my boring life story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[waves arms around at the general state of everything]

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

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

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

Right. Moving on now…

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

It was productive. (I coughed up goop.)

I am not sick!

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

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

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

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

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

Fucking men.

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

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

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

I almost wrote “31 Easter” as the title of this post.

I didn’t get a chance to do any Eastering with Sean, but with Thea we never had much of a yard and weren’t really plugged in to community stuff, so most years we just did a plastic-egg hunt in the house. She had plenty of fun with it. Now there’s no reason to really do anything. Dad says he’s Catholic; technically I suppose I am too, thanks to infant baptism. (I think the Church counts us baptized folks even if we aren’t confirmed for Communion.) But Dad makes rabbit-hunting jokes this time of year so I suppose we know his take on it.

He’s still doing okay and will actually be grilling today. He got a barbecue pit a few weeks ago and then fell ill so had to keep putting it off. My only concern at this point is how long the chicken has been in the fridge. It could have been a lot worse. Dad initially had me take chicken out of the freezer over a week ago, last Friday I think, for thawing to grill on Sunday. Then he felt like shit so he never got started. Then on Wednesday he expected me to roast that chicken which had been in the fridge for more than half a week. I wasn’t fucking having it, because chicken’s not supposed to sit opened (not in original packaging) in the fridge for more than two days. I could fudge it to three or four if I felt like taking the risk, but no more than four for sure. So while he was napping that day, I thawed the same number and kinds of pieces and threw out the ones that had been in the fridge. Then he wound up in the hospital, so I never roasted the chicken, so that’s what’s in the fridge today. We have hit my four-day limit but as long as he doesn’t do his all-too-often thing of not cooking the bigger pieces long enough, I think we will be all right.

If I complain about having the pukes and the shits, you’ll know we weren’t.

I can’t decide if I am suffering negative placebo effect from learning about that stupid EKG result or if shit is just getting borderline scary. As it is I’ve had heart palpitations at bedtime for a while. Nurse practitioner asked if I was also having trouble breathing and I said no, but there are times I wake up from sleep gasping for breath so I’m betting sleep apnea is also on the fucking table. And sleeping on my left side is less comfortable than sleeping on my right. The only reason I ever do it is so I am not always sleeping on the same side and never giving it relief from pressure against the mattress. Kind of important for general circulation. I just miss being able to sleep like a normal person. Hell, I miss BEING sort of a normal person. It’s terrifying how far out of things I have fallen. One of these days I’m gonna wake up dead and my luck, Dad will have gone during the same fucking night and we’ll both be in this house for like a week before we’re found. I don’t even have life insurance and at this point, I’m not sure I could get any. Certainly not term. I would fail the physical. I think the whole-life products are more expensive, too.

But it could be worse, or at least just as bad. Matt had a policy out on me when I lived with him. I’m dead surprised (har har) he never tried to murder me. Though maybe that’s the real reason he stressed me out so bad. It’s so fucking awesome how I’m an evil nasty person for swearing loudly when people hurt my feelings but him driving my blood pressure up with his lies and games is perfectly okay. I love humanity, but I fucking hate people.

I think I have a lead on a possible job. It will go nowhere because this is me we’re talking about, but if it did by some miracle work out, it’s in Crowley. What happens with this position is I get email notifications of open jobs from the parent company. Every now and again they will tell me again that this specific position is available. I don’t know if they are just fishing for applications (which a lot of employers do, the bastards), if the same job has not been filled and I just get repeat notifications for the same one, or if people keep quitting. My chances of getting and staying hired depend greatly on which of those options it is. I really don’t want to have to drive 25 minutes one way to work, but it’s no worse than driving 25 minutes one way to deliver food, which is what I was doing two fucking years ago. As long as they never try to push me into management, I’m good.

I still have to sort out more medical shit, so hopefully if I did get it they would be flexible for me, but me not having work is just untenable.

I did sell a bracelet the other day, finally. It was one of the chonkier ones with gemstone beads in it, so that was good for twenty-five bucks. I did not get the full twenty-five. I had to put between four and five into shipping because I wanted a tracking number, and then I owed listing fees which came due this month, and of course there are Etsy’s version of final value fees when something sells. But I still had over seventeen left, so I’m not crying about it. That can sit in my PayPal, unless I hit an emergency, until the listing fees are due again. I’m honestly not fussed. I need to list more bracelets anyway.

Also on the agenda, hopefully tomorrow:

1. I just lost a domain name. I went back and forth about whether to try to keep it and in the end decided that if I haven’t done anything with it in all this time, I’m never going to do anything with it. I will double-check to see if they’ve driven the price up to $70something to renew it now that we’re past the expiration date. If it’s still its normal price I’ll grab it, but if not, it’s gone.

It’s the “bistitchuality” domain. I love the idea, because I both knit and crochet, but some part of me is now going “eh” about the TQplusWTFLOL reference. I still think I want to do a blog about my yarny crafting at some point. I don’t know why, because I’ve never done one yet. I’m weird. But if I don’t use this name, I have to think up a new one. You see my very silly dilemma.

That said: Even if I can’t renew that one, if the finances are right, I might re-up “bigmanchronicles” early. Just so I’m not having fucking heart attacks about it next month. Having possibly had one already, that was e fucking nuff, thanks.

2. Get money into my Credit Builder card so when hosting hits I’ll actually be able to pay it. When Dad was discharged from the hospital and while we were still in Crowley, he handed me a $100 bill and sent me into Walmart for a few things (he wanted to sit in the car and have a smoke) and told me to keep the change. He does that sometimes, which is why I don’t have to constantly beg for money.

(That said, the GoFundMe is still up. I don’t know the link off the top of my head but you should be able to find it if you want to.)

(And thank you if you do. I’m so glad I have minimal expenses right now. This is embarrassing.)

…And basically whatever else occurs to me, but those are the two major things. I need to list more bracelets and I’d like to edit the existing listings. We’ll see, though. Typically I get sucked into social media because I miss having people to chat with (Carrie is wonderful, but not chatty), and next thing I know two hours have gone by. I don’t know what I do about that. I don’t want to be reduced to doing nothing but shucking and jiving for income. There is so much more to life than that and I never get any of it. What I’m gonna get is all the way to dead having never done anything significant or interesting. How depressing.

(“You had two wonderful kids, blah blah” And they both hate me, so now what)

—

Adding this in later. It transpires that Dad has not changed his bicarbonate dose yet. He thinks he is supposed to wait until he gets his revised prescription from the pharmacy. Now, his kidney doctor did not say to change the pill dose. He just said to take two pills instead of one and to take them three times a day. For some reason, Dad didn’t understand that all the way.

So Dad’s at the very beginning of crashing again. He was okay this morning, but as he was minding the grill he got extra tired. I am debating with myself whether to make him take a double dose (not double the new dose, just the new double dose the doctor prescribed) of his bicarbonate before bed. The pharmacy will be open tomorrow and I’ll probably be going to pick it up, and maybe he’ll be okay until then, I don’t know. My concern is that he will not listen to me. He usually doesn’t.

Guess that thinking of me as slow and stupid ain’t working out so hot, eh Dad?

I wonder if we can figure out organizing his medicine doses to account for the midday bicarbonate. Maybe I can find a three-times-a-day organizer at Walmart. I’ll try to remember to look when I go to town. I’ve got a $25 gift card I can dip into.

Eh, we’ll figure it out. It may take him being sick a few times. We’ll see.

Day five after biopsy: Still no results.

Took Dad for his regular labwork Wednesday morning. Got that drawn, went on a couple errands, came back to the house (I’m writing this at the house; I won’t upload it from the house), puttered about, and suddenly the phone’s frantic. It was Aunt Matilda wanting to know had Dad heard from his clinic because they saw a lab result that worried them and they wanted him to go to the ER.

So we went to the ER. We were there for long enough that he told me I may as well get supper and go home. I figured he was right because if it had been any sort of a “not big deal” thing, I felt like they’d have sent him home already, so like as not they would admit him. I was right. Not only did they admit him, they sent his ass to Crowley, which has a larger hospital in the same system.

Aunt Matilda and I chatted a little before then and I always get this vibe like she’s holding me out at arm’s length, which would sort of fit what’s gone on so far, but at the same time neither of us even hinted at hostile — or I like to think I didn’t, since I wasn’t trying. But we’re both at the point that with him and drinking we might as well just let him do whatever since he’d have to be the one to decide to quit anyway. He did make some progress though. He admitted to them he’d had alcohol. Last time I heard a medical person ask him about drinking he claimed he wasn’t, and I knew for a fact he was. Maybe he’s coming to some sort of peace about it too. Who knows.

Anyway so he was hospitalized from Wednesday evening until Friday morning. This is going to sound awful and there is nothing I can do about it; I’m often an open book and sometimes people don’t like to read it. But it was nice to have that little bit of time. By the second day into it I figured he was going to be okay anyhow. No one interrupting my movie (I don’t mean talking to me, which is fine; I mean changing the fucking channel, which is not), I could shower without being afraid he’d have to pee or worse, I got to sleep all the way through the night without massive TV noise, and so on. I’m glad he’s back now, but if we could be like in both sides of the same duplex, that would be ideal. It won’t happen, I’m just saying.

(A further note about the TV thing. I never fuss at him. It’s his TV, it’s his satellite subscription, and I am a guest here. I get it. It’s just, as objectively as manners ever can be, fucking rude to change what someone’s watching when most of the time you get to pick anyway. Just wanted to be clear where I was coming from.)

I wasn’t sure what was up from what they said in the ER versus what they said later but it sounds like he needs to up his baking-soda-pill dose. Not even kidding. The paperwork said acidosis. They had worried about ketoacidosis, the dangerous kind (there are two kinds), in the ER but it sounds like it was just his kidneys not doing what they were supposed to do which, he’s in stage three failure so that’s kind of a given. So it was urgent but not a really really really bad emergency. But still something they had needed to monitor. He also needs to get off his potassium supplement, so that was interesting.

No need for dialysis though. Not yet, anyway.

Now, while all that was going on, I was sitting in his room on I think Thursday and started poking around in the MyOschner app to see if my biopsy results were back. Not only aren’t they back, I found my EKG from the preadmission screening for my colonoscopy which, I will remind, took place two Tuesdays ago, so the preadmit would have been the week prior. So, by this point, two and a half weeks gone and no one has called me. Why would they need to call me? Oh, I had an abnormal fucking EKG. In fact, the EKG indicates I had an infarct. That’s right. A heart attack. Apparently occurring at the bottom of the heart structure. The indicators also go along with a certain artery getting clogged. None of this surprises me overmuch; I have neglected my health for years and I expected some kind of consequence. What surprises me is that this literally says something bad happened to my heart that in turn makes it much more likely something worse will happen, and here we are a week and a half after finding out about this and NO ONE HAS CALLED ME ABOUT IT. It makes me wonder if they will even mention it at my followup with my PCP on the 8th. Well I’m sure going to fucking mention it. I want a stress test. I want to know what my options are.

Such horseshit.

I’m curious whether keto is cardioprotective even after something has happened. I’m sure going to fucking find out when I get the chance. One more reason to go back to it.

But I can sort of narrow down when this might have happened. I haven’t felt right in the general area of my heart for literal years. To be more precise, probably since 2020. Possibly worse after I caught COVID in ’22, but I can’t be sure. The unbelievable amount of stress everyone and everything put me through where I literally had to run away to get any relief and it still wasn’t enough. One of the sources I read about this particular pattern of infarct says broken-heart syndrome can bring it on. I mean, who fucking knows.

I have said multiple times, mostly to myself, that Matt better keep his ass in Colorado. Never come back east, for sure. I never said I was here in Louisiana forever. I will probably never see this as home. The place I DO see as home is my fucking turf and he can just stay away until the universe fucking dies. Stealing twenty years of my life, ruining basically everything and going “oh but here’s a car and a bunch of art supplies you have no room for” and then disappearing with my last child like I wasn’t going to notice. Fuck that guy. I want to run him over with a truck and THEN kick him off a skyscraper. Fucking WATCH me.

(I will tell you a secret, which will mean it isn’t a secret anymore: When I think about what I’d do if I ever won one of those billion-dollar Powerballs? I’d buy the fucking red house, is what I would do. I’d make it AWESOME and then spend my old age in it. And if he ever came around, I’d answer the fucking door. Just to see his stupid fucking face before I pepper-spray it.)

(I was going to say something worse, but fuck all y’all. You’d like that, WOULDN’T YOU.)

Some part of me hopes there’s a benign explanation that I just haven’t found. To be fair, I did not dig very far because what I was seeing in the search results was freaking me out enough. Not even mommy blogs. Actual sciencey-mediciney sites. But I guess we will see. I did have a dizzy spell at Super One a few weeks back when Dad and I were in Crowley shopping. I’ve had other stuff going on that I really couldn’t pin down. Having an explanation would be nice, even if it’s bad news.

Dad for his part is doing a lot better. I’m learning that when he is feeling bad, not only does he slow way down and need more help, his voice goes really quiet. If I see that again I’m suggesting a visit to his nurse practitioner, minimum. If he says no off the bat I’m bringing Carrie into it. The sooner we jump on that shit and solve it, the less time he might have to spend in the hospital. After the fit he threw over the poor quality of his meals, maybe that’ll get through to him. But for now, he’s got a lot more oomph than he did at the beginning of the week.

Metabolic acidosis. Who knew. I already couldn’t take the alkaline-diet people seriously. I take them even less seriously now. As in less than zero. Morons, you will know if you “go acidic.” Fucking trust me.

I’m gonna be lazy and copypasta my Facebook post from today (one of them):

This has been a weird day.

So, first up I went for my biopsy. They told me some of what to expect, but be aware that if you ever go in for a needle biopsy, it is unpleasant. She did numb me up well. Even added extra on the second biopsy site because it ran deeper, for which I was profoundly grateful. AND with my tit numb I didn’t feel as squished by the ultrasound doohickey either. But when they stick in the sample-taker, it… clicks. Like… ugh. I did not even watch what was going on. (I don’t watch my vaccinations either.)

I got extra-strength Tylenol, or actually the Walmart brand which was like half the price, after that. Already took dose one. I am not fucking around with this. I didn’t bleed on the surface really — they said I hardly even oozed — but I’m sure I’ll bruise plenty.

And the whole experience left my poor boob misshapen, so that was fun too. Not.

So, but, anyway. I get to Jennings, look in my Humana account because I figure I’ve got at least $15 in there and it’s actually $95. I have no idea why. I will not complain. I turned $25 into a Walmart gift card and went on in.

Then, I’m checking out, right? I look down when I’m fiddling around with paying, and I see a $20 bill on the floor between the self-check kiosk (YES I USE SELF-CHECKOUT) and the drink cooler. Right as I see it this employee wanders by and remarks that I have dropped my money.

If it’d been a $100 bill I probably would have taken it to the customer service desk.

Probably.

But it was $20 and I need to pay my phone bill with minimal stress. I already had like half of that. Especially after I cashed in my $4 scratchoff, which is what I did next.

So that’s sitting in the Credit Builder card waiting for the bill to hit.

I have some things to dick around with here at the library and then I suppose I’ll go home. Though I’m debating stopping by Carrie’s first. Haven’t seen her in a bit. I dunno. We’ll see.

—

I actually have been sitting here at the library doing this, that, and the other, and my boob is not sore yet. I did take a dose of Extra Strength Tylenol after I bought it and maybe that’s why, or maybe the numbing shit hasn’t worn off yet. Impossible to say.

—

Did a little research and it looks like Walmart carries a couple card readers that also read micro SD cards. I probably won’t get it today, but probably soon. I would rather use gift card balance to get it than try to earn the money for it at this point. It’s like five bucks more. I don’t care.

—

Cooked spaghetti last night. Dad comes out after it’s all done and it’s “I can’t eat that because it’ll keep me up for hours,” and then… he was up for a while after I went to bed. And then got back up again later. Dude, it’s your blood sugar. I wash my hands of it. If I don’t cook, you fall out. If I do cook, you don’t eat and then you fall out. I am not even going to try to figure this out anymore. This is just one more person never being happy with what I do. And I already knew that about him.

God. Thea thinks I’m shit but at least I used to call attention to good things about her. Yes I fucking bragged on my kid. I still will do it. She’s awesome. My parents never thought I was awesome. They thought I was broken and couldn’t be fixed. I don’t care if I am or not, I’m fucking over it.

—

Applied for another job; once again will not announce it until I hear something. It’s to do with medical records and I’m kind of hoping a lot. The pay is not super stellar but FOR AROUND HERE, and me not owing rent right now, it’s pretty good. I think it could even score me an apartment in Iota if it works out, if it comes to that. Which again will mean I don’t get it, but I’m certainly going to try.

I’m tired. Being stabbed in the tit wears you out even if you aren’t feeling it. I’m sure the drug didn’t help. This is one of the things I hate about being this old. Shit that used to be nothing has become something.

Or I’m way too far out of shape and poorly nourished. Either way.

Finally dragged myself around to working on my laptop files. They are a fucking mess. It would be bad enough if I were merely disorganized, but I have multiples of some files. Sometimes five or six copies. I haven’t literally counted out five or six copies of one file, but you know how you can sort of count things without counting? Kind of a subconscious process? Yeah. Like that. I keep running into the same ones over and over. Like, it’s nice I have favorites, but this is a bit extreme.

Part of the problem is that when I get a new phone I filedump from the old one. I have also been known to do that when storage just plain gets too full. If I would just work out a good routine for this, it might not leave me with such a mess. Will I work one out? Probably not.

—

And I have to say this because I am a petty asshole. After the way my ex-mother-in-law Cheryl lost, threw away, or decided to keep all my film negatives from 1987 to 1999, thereby erasing an important backup device for basically all my visual history from adolescence to mid-twenties (not that it’s much to look at but, fuck damn it, it’s MINE), I am so fucking pleased that I have most of Thea’s childhood here. So Thea can’t erase any of it like some of those trans-identifying young people do and, just as important, that piece of rotten fuck serving as her sperm donor can’t have any of it. He will have some photos of his own, but I know for a fact he doesn’t have as many as I do from her formative years. Too bad, so fucking sad, fucking cry about it. There are very limited circumstances under which I would relent and give him the files. And I would ONLY give him files. I’m not paying to print these photos for him. Ever. And if he doesn’t meet those limited circumstances in the first place, he doesn’t get the files either. I’m done playing. He fucked around. He’s finding out.

Like I said. Petty asshole. This is all I can do. I can’t make him be a decent person. He’s never actually been a decent person. He’s been a spender and a consumer. Any moron can spend money and say some words and fool everyone around himself. It takes real brains and effort to actually be a good person if you are not already wired that way. And no one else can make you do it. A lot of that waste of my energy when it came to him was me trying to get him to sort himself out. It was pointless. That’s on me. But it is something I will not do again; even if he meets my conditions to get Thea’s photo files, that doesn’t mean I will believe he’s actually changed, and I fully expect him to ghost me again after he gets them, whereupon I will not even ask him why he’s ghosting, because I already know. Assholes gonna asshole. He has to live with him. I don’t. Hooray.

But he won’t ask in the first place, because he is a fucking chickenshit. Fine by me.

I’ve mentioned this somewhere or another but most of you won’t have seen it: A big part of the problem between me and him was I believed he was basically a decent guy but that it was coming out all wrong and I thought that if I just pointed out where he was fucking up, he would go “oh yeah, my bad” and change his behavior. I thought just the behavior was the problem, not his basic essential self. This mistake is not unique to me; women do this with bad men a lot. But it’s this cognitive error that human beings commit in general and I don’t think there’s a name for it and it goes like this:

“I like you. Therefore you are a good person. If you are not a good person, that makes me bad for liking you. I can’t accept the argument that I am a bad person, therefore you must be a good person.”

I ran into this with Jeremy and his infamous little hard-drive collection. I ran into it with Billiam and his emotional abuse. I ran straight into a metaphorical concrete wall nose-first with Matt and his narcissism and fuck addiction because of this fallacy and I can’t think this way anymore. I paid him out so much rope and he just keeps hanging himself. Fine, then. I can just hear his fucking friends going “you just want him to be bad,” but actually I never wanted him to be bad and none of this shit was my idea. Why I got shitcanned for HIS fuckups, I could not say. Except that the fallacy I just outlined is in play and most people don’t even know they’re doing it.

Always assume someone’s behavior is who they are, kids. And be sure you’re analyzing it correctly for context, of course. But once you’ve done that, if it’s obvious the person’s still being shitty, just assume they’re shitty and walk away. A whole lot of people over the years either didn’t check context or didn’t care about it where I was concerned, so have decided I’m shitty for being furious at his behavior. But that’s pretty typical of how most people treat women, anyway. I could fly into a rage about it or I could just keep talking about it and hoping there are a few sane women out in the world who read this and start seeing the pattern where maybe they hadn’t noticed it before. (I couldn’t care less about you men anymore. I think you like it when other men are shitty to you because you nearly always side with them against us, and I can’t trust men who tell me women are shitty to them anymore, because that’s been used against me.) So don’t assume I am talking about all of this out of rage. I did go through some rage, but that’s not what this is. It’s that I am seeing this problem that we all need to recognize and address, so I’m going to talk about it because that’s what I do. You can learn from me, or you can be a dumbass and go “there she goes again,” roll your eyes, and walk away. Your call. Not my responsibility. I already did my bit. It’s your turn.

—

Speaking of Thea’s photos. I’m never not happy on some level when I see them. I miss my girl. I wish I could tell when she started emotionally collapsing and could go back and fix it. She was such a happy kiddo for most of her childhood. And she’s outgoing and outspoken enough that if that hadn’t been true, she’d have said so. I want to find everyone who ruined her and run over them with a train. It’s entirely possible I should also be on those tracks, but I’d be putting myself out of my misery, so whatever.

I should be very clear here because dumbasses put words in my mouth otherwise: I never expected her to grow up into a pretty little princess. She was always a beautiful child, and that’s not what I mean, but I wanted more for her than for her to be ornamental. I was the one getting offended when Cheryl got her a “sugar and spice” tshirt. I was the one saying oh sure, girls can wear what they want — want tshirts or cargo shorts from the boys’ section? Let’s go get ’em. I was the one saying oh sure, you want to shave your head, let’s do it. I wasn’t good at it, but I would bleach and dye her hair too. I knew she had to figure things out for herself and as long as that was based in reality and did not involve self-harm, I was fully willing to go along.

The problem here isn’t that she’s nOt FeMiNiNe, whatever the fuck that means. The problem is she’s self-harming, because breast-binders and testosterone harm female bodies, and that she may seek extreme surgical intervention at some point even though there’s nothing physically wrong with her to justify it. I’m supposed to accept that a dude in a dress is a “woman” even though he keeps his dick (and he wouldn’t be even if he got it inverted) but somehow, simultaneously, I’m supposed to accept that my daughter “not feeling like a woman” needs to destroy her body as a a result. Make it fucking make sense. I could almost live with her thinking incorrect things about herself if those didn’t lead straight to physical damage. Feelings and thoughts are fully reversible. Though I will never just live with other people around her affirming her incorrect thoughts, either. If I say I’m Cleopatra you wouldn’t agree with me. Fuck.

And it isn’t that I am morally against sex change. It’s that humans can’t change sex. It does not matter what we do to attempt that process, it just isn’t going to happen. The medical industry is misleading a hell of a lot of people and when they wake up and figure out what’s going on, holy shit will they be pissed. Not only at the destruction of their own bodies but at what it’s done to their most important relationships. In fact, that is already happening. This whole thing is a fucking disaster. It’s lobotomies and thalidomide all over again.

Also, I fully believe that my stance on all of this is costing me in terms of being able to get on with my life in a material sense. The assholes pushing this shit are saying that women like me — and it’s usually women, they don’t care as much about targeting men EVEN THOUGH MEN ACTUALLY MURDER TRANS-IDENTIFYING PEOPLE — don’t deserve jobs or family or friends or housing or anything, really. I am old enough to remember the Christian Coalition and similar groups and people in the nineties, and this is just like that but with God left out. And in case you think the lack of God matters, no, it really doesn’t; it’s just a detail. It’s all imaginary shit and I’m supposed to believe I deserve to literally die because I don’t go along with imaginary shit. The one advantage gender identity has over fundamentalist Christianity is that once I do die, I’m done.

Nah. Fuck you. I’m fucking toughing it out. You genderdorks already made public institutions illegitimate so if I have to live on the margins then that’s what I will do and with zero regard to however that affects those institutions. You can’t fire me. I fucking quit. There are ways around most problems if you can’t actually solve them.

You know, like the way you “solved” sexism by pretending sex isn’t real.

—

I finally looked over my old phone. I guess any files I wanted to save were mainly on the micro SD card I had in it which it had lost the ability to read. Problem is I can’t get the new phone to read the micro SD either. So now I have to think about how to acquire a card reader that accommodates micros. I have one, but it’s for my iPad which, as it turns out, can’t use the reader anyway because it’s the original Air and those didn’t have that capability yet. Grump. So I need one for a Windows system. I should have more points balance on my Humana account soon, so one possible solution might be looking at Walmart in their electronics section. If it saves me some driving in Lafayette, I am all for it. I’m not holding my breath, though. I am not sure just how much technological literacy actually goes on around here. I would be a shoo-in for local IT work had I ever bothered getting any certifications. It wouldn’t pay well, but it’d be above average for here, which would be a good start.

Oh well.

I really just want to make sure I have any good photos that might be on that card. I am pretty sure I’ve got all the music files.

It does occur to me, though, that maybe the micro SD has failed. The phone definitely has a swollen battery, but now that I think about it, I can’t see why the SIM card still worked but the SD didn’t if the swollen battery was the cause of that issue. So I may be in for a hell of a lot of disappointment. Well, if that’s it then there’s nothing I can do about it anyway. I’m pretty sure it was used when Matt gave it to me in the first place.

—

I set myself a reminder on New Phone to go to bed early so that I can get up early because I really should give myself a 45-minute lead to get to Crowley tomorrow. I am not looking forward to getting skewered in the tit, but I would like very much to figure out what is going on with said tit, so there’s that.

But that’s not going to be the end of the festivities. I have a followup appointment with my PCP on the 8th, and after all this shit dies down I next have to address the ladybits. AND, I’m well overdue for a dental appointment, so won’t that be fun. I suspect I’m seeing final days on my lower left rear molar (the one right before my now-nonexistent wisdom tooth), but I’m hoping that if that is the case then we can cap it or something so I will still have something resembling a tooth there, unlike its counterpart on the other side which had to be pulled twentysomething years ago. Realistically speaking, however, I think I only have about a $500 allowance on my dental benefits and so it may be a yanking if it comes to that. If I ever win the lottery for any significant amount — at least a few thousand dollars — first thing I’m gonna do is sort my taxes out. Next thing I’m gonna do is get at least one dental implant. Enough with this shit.

—

Dad needed help last night when he got up from his nap because he was so weak he literally couldn’t walk. I had to get his walker and he sat in it (it’s a walker with a seat) and scooted backwards into the living room. That man will notice I am cooking or have recently cooked, ask me if there’s anything left, then say No when I say there isn’t but that I can fix him something if he wants. After he requested a sandwich and ate same, he was able to walk again. But he told me he hadn’t eaten in two days. Dude, no. I am not a mind-reader and you need to start telling me when you need shit. But I have to be nonconfrontational because no one ever gives me any fucking safe space to speak up.

But I’m making spaghetti tonight and maybe he’ll eat some. We’ll see.

Yesterday I went to Lafayette to do some Uber Eats driving. My experience in Columbus, especially Dublin, was that Fridays could be a little weird but that oftentimes I could make eighty bucks in a day if I wasn’t working especially hard. I knew it wouldn’t be like that in Lafayette, but I thought surely fifty dollars.

I think I pulled down about thirty-seven from noonish until fiveish. Maybe? And if I were going to go back today, twenty of that ought to go to gas.

Considering the wear on my car, I am not sure it was worth going out there for $17ish. Actually $7ish considering I stopped for snack and drinks on the way home. So, no. Not worth it.

I know. I chose to make that stop. I also hadn’t had anything but one of those lavender oatmilk matchas and a couple egg bites from the Starbucks in Jennings (you know: the one that wouldn’t hire me? Hope they’re enjoying their slow-ass drive-thru staff) since around 11am and it was then after 6pm. I knew I was going to cook when I got home but I also needed to take my metformin, which I have been told I should take with food. Which metformin I then forgot for a couple more hours, so it wasn’t even worth it.

I don’t know if I wrote it here or if I wrote it somewhere on Facebook but a thing you have to understand about being poor is that poor people are not poor because we overspend. To say that we overspend is to say that some spending is reasonable and some spending is overspending. What it means to be poor, however, is that ALL SPENDING IS OVERSPENDING. I suppose at some point I was in denial about this, too, but I have never not understood it since I grew up and left home. If you don’t have enough money, it is all overspending. The necessities are also overspending. What you actually wind up doing is holding on to money so long that it squeals, and then suddenly you break and you spend on a necessity and it turns out to be on the wrong thing because another few days go by and suddenly you needed that money more for something else.

Skipping lattes is not going to solve this. I wish it would. I skip lattes most of the time now. I should be a fucking millionaire. Or at least middle-class, anyway. Which I have never fucking been.

Despite my statement that it wasn’t worth going and driving, I should have gone back today, but here’s what I’m wrestling with now. I am now wrestling with “what if I go do this and only make ten bucks in a day?” That is not outside the realm of possibility. And if yesterday was any indication, Lafayette people are worse about tipping than Indian people in Ohio are. And they were pretty fucking bad.

But I have to think in terms of keeping things “on” for now. So I will probably make a few trips east this coming week. It depends on what I find out about my new Uber debit card. Apparently it does a “backup balance” thing that is a lot like Chime’s Spot Me. If I have access to any of that, I will probably take advantage of it to keep things on for a little while longer. I always have wiggle room with the car insurance, but I need to keep my web hosting going. But even if I have significant wiggle room on the Uber card I’ll have to pay it back, so.

Well, I have an option to make my phone cheaper. I just waited too long to try for this month since my bill comes due on the 27th. The hosting isn’t absolutely due until the 2nd; they just ding me about five days early. No penalty if it doesn’t go through, just… they like to be early. Don’t ask me. I just put up with it. I haven’t wanted to move to another host, but I’m seriously considering it. If I can get it done before the 2nd and happen to have the cash then I will have to deep-six them. Thirty-five a month. I’m fucking sure. If I had a job it wouldn’t be a big deal, but I’m getting nothing out of this except enjoyment and being able to maintain some really old email addresses. I would have better use for that money elsewhere. Or at least would be better off not having to panic to come up with it every single fucking month. So if I can get that monthly expense cut down too, it will make up for having to spend more on car insurance for less coverage. And don’t even get me started about that one or we’ll be here all day.

Dad… I don’t know what is going on with Dad. He said the other day he is feeling more like he did when he went into kidney failure in the first place, but we’ve already seen that when he’s out and out injured he doesn’t want to go to the doctor. If his kidneys really do shut down, I can’t count on him to tell me in time. He has a Life Alert or similar device, but doesn’t wear it. And he knows drinking affects his health — like, duh, but it really does at this point — but he won’t quit. I understand not being able to quit an unhealthy thing. But this is the same guy who lectures me about my weight one day and then buys a bunch of crap on a Walmart grocery shop the next day and then cooks me huge portions. He wants to barbecue tomorrow and bought pork and beans that we didn’t even need and wants me to make potato salad. Hello, diabetic. I am also a diabetic. Why are we going to do this? Ten to one he adds brown sugar to the beans too. But I’m fat and I should eat more vegetables and fruits. Right. Eating fibrous bags of water will sure solve everything. We have gone past the point of eat more healthy stuff and we are now at the point of need to stop eating unhealthy stuff. So while I sympathize with his struggle with alcoholism, I also don’t really care. I am not going around telling him to drink and being offended if he doesn’t. I know you don’t push a bad habit on someone. Closest I’ve gotten is going and buying booze for him, but he asked me to. It was his idea, not mine, and I stand to be kicked out of here on a whim if he doesn’t like the way things are going. I am not applying equivalent pressure on him. I’m just not.

Anyway he’s also sleeping a lot more, and he’s doing that quiet grumpy thing he does when he’s not feeling good. I expected him to ask me where I was all day. He’s already told me I’m all grown up and I can do go what I want, but me being gone isn’t something I usually do. I welcome the lack of conflict but I can never tell whether he genuinely doesn’t mind or whether he’s saving up for later. Any of you out there thinking only women do that can just shut the fuck up forever. Especially with what you do to us when we are outspoken. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. And he’s the one on the fucking lease. If Jodi thought I was in any way mistreating him I’d be out on my ear. But for now it’s grumps and naps. Who knows what it’ll be next week. I could have two more weeks in this place or I could have two years. Or five. Who fucking knows.

I guess I am doing the quiet and grumpy thing, too.

Doug called today and I told him about the biopsy on Monday. He’s the only family member I’ve told. Carrie kind of counts as family, but technically she’s not, and she’s the only other one in meatspace who knows (unless you count Dawn, and I’m not sure I do — we’ve lived apart too long). I have no issue at all announcing it on the internet, but unless Aunt Matilda is still lurking around, no one’s really keeping track of me. My kids have written me off, my other brother has written me off, the few exes who used to look me up aren’t anymore (one of them’s dead, too, if you can call him an ex — two if you count Wayne, but he and I hadn’t talked since 2000, anyway), and I’ve tried to friend Reba on Facebook a few times over the years but for some reason she’s not having it. Like, why are you going to pretend you want to keep up with me and then reject your one solid method for doing that. I suspect she’s busy, though, because I haven’t even gotten the occasional short chat that I was getting there for a while. I had a point talking about all this, right? Right. It’s difficult for my oversharing about my life on Facebook really being any sort of “leak” with people I know in person when none of them look at me. And knowing most of them, they wouldn’t say anything even if they did know. I’d have to count as a human being first. I don’t think I ever really have.

But Doug knows, which is fine because I know about his issues too, even if I’m sort of vague about them. I THINK they are suspecting kidney cancer. He seems to at least have a kidney tumor. There is some kind of song and dance going on there, possibly with his insurance, or I think he’d know what’s going on by now. We are just a couple broken old fogies. What the actual hell. I remember when his worst problem was getting walking pneumonia pretty much every winter.

I haven’t told Dad about my ish and I don’t think Doug has told him about his. I’ll have to ask Doug again to be sure, but I think he’s holding off. I don’t know what the plan is if his thing turns out to be malignant. I’m not sure what I will do in my case if I end up like that either. There’s nothing Dad can do anyway except start judging me if I don’t immediately jump up and conquer the fucking universe like he probably thinks Carrie did when she got colon cancer. Let him keep thinking that I’m just sort of vaguely broken and that I choose to be that way. Works for everyfuckingbody else. Doesn’t work for me, but who cares anyway.

I seem to be dancing around the obvious question. How am I doing with it? I’ve been mostly avoiding it. Once in a while I think about it. The main problems for me if I have to get a mastectomy are (1) aesthetics, OBVIOUSLY, and I already need all the help I can get on looks, and I fucking doubt that Medicaid would cover a good reconstruction; and (2) neurological map. This is oversharing, but… there are women who say nipple stimulation does nothing for them during sexytimes. I am not one of those women. Losing half the map on the front of my torso would not be good. I am opposed to getting a hysterectomy except in the case of cancer for similar reasons. Orgasms felt different after my c-section and never went back to what they had been previously; if I out and out lose the fucker, I may lose my sex life entirely, or at least the bits that actually matter to me. Same goes for if I had to get a cone biopsy. Someone found out there are nerves in the cervix that connect somehow to the clitoris, so messing up those nerves actually messes up a woman’s sexual response. I may not have a dating life anymore, but once in a while you get to thinking happy thoughts. It would just be one more thing taken away from me before I’m ready to lose it. I fucking hate this timeline. I’d like a do-over, please. And then you can just pause it at 1994 and Groundhog-Day that one year over and over. Fuck it.

Speaking of time. I just looked at the calendar and the 27th is one day further off than I’d assumed. I have enough in the Chime account to pay for the cheaper phone service. If I do it on Monday, the SIM could get here in time. I will look to see what’s involved in the changeover. Another possibility is just biting the bullet and getting a cheap plan at Walmart if it turns out they’ve got something comparable. I need to look. One way or another we are going to get that expense down. I know for a fact I can get the same features for just over half the price, and I’ll be using the same phone, so that’s not even an issue. Somebody impress me, ’cause I want a local number. If having an Ohio area code has been getting in the way of me getting employment, I can at least remove that obstacle.

(I doubt it’s the only reason. But I would almost be willing to bet money it’s one reason.)

My errant children have not tried contacting me in literal years. I last heard from Thea over a year ago and I initiated that contact. I last heard from Sean… damn. A decade ago? A little less than? Not counting when Thea was video-chatting with him, which he finally ghosted her for reasons only he knows. I don’t have a whole lot of room to complain, because Mom never hears from me. But this is one reason I want to keep a hosting service going. That will mean I always have a website with my name on it, and I can bang up a Google Voice number there that they can use if they really want to talk to me. (I’d put my real number there, but that opens me to harassment, so.)

I was going to text Thea with the new number when I got it but it occurred to me she may not even have that number anymore. I will keep it in my contact list in case I’m wrong but if they wanted me to keep her contact info current, they know where to find me and they have not fucking bothered. Message motherfucking received. That worked out really great for Matt. I never once, and you can fucking quote me, EVER told him I didn’t want to be her mother anymore. I NEVER said I didn’t want to hear about what was going on with her. He has ZERO excuse for ghosting me like that, and 2/3rds of my angry emails and texts to him were BECAUSE he was ghosting me. He had it in his grubby little mitts this whole fucking time to have things go better than they did and he chose the low road and pretended it was the high one. Oh yeah, it was high all right. On fucking paint thinner. I wash my hands of the entire affair. Already did, ages ago. She’s an adult. When she wants to behave like one, she can find me. I sincerely hope he is run over by a truck. Slowly.

Someone shared a meme on Facebook a while back that said something to the effect that people start avoiding you when they know they’ve wronged you. I know that isn’t always true; sometimes we avoid people because we’re afraid of them. Although those two elements can be merged together for nefarious purposes. It’s possible for an asshole to tell everyone he’s avoiding the victim of his assholery because he’s afraid of her, just as a way of scoring more points off her misery. I’m about 99% certain that’s what’s happened here. Oh yeah, I’m so scary. I could have fucking gelded him with a fucking dull butter knife. I could have murdered him with food. He’s got about a bazillion food allergies and I probably know about 90% of them. It wouldn’t have been hard. I did not do any of that. I left. Ooh. Scary. I hate him so fucking much for setting me up like that, you cannot possibly imagine. I actually understand now how some men get murderous after a breakup. Men are also more impulsive; one of the few good things about the gender identity experiment is that women pretending to be men have proven that testosterone makes you more impulsive. So men are going to follow through on murderous feelings a lot more often than women do, and the crime stats back me up. But any woman telling you women never feel like that has never been fucked over hard enough by an asshole. Oh, just you wait. If it never happens to you, you got lucky.

I will say this. My anger at him used to make me physically ill. After I moved out, those feelings still caused me a lot of physical distress — but that has diminished over time. I’m sitting here right now wishing I could kick him off the roof of a skyscraper, but I doubt my heart rate’s over 100bpm and when no one is torturing me with a too-tight cuff, my blood pressure’s fairly normal. (I can tell by feel when that goes high. Right now? Nada.) I sleep a lot better too. I’m much less likely to wake up in a rage at him. And I did that a lot for a while there.

I just needed to get away from the fucker. Who knew.

Okay. Enough ranty for today. On to sorta-good news:

I got an idea to start buying a one-dollar scratch-off lottery ticket every time Dad sends me to get his cigarettes, because he gets them at a certain gas station and they are a lottery retailer. (I’m pretty much sure every gas station in every legal-lottery jurisdiction is a lottery retailer.) I thought, shit, if I happened to win the big prize that would really help me for several months or a year or whatever, worst-case scenario, if I couldn’t find a job.

So I went in the last time I went on a cancer-stick run (how ironic that Dad has problems with everything except his fucking lungs), paid the dollar, got the scratch-off, took it home… and forgot about it for a bit. Eventually remembered, scratched everything, and I’d won a ticket. Go figure. So next time I was there I turned it in and got the free ticket. Got it home, same song and dance, finally remembered and scratched it and I’d won four bucks.

I told everybody that no, I wasn’t going to go buy four more tickets but I’m debating with myself. Like as not I’d do it and win nothing. At least I’d have only spent the one dollar for real. On the other paw, that particular ticket’s max prize is four thousand dollars. It sure would not hurt my feelings to win that. Hell, I’d be happy winning fifty. The odds for a win in general are less than one IN fifty. I don’t know what the odds are for four grand. Probably not nearly as good.

It’s like when you just plain have money and need to spend it on things and then you spent it wrong. I have the potential for money here and am afraid to spend it wrong. I probably should just get over myself, huh? Easier said than done.

I didn’t write yesterday, even though I got on the internet at Carrie’s, because… I didn’t. I don’t know why I didn’t. I guess I forgot. It doesn’t matter. I can write now.

I want to have a word with two out of three medical providers in this bloody state about their not knowing how to apply blood-pressure cuffs. (There’s an actual name for the blood-pressure-measuring machine but I have never mentally retained the spelling. If I told you what it was, most of you would go “Huh???” anyway.) When I went in for my consult for the colonoscopy, they put the cuff on my LOWER arm. What the fucking fuck. Only time that’s ever happened in my entire life. If I mentioned this before in this journal (I am not online as I write this, and haven’t been saving recent entries offline), I probably said the same thing then. Well, the other thing they do is put a normal-person cuff on a fat upper arm. Which is not limited to Louisiana, but EVERYONE does it here. Don’t tell me y’all have no goddamn funding for hamhock cuffs. Half or more of us are fat. Get them. Long story short I have compression bruises on my upper left arm — something else that has never happened, and I’ve had my BP measured several times since I went porker — and came this close to being prescribed blood-pressure meds. Fuck.

But the procedure went well otherwise. Those were some good drugs because I sort of felt the device up my ass as I was waking up but he must have been at the very end (har har) of the procedure because it wasn’t there long.

Verdict: No polyps. Not even a benign-looking one. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Whew. But he remarked that I have a lot of diverticulosis, which is where your colon forms pockets in its surface. I am not surprised because when I was in Ohio, I had a lower-left-quadrant pain episode that sent me to the doctor and she guesstimated I had diverticulitis (inflammation in those pockets) at that time. I actually must have developed the pockets early for the average because normally they start showing up around age forty and I know for a fact I had them in my twenties because I had the same pain a couple times then, once with a slight fever. No idea why. It wasn’t like I never ate fiber, so that’s probably not the issue.

Doc said to take Colace morning and night. Forever. I’m gonna take a wait-and-see attitude on that one. I need to do more digging. It’s supposedly a safe drug but if I can get habituated to it then there’s no point.

I generally didn’t have that high of an opinion of him. He was very brusque. I don’t need to have long conversations with my doctors but it was like he couldn’t be bothered acting like a human being for thirty fucking seconds. Dude. No.

Well, I don’t have to do this again for ten years so it probably won’t be him next time.

Carrie and I went to an Asian buffet in Crowley afterwards. They had these mushrooms in some kind of sauce that were fucking divine. They made up for the sorry sushi. Neither of us got food poisoning off the sushi but man, they even messed up the inari and how do you mess up inari? I could have dealt with the crab and seaweed salad in the inari if the rice had been okay. It was not. The rice in the maki was better, but it was all cooked. I guess most people in the smaller towns don’t want to eat raw fish. I might be able to find raw sushi in the cities. I’m not going to try right now, but it’s something to keep in mind.

I wasn’t allowed to drive for the rest of the day, which worked out because I had considered driving to Carrie’s house yesterday morning so she wouldn’t have to come get me because I thought I’d hang out at her place after we got back and then drive home. So it’s just as well I didn’t. Surprisingly, I could have because I was actually on time. Gasp. You’d think I was into anal or something, har har. (Family hide your eyes. Everyone else: I thought it was interesting at one time but my poor ass is just too trashed now. Not from finding it interesting. From the natural outcome of two pregnancies and way too much weight gain. Yep, you guessed it. So we are not going to go in the out door again. And that’s if I ever get laid again. And I very much doubt it.)

Oh, and Carrie and I discussed my biopsy next week. “Are you okay with losing it?” she asked, meaning my right tit. I dunno, I guess. I mean I’d rather not, but if it’s lose it or die, chop off my tit and call me a fat Amazon, I suppose. At least we will have caught it early, whatever it is, if it’s not benign.

We also talked about Stanford. When I was here two and a half years ago she had kicked him out because he’d talked shit about her honorary granddaughter (I think this was). I guess they reconciled, but it’s not much better now. I mentioned a while back that he (still) likes to talk shit about people. Apparently (and these are my words, not hers) he is also a gigantic man-baby who has to be the center of her attention at all times. I think that if she could find some way to fix the situation, she would. She might yet try. Lord knows she’s given that stupid man chance after chance, but if he doesn’t start minding his p’s and q’s he may be in for a shock. I did point out to her that a lot of people who’ve had cardiac events get depression afterwards. Stanford has had a whole-ass heart transplant. You never know, that could be all it is. She said he was a very quiet person when they were in high school together, so maybe he’s just changed. Whatever, I hope he sorts it out, and not at her expense. But we all know how that often goes. Men who want to marry usually do it because they want a fucking bangmaid. They keep enough of us poor that if one bangmaid doesn’t work out, why, they’ll just shop for another one. But Carrie’s a retiree from the school system, and before much longer she’ll be drawing Social Security too. She does not need that shit. She’s been divorced two or three times already. What makes him think he won’t be number three or four?

Ah well. I will very likely not be dealing with that nonsense again myself, so I wish her the best of luck.

So, today. I had thought I would go out and deliver for a while, but last night Dad said he wanted to go to Jennings today. It was one of those “let’s get some supplies in before it rains” things. I thought, well, if he buys me gas today I can still go to Lafayette tomorrow. Well, we went to the bank and looked at his balance and then we went to Walmart and got all kinds of shit and then I got home, counted it up and realized that I had not only the car insurance amount (I had already had some cash and he went and handed me more today) but I would have a decent amount left over afterwards too. So I went and deposited it after he was in bed for a nap and then paid the insurance and then went and got thirty dollars’ worth of gas and I still have twentysomething left. I still need to do delivery-driving, unless a miracle happens and I sell some bracelets, but at least it is not a national emergency right now.

And get this. I got an idea to start buying a one-dollar scratchoff every time I go in to Murphy’s to get Dad’s cigarettes, since he only does that a couple times a month. So I got my first one today. Got it home, scratched off, and I won a ticket. So when I went back out later to put my money on my Chime, I went and got thirty dollars’ worth of gas and then cashed in (ticketed in?) my winning scratch-off. Got that home? Won four bucks off of it. Cool. I won’t use that to buy four more tickets though. I will just cash it in next time I’m out thataway, or at some other lottery location. I can wait til it’s Marlboro Day to buy a ticket again. That particular scratch-off has pretty good odds, even if the odds for the max prize are not that great.

But hey. Four grand. I can dream.

I felt like shit for a good part of today though. I have no idea why. Could be leftover from the drugs yesterday, and I woke up with a headache, too. But I’m a lot better now.

I do need to eat, though, and finish my laundry. At least it is not ten tons of laundry. THANK YOU LAWD.

I have spent the day joking about having to drink Evil Potion. Said Evil Potion didn’t taste as bad as I was afraid it would. Even the slight saltiness to the flavor disappeared after my first couple of doses. The bad part was the having to drink eight ounces every ten minutes, which of course built it up in my GI tract, which was very uncomfortable. Otherwise it was like a bland lemonade. As in, it was sweet and you could taste the lemon, but it wasn’t tangy at all. After a while the slight saltiness got replaced with a note of Slight Plastic, too, which was weird. That’s the Miralax in the mix. This crap is basically Miralax with some electrolytes added.

The other actually bad thing about prep is that eventually your ass hurts. It’s all the wiping. I use flushable wet wipes, despite everyone from the Pope on down assuring me that I’m evil for so doing (I’ve developed some tricks for minimizing use without leaving myself dirty or raw under normal conditions), so the irritation wasn’t as bad as it would (not might) have been otherwise, but even with that my surface protections, so to speak, eventually wore out. Had I really thought about it I might have bought some Preparation H along with my liquid-diet supplies to calm things down. Well, I’ll probably be around long enough to have another one. I’ll have to keep that in mind next time.

Had to keep the phone in the front window so as not to miss the hospital’s call and they still called when I was on the john. These days hospital schedulers will also text you, though, so that was cool. My appointment’s at 10am.

—

The other night Guy Fieri did his Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives show in Columbus, Ohio. I don’t know if it was the latest episode, but I think that was Friday night so possibly. He went to two different places I used to pass in my car all the fucking time when I was in the Old North, which is basically the zone between the University District and Clintonville. I sat there watching him chat with this barbecue guy who sets up shop at Ace of Cups, High Street busy behind them. I could have pointed to exactly where it was had I been there. The episode that came on after that one included Gus visiting Sweet Carrot in Grandview, too. I have also passed that restaurant several times when out on deliveries.

And tonight it’s Andrew Zimmer and he visited Cincinnati and this is the first I’ve learned that Graeter’s Ice Cream is based in Cinci. He specifically wanted to highlight their black raspberry and chocolate chip flavor, and I’ve had that at least a few times.

It’s like TV Land is taunting me.

I told Carrie I intended to stay here and, my luck, I probably will, but if I can work out some way to move back to Columbus after a decent interval, I’m fucking doing it. I adore Carrie and I wish I had a friend like her up there, but this place is fundamentally unlivable. There’s a reason people here are always so fucking grumpy (oh sure, they have manners, but get a few beers in ’em and then you’ll find out) and want to vote for assholes like Trump. Happy people aren’t like that. And it just gets too fucking hot. And oh my god the fucking bugs. I can’t. I just can’t.

My family had half a century to act like they wanted a relationship with me and all it’s ever actually been is out of sight, out of mind. I’m no better, but back in winter ’94-’95 I sent a whole bunch of relatives holiday and New Year cards. I think I heard back from Aunt Diane. She was only an aunt by marriage. She died the following year of lung cancer. Leaving me with all the people who didn’t reply.

Aunt Nickie used to lecture me about my hands not being broken. The implication being that if I wrote, I’d hear back. That’s not how it actually works, apparently, so I can’t see keeping up the effort.

Mom did write. I keep forgetting that because it wasn’t regular anyway. She’d go through these phases where she’d write frequently, but it wasn’t all the time. I think she got the most active with it after Chaise died and Chan basically fucked off (he had good reasons). Like I was her last chance to be in touch with any of her kids. Thanks, Mom.

—

Additional note: It’s just as well my family doesn’t have anything to do with me unless I’m actually here and they have pretext (and it’s usually holidays). If any of you ever wondered where I got the tendency to nuke relationships from space, I didn’t steal it. There is always someone in the family tree with an active grudge against someone else, and everyone else takes sides. I do not want to be caught up in that shit any more than I probably am. I’m pretty sure Aunt Matilda stays mad at me, for instance. Yeah, y’all go ahead and entertain yourselves. I’ll be over here, like, reading books and shit. And leaving, when I can make it possible.

That probably won’t be til after Dad passes, unless he decides to move into the veterans’ home. He probably will not decide to move into the veterans’ home. They wouldn’t let him drink.

I’m leaving in that probably because if I figured out a way to do it I would probably follow through. I am homesick. This place stopped being home when Mom sold her parents’ house. What can you do. It can hurt to be reminded of Thea everywhere I go, but that’s all I’ve got left of her. I doubt that will change. I have one place like that here. One. Dad’s old trailer across the street, where she took her first steps. That family could decide to relocate tomorrow and then that would be gone too.

—

Well, a while back I realized that what I really want to do is figure out making a living through art/making and writing. Not long after that I shared that portrait of Rory as Sandor Clegane and someone on my friends list scolded me for fannying about and not making more art. And then today I saw a comment to the effect that I’m a good writer, which is not the first time I’ve seen that sentiment expressed in the past six months. I never hear compliments like this about anything else I do. Wait, that’s not 100% accurate. I did get some compliments from our customers (“plan members”) when I worked at Quantum. The compliments made me feel good, but being angry is a better motivator for talking to an employee’s manager than being happy with the employee is. The CEO had a habit of emailing everyone whenever she got word of a customer compliment, praising the employee. She never sent out an email about me. I was active on the phones for a good three months. People who’d been in my training class got several of those emails. I always fell through the cracks. I don’t do things for praise but when no one can seem to find anything right, in a way that would actually help me, with whatever I’m doing then I start questioning what the point is. I can’t be very good at it. Why bother?

One reason I get so prickly about this is I have dealt with too many shitbirds who will just sit there saving up and saving up every little toe I put out of line and then one day, just when I think everything’s going well, let me have it with both barrels. It doesn’t even have to be special fanfare, but I NEED to know I am doing okay or I’m going to spend all my time worrying when the other shoe’s going to drop. That’s no good for me and it’s certainly no good for any organization I might be working for.

I suppose it’s one reason being self-employed appeals to me. Nothing says “you did a good job” like someone paying you and then not asking for a refund.

The funny thing is I am getting paid for writing. It’s pocket change right now, but at four dollars and change after fees, I just need seventy-five paying subscribers to cover my most necessary bills. A hundred and fifty if I do things properly and pay taxes. Which I want to do, but with my income so low right now I don’t even want to think about that. I mean, thanks for the Medicaid, but it’s only marginally better than the first time I was on it twenty years ago. I drive on shitty roads, I am not at all protected from madmen in my government, and I have almost zero safety net except the occasional concession from some random charity that most assuredly does not have its shit together. So when I ask what the fuck I am getting out of paying taxes I am quite serious.

(Except veteran services in Ohio but, considering I can thank the Army that my life blew up in 1999 in the first place AFTER I saved them money and grief, they fucking owed me.)

—

I should get my ass to bed. I should also shower, but I want to make absolutely sure I am done shitting before I bother with that. I even got some of that fucking Lume deodorant because Walmart sells sample tubes. One of the problems with being fat is you need odor control in more places than just your pits. I can’t imagine a colonoscopy is any more pleasant for the doctor than it is for the patient. So I’m being nice. It also ends up being less embarrassing for me so, two birds with one stone. Anyway, all of that will do more good in the morning than it will now.

Besides, at least I won’t get the munchies if I stay up longer. Weirdly I haven’t had hunger pangs so I guess there’s something to the “you’re not hungry, you’re thirsty” argument BUT, I suspect someone got their wires crossed. Because killing your hunger pangs doesn’t mean you don’t need food. I couldn’t do this every day, even without the Evil Potion. I’d die of some kind of malnutrition. And yet, I’m not hungry. Go figure.

Okay. Off we go. ‘Later.