didn’t go to work today

i didn’t stumble out of bed to the alarm at six fifty in the morning today.  my husband goes to sleep much later than i do and to minimize his disturbances when i go, i try to lay out everything i’m taking with me the night before.  today, i forgot a few items which put a crimp in my morning – my underwear and my glasses, which i would’ve had to creep into the bedroom like the cookie crook for – if i had gone to work today.

i immediately began regretting going to work, wondering if i should or shouldn’t, which is why, as i took my shower, i decided i shouldn’t, and didn’t.  i mused that i’d rather be an anchorite monk living in a box and pondering jeezis all day than going to work.

also conceived of a notion to chronicle this day on which i’m not working, in this fashion.  due to the mangled order of operations from forgetting my underwear i would’ve had to put them on downstairs, and discovering my ride / mother-in-law waiting in the living room, have to awkwardly change into them in the kitchen.

one could say my forgetting things began before the week did.  i normally buy a block of mozzarella on grocery run and slice it for a few weeks worth of snacks, but this week thought i still had some – i hadn’t.

with these inconveniences i would have ended up leaving eight minutes late, which meant the school zone by my house would be more active, which would add another minute of lateness to my commute.

as i’d be typing this on the road, my lower digestive system would’ve started to fuss, reminding me i have at least two legitimate health reasons to not want to go to work today.  i’d also be wondering how much autocorrect could fuck up my post as i type all this.

so it’s a good thing i didn’t go and am not on my way, close to the place, as the sun continues its rise and cars rip by and seagulls cry and crows crow.  i swear crows have doubled or tripled in population within the last few years.  something fucked up is probably happening, bit it’s nice to see some kind of life proliferating.  anyway, lately there have been a huge mass of them on the roof of the building i work in, at dawn all huddled on the edge of the building, absorbing the early light, getting their will up to start hustling.  today i wouldn’t have noticed them, not being at work, also the days getting slightly longer might mean they left that ledge before i didn’t arrive.

as i didn’t approach the building, i didn’t check my blog comments and find an orgy of spambots feasting on my most recent blog post.  gross.

***

actually inside the place of work, which i was not, i would have realized i’d need to do this liveblobbing thing in shorthand notes to be expanded later, so little breathing time as is actually scheduled into any given work day.  this would have resulted in the day’s events switching to past tense.  is this past perfect?  i’m so tired.

i would have gotten into an elevator which insists on showing news stories on its little screen.  there’s one at the building where my storage unit is warehoused, which shows nothing but fluff about sports and cute animals and weather, thank fuck.  this one unfortunately would have been showing some news of the type i prefer to avoid, and in this case totally did because i wasn’t there.  i didn’t see articles about the cow-like italian bovino getting shitcanned, or the magnificently cruel and corrupt dude from fifa acting morally superior to cruel and corrupt amurrica, or whatever whatever.

there are pictures of shitler and couchfucker and some other worthless shit in the security vestibule of my office, which i normally avoid by walking past, careful not to use my peripheral vision, taking a ridiculously long way around, and coming in the back entrance.  this is not optional.  except today, when i opted to not be there.

we used to have our own cubicles where we could have personal decor and our own customizations, but now we’re permanently “hotelling,” taking cubes on the first come first serve, entering our gubmint names in a spreadsheet on a laptop to show where we are.  i would have “crytyped” my name with a few sloppy misspellings.  the keyboard’s clitoris would have fallen off again.

the big boss of the facility who once fatphobia’d me at the last office party i ever willingly attended would have felt the need to say good morning at me.  he knows my first name.  i would have tried to say some shit like “it is in fact before noon” but the mumble surely would not have been fully audible.

in the men’s room would have been putting on my makeup.  morning is the time for a few coworkers to empty their bowels in the last easy-going style moment they’re going to have, and the scent would have been unlovely, but hey, i wasn’t there.

the lost time would have meant horking down breakfast and hopping on the phones as quick as possible, straight into a frenzy of activity.  sometimes emotionally charged, sometimes intellectually challenging, always 2 fast 2 furious, unless i’m not there, which i wasn’t.  not getting my mozzarella with breakfast would have meant starting to tap out near lunchtime and chucking some other kind of snack into my gullet in some transient moment i’d stolen for myself, which i didn’t have to do because i wasn’t there.

***

lunch would have been fortunate to not be as funky in the low end as the morning portended and therefore not lost any precious time to needing to use the bathroom.  the break is still too short and i would have speedwalked everywhere to get my food eaten and get back to my desk timely.

lately they’ve been on us to never ever go over on break time even by a minute, my response to which is giving my reasons for any overage, in the preferred format for documenting off-phone time, with an email to boss.  would have been one minute late back from both 15s and lunch, so an email explaining that tossed together in the last moment of my shift would have been in order if i was there.  but the few minutes they give us to check email and do training videos at the end of the day is cancelled on the busiest days which it was, so it was good i wasn’t there, would have totally forgot to document it taking slightly longer than anticipated to wipe my ass.

***

after the last fifteen minute break, a few calls in, i would have started to get this wiggly feeling, 15:52 hours military time, hard to focus, feeling emotional, like manically sad maybe, very hard to describe.  would have set myself in a mode so that no call drops in when the current one ends.  big sigh of relief when that call ends in a relatively short amount of time, then racing around to go to the bathroom or eat a snack or any other number of things i would have had to do if i had been there and feeling like that which i wasn’t.  passing each other in the hall another coworker whose name i don’t even know would have called me by the short version of my gubmint first name, making for “right back atcha chief” styled awkward moment.  didn’t happen.

would have managed to manipulate the course of last call to end with several minutes to spare, much nicer than the shifts like the day before when i went into three minutes of overtime which is not long enough to get paid for.  my lunch bag much smaller after having consumed all the pop i’d brought with me, i could stuff it in the laptop bag and minimize what i carried on the way out, if i had been there.

same elevator same news stories same aunt-in-law giving a ride home so graciously i can’t mention how horrible the pop music on her car radio is to me, drag the recycling bin in from the curb, and it would have been evening time, but i wouldn’t have had to hear that radio and i  was able to take in the recycling bin earlier in the day at my leisure because i didn’t go and was grazing on food and napping at my own pace throughout the day, like some kind of animal who has never heard of clocks.

***

good thing i didn’t spend any time at work blogging because that’s strictly not allowed.  but not having gone there, or having stayed home as i very much did, i would have ended up in the same place, making a small few meals for my husband and doing some bare minimum chores, the last of which are still ahead of me.

and here i am.  good night.

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Juggalo Reprezentation

I feel I should come out of the closet on this, because visibility is important.  Now I don’t routinely bang Insane Clown Posse or Twiztid, but a juggalo once told me that I am a juggalo, and by his decree, so I am.  I, Bébé Mélange, am a juggalo.

If you are a juggalo and feel the need to talk about it with someone, let my comment section be a safe space for you.  Also, if you just want to ask a juggalo a question, you can put it to me.  Just be kind, you know, ask in good faith. Thank you…

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…ok, apologies to real jugheads; this was obviously a bit facetious.  no offense intended, do consider me an ally at least?  i’ll pour a faygo out for you in contrition.  i really was granted juggalo status by one of that tribe, but it’s more of an honorary title.  rezpekt.

There’s not much to that story.  I went to a diploma mill type commercial art school, which lured in radical bros by saying “you could make animays or vidya games.”  This wasn’t me; I was lured by lies about how much money I could make with the job skills.  But this juggalo, he was a radical son of a bitch, as they say.  He had a ball bearing necklace and his life drawings looked like lofi dragon ballz.

We rode the same bus south from Seattle into poor people lands, where he was the kind of guy to drop acid and shoot fireballs in his back yard, and I was the kind of binch to work in fast food and come up with house rules for ttrpgs I’d never get to use.  One night he told me that I met his criteria for being considered a juggalo.  Fantastic.  I’ll accept that.

I hope he’s having a juggalish good time out there somewhere, perhaps with a juggalette and two point five juggajuniors.  He was a handsome lad, but life has many traps.

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More Bad Ideas

Maybe because life has been rather hard lately in some respects, I’m just full of escapist compulsions.  Being a creative type, these tend toward the creative – write this, write that.  Sometimes I even have an urge to draw and I am sooo out of practice on that shit.  What I need to be doing is keep that new year resolution to sort out our shit and empty the storage unit.  If Florida is going to start having bouts of underwaterness within fifteen years, my condo is as well.  If I get that shit squared away, it will be much easier to move.  Just to live in general.

Let me interrupt the explanation of my bad ideas to talk about a good idea that isn’t getting discussion.  Any place that could salvage real estate with a system of dikes needs to get on that shit right fuckin’ now.  If Washington state does that with this river valley I live in, some pretty useful land can be kept.  And maybe we won’t have to throw all the work we did here in the trash.  All the suffering we went through just to get this far in life.  Ho hum.  File that next to Marcus Ranum’s big proposal for humanity to unfuck itself.

Anyway, thinkin’ about ttrpg fun times I’ve had in the past got me yearning to fuck around with that in the present.  Run a Vampire: The Masquerade game with myself just to see where the random rolls lead me.  But if I’m going to waste time writing, it should be writing something at least quasi-original.  One approach people like to take, to get the creative juice of a rpg while still having a possibility of selling it as their own writing, is filing the serial numbers off – like the Fifty Shades lady done with her fanfic.  I’m not in that state of creative desperation.

Then again, why focus on original content?  The notion I should make any of my writing legal to sell?  That’s laughable.  But then, making art that uses other people’s content just seems kind of pathetic.  I’ve made no secret of my disdain for fanfic.  Writing a story in somebody else’s world is a close cousin to that.  Why think of the content of a game as writing?  It’s really hard for me to not do that, for reasons.

Other random wild hares – Read all the books you’re supposed to read, to be an intellectual.  Finish Josefina y Blasfemia.  Serialize a completely unrelated novel on here, like I did with Centennial Hills.  Get back into drawing by way of doing a comic strip.  Get back into drawing by way of doing all of the exercises in the How to Draw Manga book series.  Start a book club.  Start practicing singing.  Make music.  Make concept albums.

I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years…

Those dudes from U2 ripped this song off pretty hard for “Goldeneye,” I think.  Whatever.

Anything is anything.

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Twenty Year Date-iversary

Been with this guy for 20 years as o’ NYE midnight-ish, been married only a year and a few months.  It’d be nice to do something cool for the two decade date-iversary, but we’re too gay to know how to drive, and got health issues limiting the options further.  No need for suggestions, stuff be what it be.  But congratulate us if yer so inclined, that’s cool.

New Year’s Eve 2005, we started hanging out earlier in the day, in his apartment.  I think we ate out, that I don’t recall, but I do remember we showed each other movies we like.  He showed this anime called Dead Leaves I’ve never heard of anywhere else or since (how odd), I fast-forwarded to the highlights of Hard Boiled.  I’m more of a basic bitch in the obscurity game.

One of our mutual friends came over to hang out for a bit.  I remember coming out of the bathroom and both of them looking at me like I’d lost my mind.  Took a second to realize it was because I was doing a shaky leg dance to straighten the long johns inside my jeans.  Hey, maybe I like to twerk.  Don’t judge.

He kissed me when I was on the way out the door a lil after midnight.  Or before?  I don’t remember.  Then I took a bus back to Everett.  The end.

I invited myself to live with him and sorta ruined his life possibly.  I was telling him “I love you” a year before he said that to me.  His ILUs are hard-earned.

It’s good tho.  We abide

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A Dreamworld of Magic

I’ve always loved escapism, in one form or another.  Before I could write I drew pictures, played with toys, I’ve always been into TV and movies, the second I learned about TTRPGs went hard for those, and in recent years have spent much of my time writing fantastic scenarios.

Actually before I even learned about RPGs, I’d kind of invented them for myself?  I’d tell stories when my brother and I were supposed to be sleeping, and he’d tell me what his character was doing.  I’d draw the characters when I got up in the morning – some version of ourselves as millionaires or future cops or cowboys or rock stars in a Van Halen mold.  Funny in those pictures I’d always be taller, but when we actually grew up he beat me by a few inches.

So I’m at the bottom of my social media feed, as it were.  I’m out of more mindless distractions, and my brain is calling out for magic again, like some kind of squishy pink Ronnie James Dio inside my headbones.  But somebody else’s fantasy won’t do.  Gotta have my own.  What will work for me?  What will scratch this itch?

Sometimes it’s giant robots.  My husband once suggested to me that Castle of Otranto could easily be turned into anime, and I thought the giant armor is basically already a mecha.  How would I render that?  As a comic?  Too much effort.  I like giant robots but I don’t do nearly enough with them.  Had an idea for a heavily giger-influenced mecha story with big gay overtones…  it’s not time for that yet.

Cat people.  As a fantasy trope.  Why are they on my mind?  They were always kinda weird, right?  Usually it’d be a sexy lady with a cat head, like, ok, are you seriously going to kiss a cat mouth while you’re boning down?  Eesh.  Let me not squander my furry points completely.  Um.  I dunno.  You can have a cat head if you want to.

Flamin’ swords.  I saw one recently somewhere; where was that?  A video game trailer?  I feel like it was a lady character with a flamin’ sword, sleeshin’ away.  I wonder what the first occurrence of fiery swords in fiction is.  Was it the arch-michael keepin’ us out of the godda davida?  So little in the bibble was truly original, wouldn’t be surprised to see an older source.

Through the course of various Spooktobers and MonsterHearts I have come up with a lot of fantasy stories, and as an exercise I recently tried to combine as many of them as I could into one excessively complicated plot.  That’s the key to making a 900-page fantasy doorstopper like Georgie the RatRollicker Martinez – have lotsa subplots.  But that’s too much.  I need something I can dip in and out of more easily.

Because I don’t have all the time in the world.  It’s back to work Monday and I’m not lovin’ it.

gimme a catboy in a gundam with a flamin’ sword.  he says reeawwrr!  flame sword is go!  and flies into the night sky, disappearing as a twinklin’ star.  then do your chores and go to work.  blugh.

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Awash

between the boards is where the roaches dwell.  i suppose they were named cockroaches due to an affinity for chicken coops.  the beams cross between floors and walls, sandwiched by the boards, plastered and painted over, but full of delicious prizes.  the cockroaches do not think about this.  it’s safe, it’s warm, it has lovely rot to eat.  gets a little crowded, so you venture timidly into the bright places to see what other nosh you might feel out.  this is where the war begins.  but until that comes?  back between the boards?  as much peace as they are ever afforded.

between the boards we dwell.  the other side of the plaster from the tiny ones, the lumbering creatures that need enrichment and numbness in equal measure, to balance our burning brains.  the electronics enrich, the plaster and the carpet, they numb.  we are megafauna, our median adult size defining the lower bond of that term, depending on who’s talking.  it fits.  takes a lot to move the old meat around, especially when it’s like this.

outside the boards, outside the boxes, it pours down on us, endless.  heaven taking a piss.  the universal solvent.  water.  the plants in the garden are left to their own devices.  sink or swim, guys.  if you were pruned now, you’d rot.  draw those old leaves in around you and pray overwatering isn’t a thing for your kind.  even worms famously find the sodden earth unlivable, and take their chances with crows and robins.  how do moles and gophers live through this sort of thing?

drips were a thing in art, and you still see it sometimes.  it might have emerged from the aesthetic of graffiti, of oversprayed paint running down walls from the tagger’s design, like so much blood.  lots of sculpture and visual art with sculptural elements bear this motif as well, and in both cases it is dripping frozen in time.  but that’s not how the dripping works right now, in the world.  it’s an unfathomable constellation of violence, roiling in the sky where the drops aggregate, hurtling toward the earth in columns sheets waves or just as so many singular streaks, so many more than in all the paintings in all the galleries in the entirety of the 2010s, coming down every minute of every hour, until the sky is spent.

they splash, they explode, or they wriggle vermiform down slick surfaces, loosely bound in their units by that surface tension whose bizarre nature we take for granted.  i can think of two fluids i’ve ever dealt with that cling to themselves like that – mercury and water.  nobody regards the behavior of mercury as normal, when in childhood you break the thermometer to watch the pretty poison burst apart and fuse again into strange orbs and amoeba-like puddles.  the eldritch properties of water slip past our notice as it slips past our gums.  the way we infuse it with fruit pulp, dried leaves, and burnt beans all break that surface tension, to some extent – coffee the most effective of all.  that’s why it spills so readily, leaping out of your cup at the slightest provocation.  tho maybe the tension is still there, just writ small, with narrower rivulets and spicules, clinging to the outside of your cup as it races down to leave its indelible brown stamp below.

water is water.  it all washes over us, keeps us hiding between the boards, until we can’t ignore it anymore.  like the war between roach and man that erupts whenever the border is breached, the water can bring chaos into our little shelters.  ceilings collapse, pipes burst, floods threaten everything.  there is flooding in my town, i hear.  i’m not so very far from the river.  will it swell enough to reach my family?  not likely.  not this year.  maybe when a little more arctic ice is gone.  i’ll live to see it.

let’s reflect on the reason for the season – to wish you had storybook weather, from books that were written in a land of distinct seasons, in the northern hemisphere.  whether you’re boiling away in australian heat or wiping snails off packages before you bring them inside pacific northwest doors, you want to see the jolly old elf dashing through the snow.  denied, like any other dream you’ve been sold.  i suppose hereabouts we are not the kind to buy dreams, but some of us feel the pain of their temptations more profoundly than others.

the long sleep continues.

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Thanks for Giving Us the Plague

We’re all sick.  My mother-in-law brought home some wacky virus or other, which naturally is hitting my husband the worst, because they always do.  As I compose it’s only 5:49 in the evening (black night this time of year at this latitude) and after eating some thanksgiving themed gruel, he’s gone back to sleep again.  At least there’s no wheezing.  They say rest is supposed to be good for sickness, right?

MiL cooked the gruel tho, and I said thanks to her for that.  Wish she’d ever wear a mask.

I’ve been thinking about how much of a social outlier you have to be to wear a mask these days.  Practically nobody does it.  That makes it a conformity thing, I think.  There is no way the vast majority of the population in a blue state feels easy-breezy-indestructible about disease and/or nihilistic enough to not care who suffers or dies for unnecessary transmissions.  Some of these people would do it, if they weren’t afraid of looking like a freak.

So when you see somebody wearing a mask properly, understand that person is either a cowardy custard whose germophobia exceeds their social fear, or they are a person so fucken cool they genuinely don’t give a fuck what other people think about them – mostly the latter.  Props either way, because vulnerable people like my husband don’t deserve this shit.  I wish his mom wasn’t a slave to conformity.

After a few hours of interruption, back to finish the article up.  He woke to eat two bites of pumpkin pie and went back to sleep.  Snoring again.  At least that’s breathing.

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DONK

weird birding day.  was looking directly at my bedroom window when a robin flew into it like a ton of bricks.  somehow it was able to fly away afterwards, but jesus fucking christ.  my phone just wanted me to type jesus fucking morbius.  maybe i should make a wattpad account.  also i saw a bald eagle pretty well, for a good amount of time, so one happy thing.

weird dreaming night.  something like hellraiser but more elaborate.  some goofy old lady kept nearly opening the box by accident and we had to force it closed.  there was a demon with a name like anh nyeng and all his cultists had it tattooed on their chest.  lots and lots and lots of violence.  skulls getting smashed, guns, machetes.  i think the trailer for tetsuo: body hammer may have been an influence.

i just wanted to get these memories down quick, don’t miss the post before this, if you want something more substantial.

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Can’t Tell My Husband

One day I randomly discovered that watered down coke zero tastes just fine, when served partially frozen or with a lot of ice.  Further, I found that randomly admixing other beverages to it lends a certain interest to the concoction, creating a kinder, gentler chalice of iggy pop.

My husband’s peculiarities are such that he never finishes his seltzer completely.  Waste not want not, I have taken to using the dregs of his seltzers to flavor my watered down coke zero.  This is disgusting to him, but he allows it.  But my newest transgression might be so odious that it provokes murdilation with extreme prejudice, and therefore it must remain a dark secret between you and you and you and I.

There is also at least some risk of foodborne illness.  That said, I’ve seen a guy regularly eat bananas that have turned completely brown and mushy – like that was his preference – and he never died, so here I go…

Last week I sliced an apple and I did not eat the whole thing.  It remained in the crisper until this week.  It wasn’t completely rotten, but it was a little off.  Random areas had become lightly discolored, and more peculiar, the taste was altered by proximity to a big bag of fire roasted hatch chile peppers.  Both the apple and the peppers were sealed in ziploc bags, but those peppers were radioactive.  This experience is like eating a radish with light sweetness and a healthy dash of green pepper flavor.

Why am I strangely compelled to continue eating this corrupted apple?  By the time this post comes out of queue, I will either be dead from the consequences, or alive and fine, despite my poor judgment.  Stay tuned.

Hello from beyond the grave perhaps.  I hope you’re having a nice day.

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Be Still and Know

I was in the parking lot of home despot, when I saw this sign at a distance.  Initially I thought it said, “I AM GOD.”  Strange place for fundie horseshit, I mused, until the actual product was revealed: “FARM FRESH SOD,” where the words farm and fresh were de-emphasized.

I had been primed to see these words by this ornament dangling from the rearview mirror of my ride’s coach:

Sit still and know that if you misbehave, jesus will fuck you up.  Bes’ believe.

I like to mix the ideas.  KNOW THAT I AM SOD, THE FARM FRESH GOD, like a parody of this jam:

If you haven’t thought of that song since your homeboy in college DL’d a midi of it in 1989, you’re welcome.

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