6000onions

Annie passed away last Wednesday, July 22, just at about 4:45. My brother Bill was with her and I got back there just as she was leaving. She had spent the last two days in the Solace Hospice Center at CarePartners which is a kind of amazing place: I mean it is so fancy it makes the Grove Park look like Motel 6. And everyone is super nice and it is very quiet and serene and there are gardens and a walkway and a great room and inlaid floors and, well, if life must end it’s a good place for it to do so, I suppose. But I would prefer that it not do so, that everyone become like immortal vampires, frozen at, oh, about 35 or so. Like Annie is here, which is how I will remember her: all of Annie, all her wonderful self and great wit and peals of laughter.

I am surprised at how utterly sad I am. I mean, I love Annie (and I will not say love-d, no, I won’t put that in past tense because it has not gone away, far from it) with all my heart but hers was the kind of death that is generally put into the category of “blessed release.” She was 86 years old and in failing health; her mind had been fragmented repeatedly, first by the big stroke in 2008 and over the last year by whatever aging, fatigued synapses and neurons that kept giving way in her brain. She stayed alive long enough to see Oona (her stepdaughter, my stepcousin) one more time and as soon as Oona headed for her plane to Barcelona Annie put down her hands and proceeded with determination to die in earnest. It did not take long although every hour spent sitting in hospice is the same as 24 hours anywhere else. I tried reading to her from the Tibetan Book of the Dead (it is the way of our people, yes, that is what hippies do) but she said that it scared her. She asked if she was dying and I said, well, honey, pretty much. Soon after that she could no longer speak and I’m not sure if much got through to her, but I didn’t read any more Tibetans. Instead I read first from Thurber and then started a Blandings Castle novel by P.G. Wodehouse and we got through the first five chapters in two days. Every so often she would almost swim to the top of consciousness and when she did she heard about the exploits of Freddie Threepwood and chuckled. And that is a better way to die, perhaps, than explicit descriptions of the bardo and the hungry ghosts therein.

And I am devastated.

When my father died 15 years ago I was devastated, partly because it seemed too soon – he was 74 – and partly because it closed off the avenues for reconciliation I was still naively hoping would appear. 70s child raised on TV: where is my very special episode where Dad and I hash out our differences and admit our wrongs and express our love for each other and everything ends up okay? Well. We never had one and he died and that was that: there is no closure, you know, in real life. Or a laugh track, so it’s a trade off I guess.

When my mother died 7 years ago I was devastated, partly because it seemed too soon – she was 81 – and partly because I loved my mother so much -LOVE my mother so much – that I can’t even now quite express it. And partly because it was sudden and unexpected and there was no lengthy illness, no slow deterioration, coming up to it. And as she died I knew in my heart of hearts, although I would not then perhaps have admitted it, that my mother was the only glue holding our dysfunctional family together and without her it would all fly violently apart. Which it did. My son, grieving for Annie the other night, cried for his grandmother, my mother, her sister, as well: I miss her so much, he said, and when she died it destroyed our family. We have never come all the way back together since because yes, there is no closure, there are no neat, pat resolutions or redemptions in real life. There just is the is, the now, the stumbling and the four am tears.

So having been through all that, this death of all deaths, expected for a long time now, I thought would not destroy me. Annie and I had no unfinished business: we love each other, we got along like a house on fire, we always thoroughly enjoyed time spent in each others’ company and everything was good between us. Her loss isn’t going to fragment the family: there isn’t enough of it left to destroy for one thing and for another she was never the focal point in the way that Mom was. So why am I so sad? I keep asking myself, Why can’t I see this as a joyous thing, as her reunion with her many beloved friends gone before, as a return to the cosmos, a natural part of the cycle of life? And I’m trying to see that, I really am, but instead I am grieving, helpless, bereft and wondering why the hell the world is so unfair as to take away the people I love?

Because there is no closure, I suppose, and because the is is the only thing there is. Annie’s death brought a whole big giant list of tasks to my plate – I am the executor (I kind of want a costume for this job, a shiny suit and maybe a cape, THE EXECUTOR written in big letters on my chest) and that turns out to be a huge responsibility involving metric shit tons of paperwork and grief from everyone involved. Annie was also the last of her generation in my family: the grownups are all gone now, my parents, my aunt and uncle on my father’s side and now Annie – the adults have moved away and the children – particularly me, The Executor – are in charge. But I am not a child anymore – I could use a costume for that statement too, maybe a black one this time – just a sad grownup, in a messy house, with Annie’s things here and there in boxes, and I know for the next forever I will find them, as I did her shoes last night, and lose myself in just tears and sorrow.

Her shoes are here and she is not. And that just sucks.

The Queen of Bohemia is now under hospice care.

There. I said it. It is freaking me right out and keeping me up at night, this little fact, this single simple sentence. You see, I did it, or rather I sat there at a table with helpful, kind people who said to me gently, we think it is time to call hospice. “They’re so nice!”  they said enthusiastically, “And they will help.”

“But there is nothing wrong with her,” I protested, knowing that this was not altogether true, although there is nothing, really, that you can put a finger on, or get a blood test to verify. Nothing other than the dementia that has taken a crashing turn for the worse in the last six months, and then the way she says that her legs don’t work.  She falls a lot, now, which is one of the big reasons we moved her to assisted living, where everybody is very nice and calls me every time she falls. That’s how I know that she falls a lot. A very lot, in fact so much that I suspect her of doing it on purpose, of using the toddler logic that is all that is left to her: they made me move here because I fell down, ergo, if I fall down some more, I will move again. Falls = moving and she wants to move, to go home. Home to Greenwich Village in 1955 or Mallorca in 1975 but not really Asheville in 2015, which she has already forgotten. I sympathize. I also would like a time machine: I want to be 20, 27, 35, even 42 again; I too want to move. I do not like this life right now and the choices I have to make.

Yesterday she told me that she had forgotten she was a famous artist and it was great to be reminded. “All you have to do,” she enthused, “Is draw anything, any little thing and you get a million dollars! You should try it!” and then she laughed for a long time. She also complained about everything being too American. “Americans,” she said darkly, “Everywhere. And they keep pounding it in and pounding it in, Americans.”
“Yeah,” I said, “You are kind of surrounded by Americans, it is true. That happens in America. Awful, isn’t it?”

So. This is what has happened: she has more or less stopped eating. She had basically stopped before the big move, but now she is just not interested in eating anything at all, even things that she used to like, even grapes or pie or ice cream. This means, the hospice people say gently, that she already has some malnutrition and her body will start breaking down soon. It means, they say, that she has decided on some level that she is ready to go.

It could just mean she’s on a diet, I think – I know sometimes she still worries, fucked up but there you have it, women at any age from eight to eighty six: I’m so fat! I must diet! I just won’t eat tonight! So it could be a diet. Or she could just be not hungry, right? You don’t need much food, when you’re old.  I think these things but I don’t say them, because this diet is up to me: if I want, if I issue the orders, she will get fed whether she likes it or not. An Ensure army is waiting in the wings to keep her going. If I say so, an aide will sit there and feed her, turn her head to accept the spoon, make her drink the liquid nutrition and then, I guess, eventually the feeding tube.

What do you want to do? they asked me gently. You hold her health care power of attorney, when she was still coherent, or, well, more coherent than she is now, she trusted you to make these decisions. You hold the MOST form that spells out how much treatment is too much: do you go to the ER? Do you get a feeding tube? Do you get an IV?

No, I said, no spoon, no Ensure, no tube. If she sits down in front of three good meals a day and a snack or two and doesn’t eat them, it’s her choice to make and not mine.  But you see, it isn’t, because she doesn’t understand choices anymore so I must make them for her. And I don’t know, so I can only do the best I can, but it doesn’t feel like enough. But I do not believe that life is always the best option. I never have. Yet I don’t know, for sure, that she feels the same way. I think she does, or did. But I don’t know and so I wake up in the small hours and think, oh gods, oh gods, what am I doing? Do I have this right? Who died and made me god of this small world? What if I’m wrong?

I know that I would not want to live in the state that she is in now. I know that my mother, her sister, was adamantly and utterly opposed to staying alive past the point where you need other people to care for you, where your mind or your body has gone. I know that my whole family has a horror of losing our independence and to this end I sat and watched my father die at home, no feeding tube, no water even, three long and terrible days. I stopped the doctors – or tried to stop the doctors, easier, it turns out, said than done – keeping my mother alive too long and when it was time I sat with her and watched her go. I know that Annie too has lost friends and lovers and seen ghosts and all in all been comfortable on some level with this ongoing cycle, this life and death thing. I don’t think she would want, if she could see herself now, to keep going much longer. But did I ever sit down with the QOB at the Chelsea Hotel in 1988 and say, well, OK, Annie, just suppose that in 20 years you have a stroke and you get dementia and I have to take care of you, at what point do you want me to, uh, figuratively pull the plug? How do you feel about life with dementia?

We never had this conversation. Mostly we talked about boys and art and shoes – they should be simple but breathtaking – and sometimes apartments. “It’s such a drag, Lisa,” she said, passing me the joint, “That you don’t have enough bread to get a better pad.”

So I don’t know what she wants. But I have to make the choice and I said, ok, bring in hospice, thinking they would say, oh, she’s okay, this is silly, she isn’t dying. Instead they said, well, she meets our criteria and since then there have been kind and helpful people abounding, changing her medications, visiting her, calling me to ask kind and thoughtful questions. I asked for a lama and the Tibetan book of the dead and prayer bowls and that is going to happen, which kind of surprised me. They seem to think she is dying.

“What if she isn’t dying?” I said brightly, “What if this is all just a colossal joke?”
“That’s fine,” they said soothingly, “if she’s still alive in six months she will just be discharged.”

So now I feel like it’s a fraud and that worries me too. She can’t be dying, I think, not the QOB, this isn’t happening and even if it is, I didn’t make it happen. But what if I have set this machinery in motion? What if she is actually dying? What if she isn’t? What if I have made a terrible terrible mistake and she wants the spoon, the tube, the Ensure, the wheelchair, the slumped and terrible, silent figure in the hospital bed?

I know, or I think I know, that she doesn’t. And I do not believe in the sanctity of life over all things: I believe in death as a release. When it comes my turn, I want to die, as quickly and painlessly as possible and my kids and my friends and now you have been notified of this wish. No spoons. No Ensure. No tubes. But an overdose of heroin would be taken kindly. I can’t do that for Annie but I can do the other. I think it is the right thing to do. I think it is what she wants.

But I still can’t sleep through the dark hours.

Many years ago, from a screening of The Piano Player I attended at the art cinema with my mother and one of her friends: I gnaw my own arm off, leaving it there in the darkness to keep the older ladies docilely believing I am still sitting peacefully, enraptured by the film. Then, I rapidly crawl up the side of the theatre and burrow out through the wall with my handy penknife. I arrive in the bar next door, knock back six cocktails, and return to the theater in time to reattach my arm and earnestly discuss the film. It was so beautifully shot, I will say. And so movingly symbolic.

Some years later at the same cinema with an on again off again lover, watching the Coen brothers’, or one of them at least, thinly veiled biopic: I will just lean over and whisper that I must go to the bathroom. Lady problems, I will murmur meaningfully. Might have to run to the store. No, you stay. It will only take a minute. If they won’t let me back in I’ll meet you in the bar next door.

When I worked as a cashier at Home Depot for four interminable months: I will shimmy up that pole and launch myself across the ceiling, clinging bat like to the pneumatic tubes that funnel the money overhead all day. At the point in the dim back of the store just before the tubes reach the office I will saw one open, seizing the pods of cash within. Then I will scurry out the loading dock with my ill gotten gains. I can get far on $423 in ones. Or I could just go back to standing at my register staring into space and contemplating the many varied and splendidly outré ways there are to kill yourself at Home Depot.

Today, at an unfamiliar doctors office with my increasingly demented aunt in a  wheelchair  and my brother, only just out of the hospital himself, pale and ill: In a flash, I will leap to the window. I will force it open and wiggle through, magically shedding years and pounds. I will run to my car, also rejuvenated, and we will drive. And drive. And drive until we reach that cool pine shrouded campground in Oregon that I know waits for me.

Even if I have to gnaw my own arm off. Gndhsjfn. Shmgnrgggg. I am gnawing as fast as I can but it is just not fast enough.

i have been watching movies lately. Well, actually I’ve been dealing with a lot of insane family stuff lately and when I get done with that I’m too fucking emotionally exhausted to do anything else, so I’m watching movies. Also I really wanted to see Mad Max Fury Road because obviously, as a card carrying disaffected child of the 80s, I have seen all the Mad Max movies. In fact I have for long years now anticipated the moment in the slow dissolution of society when it would become necessary for me to dress in leather and spikes and soup up my 98 Saturn to unbearable heights of post apocalyptic glory. Which moment has not yet come but another Mad Max movie has and one that’s being touted as a feminist masterpiece at that. So Jay and I went to see it and it was pretty damn good. There were mutants and explosions and bad guys and so on, red dust, Australian accents and lots of cars, a guitar that shot flames and, best of all perhaps, Hell’s Grannies, so, yeah.

Then the next night I watched Kiki’s Delivery Service. What? I contain multitudes. The one does not preclude the other. But! They are the same movie. No, really, they are the same movie. A few spoilers from here on in, so if you are the sort of tender soul who is affected by such things, better click outta here now.

Kiki and Furiosa: two young women in search of an identity. Striving to make it alone without the help of family, building a new community all on their lonesome. They both encounter difficulties with their vehicles: Kiki has trouble managing her broom altitude and Furiosa’s war rig keeps getting overrun with mutants. They both have to fight at least three big battles: Kiki is attacked by crows, the perceived scorn of her peers and an overly zealous policeman while Furiosa is naturally nearly killed by a guy with a beard made of bullets and monstrous feet, her erstwhile owner who sports a white beard, a skull gas mask and a penchant for fertile women as well as another guy who I forget now because jesus, Fury Road, and it was like 2 weeks ago.  However! Both of them have a familiar: a talking black cat and a barely talking tattooed guy with an affinity for explosives. Both of them have friends who care about them, even if it means getting blown up or mildly embarrassed and both of them have older mentors, although Kiki’s are not quite so into motorcycles as Furiosa’s. And, to top it off, pregnant women play an important role in both movies. Same movie!

But Kiki’s Delivery Service does not have skeksis. Fury Road does and when I saw it, during the brief and hallucinogenic moment of calm when they appear, unexplained and at a distance, a sigh rippled through the theater: skeksis! Which says something, I am not sure what, about a demographic perhaps, who knows just exactly what a skeksi is.

ps some extra notes

if there was enough mud to bog down the war rig than there was enough water where they should all have been hanging out right there – weren’t several of the mad max movies about the hunt for water?

they collapsed that same arch twice

it would have been sweet to see the thunderdome in the distance and

13 is too young to send a child off to earn her fortune even if she can fly

In other non movie news things are far – whoa! way far! too fucking far! holy shit! – from settling down but as I was driving home tonight I thought, I cannot take this, I can’t handle it and then I thought that is a completely immaterial statement because it doesn’t matter if you can or not, you WILL handle it because you simply have no other choice. And so here I am, handling it, at least for certain definitions of handling. Which, I suppose, is part of the much vaunted wisdom of aging. Fuck THAT noise. Bring on the skeksis.

That last post was somewhat incoherent. Stress, the wonderdrug, strikes again! My apologies. I am trying to calm down and might even, given world enough and time, achieve that lofty goal. I can see where maybe it might be possible. That is thanks in large part to my very awesome friends who have been super supportive, even unto the point of making sure I got a ticket to the raffle for a night at the Grove Park Inn WHICH I WON and heading off on impromptu photo safaris. Yes! Thanks to Jodi, I won a free night’s stay at  the Grove Park! And thanks to Jay, I took this awesome picture of downtown from somebody’s driveway on Town Mountain Road, saw 2 wild turkeys, a graveyard and Redneck Igor, the Hellhound and the Batmobile. And all that was action packed into yesterday!

In other news, though, I have assumed the Iron Throne, which is to say that I guess I’m in charge of the family now, inasmuch as anyone can be in charge and the family such as it is, which is to say diminished. My older brother has been very ill and is still in the hospital and the Queen of Bohemia now lives at Arbor Terrace, which is a really wonderful assisted living for seniors place in South Asheville. This has been a pretty rapid transition – two weeks, to be specific, and they have been rough ones. Today when I went to see the QOB she was pleased that I wasn’t my evil twin. She said “Oh, but I like you. I don’t like her. I’m glad that wasn’t you! I was confused about who was the head of the family now but it’s you, that’s okay!” My evil twin – Efficiency Felicity; she gets things done but she can be a little scary – has been out in full force lately when not being supplanted by Anxiety Felicity who mostly weeps a bit and shivers. It’s confusing, yes, even for those of us who supposedly spend the majority of our time in consensus reality. And so are we all confused, but it’s being sorted. I hope.

Because somehow in the next couple months I have to get the QOBs house sorted and tidied and some stuff fixed and emptied and then, I guess, put up for sale. I might have to do the same for my brother’s house; we don’t know yet. I have to clean up my own damn house, which is in a ridiculous state of disarray as usual and worse than usual because of my fleeting notion back there in January that I could somehow sell this place and escape the Iron Throne. Ha ha! Such a crazy notion! There will be no escape! Bah. And while I sulk about that, I still have to get the garden weeded and the dogs their yearly shots and so on and so forth and continue to hold down a full time job at our busiest time of year. The lists just keep getting longer – tires! Transfer the paper! Get a phone in the QOB’s room! Find those round wire things for Perdita’s collar! I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to accomplish all this and I suspect it’s a good thing that I don’t own a computer capable of playing Minecraft anymore.

I would, however, like to go on record as stating that I never wanted the Iron Throne, I don’t like being in charge of anything or anyone, and all I have ever wanted was a small ivy covered cottage, or, preferably and lately, a mobile version, wherein I could mutter around and fiddle with stuff like the creepy old crone I am fast becoming. But you just don’t often get what you want in this world. Unless you are a dinosaur.

so it’s been a fairly awful week. Perhaps one day I will write about it in full grisly detail but not today, not here. Let’s just say I have now been involved withe the professional mental health world on a much more intimate level than I ever wanted. And I have met with lawyers and doctors and cops and social workers and EMTs and bankers and financial managers in suits, thus using up a couple of my hard won small allotment of PTO on a heart rending, scary, most thoroughly horrible family crisis. Everybody is, basically and as far as I know right now, ok. But things have changed and change, as we know, is scary. Fucking terrifying actually particularly if you have anxiety anyway and know that you have permanently and irrevocably pissed off – albeit necessarily for everyone’s continued health & well being – someone much scarier than you will ever be.

Is that vague enough? Whee! Vaguebooking! 

What all this has reminded me of, though, was my unhappy yearlong encounter with the criminal justice system. That system, as I believe I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog, is fucked and I do mean truly, deeply and probably irrevocably fucked.  Well, mental health, as best I can tell, is just as bad. It’s a terrible piecemeal patchwork that doesn’t make any sense. You cannot have somebody involuntarily committed unless they are an actual threat to themselves or others. And by threat I think they basically have to be wearing a hockey mask, holding a chainsaw in one hand and a three page sworn affidavit naming the people they’re going to eviscerate  in the other. If they don’t go quite this far but agree to treatment, then they can go into the hospital. Can they then get out again? Who knows! Due to HIPPAA, they may or may not contact anyone or let anyone contact them.  And they can change their mind on that one as well, because even though they are not judged able to make some decisions, like healthcare powers of attorney & living will stuff – the kind of thing you might want in the hospital you know – while in there they can make others, like who gets to know what’s going on medically and logistically with them, no problem.  It is a big old mess. 

The social workers shrug and say oh well! The banks shrug and say oh yeah fraud but oh well – like when my debit card number was stolen some years ago and we found the culprits Facebook page, address and phone number. Look, I said to the cops. Oh well! That’s in California, can’t do a thing. But man let a poor teenager mouth off to a cop or buy a blunt wrap and watch the hammer of the law descend. Watch the traffic fines as they mount  up and up forever on the poor. Watch all the rehab facilities go private and cost thousands to get into and watch Medicaid not pay for Alzheimer’s care. Watch the working poor call around to friends trying to score antibiotics and never quite make enough money to get stable let alone ahead.

Why? Because everything is broken in this country. It is like the sort of stable world I grew up in in the 70s and 80s, which was not perfect, mind you, but at least contained some sort of systems that more or less worked, is gone now. I don’t know if this is because there are just so many people now and stuff doesn’t scale up well or – as I suspect, years and years of goddamn crazed greed head right wing free market capitalist agents of evil have been chipping away and chipping away at the infrastructure that kept civilization together and it is now about to collapse. They want no schools, these people, no schools, no hospitals, no libraries, no museums, no roads, no fire fighters and no police, just standing armies of thugs ready to herd the poor to their deep fryers. Welcome to the new feudalism. We’re almost there. And it sucks.

Today is my birthday – yeah, yeah, I know, the fourth is always with me, look, my birthday didn’t used to be so annoying until some genius came up with that Star Wars thing about five years ago – but despite that it has been a lovely day and here I am – as of last night actually – wearing the oh so fabulous sunglasses and earrings that my daughter gave me. Not bad, I think, for an old broad, which is something my father used to say after smacking my mother on the bum. Gently, I mean, gently but with gusto, as it were, and then he would say NOT BAD FOR AN OLD BROAD. And right now I agree, because a) I have engaged in gigandorly self esteem building activities over the last couple of days and b) there has been an outpouring of birthday love that has left me all verklampt.

And, on top of that, a Carolina wren has built a nest in that urn that you can see in the picture behind me, the one with the artificial flowers in it. In this nest are five lovely speckled purple eggs, all wrapped around with artificial leaves and some glittery bits & pieces from off my porch – you can often find glittery bits and pieces and pom poms on my porch – and that is pretty damn cool too.

Self esteem building! Yesterday I went to the herb fair at the farmers market with Jodi, came home and proceeded to get the whole garden going, which is to say I dug up and weeded all the raised beds, weeded and tilled the front flower bed, weeded most of the roses and planted all the seedlings and the beans. My butt hurts. However, not as bad as it could have because yesterday, I discovered earbuds. Full disclosure: I had never used earphones (headphones, earbuds, whatever you want to call them) before. No. I am a weirdo. I heard some radio thing and read an article  about how they would destroy your children’s tender eardrums when I was in my early impressionable teens and I never used them or allowed my children to use them. Yes, okay, a weird hill to die on but it was mine own. So it was very exciting for me to get some from my son, put them in my phone and then get Amazon music up and running. Just in case you are unaware, Amazon music does or did this thing whereby they will keep a digital copy of any CD you ever bought from them in perpetuity right there in their Amazony cloud. Which is why I did my gardening rocking out to Dead Prez and the Roches Christmas album. You haven’t lived until you have gotten suddenly hit with A Child Is Born while under the rosebushes in May. But the garden looks AMAZING. And then Audrey and Celeste and Jodi and Jay came by and we drank wine on the porch, discovered the birds nest, ate squash casserole and it was thoroughly wonderful.

Today, which was my actual birthday, I tore out the carpet in the hallway and painted the stairs white.

No, really, I did that. See, my friend the realtor came over a couple of weeks ago and gave me the bad news: yeah, despite living in one of the hottest real estate neighborhoods in the country, my house STILL sucks and I cannot get giant piles of moolah for it. It is just not all that. Boo. I have been sulking ever since but also it has sort of woken me up: if I have to live here for the rest of my life then fuck it, I am going to finally do all the things I said I would do when I moved in seven – 7! – years ago. Thus, I did those two things and soon I will do more. I even bought a book – this book, it is a big bestseller right now and I am a sucker – on decluttering and I’m all on that too (although clutter is not really my problem so much as just basic disgusting grime, glah.)

And then after showering and hanging out briefly with the Queen of Bohemia, who handsomely invited me to take anything I wanted from her house for my birthday (I declined although tempted by the super fabulous Indonesian jacket she has dug up from somewhere and been wearing lately) I met some friends for drinks at the DeSoto and then went with my kids, Jodi and Charles for Korean food at Korea House downtown. I had never had Korean food before and it was delicious and all in all a very very fun night with lots of Vinho Verde and I didn’t fall down despite wearing my once a year fancy high heel shoes. Plus lots of people have called and texted and so it would seem that everyone doesn’t hate me after all, although I cannot imagine why. Probably they should. But I am very glad that they don’t, and also deliciously full.

Anyway, it has been a great birthday weekend. I am sore, I am beat, I am probably dying from horrible weird ass 70s carpet dust inhalation, but my hallway looks GOOD, my garden looks GOOD and my stairs look GOOD.

Like me, the old broad.

Happy birthday to you too – and thank you for the birthday thoughts!

On Sunday Jodi and I went over to the Asheville Darkroom, which is a very cool place that I had been wanting to visit, for their celebratory event for World Pinhole Photography Day.

I had always wanted to experiment with pinhole photography and never done it so I was all excited and it was really fun! They gave us each a “camera” to use and sent us out on our own. I got there a little earlier and so took three images – the first one was a wash, totally overexposed, but I am quite happy with the second and third, above. And now I want to make my own pinhole camera – which is to say, a box with a hole in it, a project well within my mad technical skillz set – and make more.

In other news my friend Adam showed up from Baltimore and proceeded to fix all my gutters, hurrah. He may also have fixed the living room roof leak, let us keep our fingers crossed. And I have not one but two Schrodinger’s Lottery Tickets in my wallet because I have, over the last couple days, found fully $17 in the pockets of various pairs of pants, so I took it as a Sign that I was rocking in the arms of Great Luck and went and got a lottery ticket from the Gas Up. The Gas Up, by the way, apparently no longer sells gas and perhaps should consider changing their name to the Wine Up or Beer Up or possibly Snack Up. Anyway whenever I check the numbers – a fraught experience because of course that transforms a Schrodinger’s Lottery Ticket to just an ordinary lottery ticket – I should find that I am a millionaire and I am quite looking forward to it. But I think I will keep the anticipation going for a while first.

On the way home from work today I saved a family of geese. Then when I got home there was a completely unexpected out of the blue anonymous generous check in the mailbox and holy shit. Just, holy shit. Talk about crazy instant karma: become a goose family crossing guard! It pays super well! HOLY SHIT.

See, I was driving home on Swannanoa River Road and right by the U-Haul, almost at the corner of Tunnel Road, where I have seen a pair of geese before – and even photographed them, or almost photographed them in that I think I got part of a wing, early one morning a couple months ago – I saw a whole goose family hanging out on the side of the road. So I naturally pulled over and parked in the UHaul parking lot so I could take some pictures. I didn’t try to get very close – I am a little afraid of geese after an unfortunate episode one summer when I was like 9 – and I was in the middle of the parking lot zooming in with the phone when I realized that they were preparing to head across the street to the river. The busy street. The very busy, fast, rush hour street.

So I headed to the street as well, figuring that I would stop traffic because although I was afraid that I would get killed I was more afraid that one or more of the geese would get killed while I stood there because I don’t think I could handle that. Another car stopped and a lady got out. “I think we have to stop traffic!” I shouted and she waved agreement and then DAMN we stepped into the traffic and held up our hands and EVERYBODY STOPPED. And the geese walked across the road and we darted back out of the street while people smiled and waved and gave us high fives and one lady yelled “Thank you so much for stopping! They are so cute!!”

It was awesome. I felt like a hero. I have really not rescued many of, well, anything in my life except possibly spiders who I save from the house and put outside. (That is, except in that one Charleston apartment where I put them in the chandelier which ended up after a year of this being the most magnificently gothic draped chandelier you have ever seen, whoo yeah.) I like spiders, however, rescuing them doesn’t really ever make me feel particularly heroic. Maybe it’s because they are so much smaller than geese, even very small geese like these.

ANYWAY. Geese safely on the other side of the road, I came on home and got the mail. Hmm, I thought, what is this, the Give Initiative, probably a charity, handwritten envelope, feel sorry for that intern – and I opened it up and HOLY SHIT, LO, it was a CHECK FOR $500.

This is like one of my dreams, like it is an actual wish and toast that I say and have for years: “Here’s to large anonymous checks in the mailbox!” “I wish for a large anonymous check in the mailbox, with no strings attached that hurts no one and no one has to die for me to receive. (I am careful with my three wishes, yo, I have this shit planned.)”

I never really thought it would come true but, it has. It has.

And I don’t know what to say except, my gods, I am verklampt, I am overwhelmed, thank you, anonymous donor, thank you so much. There are tears of gratitude in my eyes and I am going to use this money thoughtfully: I’m going to use it to make more money – I have plans! Yes, plans! – and when I do, I will, as you asked in your letter, pay it forward.  Thank you so much. I think you may have changed my life and I know you have changed my outlook.

For one thing, I’m never thinking mean thoughts about a goose again.

• I had a yard sale. It was quite fun, particularly since my two best friends and my daughter and her best friend all helped out. And by helped I mean we started drinking bloody marys at 11 am. It is amazing how much vodka helps you deal with the public. In a related note specially to the lady who left a note on my door the morning after the yard sale, why yes, I am ready to hear your offer for my giant terra cotta plant pots which you thought were too expensive at $5 apiece! You’re right, the price HAS changed! I am now prepared to take $20 each for them.
• I was supposed to have a party after the yard sale but I didn’t. Instead, I turned off the lights, closed the curtains and put a big sign on the door that said PARTY CANCELLED TOO TIRED WE SUCK YOU GO HAVE FUN. Then Audrey and Jay and I, feeling retro, settled in with a pizza to happily watch Diva and several episodes of The Prisoner. Fortunately, none of my other friends showed up anyway! Turns out we all suck equally.
• I worked my ASS OFF for the four days preceding the yard sale and then again directly afterwards. My house is still filthy, horrible and stuffed with, well, stuff but slightly less filthy and horrible and crammed than it was before. I, however, am tired. But I’m not afraid of the garage anymore.
• David the real estate agent came over on Wednesday and looked at my entire house. I am now waiting to hear from him to see if I can actually sell this place or if I am fated to remain here forever, slowly crystallizing like Miss Havisham only with more vodka and louder music. He said, and I quote, “Well, Felicity, there are three key elements to real estate: location, square footage and condition. You have location and square footage!” Yeah.
• Home Depot, in a crazy lapse of sanity, gave me a ginormous credit card, so if I do end up staying, I might be able to do something about that condition issue. Or at least I could buy the materials and put them in the living room for a couple of years while I weep a lot.
• In quick news, the iMac died, which has sort of soured me on Apple altogether because, fuck that, my PC is twice its age and still chugging along. I have already spent the yard sale money on a crazy orgy of eating luxurious foods like pizza and subs and also I bought a skirt and top at Ross Dress for Less and a new canister of CO2 for the soda stream and a mandoline so I can make more of the thin refrigerator pickles – these, to be specific – that I have become hopelessly, completely addicted to. And, in other addiction news, psst, hey, kid – why don’t you try out Sim City Buildit? (evil laugh)
• And I think that’s it.