day. Then I would never fall behind. That’s $60 a week after gas which is $240 a month which is more than I need and then I’ll likely get random bits of change from Dad as well. I usually do. The stopping at $40 a day might reduce my fuel needs, too. It will definitely be easier on my car.

Uber tells me they will be raising the Instant Pay fee to a dollar and something. It was fifty cents when I started two years ago. I am pissed. There is a workaround: I need to activate my little debit-card account they set up for me, at which point my money’s instantly available and no fees. It’s just not a good time to do the activation yet. Let me get my insurance paid first. But I didn’t want to have to take on YET ANOTHER fucking debit card account. I’ve got both the debit and credit cards with Chime, the debit card with PayPal (yes, they have debit cards again; no, you do not need a business account), that BioLife thing (not quite as functional, just holds money), and probably one or two other things. What the fuck. But if I am going to keep doing this I might as well save some money.

Dad called two or three times while I was gone. I probably should have answered, but either he was going to ask me what I was doing and then give me shit, or he was going to ask me where I was and then ask me to do something for him while I was out or, worse, drive allllll the way back for something that could have waited. Neither outcome was desirable, so I just didn’t bother. I have enough trouble earning money in this de facto third-world country without him interrupting the process.

Lo and behold, there were signs he had cooked food when I got home and he was already in bed. At least this time if he got the runs there was no way he was going to blame it on my cooking. Yesterday wasn’t the first time he’d had them after eating, but it was the first time he had an accident that he needed my help with. I suspect it wasn’t the first accident either, just the first one he had no choice but to tell me about. There have been a couple suspicious leavings here and there, like the time he dropped shit in my clean laundry load in the washer. His attempt at playing innocent afterwards when he inquired about the towel was awkward as fuck. I just played dumb.

My luck he’ll make special effort to be awake when I leave. Hope not. Just let me get on with things. I am tired of the drama. You folks see my drama here when I’m mad at other people’s drama but you don’t see the bullshit they put me through over basically nothing. If people would just fucking relax and stop trying so hard to have problems they could have prevented or else just not seen those as problems, because they really aren’t, I’d have almost no conflicts with people. They look at me funny for having hobbies and puttering. That is how you keep yourself from needing to make people miserable. Watching TV does not count. Neither does gossip, unless it is celebrity gossip, and then only if it’s positive. I am at my bitchiest when I spend more time thinking about my hobbies than actually pursuing them. I am not a mutant. Most people with hobbies are like that. People without hobbies are even worse.

Speaking of. I had finally settled on something to do for a sample drawing for my portrait-drawing listing on Etsy. It is not my first choice but I don’t know what I did with that one photo of Thea. I may never have transferred it from the photo CD to my machine. I hope that’s it because otherwise I already see some gaps in photos I should have in my files. (I came to a standstill on photo organization anyway because something fucked up in one transfer session and the filenames changed on the photos!!! I have to fix that now GODDAMMIT. I had already fixed them before!) It’s a film photo so even if I can’t find the digital, I haven’t lost it — it’s just a pain in the ass to deal with if that’s the case. ANYWAY, I had a point: I need to get on the ball with the source photo I did pick. I don’t know why I nag myself about it ever; when I put it up there, everyone will ignore it. But if I don’t try, that’s a source of potential income I’m flushing down the toilet. Plus in the process of obtaining said income, I will get lots of PRACTICE, which I have been beating myself up for YEARS for not getting. Just like not getting practice, I’m not getting younger. I need to quit fucking around with this.

The image I picked is a shot of the big man when he was in The Crew (2009, UK film, in case there’s a U.S. film by the same name). It’s in that first sequence where they’re knocking over a semi truck for its cargo. They did a nice closeup of his face as he sat in the boss’s SUV looking out the window. I wanted something with not a lot of details in it so I could get it done more quickly.

I saw a new pic of the big man today. A few actually, from the same event. I don’t know why I am suddenly seeing news about the Knuckles premiere (I don’t know the exact title and I’m not online right now). I could have sworn it was airing already. Maybe that’s just been the hype leading up to the premiere? No idea. Anyway, I was surprised big man showed up for it. Probably had to as he’s playing a major character (the Buyer, basically I think the main antagonist). He is not an extrovert, is mah big man. More to the point, I almost didn’t recognize him. He was, quite out of character for him, IN A NEW SHIRT AND SUIT COAT. There’s an outside chance his trousers are not new, but I can’t tell. (They might be from his black suit, and he’s had that one since at least 2015. And hot damn does he look fucking… never mind… in that.) That alone wouldn’t have thrown me off, other than this is a whole different look for him and creates a whole different vibe, except he also got a haircut and GROOMED HIS FACIAL HAIR WHAT THE FUCK. I have NEVER seen him do that. Either he’s clean-shaven, has that scruff thing going on that half the guys are doing now, or has gone full wild-man beard — at best, with the beard, he might condition and comb it, MAYBE trim it a bit. But not like this. He’s cut about two-thirds of it off at least and he has shaped it. And, weirdly, he’s groomed around the ‘stache. Including above it.

I said on the fansite I would not express my opinion. I will do it here because no one fucking reads this anyway.

1. This change has “wife has weighed in about wardrobe” written allllll over it.

2. I don’t like the mustache. Groomed at lipline, yes. Shaved above, no. And I can’t decide if it looks like he did it himself. He might have. No biggie: hair grows back. He might nail whatever he was trying to achieve with more practice.

3. The overall effect is “someone tried to change Rory McCann into something he’s not and it looks like he’s not sure he likes it.”

Even if it was all his idea, even if he picked everything out, even if he paid a facial-hair groomer and they just happen to suck at their job, that’s the vibe going off right now. The look is good (even with me not liking the mustache trim, them doing a better job at it would have taken the teeth out of that objection at least) and he should not be embarrassed… it’s just not HIM.

Or I’ve been dead wrong about who he is. Equally likely. I don’t know everything. I know even less about a man I’ve never met who is not my man. I like him scruffy and/or beardy and I’m sulking a little bit, mentally, that someone (or he) has cleaned him up. BUT it’s also possible that he was depressed or had something else negative going on mentally for a lot of years and maybe the scruffy reflected that and now he’s doing better, he just hasn’t gotten “settled in” with his new look yet.

And if that’s what it is then I will get used to it and learn to like it better. I don’t hate it, it just weirds me out. Familiarity will cure that. We’ll see. So show up in more pics, big man! You’ve got a whole-ass Instagram account you’re not even fucking using. (I fucking called it.) PEEKTURES. NAO. FOREEEEEVER.

Hm. I wonder if he still has that marvelous red scarf…

Sad that I know parts of his wardrobe, huh? There’s a blue buttondown shirt that I recognize because he’s worn it a lot, there’s the aforementioned black suit, there’s the blue-and-green plaid trouser suit (haven’t seen that one in years, he may have chucked it), there’s the Blackwatch tartan kilt suit that I suspect is wool (and I very much doubt he’s chucked that one), there are the black leather dress shoes I’ve seen him wear with Black Suit and Kilt Suit and, possibly, as the Scott’s Porage Oats Man — if he takes good care of them and only wears them for dress occasions then yes, they could last that fucking long — and there’s this sort of brickish-clayish-red polo-style short-sleeved collar shirt that he wore for his Hound audition and has been seen in since. I keep seeing those on repeat. I wonder what other new stuff he will pop up with. And the hat. He’s got this hat I like on him. Maybe a fedora but if not, similar style.

(Yes, I know the “wisdom” about men in fedoras. Bite me.)

(Wait, no, you don’t bite me. Big man can bite me. Gently. Nip. Mmm. There ya go)

(Wait, did I say that out loud)

Anyway.

I probably noticed it before and then forgot, but there seems to be a BioLife plasma donation center on Ambassador Caffery in Lafayette! One of their locations in Colubmus was where I donated plasma in ’22. Gave it up because almost every time I went in, they said my heart rate was too high. I even got turned down once for being one beat-per-minute over. I think that has actually gotten better, though. I need to call them and see whether they will allow a diabetic to donate because if yes, I’m down. I would still have to drive to get there, but I would not have to drive MORE once there, dig? I wonder if they will let me use the same pay card… if I even have it. I might have chucked it out. Eep. I would make at least as much going there twice a week as I would have done earning the bare minimum with Uber. It’s worth a shot, anyway. No pun intended — it isn’t really a shot anyhow.

I am pretty sure I have dental shit going on with my back teeth. Upper way back in the back (my) left-side molar, anyway. I have something LIKE a dental plan? But I see something in the paperwork about a $500 annual allowance. If they had to do anything more than clean, x-ray, and drill-and-fill one tooth, I think I’d be in trouble. I have to figure this out. I am not in pain, but it’s gotten sensitive. That is not a place I want an abscess to form. That’s right up under my sinuses. I’d be one sick muhfugger. Not even in the fun way. Fortunately for me, I know some tricks. It will depend on what actual damage is there. Nothing has broken off, so that’s promising. The question is will I be able to afford said tricks. One day at a time, I suppose.

Oh, okay. What tricks. The official story with cavities is that bacteria eat holes in your teeth for no fucking reason and then the dentist has to drill the holes and then fill them with mercury so you can lose IQ points to not have holes in your teeth. What’s a lot more likely to be true is that your teeth, being living organs, can be malnourished just like the rest of you and when that happens, they develop weak spots. Kind of like getting osteoporosis, except in your teeth. The bacteria batten down on the weak spots and then you wind up in trouble. But there is a period of time in between the formation of the weak spots and the development of holes when you can still solidify things back up. This actually happened with one of Thea’s permanent teeth. There was a soft spot forming and the dentist put it on watch right around the time I switched Thea and me to animal fats and from the next time we got her a dental x-ray, the dentist never mentioned the cavity again. It had mineralized back up.

So what I need to do is my old trick of AD3K2 + multimineral + cleaning up my fat intake. It works a treat. It will work even better if I can go keto because there’s some kind of relationship between your insulin levels and the health of your teeth. This is not from a mommy blog. This is from research abstracts I dug up off Google someplace. The solid bit in between your enamel and your pulp chamber in each tooth is called dentin, but it’s not as solid as it looks; there is fluid circulating in there. If your insulin is elevated, that fluid-circulation rate slows down. People with hyperinsulinism and insulin resistance tend to have shitty diets anyway, most particularly in the mineral-intake department. Wreaks all sorts of havoc. Your teeth being one of the metabolically least important parts of your body and yet excellent little mineral reservoirs, if your body needs minerals you are not giving it, they will be first to go.

Poor people don’t get cavities from LaCk Of DeNtiStS. They get cavities from starvation. Even if they’re fat, they’re not getting enough of something.

Wait, what do I mean “they.”

I wish I could say I’ve completely come to terms with my situation, but nah.

Dad got up and watched the news for a bit while I was farting around with this. I had my door closed, so he didn’t bother me. He’s now gone back to bed. I think I will do likewise (to, obviously, not back to). I need wiggle room to find the ideal time to go out the door in the morning. I was so tired when I came back, and this second wind’s only going to last so long. Ni-night.

You too, Rory. Damn it. Wanna cuddle.

Dad had a doctor’s appointment today and I didn’t feel like cooking only to run into drama again — and he hadn’t ordered breakfast last night, either — so I snitched three of his breakfast pancake-dogs and had the leftover coffee. I’m not proud. If it’s sat in the coffeemaker carafe overnight I’ll still fucking drink it. I like cold coffee better than hot anyway.

He had a hard time getting around today. Well, this is what happens when you forget what a microwave is and get all proud and pissed off because someone didn’t make everything fucking perfect for you and you throw perfectly good food away. Then you’ve got no energy and you can barely walk. I didn’t say anything, just helped him get around. He at least seemed to have gotten over the evil grump thing, for now, which helps the overall situation.

He wanted a chili cheeseburger for supper. It is pretty simple: half a bun, cook the patty, put the cheese slice on, heat up some microwave chili (see? except I heated it up), spoon that on top. I cooked some fries too, and for once they were a kind he sort of liked. And he actually finished his supper.

Except the universe has a hate-on for me recently, because he got diarrhea later. The problem with being old and slow is that if your guts go faster than you do, you will be in trouble. I guess it isn’t a severe hate-on, because what mess he couldn’t hold in hit the bare floor (no carpet! no rug! yay!) in his bedroom and apparently did not splash anything else. Another thing about old people, or at least this one, is their gut flora must change or something because things are not as rank as they used to be. I got things cleaned up okay. He’s got an extra Depend in the bathroom in case he needs it — and the thing is, he usually doesn’t. But lately he’s gotten the runs a few times. He advised me to spray Lysol in my room in case it’s something catching. Boy, by the time I have cleaned up your hypothetically infected shit, spraying my room does no fucking good. I swear he has this magical-thinking outlook about damn near everything, but if you asked him, he’d tell you he’s practical. No, Dad. Really no.

You see me talking about this all casual-like. I was definitely grumbling about it to myself between my ears, but I did not give him any shit (he made quite enough of his own, thank you) and there’s no reason to. We can’t help when our bodies don’t work right, and he was embarrassed enough. The only reason I am even talking about it here, which a lot of people would view as public humiliation, is because we need to know this sort of thing happens to the elderly and that someone’s got to fucking clean it up. Because right now you are fobbing off the care of the elderly on unpaid female relatives and underpaid care employees and that’s bullshit. Maybe if we all understood we are all headed for this ourselves if we live long enough, we might rethink that whole strategy.

And for the record, though I would not like to deal with this every day, I would rather deal with this than with him giving me attitude about food, or anything else really. There is no intent involved with malfunctioning intestines. There is all sorts of intent involved in being mean to someone.

If I end up having to wipe his ass, though, we’re going to talk because if I’m not gonna get paid for this other than room and board, someone needs to get paid for it. He needs to quit drinking anyway. I don’t know if that is contributing to his general situation. When he was last in the hospital his nephrologist suggested he might have neuropathy in his stomach, because Doc sees that sometimes in diabetics who, for probably obvious reasons, are a large part of his patient population. I don’t see why that couldn’t happen lower down the GI tract as well. Or something else could be going on. My money’s on Dad does not tell his doctors everything, even though if he did then it’s possible they would have something that could help him. I don’t know exactly what he is expecting to happen here.

He does seem to expect to die soon. Both his parents passed away in their early 70s, and he’s 72. He’s in a bad way now himself. But fuck, if I knew I was about to croak, I still wouldn’t want to put myself into situations where I’m shitting on the floor. That just compounds the misery. It isn’t worth it.

I need to get out and Uber (Eats) tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday or I am not going to make my insurance payment by the absolute last due date on the 21st. If it’s not looking good to get it done but I have some of it, I can ask Dad for the rest and he’ll probably be all right with that, but I’d rather not go there. If I aim for $70 a day to account for gas (say, $20 a day for that — so $50 above that) and make sure I get all of lunch hour, it might be possible. Youngsville seems to be pretty good for tips and that sort of thing, and now that I know they’re kind of close to Lafayette, I’m more willing to give them a shot once I’m there. And then I have to keep going after that because I have to re-up the fan site domain. Letting that go is not even an option.

I don’t know why I bother. I enjoy the hell out of the big man but I know why I do and it’s kind of sad and pathetic. It also keeps me out of trouble, and God knows men never seem to add anything but money (when they’re not taking it) and misery to my life, and I can make my own of both and it won’t even give me an STI. So if I’m gonna be into a guy, let it be a completely unavailable thing. But it still feels like “putting too much energy into a man who will never appreciate me,” which is exactly what it is, and I wouldn’t do this for any other guy anymore. Closest I’d get is going to see that Scottish comedian in Houston when he heads out thataway, and I probably won’t even do that, because I wouldn’t just have to pay for the ticket. It’s a five-hour trip one way and I’d need one night in a motel to be safe, minimum. I see lots of his funny stuff online. That probably will have to be enough.

I need to find out how to order a physical SIM from Visible by Verizon. If I can do that then I can finally switch to something cheaper and get a local number. I will wait until after I get the insurance and big man’s domain paid. Hosting isn’t due until 2 May.

Okay. Need sleep fall down go boom.

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.