Dreamt I was at a food court that was having some kind of cultural show, like a South Seas expo and food festival. Someone stole my stupid dumbphone with the leopard bling blang cover. It was my fault, it was in my hoodie pocket.
“Sebastian Bach!” I said to Sebastian Bach, who had come there with me (just as friends ok) to sample the cuisine. “Someone has stolen my dumbphone!”
“Here, use mine to change your passwords,” he said, handling me his phone, which was exactly the same as mine, but without the cover. Wow! I saw his email but I tried not to read anything.
I was tapping away at it when he brought me some Indonesian (?) glop in a styrofoam box. YUM! I love that guy.
On Thursday I talked to SeaFed, Franny’s father. This is the closest I will come to doing any kind of intervention, and it’s for my kid and not really having anything to do with the person who has a problem. I laid out what I knew, which added up to me not feeling comfortable with Franny being unsupervised over at my mother’s house.
It’s always awful talking to him. I always feel like I have ten seconds to make my pitch before he rings the gong. Of course we would rather chew our respective legs off than have a conversation anyway, so there is the knowledge that if one of us calls the other for A Talk it is some serious motherfucking shit.
“Okay,” he said. “I won’t tell your mom you said anything, I will just be delicate when I bring it up.”
“Don’t be DELICATE,” I said. “You didn’t hear this on craigslist, you heard it from ME. Shout it from the rooftops! Something is wrong right now! I don’t want to see Franny in a car crash or left alone. That is all I care about.”
“Alright, fine, no unsupervised visits for now. I’ll speak to your sister Friday.”
I have no idea if he did or did not. I heard from my sister a bit via text today, but she was so anxious over the last few days about making waves with my mom I don’t want to get up her butt.
One thing that got to me a bit was that SeaFed was so apologetic about my mother, and it wasn’t even that, exactly. I just wanted to say, I don’t know her anymore, even. All I care about is Franny. Which I pretty much did say, I think.
How much does it suck to get a person who basically hates you on your side? I wonder if he thinks about when we were divorcing and he asked her for an analysis of his habits with alcohol for the court and she wrote that she thought he was an out-of-control alcoholic. He did not see that coming, did he? BACKFIRE.
I have this fantasy that my sister being pissed at my mother and my ex not letting Franny go over there will be a wake up call. I would like to see complete rehab happen. Who knows what will happen, though.
This is weird, I wish it wasn’t happening. Just like a lot of life.
PRE.
DURING.
After.
Sup bangstoast. I played Munchkin most of the afternoon with this one.
Dreamt that the cats were covered in fleas, except the fleas were tiny clear crabs, like beach kind. Do body lice look like beach kind? I don’t EVEN know. Let’s stay up til 2. Yay anxiety, high kicks.
After last night’s various bombs, was surprised to wake up looking like Clover from Blue Monday. OH YEAH I cut my hair yesterday. HAR. No dreams recalled.
What can you do with this? Sometimes I think I am a cold person for hitting my last straw and walking away from my mother 5 years ago. Then I hear that my mother blew up at my sister over Christmas, drunk, calling her stupid and a loser and a retard.
“Mom went PSYCHO,” Morgan warned me.
“Okay,” I said. It would not be the first time.
“No, REALLY,” she said, and then told me everything. Morgan’s face twisted and she pointed at me as she imitated how angry our mother was as she screamed at my sister and told Morgan she was ruining her life. I kind of felt like I was time traveling back to when I was a kid and she told me how worthless I was and how little she cared about what happened to me. She looked kind of like my mother did when she was very young, and furious.
She was getting to the end of the recitation of the tirade and I burst into tears over my cheese plate.
“Oh–it’s OKAY,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I know this isn’t about me. But it hurts my heart to hear what she said to you.”
Like all family relationships everywhere since the beginning of time, I have a funny relationship with my sister. She is ten years younger than me and I spent a lot of time just…being there for her. She spent a couple of summers in high school practically living in my house. I felt like I hung in there for as long as I could with my mother and then shoved off–they seemed like they were doing okay.
I guessed my sister was coping. She knows, though.
“Mom’s a JERK, you know it,” she said. “It’s okay, because I know all that shit she said is FUCKING BULLSHIT.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re older, you know who you are.” I pulled my weepy ass back together again. We talked about all the times all the booze had been poured out, a wine cellar had been given away, vomit out of car windows, only to reappear a couple of days later.
“I used to buy Mom’s story, that she was scared of Dad, that he abused her, that she was helpless. I saw her provoking him, like mad. She would push him until he would pop,” I said.
“Mom likes to fight,” Morgan said.
My sister’s husband came home and helped to kick my drunk and raving mother out of their apartment. I was so so very glad to hear he was there for her like that.
We were sitting in Morgan’s car smoking a cigarette (shh). Louder Than Bombs came on when she turned on the radio. She pointed at the radio.
“You got me Singles when I was twelve and ‘Hand in Glove’ was the first song on it.”
“Well, you were a teenager. ‘Here is your mandatory angst kit.” I thought for a moment, inhale, exhale, I am such a shit smoker now. “You okay?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think I’m relieved somehow.”
“I almost emailed Mom and told her not to come to my house again, but I decided not to make the aggro, for myself. I let it go. I think…I’m pretty happy most of the time,” I said.
This weekend’s mad panic was a LOOSE CHICKEN! No, a young Disney starlet was not roaming my neighborhood. She was a very handsome barred rock that did not belong to us. Generally, for reasons I can’t and don’t care to articulate, I don’t purchase the barred utility chickens. Boring! They are red tulips. Okay, I guess that was an articulette.
Marty McFly was kind of an exception, but he was a cochin. Maybe part of it too is that when I lived in Crown Hill there was a lady who lived across the alley (who lived in “GREENWOOD, thank you very much.”) and had about 23 barred rocks in a weenie space that were all pecking each other to death. Her chickenry was appalling.
Anyway, a nice neighbor knocked on the door, one who is across the street and came over to chat me up about my Xmas angel while I was out spraypainting my newest mirror for the mirror wall. We also talked to the lady with the Independent Dog and I think Moonpants might have been involved as well. Everyone was VERY CONCERNED about the homeless chicken.
I clean my coop, I throw my ladies scraps. I talk to them (they ignore me). They follow me when I am digging up bits of the yard. They always have plenty of chookchow and water, especially if it is hot or frozen out. But that is kind of where it ends. Generally chickens are content to stay near you if you raise them and feed them and provide a completely enclosed space OR a slightly ramshackle backyard that is reasonably fenced. But I am not going to stand over them going PRECIOUSSSS or tag them. Chickens run away. They get themselves eaten.
I think the neighbors were far more concerned about this vagabond chicken then I ever would be. Independent Dog lady trotted up to me as I was leaving with the girls for a family march around and said “We found the chickens home!!” and I blanked for just a minute.
“Oh GOOD, GOOD,” I said, brain caboose finally having caught up to the engine.
“We just wanted to let you know.”
“Thanks.”
This weekend I have also started a Good Behavior During the Arsenic Hour star chart for someone who actually tries to figure out how many people she could drop into a volcano all at once and how to build machines that “could beat the police, all of them.” I am going to save it for when the media comes to my door 30 years from now and the caption Mother Of Supervillian appears under my name on the news later that night.
“I TRIED!” I will say, shoving a greasy and rumpled paper through the crack in the chained door. “Here is her star chart from when she was five!”
Sex dream interrupted by alarm, naturally, then a dream about raising a baby panda but dressing it in little clothes and also forgetting it in an apartment hallway while visiting a friend.
Today Strudel has a prick on her arm. It is the prick of a tuberculosis test! That is how bad some of us have been feeling and oh christ with the coughing up of the blood and the zsd’lgksdgncg;h. Anyway, we are set to meet her kind doctor in the parking lot of her small practice tomorrow, because she doesn’t work Saturday but is coming to see Strudel’s arm, which has a bear’s head on it that she drew around the prick, making the dot into the bear’s nose. This is much improved over the girls’ old doctor who up and moved to California without leaving a note.
Franny had a funny moment around dinnertime.
“Mom.”
“Yes.”
“Can I…get dressed tomorrow?” I cocked my head at her. “I mean, I’m going to get dressed tomorrow.”
So she’s feeling better. The fun non-fever tiredness hellride part is still coming. I’m not going to tell her. I dream of being alone next week. This week almost broke me.
Tonight I made turkey noodle soup with the giant turkey I made earlier this week. Who was that crazy fucker? That was a person who would have licked herself into hot spot hell if she was a Jack Russell terrier.
