Grief

Grief comes like throw up sometimes. Your thoughts start to bottleneck like cars on a freeway and all it takes is one unusual thing to focus on.

My grandmother has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She’s actually been taking the news really well but it’s sending the rest of the family through a loop. We’re all in a slight-panic mode running trying to do something helpful or trying to look like we’re doing something helpful.

But my Grandma keeps saying that the only thing she wants is to go peacefully in her sleep.

My Dad called to tell me while I was at the park and I took the news really hard so I thought I’d drive myself straight home before I started to lose it. I always think I’ll take things like this better than I do.

Grandma was laughing in the background as my Dad was talking. He said, “She says she’ll take Obama care.”

I assumed that was probably a resignation toward the end since our family has always assumed that acceptance of democratic, political measures is tantamount to death and destruction in the slowest, most illogical ways known to man.

I spent last weekend with her and she is adamant that she can’t go fast enough. But I know the rest of us are not at all ready to see her go.

I’m having trouble spelling out to her how much I love her.

Nine Days

12:08 AM. Again, I can’t sleep. And I’ve run out of money to buy the sleepy generic Tylenol PM’s to guide me safely back downstairs so I’ve resorted to experimenting with 6-month-old doctor-prescribed Tylenol/ codeine pills which do not actually put me to sleep. But they do make me not mind at all. I’ve never been calmer about hearing nothing but crickets.

And they kind of slow things down a bit. I realized that I’m at a huge advantage when I can’t sleep. I literally have “all night.” Not that I want to take the entire night, mind you. A few extra half hours or a couple hours and hopefully I’ll get a heaviness to my brain which spells out that it’s time to get to bed.

Sadly, I don’t even remember what the Tylenol with codeine was for. I’ve had so many medical misadventures over my life that my brain has resorted to repressing most of them.

School starts in nine days. This is both good and bad for many many reasons. The pluses: I have a job, I have a paycheck, I have something to wake up to every morning, I can sleep at night because I have to wake up every morning, I have a schedule that keeps me busy and makes me feel relatively important in my own small square in the world, and I’m not feeling like the molecules of my body are floating out into thin air without a rigid schedule I’m chaining myself to for survival.

The minuses: well, I can see them in just about every plus I just wrote down. But it’s really a matter of perspective or choice. What am I choosing to look at? The positive or the negative. I’ll let you know about a week after school starts.

Crickets

Three weeks to go till school starts. I’m trying to gear up my brain but I’m having trouble getting there. Teachers who take the summer off to “relax” tend to lose themselves during the three month sabbatical

It’s like they let every molecule of their body dissipate into nothingness and scramble to collect it all again when school starts. Needless to say, this is a difficult process.

Richelle and I are cooling off from a heated argument we had earlier so the sounds of the crickets and grasshoppers right now are unusually loud. She’s right, of course. About most of it.

I'm still sitting in the Alamo of my 2% right. I won't be taken alive.

Dont' read this unless you have absolutely nothing else to do with your life.

I haven’t written anything so far in August. This is shameful. I’m like Ernest Borgnine says in the film Marty, “What I been doin’ with myself?” I want to give excuses but I don’t have any. Like you drive off a cliff and smash your body up, people will understand why you haven’t been keeping up on the letter-writing. You were a little tied up. It’s understandable.
So this is me just getting back into the swing of things. I’m writing to say I haven’t been writing. Hopefully, you figured out that you needed to stop reading this post within the first few words.

What's the term for sleepless?

2:15 a.m. Tuesday morning. Can’t knock out yet. Trying to lasso the stampede of buffaloes in my head enough to sleep. I know a lot of parents who take their kids on car rides in order to put them down. This would actually work for me except for the fact that I would be behind the wheel and probably barreling down the freeway doing eighty when I finally accomplished the task.
For some reason, I can’t think of the term for sleeplessness.

Garage Sale Day

Let me give you an idea: when you’re starting to fantasize about your house burning down, it’s time to have a garage sale. We did that today and there are no words to describe it. I’m making a commitment now that I will never buy something other than a house or a car for the rest of my life. I want to buy space. Not “things” but the “absence of things.”

It was going to my head today. People were trying to negotiate lower prices with me and I always automatically went with the first price they quoted.

“How much is this?”

“I don’t know. Ten dollars.”

“How ‘bout five?”

“Sure.”

It was beautiful to me. Because in my head, when they asked me the question the first time I had to fight the impulse to say, “Just take it! It’s free! Don’t you get it! It’s junk!!! I don’t want it!!! If you ask me, I’ll pay you to take it away."

I clearly recognize that this would affect sales numbers at the end of the day. But I can’t bring myself to care.

I discovered this whole garage-saling world out there today. They’re amazing how they’ll rifle through these piles of clothes and books and examine these products that look they’ve been parked in someone’s garage since the first world war.

It gives me stress to own this stuff but to actually get a chance to see people who go out and pay to take it off your hands just stuns me.

The one depressing thing I found was that we pulled out a certain amount from the garage, sold $300 worth of stuff and then, somehow, when we put things back in the garage we had more than what we started with in the first place. This is a cruel joke.

Boredom Marathon/ Jury Duty

For the first time in my life, I've joined the ultra-responsible in their proverbial "civic responsibility." I'm waiting for jury selection. They haven't called my name yet and I've been waiting here for six hours!!!!!!!!!

Get a grip. Get a grip.

This is mindless.

We're all waiting in a large room for hours upon hours with very few of us actually wanting to talk to the other person. In the entire one hundred person room, I hear like four people whispering to each other under their breath. The rest of us are staring at books wishing we were somewhere else. I think I found purgatory. I'm trying to keep myself from looking at my watch every sixty seconds but it's torture. It's like time is playing a trick on me.

This is painstaking!

I wonder if any one has ever committed a crime after going stark raving mad while waiting for jury selection. All they would have to do is just transfer me from the sixth floor to the fourth floor where the inmates are being held. They're probably at least talking about something. I want to inform people behind me that there is really no reason to whisper. But I'm a hypocrite. I would whisper too.

Ah ha! Just got a text from my friend Pete. I will investigate.