I have been partaking in the recession-era family past time: collecting scrap metal from old dumps. If we find stainless steel, aluminum, or something heavy, it’s a “bonus”. I guess that’s about the only upside to pollution: the ungodly amount of time it takes for trash to break down means that glass and metal are up for grabs sixty years later to whomever has the stomach to dig around in rusty cans for fun and profit (mostly for profit). It’s an investment in the future, for all the wrong reasons.
I had a strange thought about cognitive growth when I was hanging out with my nephew. People keep asking him where his nose is, and where his eye is, and what color this is, and where is the stuffed cow. These are things that we can ask a fifteen-month-old, because he’s new, and he never gets tired of it. But, when someone says that they don’t like something, be it some type of music, or literature, or an activity, because they find it boring, we call them a snob, and get offended that they don’t share our interests. But, to that person, listening to nothing but bad country music, or watching some newest campy dumb comedy, it’s like asking that person to point to their eye or their nose over and over. They’ve grown beyond it, and should be left alone. Sophistication is not a negative trait, although that thought seems to be gaining in popularity. Kind of like syphilis.
Tomorrow begins the part of my visit to my family that I’ve been dreading: the potluck with extended family. I had two short phone conversations with the only cool aunts I have (I come from a big family, and only about half of them are the bad kind of crazy, the other half are the good kind), telling me that they weren’t going to be there, to save me from the bad kind of crazy. As much as I love my immediate family, I cannot stand most of the rest of my family, and would probably avoid it, if my mother hadn’t come up with some hairbrained scheme to get my boyfriend to meet the people he’s been avoiding (which didn’t work, it’s just a hairbrained gathering that has no scheme), so now it’s some impromptu going away party for me, so that means that I have to be there with people I don’t care for. By myself. Micah’s not going, my sister’s not going, and Eunice and Mellisa are not going to be there. So it’s down to me, my dad, my nephew, my crazy mother, my crazy aunt, the random distant cousin who now lives with her, my alcoholic uncle, maybe a cousin or two, and my racist grandmother who likes to loom creepily behind people. Maybe I can just take my dad and puddinhead and just go look at some trees for a while. Ugh. On the bright side, maybe I’ll have contracted poison ivy by tomorrow and no one will want to touch me.

I hadn’t realized how depressed economically my hometown was until I came down here. This visit so far has been a secretly heartbreaking, and gives me just one more incentive to get the hell out of dodge. People are trying to sell crystals (the kind that grow in the ground, not the illegal zombie-making kind, although I suspect a bit of that is going on too) just to make ends meet, and living in houses five or six people at a time. My own parents, who have always been kind of bad with money but have always been able to survive by the skin of their teeth, almost cried when I gave them my stockpile of rice and greenbeans. Any time someone now bitches about welfare queens, I shall soundly punch them in the nose. Everyone’s just trying to survive the best way they can, and people who abuse the system just make the people who are scraping by look like a mockery to the people who are holding the pursestrings. The weird thing is, as bad as I thought my own situation is and was, I’ve never had to do without. I’ve always had means of supporting myself, and ways of saving money, and ways to be resourceful, even if it meant that I was walking everywhere. Then again, I’ve been looking at the past four years as just a waiting place, and I made the sacrifices I made so that I could achieve my dreams. My dreams kept my head above water, and it kept food in my pantry and kept me working and creating and never giving up hope. I’ve never given up hope, even when it seemed hopeless. It just puts a lot of things in perspective for me. But, Jesus H, I still keep looking around and thinking, it’s 1934 all over again… and it’s kind of shattered my entire worldview, of how I thought humans thought. It’s all turned upside down. But, it still doesn’t make the fact that my aunt Lora is pretty much constantly drunk any less disturbing to take. Or the fact that I handed my nephew to her back when he was a week old, not knowing that she was three sheets to the wind, and she made some slurred speech about the fact that he was going to be the only bright spot in everyone’s lives for a while. And, it seems, she was right. All of my unemployed and hopeless neighbors and relatives come over just to play with the little puddinhead (I will introduce the child to Twain once he finally is old enough to look at me incredulously when I call him that) and this little kid, this goofy-faced whispy-haired destructo machine that likes to eat crayons, does seem to inspire hope. He just hasn’t grasped the concept of kicking a ball. Or the fact that stuffed bulls only fly when I throw them to him. But, he’s still new, he has a lot of dirt-throwing years ahead of him.

I fit most of my worldly posessions into the backseat. This makes me happy. But, it’s mostly books and art supplies. My priorities are almost too damnably bohemian. I could live off rice and soup forever, just as long as I am not separated from my paints for too long. People keep asking me what I’m going to do with the rest of the stuff, as if I’m going to miss not being tied down my the trappings of domesticity. I’ve lived before without lots of useless crap, I can do it again. I can wash two weeks worth of clothes and then wear them again. I can live with no TV. I don’t require a well-stocked minibar in my basement. I’m just excited to get my nomad on again.

All this time, and I’m unbelievably relieved to be getting rid of the bed from hell. Damn thing’s ripped up all my cute panties. And all I have are cute panties, each with a big hole over my hip. It’s like they’ve been violated, but all it was was an over-enthusiastic broken spring. Blah.
Well meaning people are just a hinderance when they try to help but don’t really know what they’re talking about. As a result, I almost spent an unnecessary amount of money because some redneck pointed out that the passenger side light was out on the jeep. And then he proceeded to list, for about ten minutes, what the problem could possibly be. After all that hassle, the light wasn’t out. I’d even pulled out the owner’s manual to look up how to replace the bulb. All Micah could do was thank him for pointing it out. And, if it hadn’t been this week, of all weeks, just before we move, with money as tight as it is, I don’t think I’d be so angry at the man’s blind stupidity.
I’m trying to adjust to a daywalker’s schedule. It’s so hard when I’ve been working nightshift for three years. Right now I just want to sleep, but this is my usual bedtime, when most people are getting up. It’s like I’ve been living in Oz all this time, and I’m adjusting to earth habits. Where the hell are the flying monkeys?
Final thought, before I give in to sleep: You cannot squeeze blood from a stone, and expect the stone not to crumble.

I heard something fall on the air conditioning unit, and my first instinct was to grab the machete. No intruder is getting in my window with his spleen intact. The skin inside my ear is splitting again, and all I can do is to keep touching it with unclean hands. Beer bottlecaps. Beer bottlecaps. I close my eyes, and let the tinkling sound of bells fall as I reach for a cup of freeze dried instant coffee. Beer bottlecaps. Beer bottlecaps. I could unlock this door right now, and walk straight into the bright light of the walkway, but there’s an unknown that keeps me from wrenching open what I do not know I do not know. Beer bottlecaps. Beer bottlecaps. I dreamed again that I was on a stage, but my elusive friend was there also, and I was attempting to keep the screws from sticking out of the wood, and we kept leaping from train car to train car. Why did he disappear at the time that I needed him most, and why do I feel the need to bury that part of my life into the narrative of a girl who compulsively spraypaints blank walls? And, why, oh why, oh why does it feel as though the next time he resurfaces, we’ll be on opposite sides of some war? Why do I worry so much about war, and why do I still dream about the way he used to touch my hair? Beer bottlecaps. Beer bottlecaps. The wax is dripping in every flicker of the panther-barricaded sunrise. All I need is one more sleeve of cigarette, and a breath of something gentle. Beer bottlecaps. Beer bottlecaps. Ting. Ping. Ping. Gong….

The solution to our bathtub being clogged was an adventure. We snuck out of the house to a marina on the lake, and borrowed their public showers. Micah kept warning me that the facilities might be gross, but he underestimates me. It looked just like college, except all the hot water hadn’t been used up by some sorority girl.
I was thinking today about how some people, or really, those that are used to creature comforts, are used to “slumming it up” as long as it’s temporary. I was thinking about this while grumbling about the price of the overpriced sandwich on my plate, and reminiscing that one of my cousins used to work at an overpriced sandwich place. Now, she’s about to become a lawyer, and since the last time I saw her two years ago, she’s gotten prissier and prissier, but I still remember that at one time, she was a sandwich-slinger in khaki pants. At one time, she had to mop a floor for money. Now, it’s like that person is a million miles away. I’ve always said that the people who are most likely to treat people lower on the social totem pole with respect are those that have been there, but I gotta wonder if, to some people, being covered in cheese dip is not something that makes you a “minimum wage slave” but just something you have to put up with until your champagne wishes come true. I don’t ever want to become prissy. And I don’t ever want to forget that it sucks being covered in cheese dip. Especially when you get hit in the eye with it. Ouch.

It would seem that on a person’s birthday, people like to come out of the woodworks and say “I miss you” when they normally wouldn’t think of you if it weren’t your birthday. So, I have come to the conclusion that people are opportunistic assholes. Nothing new there. Also, my boyfriend kept asking me what it was like to be twenty-eight. All I could say was “twenty-six sucked balls, don’t want to go back to twenty-six”. Actually, I would not, for any amount of money, go back to age twelve, sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one, or twenty-six. Those are what I like to call “The Bullshit Years”.
We found out the hard way today that Drain-o does not actually dissolve hair. So, we’ve still gotta do something with the bathtub. It keeps getting harder and harder to get rid of bodies these days.
I’m finally at the age where I am completely put together now. No more awkwardness. My skin and hair look awesome. My brain works the way I want it to work, putting thoughts together at lightning speed and combining pieces of information efficiently. My life finally stopped sucking.My sense of style is enviable. And, my body is fast, strong, and can pretty much hold up to anything. Hooray!

And so ended both the easiest, yet needlessly stressful job I’ve ever had. With a handshake and a punch of the clock. My co-workers and managers tried to get one last “let’s make RaeRae our slave” weekend out of me, and for that reason I almost didn’t show up to my last night. But, my work ethic won out in the end, and all the cleaning I did seemed more final, more real. “This is the last time I’ll have to mop this floor” “This is the last time I’ll get a second-degree burn from this grill”. I think the weird part about it was that people kept asking me why I was leaving, and I said “I’m moving seven hundred miles away” and it was like I was speaking Greek. No one quits a shitty restaurant job. No one moves out of state. No one tries a brand new life.
Paring down my things has been kind of hard to do. Not because of so many things I want, but so many things I want to throw away, but that need to be stripped down first to become art supplies. Old textbooks. Notebooks. Pretty booze bottles. Clothing. Things that were dumpster-dived but that are too big to fit in the jeep. Being a found-art artist means that everything has potential. I have three boxes full of silk flowers that need to be cut down further. But, I will make this work. On the brightside, there’s little to no furniture, and four months ago we got rid of the bulk of our domestic trappings. So, now, the rest of everything goes in a few suitcases and trunks and fits in the back of the jeep. This all makes me feel like a gypsy, or a refugee. More like a gypsy, as I’m hitting the road by choice.

I think it’s really adorable that my boyfriend becomes conscious enough to momentarily stroke my arm while I’m looking up pictures on the internet, but not conscious enough to remember that he did it.

Do you think it might be necessary to someday stage a protest while writing witty things on nametags? Because I have a crazy assortment of things in a briefcase that will someday be useful for a protest, such as bandanas and random inspirational but not-specific-to-a-cause posters, but I also have nametag stickers. “Hello, my name is FED UP WITH ALL YOUR FASCIST BULLLSHIT!!!!!”

I took apart an old issue of Ellery Queen (a 1970′s mystery magazine) to see if there was any useful lines I could use in my writer’s sketchbook. None. Not a one. I forgot that mystery novels get straight to the point and don’t play too much with pretty words “Yeah, I shot him, and I would have gotten away with it…” I gotta wonder who the hell reads mystery novels for entertainment. I’d like to think that they either have a hard-on for detectives, or they’re possibly kind of sick fucks.

My job is over in three weeks. After three years, it is a time for celebration. Weird thing is, all the things that were keeping me working and caring about my job a month ago are gone. So it’s going to be really really really hard for me to actually work and not just say fuck you to my coworkers. I did okay tonight, but it was a short shift. It makes me wonder how the hell I kept it together this long.