Bad Decision

Sunday morning. The Portillo’s polish sausage last night was amazing, but combined with a few too many fries and a chocolate shake large enough to bathe in while I’m sucking it down was a bit too much.

As Miss Piggy once said, “Never eat more than you can lift.”

Our TV is Digging Itself a Hole in Our Backyard

Saturday morning. Our massive, big screen TV in the living room is slowly dying which is breaking my heart. You realize how attached you get to things after they start packing their bags and showing you the tickets of places their going to be traveling in the world. We had so many good times!! Don't leave!!!

I still watch a little Fox News for the political commentary but it looks as though everyone I’m seeing has just crawled out of a pool of a highly toxic pink jello. On a Saturday morning coffee high, this only increases the levels of paranoia one can experience.

I start to feel a sneaking suspicion that liberals may have something to do with the fact that O’Reilly looks like his hair is playfully on fire.

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.