Waiting in the Car Again

I have the degenerative disc disease.  Not crippling most of the time, so far, but the first of those three Ds promises that by the time I’m able to retire, I won’t have the spine to enjoy it much.  Meanwhile, I avoid catastrophically throwing out my back (again) by strategically deploying my spine points.  Kinda like spoons, but specific to spines.  I can feel out when my fortitude is getting iffy and stop doing things.

So we’re out at garage sales and thrift stores and garden centers for a day, and walking slowly is worse for my back than walking quickly, so keeping my lovin’ man company as he shops drains the spinals.  At the last stop I decided to stay in the car.  Two of four windows were cracked and I put up the foldy silver dealy to reduce heat coming through the windshield, I put a hoodie on the lil hook thing over the back seat window on the sun side to also block some.  But the sun burned off what was left of the overcast morning and the air began to boil.

I finished slowly nursing a cold drink.  I almost fell asleep and woke up again.  I wanted to be able to rest my eyes so I put on Radiohead’s Amnesiac and stopped looking at my phone.  Jumped in the river, what did I see?  Black-eyed angels swam with me.  I ran out of drink and started melting the ice cubes in the cup over my head and arms.  This just felt like spinning plates.  I ran out of ice cubes about the time I ran out of Radiohead.

I locked the doors, got out, and lo, there was a dumpster near, for the empty cup.  When I tossed the cup, I found myself able to see around a wall and lo, there was a port-a-potty.  I had to drain the lizard, so I stepped inside.  Warm, but not as warm as the car, and far from the nastiest port-a-potty I’d used.

As I started to go, I saw inside the urinal a little organic bit of matter lurking, pale brown like a bramble under summer sun.  But no, I had a good idea that this was a spider, and it quickly emerged to confirm the theory.  My vision is deteriorating, so too close and too far I can’t see well, but this guy was in the sweet spot where I might have been able to count the eyeballs.  Not the biggest spider but far from the tiniest, adroitly trooping as it circumnavigated the pissing zone.  Would it jump on my junk?  Would the story get worse?

No.  I left in peace.  There was a low-key moment of stress when I noticed the door’s plastic inside latch was half torn away.  Somebody else’s problem.

After all that, I rolled around the corner to see my man coming out of the place with a cart full of plant life.  Good timing all around.

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The Size of the Matter

I spent most of my 20s working in fast food, and as I was pushing 30, at Jack in the Box specifically.  Fast food, like being a security guard, is work you can get without a high school diploma.  Poorly compensated, but the people who do it for a living get by living close to the ground.  We have rotating casts of roommates and romantic partners, pooling resources in endless strings of makeshift households.  We’re modern hunter-gatherers, unable to survive health problems or any of the crises that money would buy some amount of prevention.

But it’s cool.  Nobody deserves to be insecure about food, shelter, medicine, etc etc, but it’s kinda funny being a sheisty fuckup among sheisty fuckups.  Office drama doesn’t hit the same as the soap opera of a workplace where people aren’t distracted by cerebral activities.  When you aren’t worrying about TPS reports, you have all the mental freedom to live in demented fantasies and romances.  I was on the loserly end, so fantasies all the way, and that was good for me.  I couldn’t afford to do it forever, but I got to do a lot of drawing and dreaming, conceiving of creative things that might bear fruit many years later.

Fast food workers are characters.  Like, in a movie, they’d never be played by the star; they’d be played by character actors.  Stanky weirdos with funny faces, sultry sirens with scars and piercings, people on a path to homeless-flavored mental illness, druggies in between freakouts, and of course, hard-working family people with zero economic privilege, like immigrants and children of broken homes.  I guess a few of those could have described me.

So in the Jack-in-the-Box scenario I am about to unfold, I was the stanky weirdo working the front counter, while hard-working family woman was having an idle conversation with a sultry (very short and chubby) siren at the window.  It was a slow moment, all was quiet in the universe, and I could hear that chat well, tho I was not involved with it.

Siren says, “Yeah, this guy I’m with is real nice and all, but I just can’t stay with him.  His dick isn’t big enough.”  “What do you mean?,” asked family woman.  “When I have sex, it just doesn’t hit the same unless I feel full inside.”  Anyway, I must have pulled some kind of embarrassing face, because family woman felt the need to say at me that size doesn’t matter.  She even came over to me, offered some other kind of nicety.  Maybe it wasn’t my face that was the matter; maybe she just sensed my small dick energy.

I don’t think I was offended at the time.  Pretty sure I found it amusing, and I still do.  But at this point, the funniest thing about it is wondering just what made me look like I needed my vienna sausage consoled.  Also, that some people are just so quick to nurture that this is their first instinct.  And that by going out of her way to offer that comfort, she specifically let me know she thinks I’m packing a triple-A battery.

So funny.

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5Ggles

On the bus to Seattle along I-5, I saw a large raptor-style nest atop a relatively short cellphone tower.  Next to that, whether it was the nest’s builder or not, I beheld the majestical symbol of Jesus’s United States, the bald-ass eagle.

As far as I recall from nature specials and a bit of observation, big hawks and eagles like to build huge nests on tops of trees, especially when they are blunted off or expansive enough to support such a structure.  Cell towers have a broad flat top and are often quite tall, so they appeal to that instinct.  I once saw nesting ospreys in the tower across from the walmart where I used to work.

My hope is that this doesn’t mess up the birds too much, and that, understanding this reality, cell companies would build the towers to deal with birdy presence – safe places for urine and feces to fall, engineering to reduce fire risk from giant amateur weaving projects next to the high voltage, etc.  If I had to guess what actually happens, it’s probably nest destruction where legally allowed.

Good luck to the beasts, as ever.

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Time for Bifocals

Got my prescription for middle-aged baby’s first bifocals almost a year ago and before that rx slips even further into the past, I figured I’d take a day off and get it done.  You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I would get this done easily.  At length I would get my bifocals; this is a point definitively settled — but the very definitiveness with which it is resolved precludes….  Eh, sorry.  What was I saying?

The HOA is having the driveways in the cul-de-sac re-slimed with black goo, so my chauffeur was unavailable – unwilling to drive across the lawn to escape.  Sigh.  I walked a short way to the bus stop before the day could get as hot as it planned to be, stood with my head in the shadow of the sign and waited about five minutes.  Coulda been worse.  Can’t do one of these posts without mentioning birds.  I think steller’s jays* were tusslin’ with some other kind of bird up in the treetops, hard to see.

The bus snaked through Auburn to the station, which is also a train platform, and there I had to wait maybe twenty minutes to catch the next one.  While I waited a thirtyish Islander guy tried to vape and was told to take it across the street by the security guard.  A West African lady with four kids came to catch the bus and the little boy was dragged away from where he was trying to watch the train.  I’d just been standing in the same spot watching the train a moment before he got there.  Some people just wanna watch the wheels spin.  I saw a few more Africans walking by, a short but attractive couple in very clean clothes.  The man’s shirt said he was the proud dad of a US marine, but I swear he did not look old enough to have a kid in the military.  Is the Corps taking twelve-year-olds now?

I make these racial identifications to illustrate the color of the world, but it would be foolish to say you can tell just by looking at somebody.  Nigerians look very different from Somalians on average, but it’s all a grade, with outliers this way and that.  The Islander I would not have been able to tell from a Mexican, except that he had some Polynesian pride apparel on.  Gotta have those turtles and surfboards.  Anyway, this is to add an unwritten question mark after any racial descriptor you hear from me.

I got off the bus and had to trek across the Mall-Formerly-Known-as-The-Supermall’s endless parking lot to get to a walmart.  I told the lady I need glasses, she asked if I had a prescription, I asked if I could e-mail a pdf and she said no, I had to print it, referred me to Electronics, and I swear I spent a full hour at the kiosk trying different shit to get it to recognize my files.  After every type of connection failed, I resorted to google Photos, which has to be tricked into importing pngs.  While I was at it, I found out my google Photos account had nothing in it but pictures of a walmart bathroom from when I worked at one in a neighboring city.  Did I take them because of amusing graffiti, too small to notice in thumbnail?  Not curious enough to open the files.

I finished hacking the planet to place my order and it told me to come back in an hour.  I knew better.  I waited five minutes, watched them print behind the counter, just walked into that employee-only area and snatched them.  Who would stop me, in the perpetually understaffed late crapitalist megaretailer?  Nobody saw a thing, but some security cameras which may or may not have even been watched by a human in that moment.

I get to the front.  “I need glasses.”  “Insurance?”  I whipped out this card I’ve been paying for five years but never used.  She compared it against a big list in scribbly cursive.  I think she was Persian.  No dice, so she went to somebody else.  They were going back and forth until another lady – a blonde with some flavor of German accent – told me they do not take that insurance.

You’re probably starting to get why I took a whole day off to do this.

I hadn’t eaten, so time to go into The Artist Formerly Known as The Supermall of The Great Northwest Where My Brother Got Perma-banned From Incredible Universe on Opening Day for Hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del on a Locked Up Computer, there to ingest buttery little hotdogs in bread twists, or as we call them in jesus’s chosen nation, pigs in a blanket.  While I ate, I watched kittens wrestling in a storefront and looked at my insurance’s website to find acceptable providers.  I could take two buses to get to another part of Auburn or one bus to get to Federal Way.

Out to the bus again, the day now over 80 degrees, and me without a hat.  I’d just missed the bus, had to wait a half hour, but the shadows were still kinda livable, with a cool breeze blowing.  A skinny East African youth (American accent, may have been born here) asked me about the time, then laid out a tale of woe.  He missed the bus earlier because he fell asleep listening to a podcast, and when he woke up it was so much hotter, really unpleasant.  I helped him figure out which side of the road to be on, and he floated off to hang out with a less loquacious friend.

He wanted to get to the Federal Way Transit Center, and I wanted to go a little way past that.  He fell sleep again behind me on the bus, his big sneakers kept sliding under the seat and bumping me in the heels.  I don’t know why some young AMAB people are, for a brief season of their lives, practically narcoleptic, and then never again.  My boyfriend knew a white kid who, without chemical assistance, fell asleep on the bus so hard that they called the cops to rouse him.  We got to the FWTC and his quiet friend tried to wake him, but then gave up and left him sleeping there.  I was distracted and didn’t think much of it, but as we kept going past his intended destination, I realized that maybe I should be waking him up.

I was too indecisive or shy and left him dreaming his way to the Twin Lakes Park & Ride.  The first place I went had fancy brand names on most of their frames and I got a set priced at $367.  My insurance was covering like $45.  I should never have paid for that shit, not one fucken dime.  I told the tattooed hipster lady I was off to do a lil comparison shopping.

On the way to the bargain place that always advertises two for one deals, dumping sweat, I stopped at the daiso and bought an apple soda from a kid named Kieran.  It tasted like pears, somehow on a grade to cold vegetable soup, and cost three dollars.

I picked out two different frames I liked, anticipating the bogo deal, and found out it couldn’t apply for reasons.  Getting only one pair, max benefit of my insurance, etc?  $364.  At least the frames were a little cuter than the ones at the designer place, so I said fuck it, bought the things, and was done with it.  Well, they won’t be ready for pickup for a few weeks.

I was done trooping through the heat so I tried to arrange a ride back home and was delayed by miscommunication and foolery until the thick of rush hour, and it took forever to get home.  One of my cohabitants was cooking some peppers and asked me to tend them while she visited with her sister, who had just dropped me off.  I found a bisected produce sticker floating in the vegetable oil, and a few slices with the kind of creepy brown texture I would’ve pared off into the trash.  I ended up cooking dinner in its entirety – yakisoba with a mix of frozen and fresh veg, some kinda peanut sauce, just whatever ingredients had been left out.  I don’t even like that type of shit.  Yum.

But they’re coming.  The cute bifocals.  Should be here in time for August’s Podish Sortacast.  See if anybody can even tell the difference.

 

*That a thousand organisms are named after every colonizer is a fallacy.  Species Georg (Steller) is an outlier and should not have been counted.  Memes aside, I hope there’s progress being made on that project to decolonize bird names.  Let me know when the new names drop.

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PS:  Don’t miss Centennial Hills Part Five, posted a few hours before this.

Kids These Days

So I’m out and about today, manmoded testosterone-maxxing in hoodie and hoary facial roughage.  This morning we went to a garden market in semi-rural suburbia, my mans to shop and me to stagger around looking at wildlife while doing my weekly call to busted old paternal unit.  I beheld a swarm of tadpoles in a planty tub (idk from garden people lingo), cliff swallows, killdeer, white-crowned sparrows, anna’s hummingbird, goldfinch (i know, u see them all the time, but I don’t, so it was cool), less positively IDed barn swallows, and very remote big-ass birds at high altitude, I think two herons and a bald eagle, but hellifino.

As we get to the counter I was reminded of the differences between the generations.  Mild-mannered elders were the main run of customers, well-off and engaged in potentially expensive hobbies.  People my age had a bit more aggressive energy.  I feel like we’re the ones to blame for this edgy bullshit marketing like “big cock farms” products, and “hot shit” sauce.  And then the youngest people were, of course, working all the service jobs.

At the counter, as at all the salvage yards and thrift stores from Ballard to Olympia, the staff had colorful hair and pronouns.  Mind you that in this more rural locale they lacked the boldness of a pronoun name tag, but you got the vibe.  The gentle and conventionally attractive youth that rang us up had a gender-neutral name, u kno how it be.  We also visited one of those thrift stores today.

Later I had to return some junk at the mall, and it’s hard to go out there without wanting some kind of treat for my efforts – a frozen coke, mozzarella sticks, tiny hotdogs wrapped in buttery pretzel dough, u kno, pigs in a blanket.  But I felt full and had already had treats to spare today, so what could I do?

I settled on visual treats.  The American mall is a dying institution, they say, but the lower rent businesses that are better able to afford devalued storefronts are fascinating.  Catholic art and gifts, a barber shop, a nail salon, gluten-free fried foods, a shop that sells freaky homemade fan art products…  I used the smartphone to find out that saint with the unicorn horn and Flava-Flav medallion was St. Jude.

As I finished my few minutes of foolery, a child of ten or eleven approached me, and asked “English or Spanish?”  I said Ingles and he issued the challenge.  “First one to move is gay.”

I was in a bit of a hurry and was like, “It’s cool, I’m gay.”  He was like “whoaa” and either him or one of his homies said, “it’s cool” as I walked away.  Nice to get the nod of approval u little weirdos.

Kids these days.

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500 Words on the Topic of My Pants

Thanks Siggy for this donation.  Topic: a personal story, in my usual way.

MY PANTS

Faded or torn-up blue jeans occasionally rear their ugly head in fashion, and I have worn them far more times in the past than they have been fashionable.  When the holes were big enough and the weather cold enough, I’d wear those off-white thermal underwear underneath ’em.  You know, long johns.  Don’t google those unless you wanna see lots of manly packages and possibly some erections as well; they’ve become a fetish thing.  But yeah, this was the uniform for the lower half of my bod, at one point in time.

But they ain’t cool in my book if they didn’t get faded through actual wear.  Start with some medium blue jeans, wear them til they fall to pieces, shaggy strings all over like a Komondor.  And when should you wear scrubbly clothes?  When doing scrubbly activities.  During the latter part of my time in college I was living with my dad while he tried to make a living as a painter.  When he was desperate and needed some unpaid labor to squeak through a job he’d under-bid, he had me.  That foolish mess paid our rent, my freelance arting did not.

There’s a block of businesses in Seattle that my dad got hired to paint. Some of the lessees chose the color for their little slice of the building, but the rest of the behemoth was up to the property owner.  At first she picked out a color on the rose side of beige, but when the building was almost completed, she said hey, wait, that’s titty pink.  What was I thinking?  So she had my dad start over again with something in the ballpark of gingerbread house.

So I’m helping my dad paint a big-ass building when it isn’t raining.  For slave labor it wasn’t bad, or maybe I got rose glasses on.  My dad was much stronger than I am at the time, not to mention having the relevant job skills, so he did most of the hard stuff and I just moved hoses and tarps around, did a little brushwork.  The weather was mild and you could hear kids rolling skateboards around all day.  A local pizza place made good, passably cheap stuff at that time.

But where the jeans were the most blown out, at the knees, I got some brown paint there.  You see brown specks or splashes on a garment outside of a context where there is definitely paint happening, the most generous interpretation is that they are mud stains.  You can figure what some people thought.

I don’t know what I was smoking at the time, but I gave the perceptions of others zero thought, and wore my stained jean/long john combo everywhere I went.  One time up on Capitol Hill this rough-hewn unhoused dude looked at me like I was the worst kind of poser.  I think he audibly huffed, might have cursed?  I didn’t wear them for long after that.  Even without specifically phrased feedback, I got the memo.

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1000 Words on the Topic of Teeth

Got a donation for $100 with nothing I could interpret as a topic, but I wanna earn my $700, so here’s 1000 words on… The Tooth.  The Tooth!

The German word for toothbrush is Zahnbürste, which literally translates into toothbrush. But to me “bürste” sounds like an explosion, so my mind, which cannot “speak” German after years of trying to fuck with that in duolingo, translates the word halfway and gets to “tooth burst.”

Teeth might as well burst.  So fragile.  At least, if you don’t do right by them.  I can’t handle the tooth.  I grew up in a dysfunctional family, and my parents never made hygiene part of my routine.  When your kids say “I don’t wanna,” the answer should probably not be, “Fine.  Rot in your filth while I read romance novels or smoke drugs.”  We didn’t get a lot of sugar because the parents didn’t let us choose what we were eating much, so my teeth held out pretty well in the face of never getting brushed.  At first.

Flash forward to an even more dysfunctional situation as mom is out cheating, using lunch money to get out of having to prepare food.  (Don’t even ask why dad wasn’t preparing food lol.)  So we got to choose what we were eating, and the sugar began.  Pop, candy, still with terrible hygiene, equals dental wreckage.

Years later, my dad tried to make up for letting that situation happen, by working out a deal with a dentist.  He painted the guy’s house for a break on services rendered, and that guy spackled my mouth with fillings, yarded the unsalvageable stuff out of the back of my jaw.  Clean slate!  I was ready to start a brand new future of sorta having teeth again.  There was a word of warning.  “Some of these fillings really shoulda been crowns.  This work will only hold up for so long…”

It did hold up a real long time.  That dentist was a real craftsman.  But time’s arrow goes one direction, and passed through my mouth along the way.  It’s like in a cartoon where Tom the cat’s teeth all crack to pieces and fall out of his mouth for yuks, but slow motion.  I’ve had dreams about my teeth falling out before.  An interesting thing about those dreams is the strong sense of taste and touch.  I can feel the texture of my teeth with my tongue, feel the liquid sensation of blood and drool going down my throat or coming out of my mouth.  I can taste the saltwater and iron of the blood in my mouth, very richly.  I’m not even panicking about it, usually just like, “at least now I can get dentures and be done with the whole fucking deal.”

But I’m not there yet.  It’s just more piecemeal work.  Drill drill fill fill.  Bzzzzz.  My teeth are not ready for prime time; they do not look good.  Kinda passable at a distance.  As I began to make more video, I’ve been wondering if I should get veneers, make the front look nice. But applying them requires shaving some enamel, and I can’t afford to lose any of the structure I have left.

People always use “root canal” as a symbol for the ultimate experience in grueling pain. This is far from accurate.  You get anesthetic so it doesn’t hurt while you’re getting it, then they literally kill the nerves that are the source of dental pain, so it doesn’t hurt coming out of it.  Give me a mouth full of root canals.  I fucking love ’em.  Why in hell do we need nerves in our teeth?  They’re bullshit, yard ’em out.

I always iron-man dental sessions.  Transit is a snip for me because I can’t drive (too gay), so the more work can be done in fewer sessions the better.  I was at the dentist for hours on the day I started this fundraiser, which is why my judgement was too impaired to just set up a fucking payment plan until they’d already run my card.

Oops, now it’s time to do some verbal soft shoe for the people.  But you deserve it.  FtB still has a commentariat, a following, and while a fraction of what it possessed in the halcyon days, it’s something.  And it’s you, so thanks for reading!  I’ll keep writing ten words per dollar you donate.

Here’s a wacky tooth-related piece of trivia about my life:  If I had gotten my teeth fixed sooner, I might have ended up in a long-term relationship with a young lady, which might have saved her from alcoholism.

I recognized a sexual flexibility in myself and it seemed like it was just easier for gay guys, so I vowed that if I didn’t get a regular girlfriend again by the time I was thirty, I’d go gay.  Shortly before I turned thirty, I hadn’t gotten my teeth fixed yet, so I was too self-conscious to kiss people.  I had a date with this nice girl, at her house, watchin’ movies for hours.

Was it a date?  We hadn’t used those words.  But if a lady gets you in her room, hanging out on her bed for hours, probably she would like you to kiss her at some point.  Not a given, but a distinct probability.  If I had kissed her, we might’ve started dating.  I didn’t, we didn’t, and a little while later I had my dental work done.

I called her up and was like, hey, wanna go out some time?  She said, “I’m with a guy now.”  We chat for a bit and it comes out that their idea of a good time is getting drunk.  She wasn’t into that before she got with this guy.  So if she’d gotten with me instead, less alcoholism in the world?  Maybe.

About then the clock had run out and it was time for me to be gay.  Been happy with the same guy ever since.  The end.

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Floating Away on a Strange Day

Content Warnings: Homicidal Ideation, Capitalism, The Housing Market

So I’m looking to buy a house for the first time.  A butterfly just fluttered by.  What was I saying?  Oh yes.  I’m looking to buy a house for the first time or, rather, a condo – because it’s the only thing in our price range that isn’t a dilapidated pile of weirdness or vacant lot.  This search has brought me back to my hometown – not the place I was born, but the place that I spent most of my formative years, from junior high through high school, to fast food and living in attics and basements in my twenties.

I have an appointment today for viewing a place at 4:00.  It’s on a street where I used to live, a street I walked many many times.  I can remember losing some drawings there on a snowy night, retracing my steps, and finding them in a puddle with half the water soluble ink washed away.  This was the street I lived on when my oldest nieces were taken from the family by CPS and went through very bad times.

But I might live here again, in a condo this time.  I say here, because as I compose this, I am in that neighborhood.  But I want to start this story earlier in the day.  I work from home three days a week and go to the office on Tuesdays.  We’re required to come to the office on a different specific day of the week for an in-person meetingcovid spreader event once every three months, and that happened yesterday.  So my laptop was packed up in a bag this morning and I didn’t feel like unpacking it just to do a half day – I also have Monday off because of a doctor’s appointment – so I took the whole day off from work.

To save a little dosh I took the bus instead of an uber.  The first step of that trek was a fifteen minute walk along a busy thoroughfare in my grey smear of a suburb, no sidewalks.  Across the street is the chamber of commerce building, which is in the bottom of a paved ravine for some reason.  The sign looks like it’s falling, because it’s on the ramp down to that pit.  It just struck me as a fun metaphor for capitalism, especially contrasted with the side of the street I was on.  There is a vacant patch of land that is, for the moment, overgrown with trees and high bushes.  There are trails there, not unlike the trails deer create as they push their bodies through the woods, but these were created by homeless humans, of the losers in our shitty game.

I’m a different tier of loser in that shitty game.  The cost of rent here is jumping so quickly that the only way to have any hope for the future is to buy a home fucking immediately.  High as interest rates on home loans are, it will be the equivalent of taking a two hundred dollar rent hike one year in exchange for not having a hundred-plus hike annually forever.  I’m finally in a position to make this happen.  Five years ago I wasn’t, and prices then were half what they are now.  It’s kind of miserable to see what I missed out on.  Anyway,

I got on the bus, took it down to my hometown, got off at the transit station.  A little old lady – probably not ten years older than me – was trembling on the platform, in the bright sunlight.  I smiled at her through my n95, hoping in a moment that my eyes had been smiling.  Then again, maybe I shouldn’t have done that, because she had some words for me.  I can’t tell if she was begging for change or telling me I’m gross, because her language was a mysterious babble, inaudible above the noise of train tracks and freeway nearby.  Even though there was plenty of room for her to sit somewhere else or move away from where I was sitting, she just stood there, trembling away, a few feet in front of me.  I got uncomfortable of that awkwardness and moved myself to another bench.

The bus from the transit center to my old neighborhood runs half hourly.  Could be worse.  There were just a few people on it, cute-looking gay &/or polynesian mans, and they got off before I did.  Then I was there, on the street of my grody late childhood.

There are a lot of mobile home parks down here – more than I remembered.  The tree where our siamese cat got stuck has been cut down, and the fence hole we used for a shortcut to the 7-eleven had been sealed up, and covered with bushes.  I got to the place too early, and so I set out to time how long it takes to get from the condo we are considering to the nearest grocery store and park.  Spoiler, twenty-five and twelve minutes respectively.

Along the way to the grocery store, there’s a spot where you can turn left or right.  Right keeps you going towards the grocery store, left now leads to a private freight road that wasn’t there when I was young.  But also in that direction, there was once a way you could walk down to the river over some rough rocks and thorny bushes, and I wanted to see if you could still do that.

That was a mistake.  It’s private property, but you can tell it’s never attended by anybody.  The sign says the police are contracted to enforce against trespassers, but where were the cops?  Hell if I know.  The fence was smashed down around some mossy boulders.  I went inside.

The way down to the river was just clear enough that I could tell people still used it regularly, but it was grown over.  Based on the vines I suspect nobody had used it for at least a few days.  It’s a twisty hike through blackberry bushes, bamboo, spider webs, fallen logs, abandoned mattresses, emptied beer kegs and cans, used condoms, syringes…  All the good things in life.  When I reached the water I could see that it was white for some reason.

The last time I went down there I was probably seventeen?  There was a lot less overgrowth back then, and you can see garter snakes slipping in and out of the boulders on the hillside.  Around that time my sister got pregnant, and I knew she was going to destroy the life of any child that she gave birth to.  For years after she proved that to be true, I used to (creepily) tell people that I should have brought her down to that piece of river and put a knife in her heart.  Prebortion.  I never did that, so several lives were ruined, and my own was spared.  I used to regret that more.  Note: If your siblings have counted not murdering you as one of their life’s regrets, you done fucked up.

I crawled out of that disgusting patch of land, all my preparations to look presentable gone to waste.  The spider webs glued all sorts of strange things to my new black pants and they won’t come off.

I walked on this hot shitty day to the local grocery store.  It had changed from albertson’s to safeway, and the AC was not adequate to cool me down after all that exercise.  Sticking my head in every cooler and getting it misted in the produce section, also totally useless.  I went looking for a restaurant with adequate AC, hit up the mcdonald’s and the subway, before I settled on a Mexican bar & grill that was one of the last businesses standing from my youth.

The counter was sticky but you could get cold beverages and it was on the shadowy side of the strip mall, so cooler than the franchises in the front lot.  I watched a rebroadcast ladies soccer game from several years ago and consumed a few non-alcoholic margaritas before I set out again.  Now I’ve timed the trip from the condo to the nearest park, and I’m laying on a metal bench in a large gazebo…

Coming back to this post after having toured the condo and come home, and having put in our bid.  It’s got central AC and the price is as right as possible given the circumstances.  If anyone outbids us though, we have to keep looking.  No wiggle room in our budget.  I feel partially cooked, even without significant sunburn, like I’m on a grade to the status ailment “sweet juicy meat falling off the bone.”

Eager for this journey to reach an end.
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Sitting on the Ground

I have a less than average concern for how I look to passersby and tend to sit on the ground when I’m waiting for the bus. In the war against homeless humans, a lot of stops don’t have benches, so I’m down in the dirt, sitting with my legs pretzel’d. That puts me close to the small details of the environment – the tiny stones in the concrete, odd-looking weeds moss and stray plants, crumbs, garbage, insects. One time I saw the circle of dust being blown away from a wasp’s wings, as if it was a tiny helicopter. I wonder how many people notice these things.

This morning I had a dream I was in some kind of half-assed boot camp for work. It was in or around an antique church. At one point we had to swim in this heated pool. I was able to swim despite not having that skill in real life. There were ducks swimming underwater near the surface, big fish in the depths. After we got out I saw an automated stand selling posh ice cream cones and wanted one, but the alarm woke me up.

I get to work and there are two cars in the parking lot. Ask one person and tell the other the news. The freezing temperatures last night caused a power outage. We’re supposed to wait for a call at ten AM or check our work’s inclement weather line to find out if we’re going to come in later at all. I could have gone to the mall to wait til ten, but it was less walking and less waiting to just get on the bus home instead. Turned out to be the right call because work stayed cancelled.

While walking to the bus, I saw lots of robins chasing each other through the trees, making cute squeaks. I should clarify these are American/fake robins, so picture a thrush. When I sit on the icy concrete next to the frosted grass, I see crows out in the street poking at I don’t know what. One of the crows bounced back to the curb a few paces from me, nervous of traffic.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen bird breath, but it’s a thing. When the weather is cold enough and the bird is big enough, you can see their breath as surely as your own. Warm blooded, after all. I’ve only ever noticed it on crows, and then rarely. Whether it’s because they’re small or because weird bird respiration keeps their breaths short or thin, even on a snowy day, you can’t always see a crow’s breath. Just when they’re taking a deep one.

This crow on the curb was puffing out so much vapor that when it had its beak tilted down, I saw the vapors break over the concrete. It was like a fantasy creature using its ice breath attack. It was also occasionally sneezing, which was adorable and sad. The sun crested the east side of the valley about then and I wondered if one of those was a sun sneeze – where a temperature shift in your face tickles your nose.

Well, I have the day off, so that’s one three day weekend soon to be followed by a four day weekend. I know I need the practice at work so this isn’t great on that level and undercuts my appreciation of this luck, but I do hope to enjoy myself.

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It Ends Sitting in a Car, Thinking About Birds

I had a long day. It could have been worse. In a stressful moment I was rude to someone I didn’t want to be rude to. Mega-retail on an understaffed, hot Sunday. I remembered to take some Excedrin two hours in and that helped.

In the early morning (later as well), we had an unusually high amount of homeless people looking to steal, or just negotiating some of the innumerable crises that make up their lives (I deal with the phone crises), or some combination of the two. Some Sundays the early part of the day can be dead as doornails, hours with just a few people wandering through. When it’s like today, my feet get beat down. I hope I helped some people.

Some cell phone companies decided to run promotions where you trade in an active cell phone for a deal on a new expensive phone, and chumps on the hustle think they can get a burner and flip that in a day. I try to tell ’em to read the terms of those deals more closely, because cell phone minutes aren’t returnable and they could be out forty bucks for nothing.

The company has a problem with staffing the store on weekends. When people are new, it’s easy to get them to work whatever hours you want. But when they get a little experience, they realize weekends are hell, and restrict themselves to weekdays. So Tha Man has been busting moves and leaning on people to open their availability, cutting hours all over the place. Other companies have been doing the same enough that Oregon was crafting legislation to make it illegal to force retail and grocery proles to work on-call or not at all.

All that’s to say the photo section guy has been reduced to one day a week, and only shows up if he feels like it. The rest of us aren’t as trained as we’re meant to be and have other responsibilities, so it’s a rolling train wreck over there. But I still have to go over and help people with it. One of these days I might figure out how to use the SD card slot on the new kiosks. It’s kinda funny watching a place go to hell.

There’s a weird banana toy thing with a hole in the side, someone left on a counter. It’s got drifts of uncanny powder all around it. What is that stuff? No one wants to clean it up and we’re all non-verbally daring each other to see how many days or weeks we can leave it there. It’s right in front of the drop box for customers sending out film to be developed, and that process takes a little over a week. If we have the resolve, someone could see that banana-thing as they send out the film and again when they come to pick it up.

It wasn’t even the hottest day in recent memory, but for some reason people were feeling it. Back to school shopping, or trying to hump the last days of the summer for all they’re worth, they cram into the place. Meanwhile, our own summerhumpers skip work and leave us even more understaffed than Tha Man’s hijinks have. Lines thirty deep. Stuff like that.

The babies were feeling it worse than usual. The stereotype of retail, I think, is of hating children because you hear them crying all the time. That doesn’t have to be true. I take on board the education I’ve had in recent years about ableism and children’s rights, think about the kid’s perspective. Plus they usually are not as jumped-up as the stories tell. But today they were upset. Zombie-walking with sweat-rimmed cheekbones, falling on the ground squalling. May you have better times tomorrow, babies.

I usually see our security guys, but today they were not to be found. I don’t know why, but the place really took advantage and got weird. There was a white dude slapping a belt in his hands as he walked around. A middle-aged couple almost jovially having a domestic dispute at 90 decibels while they strolled up and down every aisle. I noticed the man had a bizarrely formed earlobe. I used to feel upset about deformity and mutilation as a kid, but I see so much of it every day now that it’s helped me to be less ableist. Still some residual feeling a type of way about it.

While the couple was throwing out that massive wall of sound, a customer and I were trying to finish a transaction and having trouble thinking. She was pretty mad about it, but I tried to quell that by being casual. I said, y’know, people gotta keep life interesting somehow. We can watch drama on TV, some people feel the need to live it. Is it bad?

With overflow business from the understaffed front end of the store, I spent a lot more time than usual at the cash register. That helped my feet get less busted than usual, but I was still wiped out enough to need some rest at the end of my shift. I was waiting for my ride to finish some shopping of her own, drifting in and out of consciousness. I realized it was taking over an hour and went to check on her, helped finish that up and get out the door.

She’s borrowing her sister’s car while she waits to get her own fixed next week, and as payment for that, she had to get groceries for her. The sister is a chatty cathy, so when she brought the bags into the condo, my ride disappeared on me for several minutes. Five? Ten? Fifteen? I couldn’t tell, waiting in that clean new borrowed car in a suburban residential parking lot, surrounded by low buildings and tall trees.

When we first showed up, Steller’s Jays were running up and down rooftops and flitting through dense tree boughs. I heard more of them than I saw, and they were joined in the shuffle by several northern flickers (and another type of woodpecker I didn’t get a good look at). Eventually they all took off for higher treetops, leaving the ground level to a solitary junco.

There was one tall tree I could see well and it had tons of birds in it, like a bird apartment building. I couldn’t see them all at once, but I could see many go in and fewer come out, and hear lots of bird calls. The jays, the flickers, birds too small at that distance to identify. May have been chestnut backed and/or black capped chickadees, goldfinches, red breasted nuthatches, and more.

Among the calls, I heard notes that sounded like the chime of a cuckoo clock, and wondered if it could be a cuckoo. No, the cuckoos here surely have different calls from the European ones of infamy. But it put me in mind of my feels about brood parasitism again.

I was wondering why brood parasitism is selected for, why it is advantageous enough to stick around after it comes into being by whatever odd fluke. (In the comments on my brood parasite article, Icthyic linked to a scientific paper on the evolution of the trait. I’d forgotten that.) Anyhow, it occurred to me cuckoos are not just saving labor energy by non-parenting. They are also hobbling the competition.

In order to have their chicks raised by another species, that species must naturally serve food edible to the parasite. To avoid poisoned chicks, the adults have to be eating the same thing, so they’re competitors. A competitor for food that is being run ragged by your offspring is easier to beat in a race for resources.

I felt clever-ish, despite the fact I probably heard Richard Attenborough say the same shit at some point in time and just forgot about it. But why do I think about brood parasites like this? Last time I wrote about it, I had seen one in person. This time, it was just a random thought.

Since time immemorial, the cuckoo has been a symbol for the sexual paranoia of demented patriarchs. It’s seen a resurgence in the form of the alt-reich’s fetish porn-inspired cries of “cuck.” So it’s in the air. But it occurred to me, is this personal?

My father married my mother when she was already pregnant with my sister from another man. That baby grew up to be dangerous, exhausting, life-ruining. Antisocial Personality Disorder is rough. But then, so is being biracial in a house full of white people. I wish her well (for her own sake as well as the unfortunate people in her life), though I never want to see her again. Most likely, this background has nothing to do with any of my thoughts, waiting in that car. It just felt important to mention. So I’m mentioning it.

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