sound and fury (signifying nothing)

I may need this explained to me as if I were a particularly stupid five-year-old. But I don’t understand how the appropriate punishment for inadvertently* providing alcohol to a minor is listening to a “Victim Impact Panel” talk about “The True Cost of Drinking and Driving”.

What’s even better is that they charge you a fee for having to sit in a classroom for 2 hours and be guilt-tripped by people you don’t know talk about a loss you had nothing to do with related to a crime you didn’t commit. If that doesn’t speak volumes to the kind of stranglehold MADD unfairly has over alcohol policy in this country, I don’t know what does.

During these little propaganda sessions, you’re supposed to sit straight-faced and silent while all this crap is laid on you, or you don’t get credit for having taken the class (and you definitely don’t get your money back). My biggest challenge would be to refrain from saying “if alcohol is so terrible, why is it still legal?” The lost fee and credit would be worth it if I could get them to admit that they’re working on that.

The thing is, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to their stated cause. If they weren’t a modern-day temperance movement, I wouldn’t have a problem with them. Even their own founder left the group when it got away from the prevention of drunk driving to the prevention of consumption of alcohol. It’s telling that a mother who lost a child could rationally look through her pain and loss and say “this isn’t what I envisioned at all. I’m out.”

That this class has to be considered at all is a symptom of a justice system permeated by laziness, apathy, and greed – whether on the part of Greensboro, Guilford County, or the country as a whole I couldn’t say. You’d think at some point during the proceedings (including two court dates), the accused would be able to speak to a judge and explain that, while the letter of the law may have been broken, the spirit of the law remained intact. But that’s not even possible – a judge won’t even deign to communicate with you if you don’t speak their language. And that thing about “if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you” is bullshit, too. Court-appointees cost money too – even if you’re unemployed. That bodes well for the poor and minorities who are accused of crimes.

I understand that there is procedure and protocol that must be adhered to, but our legal system is a bloated and broken bureaucracy that in many cases serves only to feed and expand itself. Justice for all, indeed.

Whatever principles it may have been founded on, this country’s system of courts and laws only benefits those who can afford to play its game. It’s rigged against We the People from the beginning.

*You may wonder how you could inadvertently provide alcohol to a minor. In this case, it’s as simple as asking a pal to accompany you to the corner store under a “safety-in-numbers” theory, not realizing this pal was a few months shy of 21, getting stopped on the walk home when said pal is helping you carry your alcohol home, and being carded by cops looking for an easy hit of revenue.

The upside to the way things are going this weekend is that it’s showed me how tenuous my perch upon contentedness is. Of course, there are drawbacks, like realizing how insignificant you are and feeling violated. Given that, I think I’m justified in feeling a little blue.

I’ve been thinking recently how 2009 is shaping up to be one of those years where everything just falls into place. It was prepared to go into the annals as one of my best years, but I see now that ignorance truly is bliss.

I’m not going to get into it because it’s not my place. It just hurts that someone you thought you were close to would rather confide in strangers and keep you in the dark about their problems. And I’m not blaming anyone but myself. It’s my fault for being distant and unreachable. It’s my fault for being self-centered and inattentive.

There’s not a fucking thing I can do about it, but I can listen, dammit. I can care. Or thought I could.

But now I’m angry, and I feel like I have to express that anger somehow – not just in some toothless blog post but in the actual world where actual people I’ve actually failed abound. So I’ve decided I’m not going to Greenville at the end of this month. Not only can I ill-afford it, but it’s just not necessary. I’m just not necessary.

Besides, what the fuck’s the point? It’s a birthday party for a one-year-old. It’s already pretty clear to me that my role in her life will be relegated to the odd holiday visit and lame birthday presents. Sad thing is, it’s an improvement on my role in her mother’s life: class-A mooch and shitty sister. An all-around letdown.

Compared to this, having my car broken into isn’t even that upsetting. Especially considering that the culprit took the face plate off the stereo but left it sitting on top of the car, and went through the glove box but didn’t take my credit cards (which are useless, but it’s not like they would have known that).

The really weird part is that my car sits right out on the street. You’d think if anyone’s car would be ransacked, it would be his, as it sits in the back corner of the lot fairly hidden by shade and trees.

Coincidentally, there was a parking ticket on my windshield for the expired parking permit. So I’m pondering the plausibility of two scenarios:

• lowlife sees car covered with dirt and leaves (from not having been driven for 6 months), sees ticket, and from that makes the logical leap that whoever owns the car has either abandoned it or doesn’t care about anything in it so it’s ripe for the picking… yet for some reason doesn’t take anything of value (stereo, credit cards, CD collection).
• parking enforcement officer writes a ticket but knowing the car hasn’t been driven in a pretty long time, decides to come back later with a slim-jim and go through my car. Likely they’re lowlifes themselves (they do work for the police, after all), but because they’re not real cops they do a shitty job of covering their tracks (left the trunk and the driver’s door ajar).

I’m not going to do anything about it, because it’s not worth the effort (and possible retaliation since they know where I live). It’s just kind of unsettling. I am going to have to jump the car to move it from the curb to the gravel lot, and that’s going to be a pain in the ass.

I probably will pay the ticket with a note that says “Breaking into my car was a nice touch. That’ll teach me to let things expire.” Maybe I’ll include some photos of my neighbors’ cars, most of which have expired permits or no permits at all. Perhaps with another note: “Here’s some untapped revenue for you. Also, I bet they have much nicer stuff in their cars to rifle through.”

An odd title, perhaps, for the vitriol I’m about to spew all over myself, but I wanted to address this point and get it off my mind before it made me insane.

Why do we call it the milk of human kindness? I mean, I know the origin of the phrase, but it seems odd to me, because milk is so ubiquitous, so readily available, whereas human kindness is, well, not.

We need another fluid that would more accurately represent it. I was thinking honey would be nice, because it doesn’t flow all that freely, it comes at a relatively high price, and isn’t actually manufactured by humans but by bees and then appropriated by us for our own selfish purposes.

I suppose I could have made a comparison to raw sewage, but I’m not sure I really want to get all that into a metaphor like that.

Anyway, the reason we are gathered here today is that I hate myself.

I mean, I’ve hated myself for most of my life, so this isn’t exactly breaking news. I’ve beaten that hatred into submission over the past couple years, but it’s always there, and certain things tend to bring it out. One of those things is having pictures taken of me.

This was Mom’s thing, having pictures taken of us, and I did it to make her happy, since I guess I do owe her one (or several). And I thought I was looking all right, since the last time I had pictures taken of me was about 50 pounds or so ago. I’m not the hottest piece of tail out there, but I figured with the bike riding and the wearing smaller clothes and just generally being a medium-fatass I would look all right. Plus, you know, I looked in the mirror before I left the house, and even in the reflective windows on the side of the bank we were next to.

You know how you’ll go somewhere like Walmart or the county fair (or, say, the North Carolina Apple Festival) and see these disgusting lumbering wads of humanity, the waddling hordes of Americans that you look at and think, “don’t you even look at yourself before you go out in public?”

That’s the thing. I’ll think I look all right in a mirror, and then I’ll see myself through someone else’s eyes (or a camera’s lens), and think “Jesus God almighty, is that what I really look like?!” That’s why it’s especially grating to have someone tell me something like “that’s a nice picture of you!”

No, it isn’t a nice picture of me. If that is attractive comparable to how I usually look, just shoot me in the face. The resultant reconstructive surgery might improve things.

I know two things, now. I’m waaaaay more shallow than I thought I was, and I’m not exactly thrilled about that, but there it is. I’m a lumbering, ugly wad of humanity, a bloated waste of skin and other organs (and the fact that I’m about to start Nature’s Special Time isn’t exactly helping), and this bothers me more than it should, considering how above such concerns I like to consider myself to be. (In summation: I’m a hypocrite, and a goddamned fat and ugly one.)

The second is that I’m not allowed to make fun of other people who are similarly affected.

I don’t write often anymore, and as a result, it suffers. Basic things like how to introduce my ideas with relevant and insightful commentary fall by the wayside in favor of “ohmygodIhadathought”-style incontinence of the vocabulary.

Not that this is going to be any different, so in that vein, here are a few things that have been on my mind lately.

One. If I put up a barrier and you (as a generality, not specifically) force your way past it, you have no right being upset or judgmental about what I’ve hidden. It’s not publicly viewable for a reason. I don’t have a concrete reason to be suspicious, just the nagging paranoia I’ve lived with ever since I was eight years old and convinced myself there was a camera in the air vent in my bedroom. I’m afraid someone, for some reason, is gonna guess a password or otherwise traipse into my digital domain and get an eyeful of my protected or unpublished entries, like the time my dad read my journal in high school. To his credit, had the sense not to punish me even though I called him some pretty explicitly rotten things.

I guess what I’m saying is that if you go snooping and don’t like what you find, that’s what you get. That applies both ways, obviously, because sometimes I stumble over shit I really wish I could unsee. And all that said, if someone somehow accessed my old Diaryland account and let me know how to get back in, I would actually be pretty grateful.

Two. I’ve come to the conclusion that I work very hard but I’m not very smart. This is the only reason I can think of for why I’m continuously told that I’m a great worker and yet am repeatedly passed over for promotions.

Three. The Ashleigh and Spencer Show is starting to look like Dana and John 2.0: new and improved with slightly less on-the-clock goodness. As someone who’d much prefer to put the entire Arkansas fiasco behind me and out of my  mind entirely (inasmuch as I can’t actually delete that period from the annals of time), and inasmuch as part of the reason I work so hard (see Point Two) is because I’m picking up slack on account of bullpenning*, I find it sort of annoying, both Spencer’s nonsense and the way my mind automatically draws these parallels without the express written permission of Major League Baseball.

Four. I have had the music of Alabama stuck in my head all day. Roll on!

Five. If I can’t fight fire with fire (which is my first choice since, in this case, it would just be fun, but its effectiveness would be limited, so I have to decide if I want to out-, uh, fun them or just out-annoy them), I’m going to fight it with Weird Al.

Let me state the problem plainly: I am becoming extremely exasperated with my neighbor. We share a bedroom wall, and he has a new girlfriend. Okay, so not-so-plainly, but you can connect the dots.

I’m not trying to be a prude. I like sex, especially that can’t-get-enough new-relationship kind. But while I’m glad he’s happy, I really don’t want to have to listen to it. It makes me feel like a pervert, which I’m sure speaks to some deep-seated issues I have. I suppose I could feel guilty about when we lived at Jeff’s, but he was on a different floor and at the opposite end of the house, so it’s not like we were bothering him (not that I’d care if we were, the jerk). I don’t guess it was particularly enjoyable for Todd, but the hell with that insufferable prick.

But I’m not an insufferable prick – at least not to Anders -  and so I don’t appreciate being subjected to hearing him pound his girlfriend. I mean, these are all two-bedroom apartments, so would it be that difficult to just move it across the hall? It’s not like I can just flip on the television to drown them out, since I’ve been storing it in the closet due to the fact that there’s no cable to connect to it.

However, I am in possession of some really fucking annoying music and a set of computer speakers. And next time they either wake me up or keep me from going to sleep, I’m going to have a gotdamn polka party.

*”warming up” your next relationship while you’re still in the current one, dancing on the “cheating” line. Actually, on reflection, I wouldn’t say that’s specifically what’s happening, since as far as I know neither of them are currently seeing anyone. I guess I just like the word.

“I think that when we say that teenagers are like small adults, we too easily dismiss the fact that they’re also large children.”

Life is a prison sentence. That sounds bleak, I know, and what else could you expect from the World’s Greatest Pessimist. I think it can actually be pretty great sometimes, but as it relates to procreation, it’s like being locked up.

Childlessness is like being paroled. Actually, it’s childfreeness (having no children by choice rather than by chance) that’s like being paroled – there are still all these rules you have to follow, but you get to have some measure of ownership over your own time, and you can take a shower in peace without being violated.

Many people, by choice or by chance, do have children, and are currently serving an 18-to-24. And some of them really hate to see someone else get off so lightly. This is my theory as to why, when I tell someone I don’t want kids, they say, “Oh, you’ll change your mind. It’ll happen.” It’s a scene that’s replayed for the past dozen years at least. I wonder what the mandatory minimum sentence is before you can be taken seriously and even surgically sterilized.

To be fair, I suppose it could be a little insulting to be told that your decision not to procreate is a positive. Not that I think anyone would see it that way, even someone as notorious for overthinking shit as I am. In fact, one guy actually said “good for you!” when I told him I didn’t want kids. He didn’t mean it as an insult (“thank God there aren’t going to be more of you!“), and I didn’t take it as one, and I take everything in the worst possible light.

To everyone else, it’s that I’m too silly and young to know what I really want for the rest of my life. Which is interesting, because if I got knocked up tomorrow – a circumstance that would most likely also affect me for the rest of my life – it would be nothing but a chorus of congratulations and well-wishes. The same people who claim I’m too young to really know that I don’t want kids would most assuredly not turn around and tell me that I’m also too young to know that I do want them.

No. They’d just be glad I was finally starting my sentence.

Being a slob is not a protected class.

I say that because if I owned rental properties and leased them out to people, I would not rent apartments to people who obviously had problems cleaning up after themselves. Gays, Mexicans, cripples, come right in. Messy bastards? Not so fast. To enforce this policy, I’d visit my potential lessees at their current residences, unannounced, to see if they do nasty shit like leave fossilized remnants of salads and yogurts in the fridge, or have a Jackson Pollock-like collection of toothpaste spit-stains on the bathroom mirror.

One might claim I’m being unnecessarily harsh towards the previous tenants of our new place, given that there was a one-day turnaround between their moving out and our moving in. I think I’m being perfectly reasonable. They knew they were leaving, and we had shown interest in the place for nearly a month before they did so. I realize a day might not provide ample time for a cleaning crew and carpet shampooer to do their thing (especially if that day was Super Bowl Sunday), but when I moved out of my last apartment, there wasn’t any need for such things; I left that place as spotless as I found it. (The landlady even made me pull out the fridge and clean the crumbs behind it. Here, I’ve worn out four Magic Erasers cleaning off the “smudgies” that our current landlady claimed not to tolerate.)

At any rate, aside from the cleanliness issues, I really like our new place. It’s a two-bedroom but small; it’s a few blocks from UNCG, so it was meant to house primarily students. It takes me ten minutes (if that) to get to work.

I anticipate my stress level dropping dramatically. Hopefully that means my rate of hair loss will also sharply decline.

I’ve done better in the self-esteem department than I think I’ll ever truly get credit for. It’s especially hard to look at yourself as a decent human being when your unconscious mind gives you a sharp kick in the integrity. When you’re down, no less, asleep and unable to give even the feeblest of nuh-uhs.

It’s not fair to wake up feeling guilty when you’ve been an absolute paragon of good behavior (and irrespective of any seasonal list-making or double-checking). That’s the predicament in which I currently find myself. I’m perfectly willing to blame it on Jon McLaughlin.

To his credit, he’s an extremely talented performer, and puts on a fantastic live show*. However, he does have a song called “Four Years” about high school (and moving on therefrom), and my Fark-addled mind has, on more than one occasion, resentfully muttered, “you know what else was four years….”**

The whole reason any of this showed up last night probably had less to do with any pop song and more with a fleeting thought of how different my new set of “in laws” is from the last batch. Add in some residual grudgery, an unfamiliar bed, and the queer sensation of sleeping in satin (as I did wind up with Christmas jammies after all), and I woke up feeling like a complete shit, nearly weeping with regret, about having cheated on my ex with my current boyfriend.

Let me spell it out, both so there’s no ambiguity and to reassure myself that it was all in my head: not only did I not even meet Andrew until my previous commitment was 1000 miles behind me, but I have never cheated. The closest I’ve ever come to infidelity was on a regrettable May night in 2004, when out of the loneliness that a long-distance relationship tends to foster, I kissed someone else. (Who would go on to tell people that it went quite a bit further, although I never touched him below the neck unless my hand inadvertently brushed against his comically small flaccid member through his jeans.)***

However, I’ve always been of the mind that if you wanted to sleep with someone new when you were already chained up, you should break off the relationship first. (To be fair, in my case this was a perk of the breakup rather than a motive for it; if I’d been happy in the first place, my eye would never have wandered.) Since I did what I consider to be the right thing, I wish my ever-yammering brain would shut the hell up already and let me enjoy myself. After all, it’s Christmas, ain’t it?****

Music: Something not-too-unbearably Christmasy

*He’s also tiny up close, like a singing Ken doll. Might be an Indiana thing.

**What would you call such Godwinning of your own stream of consciousnes? This isn’t a riddle; I’m open to suggestions.

***Now that I think about it, I wonder if this whole episode had less to do with Mr. McL than with the stupid juggalo sticker I saw on the back of a Highlander yesterday.

****Indeed, it is, and if you don’t know that reference, you should educate yourself post-haste, lest you be at risk of having no soul.

Never has this adage been proven more true than at this time of year. I have no idea how the birth of the Prince of Peace inspires such greedy, selfish asshattery. Perhaps something in that disgusting eggnog people keep drinking.

It’s one thing to have to deal with this kind of thing when you leave your house and willingly subject yourself to it. It’s quite another when you’re paying more than 50% of your salary to reside in its midst.

Perhaps this is just an overreaction brought on by the fact that, before I can shower in the morning, I have to wait for someone with a cleanliness compulsion to finish his morning bathing ritual (as distinguished from his evening bathing ritual… how the hell dirty can an IT drone get, anyway?).

Perhaps it’s just attributable to the fact that I glimpsed a tiny ray of hope in the offer to share a room with Andrew and lower the rent to a more affordable rate, yet have heard nothing since. I’ve become convinced that my stunning luck will kick in and the offer will be withdrawn. I’ll continue to have to scrape together the cash to live here, all but ignoring my credit card bills and the debt I owe to my mother, until our tax refunds arrive and we can move out. (I must admit I am curious to hear what rationalizations would be offered for it, and wonder how fast we would be replaced when we left, because without that steady rental income, the flights to Christ-knows-where to do Heaven-knows-what might have to be cut back to only once a month. And we’re not going to talk about certain vices.)

Perhaps I resent being made a dog-watcher and dish-washer. Perhaps it really steams my broccoli to be awakened at 2 in the morning by either drunken shenanigans or the dog’s vocal response to such, when I have to be at work at six in the goddamn morning.

When I moved into my last apartment, it was my first time living completely on my own, without roommates, siblings, or significant others. I was told I’d relish the solitude.

Sometimes I would trade that, even the annoying upstairs neighbors and the dreadfully Arkansan location, just to have a space that was bigger than a bedroom and the option to shower whenever I pleased.

It’s not news that I registered as a Republican in 2000 partly because of John McCain.

It’s not news that John McCain lost the South Carolina primary election that year because of push polling, specifically, sleazy scumfucks calling potential voters and asking them “would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had an illegitimate black child?” The black child in question, of course, being Bridget McCain, a Bangladeshi baby adopted by the McCains.

It’s not even news that Charlie Condon, the same sleazebucket who birthed the original push poll idea in ‘00, is running John McCain’s South Carolina campaign this year. That’s right: John McCain, having had his own daughter used in an unbelievably dirty effort to sway the votes of ignorant and racist South Carolinians, turned around and said, “hey, I’m totally over what you did to my family. I want you to be the guy who gets me elected in this state.”

It’s news, at least to me, that apparently Bridget McCain herself found out about “her” role in McCain’s 2000 loss and asked his campaign if they would avoid such dirty tricks this time around.*

So much for family values, huh? Not that it’s any surprise to anyone, red or blue, that John McCain has pretty well devoted his life to winning the presidency at any cost, like it’s a basketball championship or something. Along the way, he seems to have lost a great deal of the integrity that possessed folks like me (who grew up in a pretty liberal family) to believe in him in 2000.

Of course, John McCain is going to win soundly in my home state this year, a state that rejected him eight years ago based on rumor and innuendo. Then again, McCain is a vastly different person than he was in 2000. It would seem his transmogrification is nearly complete, allowing a state full of insular, close-minded fools to once again march to the polls and pull the lever in support of a candidate, and a party, that gives not a damn about the best interest of the common person, all because they have this warped idea that it’s “what Jesus would do”.

I love South Carolina, but there are some seriously cringe-worthy moments in its history, and this is one of them. My only hope is that North Carolina can negate some of the stench wafting up from below by going blue this election.

Music: Sara Bareilles – One Sweet Love

*Not that the plea of his daughter made any difference: not only did Dear Old Dad hire the same jerk who dragged him (and her) through the mud in ‘00, but his campaign has been running push polling again: “would you vote for Obama if you knew he supported Hamas?” Of course, McCain could hide behind the notion that it’s not him, specifically, but his campaign (or, heh, that wily old “overzealous staffer”) making the calls, and he has no control over it; to which I say, you want to lead the country (and by extension, the Free World), and you can’t even lead your own campaign staff?! I’m not too terribly worried about it, since most of your undecided voters are the analytical, gather-the-evidence types who aren’t so stupid as to fall for push polls. The reason this kind of shit worked in 2000 was because they targeted the seedy underbelly of the Republican base – the uninformed racist redneck, or the quasi-informed-but-mostly-single-issue-(abortion, guns, Jebus)-voter. In other words, the ones so stupid that they mostly vote to see their team win, no matter how badly they’re really shooting themselves in the foot.

And in case you’re wondering or care, my greatest hope this election is not for Obama to win, although that’s the direction I’m leaning (to think, I’m actually voting in a battleground state this year! My vote may mean something! Sorry, Ralph). It’s for McCain, through his ineptitude, lack of dignity, and ridiculous choice of running mate, to split the Republican party into two factions: the fiscal conservatives (whose ideas I can understand even though I don’t agree with them, because they’re usually reasonably informed and don’t insist upon foisting their morals on everyone else) and the social conservatives (who have made a mockery of the Separation Clause and represent the type of stupid that shouldn’t be allowed to influence major policy in this country). We could actually get a viable third party out of this. It isn’t the party I’d have hoped for, but it’s a start, damn it.

Here’s a piece of wisdom I never thought I’d be sharing: don’t believe everything you read. Or anything, apparently. Because anyone who shares any particular bit of knowledge shouldn’t be trusted, as they stand to gain from it.

What I’m saying is that book learnin’s bad, folks. This is particularly problematic for me, because I like reading and learning things.

Unfortunately, however, I also like sharing these things I’ve learned. I do it to spark conversation and debate, to impart what I have learned onto others so that they may in turn share it and spread it. Throwing my seeds into the wind, as it were.

Of course, you could also look at it as my being an obnoxious, overbearing know-it-all, and attempt to subtly undermine me by saying that my “knowledge” isn’t accurate because my source stands to profit (or has profited already) from sharing his or her knowledge with people like me. This goes for social commentary, checkout tabloids, research papers, and calculus textbooks.

(I think I’ve been bitch-slapped by someone I might have previously underestimated. Explains the particularly sharp stinging.)

Besides deciding to become an anti-intellectual bump on the log of society, what’s one to do? I suppose reading only things that are completely unprofitable is an option. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch – I already write things no one makes a profit off of.

Does that mean that I am an authority on everything?

Music: Ryan Adams – Nobody Girl

There’s a line from a song by Sugarland: I fell in love out of college/a good man but a bad year.

Never have I been one to define my life with snippets of popular songs (who am I kidding?), but this one seems to ring especially true of late. A lot has been going on recently, and not much of it’s good.

• Andrew lost his job. Actually, that makes it sound like he misplaced it somewhere, or overslept and decided, “fuck it, I don’t need to work.” What happened was that he was cut by the greedy corporate assbastards at Clear Channel Communications. Thanks to the economy’s current state of shittiness, he’s been having trouble getting another one, even one that pays minimum wage and only offers part-time hours.
• I have a job, but it’s a) 20 miles away and b) more different from my previous one than I’d thought. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to have it. And plasma “donation” and blood donation are cousins, but they’re more like the children of estranged siblings that live on opposite sides of the country. And that’s all I have to say about that.
• My car died. The little old Neon that could decided it just didn’t feel like it anymore. I was on my way to work one morning, not even out of Kernersville yet, when the temperature gauge spiked. Upon further examination, Jeff determined that the water pump blew. Of course, given that it’s a Neon, everything about it blows, but I had the stupid water pump replaced three years ago. Is that the shelf life on one of those things? Anyway, by random chance we happened to find a potential buyer, a guy who saw the car with the hood up at the gas station and gave us his card. He wanted it for parts for his kid’s Neon and was going to give me $400 for it. Then, when he came over and actually examined the car (which we’d asked him to do at first anyway), he decided it was only worth $150. Then he got in his Jaguar, drove off to Bible study (I am not making any of this up) and disappeared. Andrew called some salvage yards to see what we could get for it, but they all said they’d have to look at it and see. Problem is, you can’t drive the damn thing more than 2 miles without it overheating. We live 5 miles out in the country.
• My phone is gone, man, gone. And it’s really unlike me to lose things, especially those of value. But that little Nokia that’s been through so much (two screen deaths/resurrections, an overheating mishap in eastern Arkansas) apparently fell out of my possession at some point. Luckily I had an extra SIM card from the backup phone I bought the first time it died, and an old Blackberry. Given that I had to go with the el cheapo prepaid plan, though, I don’t think I’m gonna be having any quality conversations anytime soon.
• The Grand Prix blew a tire. Again, luck was on our side, even though he didn’t have a spare (still doesn’t): he was only a couple miles from home and right in front of a school. Plus, as I know from my many forays into Tire Changing Land, used rubber is one of the more inexpensive fixes for a car. However, it’s apparently im-fucking-possible to find in Kernersville, which blew me away. Of course, I hadn’t needed any tires (yet), but shit, there’s been a used tire place up the street just about any place I remember living, and Kernersville is the same size as Van Buren. However, we came up empty: a tire place that only sold new ones (and wanted $95), a tire place that didn’t “do” tires anymore, and, on a whim, a tire distributor/warehouse of some sort. Actually, that last was sort of serendipitous, because the woman in the front office possibly smelled our desperation and hock-shop stench (having just pawned Andrew’s guitar and our DVD players for money to get a tire and a tank of gas) and called half a dozen places in search of what we needed. The final place said “yeah, we have [whatever size tire it is Andrew's car takes], $25 installed”. When we got there (on the far side of Greensboro, and in the shady neighborhood where we got bad vibes from the Tolstoy selling the Acura), they checked their stock and said, “no, we don’t have that size.” Fortunately, though, they sent us to a little shack a couple blocks up, where they had at least half a dozen of them.

Now, I’m not so myopic that I’m going to cry and wring my hands and bemoan my fate. In fact, I’ve been counting my blessings lately that things aren’t worse: we’re both in reasonably good health (although he has no insurance, so if he gets sick, we’re fucked); I have a way to get to work (but, again, that’s all I have to say about that, at least for the time being – plausible deniability FTW); we live in a nice place with reasonable rent (here’s hoping the foreclosure bug doesn’t decide to bite Jeff in the arse).

It’s just an interesting contrast from when I first got here: even though I was pretty broke and didn’t yet have work, I had relatively few worries. In fact, looking back at it, it seemed nearly utopian, although I know I’m peering through the startlingly rosy glasses of hindsight. Just proves the Wisdom of Biggie: more money, more problems.

Music: Ryan Adams – The Sun Also Sets

I don’t know much about police procedure, thankfully. I really don’t even watch a whole lot of cop shows on television, but when I do, I know there’s usually one final piece of evidence that convinces them they have probable cause to arrest the bad guy (or the good guy, depending on the direction of the scenario). The music crescendoes, the shot zooms in, and some walking mass of cliché says “book ‘im”.

I’m so at home here. It’s been unexpectedly seamless, so much so that, as hackneyed as it sounds, I’m really just wondering when I’m going to wake up. That seems to be my nature: waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe I need to change that. Maybe I’ve come far enough, or just accrued enough karma, that this is going to work out.

It is comforting to know that some things never change, including that if it in fact doesn’t, there will be a buzzard section waiting to tear apart the carcass. These aren’t even people I’ve wronged. I haven’t shoved my happiness in anyone’s face, and no, I don’t think warbling about it on my unseen little corner of the ‘tubes constitutes a face-shoving.

I have this marvelous ability to leave people in my dust. I’m a forgiver, but more so a forgetter, and after this, I’m going to take full advantage of that fact. I suppose it speaks volumes about my ability to delude myself, because how else could I just delete four years out of my life? That’s about as much as I can say without stepping over the line and bad-mouthing anyone. I’m not going to give anyone the satisfaction.

That said, I don’t appreciate people talking shit about those I care about. That’s probably what has me most aggravated. I don’t care what anyone says about me; the historic record will show that my worst criticism comes from myself. I do find it childish and petty for someone to say “she’s only with you because she hated where she was so much.” As though I was just using him to get out of Arkansas.

I’ll say it this way: I wanted to get out of Arkansas since about six months after I got there. I actively made plans to do so when I had the means, the motive, and a place to go other than my mother’s basement.

No one’s getting used. I was lulled out of a state of inertia, for which I can’t express my gratitude enough. But using someone to get away from a place where I was miserable and to get to a place where I was reasonably assured I’d be happy (I’ve loved NC and wanted to live here for years), would probably entail more, you know, actual using. I wouldn’t have spent over a grand of my own money and driven my pitiful crap out there in my pitiful car. I was never looking for some sort of handout. All I needed was a place to land. Happening upon love was the draw, though. Without that, I’d still be stuck in Van Buren.

I don’t mind taking risks. I have a pretty well-developed sense of adventure. And I refuse to feel bad because this makes me look foolish to people whose idea of living on the edge is taking a job fifty-five miles away from the womb.

Music: Brad Paisley – Waiting on a Woman