It feels like I am experiencing seasonal adjustment disorder. And why wouldn’t I be experiencing S.A.D.? It’s the middle of fucking May, after all. Temperature lurched from the mid 50s today to 70+ degrees, with last night feeling like a cold and windy winter evening. Now I am out earlier than I should be swilling cheap IPAs at the millennial bar, after a day of utter waste and failure. I slept last night as if my life depended on it, which is not to say I slept well. I did not sleep well. I felt spastic mercury bebopping around my innards, these poisons of anxiety and indigestion from a too-late supper of undercooked pork chops and a 3.3oz bag of microwave popcorn.
As a parting gift to myself before letting my Costco membership expire I bought a cinder-block-heavy carton of Kirkland-brand microwave popcorn, 44 3.3oz bags of which I have consumed 2 since last week. (Kirkland is Costco’s store brand, and its products generally et good reviews, unlike other store brands like Krasdale). Carrying that bag of bricks home from Costco (about a mile walk, I guess) would have felt Christ-like were it not for the fact that there is nothing sacred or particularly religious about popcorn (or is there?), nor am I willing to equate the experience with my calvary.
It would be good to know that there is a book of the apocrypha called “Popcorn”. I purchased the apocrypha in high school, from Publisher’s Central Bureau, the source to which I owe the presence of a great many seminal cultural relics which still inhabit my spaces. I was getting ready to get rid of somethings today because they do not bring joy to my life, as the trendy aesthetic dictates we junksters do. I don’t think I would ever get rid of the stuff I ordered from Publisher’s Central Bureau back in the day. But that’s another story for another day. As for the apocrypha I remember the Book of Adam and the book of Peter, which I think contained reference to Jesus having a brother. The apocrypha fed all kinds of theories, from looney to defensible, that Christ married and had children; that he would thus have living descendants to this day; that the parting of the Red Sea is perfectly explainable based on tidal conditions and astronomical readings of the day… (hah, almost said “gastronomical”… and our Saviour parted the seas with Flatulence… gotta leave that statement’s protagonist open-ended [DOUBLE HAH!] to imply that it was not Christ Himself but His jokester kid brother… was his alleged name James? .. who parted the seas with his butt. Ah, yes, nothing stirs the intellect like the first beer in three days intertwined with recalling high school apocrypha readings. close parenthesis, please. >>>) (Thank you.)
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I’ve been feeling sourness for other reasons today. A letter from the IRS took a dump on my satisfaction that I had the next several months of rent and hookers paid for via tax returns and other long-planned financial detritus. Someone screwed up and I don’t think it was me. My accountant should have caught this, I think. Form 8962 was absent from my return. 8962 is meant to complement the 1095-A and the 1095-B, which I dutifully provided. Something about the ACA and the subsidies I got last year and how they can’t file my return without the 8962 because it determines what subsidies I might get in 2017… So it’s not even about last year’s returns or the fat refund that I’ve been waiting for, it’s about next year’s projected ACA subsidies. I mentioned this to a friend who is an ACA groupie. He has no use for the ACA. I think his infatuation for all things ACA is something of a racial Obama thing. I explained the dilemma to him and he just kinda brushed it off, suggesting that the ACA was unimpeachable in its foresight and that I am but an unfortunate piece of statistically irrelevant roadkill. That was a nice feeling of irrelevance. Hooray for the ACA! I was going to spend the return on relevant flourishes but by the time I get it (6-8 weeks, if I even get it at all) I’ll probably just look to spend it on food and rent.
Funny thing: Accountant is in Arizona. He said he could probably have figured this out straightaway but his home computer had been forcibly upgraded to Windows 10 the night before, and he could no longer access his home PC via the Internet. So we wait. Perfect. I already suggested that my accountant has less respect for me than he once did on account of my ever-shrinking income. I think that if he did overlook certain things then that disrespect is to blame.
As if to add to my accumulating feeling of irrelevance I went to the ghetto supermarket to get some olive oil and pork chops when I instinctively chose the express aisle. 10 items or less, no WIC. Woman ahead of me had 47 items (you can see the item count on the register LED screen) and she paid via WIC. The WIC card reader wasn’t working so the cashier had to punch in every digit of the card. I watched as the longer lines of people with carts filled with a months’ supply of provisions came and went through the other aisles.
Why do rules exist?
I went outside and an asshole delivery douche motored north up Crescent Street, which is one-way going south. I jumped back as he unexpectedly approached the intersection. I had the WALK light and he was, of course, going the wrong direction. He slowed down, never fully stopped, waved at my face his bag of food or dog shit or whatever he was delivering, then started barking orders at me, pointing a line at the crosswalk with his other hand, which clasped his cell phone into which he had been talking until this inconvenient encounter with an irritant law-abiding citizen. He had not even been steering his scooter/motorcycle with his hands. They were both occupied by a bag of I-don’t-know-what and a cell phone. He steered with his forearms, I guess, or maybe his face? Maybe he is at the vanguard of things and delivering bags of food (or whatever it is) from Google’s self-driving terrorist machines. The assholes who break the rules and drive the wrong way against one way streets are now giving orders to the frightened and irritated pieces of shit that get in their way. It is a wonderful world of irrelevance. I might start doing what the kids and old folks do at the subways: wait for people to exit through the emergency exit gates so I can ride for free. In a culture filling with assholes who would notice another one?
Except that I am white, and not on two wheels. So there is all the crosshairs on me that is needed to guarantee a public shaming. If I was white and on two wheels I could get away with homicide. As a whitey on two legs I gotta be careful. Right? Hah.
Iiiiii… need some sleep…
Chubby Checker on the jukebox here. “The Twist”. I always thought the “round and round and round” singers sounded like they anachronistically came from “Happy Days”.
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Apropos to almost nothing… one minor success I had today was deciphering the database schema of a message board forum… I have hosted a BBS discussion board since 1997. I have not contributed to said board since I don’t even remember when… 9/11 vintage, certainly later than that but not for long after.
I discovered that the software for that board quietly croaked a few months ago. The 5 or 6 denizens of the boards did not complain. They just kept hitting the “New Messages” link and finding nothing.
Today I figured out a path to moving the old boards to something new. In the progress I discovered this weirdly beautiful incantation from 1997:
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who am I??? I am the Mother, Mommie, Madre, the finder of lost shoes. I have been a Mother since I was 16 years old. My oldest child is 23… my youngest is 3. My 5 1/2 year old son is autistic. I do not travel, I do not go out, I do not speak to people… only doctors and insurance companys and therapists and teachers. I am no longer Linn… I am Kara’s Mom or Ryan’s Mom or Brenna’s Mom. I read stories and make cookies and smile when I want to scream. I watch Beauty and the Beast and see the wisdom in Winnie the Pooh. I know all the songs from the Jungle book , I can make Christmas
decorations from pop scicle sticks and glitter. I am the woman in the grocery store who has at least 2 kids in tow and looks so tired. I am the one who is molding the future… I am Mom.
