I Should Kick Myself
The entry into the garage. We had new siding put on the house three…four? years ago. At the time, they also put in new garage doors with openers, new windows in the media room (a 10′x25′ room on the south side of the house). Why I didn’t include this door in the deal is a mystery to me. I remember thinking, “Ooo, this is too much money.” But, honestly, what would another three or four hundred dollars have done to the loan, lien on the house over the course of fifteen years?
Nevermind the decaying concrete ruined by ten years of throwing “snow-melt” on top of it, that now needs to be ripped out and replaced. “All in good time,” I keep thinking. “All in good time.” And then there’s the landscaping. Oh, fuck it. The shoemaker’s kids go without shoes.
Cast y’all’s votes, y’all.
Should I be the next Oprah?
[Because of the Strength]
A Half would Have worked
empty doesn’t
Empty
Suck ASS
idiot
Half a glass of water on my laptop keyboard does not a smart boy make.
I Could Watch These Damn Things for Hours. They’re Like Little Chocolates Mixed with Hugs.
Something fell out of the sky and landed in Texas
And they all stood around in fear and awe. There’s a LOT of garbage in space, folks. And sometimes it falls down.
overheard conversation and M. de La Rochefoucauld
Girl 1: …and I’d get lifts there regularly with this, like, bloke, from… but then later this bloke, like he’s older, and I think he’s getting, you know, and I think… well, he’s sort of middle aged and, anyway, you know what, he’s killed in a car crash next week. It’s so funny [she actually laughs and her friend laughs too], I mean, it’s like, you know, but it’s really funny [more laughter from both]. Of course I don’t, like, get the lifts now…
Spilled Coffee, #2
He was in a friend’s downtown loft waiting for the rest of bachelor party to arrive. This was the warmup to his big night, and he had bizarrely mixed feelings about it. Everyone was playing a craps on a borrowed table. He walked away from the game, grabbed an appetizer off a long wooden table, then retreated to the windows and looked out into the Detroit evening.
Wayne, the wealthy brother-in-law to be, pulled away from the craps table a few moments later and huddled next to him. Wayne was married to Steph, the bachelor’s soon-to-be-wife’s twin sister. Steph had the perfect life: no job, living in a mansion, two perfect children. She had the staggeringly elite country club membership and tennis lessons. Everyone in the family joked that everything came all too easily to her, and that everything Wayne touched turned to gold.
The bachelor admired that about Wayne, and in his own way, thought that he would ultimately have these same luxuries by marital osmosis. Or something.
“You know, she wants to be just like Steph,” Wayne said of the bachelor’s future wife. This came suddenly, out of nowhere. On the list of things to say given the festive moods, this was like a bee sting.
“Yeah, probably,” the bachelor said, turning to look Wayne in the eye and smiling.
Wayne put a hand on the bachelor’s shoulder. “No probably.” He smiled cartoonishly wide. “Just so you know.” The smile slowly faded to a plaintive gaze.
“Well yeah. Who wouldn’t?” Anxious laughter.
A pause, still looking at each other. The hand fell away from the shoulder.
“OK then. Let’s go have a beer.”
“Yeah, OK.”
If the subtexts of life’s events had a voice that grew louder in accordance with their prescience, this one would have screamed.
Spilled Coffee #1
She had just moved into his house, and it was weird. Not weird because he had been Mr. Happily Single or HBO primetime I’m-afraid-of-commitment fodder or anything like that, but because they weren’t partners at all. They even had an awful sex life, where awful means once every two weeks and it was work, god was it ever work. It often resulted in crying. And they were going to be married in about a month at a fancy country club and it was going to cost upwards of $20K and the only thing he wanted out of the deal was a huge house in the right zip code to show everyone he had actually arrived, because that was what he had been taught was important. Of course, she wanted babies and to quit working, because that equaled an identity.
That was the deal. Unspoken and subtly hostile, but a deal nonetheless. Their future had an agenda, like a meeting or a conference. Or a trial.
So you’d think on the cold October night just after she moved in, when they were about to sleep in the soon-to-be marital bed, and she told him that if they didn’t fix their sex life then there would be problems down the road, one of them would get the hint. The ideas of big houses or kids or money or whatever would, just for a moment, take a backseat to the realities of not being connected at all in the way married people need to be, but no, it didn’t.
And that was one of the many red flags that were ignored. That was how dedicated they were to marching headlong into the icy wind, candles extinguished, propelled by the demons of their upbringings.