6000onions

I have had a post in my head for a couple of days now about depression and how insidious and sort of weirdly all encompassing it is but then I just can’t, somehow, sit down and write it. And that’s it, really, in a nutshell – I just can’t. Do anything. Last November, faced with a one two punch of the impending holidays and the kids downstairs announcing that they thought they had bedbugs (again. We’ve had bedbugs – twice. No, really. Don’t ask. Once long ago in a fairy tale forest or a dark and dismal dungeon I was cursed by a Vermin Witch and ever since I’ve suffered intermittent plagues of a rotating cast of Vermin. Which makes for hilarious anecdotes but, like much later anecdote fodder, is not so fun when you’re going through it. Vermin Pro Tip: everyone has a rat story. No, everyone. If you’re in one of those terrible conversational lulls where nobody has a word to say, get the rat stories going. You’ll laugh, you’ll gasp with horror, you’ll never want to see any of these people again, but the conversation will flow like water. Dark, scummy, but quick moving water.) Anyway, at that point I gave up and went to bed. Well, first I spent the tax money on bedbug supplies, which are fucking expensive, and then I just gave up. We didn’t have bedbugs, by the way, although we did have a small and unsurprising infestation of fleas, but the money – roughly $400, yes, $400 – was already gone. Gone, baby, gone. And the money being gone and, perhaps even worse, the knowledge that losing $400 to an unexpected expense was enough to actually completely cripple me, that the way I live is such that if anything goes wrong, anything at all in this house of cards, I will abso-fucking-lutely literally end up homeless and babbling on the street, sent me to bed.

People usually say to me, oooh, you’re so brave, you keep going! Most people would just give up! and this always makes me sort of irrationally angry, because a) I am not brave and b) I do give up. I gave up long ago. It’s just there are different degrees of giving up and mine involves going to work and, uh, going to work. I can get up and get showered and dressed and go to work and even go out with my friends once in a while and feed the dogs and etc.: function for certain values of function, but that’s it. When I’m not doing the absolutely necessary, I’m in bed or playing Minecraft and all this has been a long winded way of saying that the house has basically not been cleaned since Thanksgiving.

I only ever slowly become aware that I’m depressed – like, one day in February I thought, you know, perhaps it isn’t entirely normal to do absolutely NOTHING on your days off except lie in bed and play Bubble Witch on the iPad, but then my brain drifts off again and I don’t care if I kick aside cartoon tumbleweeds of dog fur to get to the kitchen. Or, well, that’s not true: I do care, but I can’t, somehow, do anything about it. Mindfulness is supposed to be the key, but that usually goes like this with me.

Self 1: Okay! We’re going to get something done, here! We’re going to clean out this closet!
Self 2: Whatever.
Self 1: Yeah! We’ve got boxes! Let’s open this one and
Self 2: Those are Mom’s scarves. Look what you’ve done to them. She loved those scarves. She’d cry and cry if she saw what you’ve done with her beautiful things. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you take care of things? Why have you let everything fall into rack and ruin? Look around you! It’s disgusting! You’re disgusting! And you’re hugely fat, repulsive, loathsome, your inner horribleness is starting to show, you know, that happens, you’re old and fat and your dissipation is showing on your face. You deserve to die alone in the gutter and be eaten by the rats.
Self 1: Look! I am tearing myself up again! I am mindful that I am being mean to myself!
Self 2: Yes! You are! And you deserve it! Look at those scarves! Are you really going to throw them away, you selfish inconsiderate monster? You’ve lost or destroyed all the family heirlooms now, there’s nothing left, hundreds of years of things your ancestors worked hard for and valued, all destroyed in one generation by your useless, useless self.
Self 1: I can’t. . can’t. . I didn’t mean to . . I don’t know why I’m so bad at this . . .
Self 2: What are you going to do? There’s too much to do! You can’t do this! It’s too hard! Go to bed.
Self 1: Okay it’s safe there.  Look! I have all my bubble witch lives back!
Self 2: It’s for the best. You’re a shitty artist and your photography is pathetic and you don’t even have the gumption to write a stupid blog post let alone a book – you’re a total fucking alkie loser who will never get anything done ever again, even laundry, but you actually are pretty good at bubble witch.
Self 1: I am good at bubble witch! Yay!

And, as they say, lather, rinse, repeat. I have been off work for four days and I have managed to clean out one closet and sort of vacuum a couple of spots. This is not going to get this house to the point where I can show it to a real estate agent. And then, of course, I go into the spiral of, do I really want to do this? How do I do this? If I sell this house, if I even can, will I end up homeless anyway because I will trickle the money away on stupid shit? Why can’t I do anything right?

And then there is the anthropomorphization. I had to go lie down yesterday several times because I have decided to give Mom’s old vacuum cleaner to the Goodwill if they will take it and the dump if they will not. I cried. “It trusts me!” I bawled, “It’s been in the family for over 30 years!” That’s just the vacuum. The Irish linen tablecloths that I will never use, the crystal salt cellars, the sad remnants of the silver and all the objects that point out the fact that I will never, no never, live a life where I set the beautiful table for dinner with lovely things but instead I will eat bargain cheese standing up at the kitchen counter with an unwashed dog at my feet, sent me off for a restorative lie down. Don’t even get me started on the house itself. I suspect that my house, which is not architecturally significant or beautiful, will be torn down and replaced with several ludicrously expensive vertical eco-houses (side note: those houses are horrible for old dogs and probably even worse for old people and what the fuck, Asheville builders, do you really think everyone stays young with young dogs forever?) because that’s the way this neighborhood is going. I think about the work we put into painting it and decorating it and the garden, oh god, the garden – and how the house has nobly stood here for either 50 or 75 years depending on who you talk to, uncomplaining, sheltering families, never doing anything wrong, poor house – and I have to go lie down some more.

So what with all the lying down there is not a lot actually getting accomplished and I think I’m on track to get the house on the market by, oh, 2025 or so. By which point I also think the house will be quite literally full to the brim with dog hair and I hope there’s a market for that by then.

But! All is not bleak! I mean, okay, it is, but here’s the thing: when I begin to recognize that this stuff is going on it generally means that I am actually starting to clamber slowly up out of the mineshaft. Or so has been my experience in my oh, so many, many years of this slide down the rabbit hole, crawl out, slide back down again life. And maybe I will get more energy. Several well meaning friends have given me therapist phone numbers to call and if I can bring myself to do that, then it means things really are going to be looking up. And I am having a fun staycation anyway; I went to see Gogol Bordello on Monday night, I went for a hike on Sunday and I went to trivia last night. I am getting better. I hope. Oh gods, I hope.

Everybody likes my Great Plan. Everybody, that is, except my adults, who are naturally agin’ it, as we say here in Appalachia, because it means they will have to go out and be, well, adults. I do not blame them one bit. I am still furious with my parents for dying and forcing me to finally grow up and unlike them, I will not even (hopefully) be having the good taste to actually go and expire. I’m just – leaving. Goodbye, adults! Good luck!

I am also terrified. I have never had approval ratings like this before in my life. Mostly, I go to my friends and relatives and say, hey, I think I’m going to (insert Life Plan #5,322 here) and they usually turn sort of pale and say something like “Uh, wow, that’s a big step, are you sure that’s really a good idea?” This time, they’re like, “Well, we’ll miss you, but yeah! That’s a great idea! We’re so excited for you! That’s awesome! Do it!” I am not used to this and it kind of makes me want to do the exact opposite, because I am contrary like that. Plus, in the late afternoons when the light floods in to the living room, giving it a brief and illusory look of elegance and charm and I think about leaving my Japanese maple and the big oak in the front yard, I get mildly hysterical. Then I think about the amount of work that has to be done and I get thoroughly hysterical.

I don’t even know how to begin the monumental work of emptying out this house – although Adam came over unexpectedly yesterday and opened the garage door, so that’s a start. I was a bit worried last night when I came home and all the garage lights were on, making the open, packed space a sort of beacon. Then I thought, wait! What are you afraid of? That someone will go in there and . . . STEAL stuff? The stuff you’re about to mostly throw away? Leave those lights on! Open the gates! Lock up the dogs and maybe put out a few Free Stuff Here signs! I wouldn’t really do that, though. I’d feel too guilty when the Garage People caught the would be thieves and ate their souls. Oh, I haven’t told you about the Garage People? That’s . . . for the best, probably. Yeah. Mostly they just eat clothes and hairbrushes and baking chocolate, though. They hardly ever swallow souls anymore. I think.

Anyway! I am more concerned about raccoons and possums than I am thieves, which is why I’m sitting here waiting for Adam so we can figure out a way to sort of close it up again without fully closing it up again. We also have to move some of that furniture so I can actually physically get in there – only the Garage People, who are mutable and slender, can get in or out right now. They are also the only ones who know what is in there. I stopped going into the garage except for extremely short, terrified visits some years back when the plague of mice was at its peak. Not only am I phobic about rodents, I am also neurotic about Hanta virus (okay there have only ever been like two cases in NC but still) and so I have to hold my breath while I’m in there, which necessarily limits my garage time. There could be anything in there. Lost relics. The Arc of the Covenant. The mummified bones of previous explorers. My brother’s elementary school report cards and a box of marionettes that my father gave me in 1973.

I need to make lists. I have worked myself into a state whereby I need to make lists but I cannot make lists without the right notebook, which I recognize is more than somewhat insane. Still! There it is. There is too much to do and if I just start making lists on random scraps of paper, they will all get lost and not coagulate into a Great List, which is what needs to happen. I also need information, like, how exactly do people sell houses and move out? If you are selling your house, and you don’t get the money for it until the day of closing, at which point the house has to be empty and clean and ready for the new people, where does the money come from before that for you to move that stuff and find a place to put it in? Most people, presumably, have some extra money for these things. Those organized, together, successful people! I hates them. It seems like rather a lot of money. I, of course, do not have it. I have, like, $50. That is not bad, for me, but it isn’t really enough to get a dumpster and another, smaller, cheaper house and / or a storage unit and a funky camper van yet I will need all those things, not to mention helpers for the whole entire gigantic emptying and cleaning and moving process.

Yeah, I am terrified. That is a sign, I think, that I am doing the right thing. I know I’m doing the right thing – or, gods, I hope I’m doing the right thing, but I have now told everyone I’m doing it, so it’s too damn late to back out. I am not completely abandoning Asheville yet, though. I have now decided to try to buy a much smaller, much cheaper house somewhere around here – hopefully in Buncombe County but not, obviously, in West Asheville – and then renting it to the adults at somewhat (not a lot) below market rates. This gives Theo and Django and Okra and all my houseplants somewhere to live while Perdita and I racket around North America in our camper van and it’s kind of a better investment than just having that money sit in the bank and earn basically $50. This is the one part of the plan that everyone is not entirely on board with, and I get that. But! I might want to move back here! What if the rest of the world sucks? So I am hedging my bets, not always wise, I know. Still.

Anyway! Want to buy my house? It will be available in the spring. I hope. And me? I will be gone, baby, gone – out into the world to see what I have never seen. Yes, that’s right: Rock City – and a few other places, like Vancouver and Niagara Falls – here I come.

I started out writing a really depressing post the other day but you are in luck: I cannot find it. I think it’s on my phone somewhere but we will let it drift into the eternal draft neverland, because oh ye gods, yeah, life is depressing, I’m fucking depressed, you’re probably depressed and what else is new? There is just not all that much I can say about it except, well, yeah, I would also like to sleep for a hundred years in a castle made of thorns or, failing that, fuck the pain away. Both seem equally unlikely, although the second – you heard it here first – is basically my New Year’s resolution. Yes, I’m looking to resurrect my inner slut. She’s been out of commission for years and years and enough. I’m not looking for a boyfriend; I fear that train has sailed. Oh well! But there has to be some middle ground here. So introduce me to your single male heterosexual friends, please. If there are any of those rare creatures in Asheville, which I doubt. Preferably the ones with poor eyesight and little discretion.

In other news, we had a surprisingly lovely Christmas. I started dreading the holidays last June but both Thanksgiving and Christmas went off without any huge enormous glaring hitches. The kids gave me a DVD player – yay! My goal of lying on the couch watching movies draws nigh! – and took me shopping later – I bought a pair of electric purple flocked leggings I am calling the Psychotic Break at Ross Dress for Less pants – and we had a super day all in all and consumed roughly our own body weights in cheese. Cheese! Cheese! I am going back on a diet. Someday. I gave them socks and underwear because I am one of THOSE moms, yes, and a variety of other useful items such as fancy sunglasses and breathalyzers and plaid flannel shirts they hated. Miles and his girlfriend gave me an Amazon gift card I have not yet even begun to figure out how to spend – maybe on flannel, I like it – and so, all good and cheer and goodwill reigned in the household . . .

Until New Years Day when all hell broke loose. I could wax darkly hilarious about that but in the interests of preserving the tiny, tiny margin of friendliness that is left in this house, I won’t. Suffice it to say that we don’t often fight around here, but when my family decides to fight, hoo boy, we really decide to fight. They don’t want me to sell the house and leave town and I don’t want to stay here, or maybe I do, but not like this, and I feel unloved and unappreciated and they think I’m an idiot and so on and so on and so on, ad fucking literal nauseam for several days. Just now an uneasy peace is reigning but that’s pretty much because we’re all mostly avoiding each other. It sucks. I suppose the happy Christmas elves had to have their revenge. Bastards.

Well. I think this proves that my plan of leaving is actually a good one, although my heart quails within me and I get all verklampt when I think about my garden and my tree. I don’t think I mind selling the house so much but the garden, argh. I have however been looking at RVs and camper vans and so on and reading up on it and I think my plan, while still hideously financially irresponsible, is doable. More or less doable, but then I think, leaving Asheville? For parts unknown? After 15 years? Are you crazy? Don’t answer that.

Well, at any rate 2015 will I think be very different than 2014 and that’s a good thing: it is time and beyond time for changes. In that spirit let me report that the two gallery pages are COMPLETE, yes, FINISHED, I took a picture Every. Damn. Day. in 2014 (except on November 9 when I made a small ArtRage painting out of an old photo instead and December 18 when I just forgot and ended up taking a selfie after midnight so technically not the 18th but oh well what the hell.) And now that it is done I feel proud and also, I don’t know what the hell to do with myself. It’s weird, I feel strangely incomplete now that the little voice in the back of my head isn’t saying “Don’t forget the photo of the day! Photo of the day!” 24/7. Actually it is still saying it – and then I have to keep saying shut UP, it’s 2015 now. And changes are afoot. I think. And then I think, oh gods, I can’t deal with it, and then I think, is there any Valium left?  Ah the holidays – the decorations are gone but the indelible psychic scars linger on.

OCTOBER is now up on the July – December gallery page. I am breaking some land speed snail records here as well as noticing that in October I got real funky with the pictures and there’s more and more art seeping in among the straight photography. Which is kind of nice. Part of that is the partial acquisition of an old iPad – I say partial  because I am sharing it with son Miles and his girlfriend Jordan which means I get to use it for like 3 hours every other night. Enough to play bubble witch and occasionally use Art Rage. I adore Art Rage on the tablet and I both love and hate the iPad camera. It’s a terrible camera- it’s a first gen iPad – but it takes amazing photos, like a Holga or something, all dreamy and painterly, lovely blurry watercolory things. Unfortunately they’re also tiny tiny and I don’t think – I could be wrong – that there’s any upping the resolution so I can actually use them anywhere except online.

In other news it looks like I will survive my FOURTH CHRISTMAS IN RETAIL without drinking myself to death, shooting anyone or dying from a tragic Christmas music overdose. I mean there are still a few days to go and I really hate all holiday music now with a white hot passion but I think I might make it through. If all goes according to plan and the fates are kind, anyway, I will not have a fifth Christmas in retail.

Note: You said that last year about a fourth one.

Note: Shut up, omniscient narrator. You’re not so damn omniscient.

We have not done much about the holidays this year. I didn’t even get a tree, which kind of makes me sad, but oh well. There are a few decorations up outside and thanks to my friend Bryan the yard is finally clear of leaves – what? Mid December is late to get around to that? Whoops. Here is the fuck I do not give. – and looks way less trashy, so that Frosty and Rudolf and the chainsaw bear can shine in all their glory.

It looks like we’re not even going to do a Christmas Eve or Christmas dinner, which, like the tree, is kind of sad but kind of alright, too. Thanksgiving was nice and all but MY GAWD it was a lot of work. I am off on Christmas Eve and Christmas day and not having to really do anything except make some brunch stuff and trundle it over to the Queen of Bohemia’s on Christmas morning is a giant relief. Also, cheaper.

In other news there is no other news except I need to get on the Christmas present bandwagon thingy, like, yesterday. And I am watching all the Studio Ghibli films with the Queen of Bohemia and that is great. We watched My Neighbor Totoro last week and tonight I think perhaps it will be Howl’s Moving Castle. And while I’m talking about animated movies let me put in a shoutout for Kirikou and the Sorceress, which I had never heard of before but which is AWESOME and I recommend highly. You can watch the whole thing here, and if I were you I would. However I feel I must say that if you are boobphobic you a) have my sincere condolences and b) it may not be the movie for you because there are lots and lots and lots of boobs.

September is done on the July – December gallery page! Whoo! I am only two and a half months behind now! Things are moving right along. September seems to have been a very social month for me: there are lots of pictures of people, not just clouds and dogs. One of the interesting things about this project has been noticing trends like that – when you’re going through your day to day slog you don’t really see the larger stuff that’s going on around you but returning to the pictures tells a whole new variety of story.

In other news, I was lying around looking at Instagram this morning and I came across somebody pitching a fit about #ferguson on one of Ron English‘s pictures. That person is a racist, although I am sure they would hotly deny that, and I got mad and had to put the phone down for a while. Then I thought, and almost wrote, but there is no point to arguing with idiots anywhere but particularly on the internet and even more particularly on somebody else’s instagram that is actually about art and not politics, the following.

Anybody who kills anybody else in the USA should be immediately arrested. They should be taken to jail and arraigned and have bail set and then they should stand trial for murder. I don’t care if they’re wearing a blue uniform or not: murder is murder and everyone must face the same consequences for it. The rule of law is either the rule of law for everyone or it is a big fat fucking joke. Because look, THIS IS NOT A WAR AND THE POLICE ARE NOT SOLDIERS. 

And once we get out of the mentality that it is a war, and once it sunk in that everybody faces the same consequences for murder – and let’s call it murder, absolute murder and nothing else – I bet you the cops would suddenly discover non lethal ways to do their job.

That is all I have to say about that.

And in a complete and total non sequitur, I don’t think I want to deal with a Christmas tree this year – there isn’t really a place for one in the current incarnation of the living room and argh, the money and the time and yeah, I don’t think I can be arsed. But I want the smell and the lights and, well, something, so I have decided that I need a Christmas branch. Anyone got a pine tree hanging around that could spare a branch or two?

As I was driving home from work tonight, talking out loud to myself – well, talking to Batly, my car, because that is so less crazy than talking to myself – I saw a raccoon. It was a small raccoon crossing Riverview Drive and I stopped to let it pass by and said, Hello, Mr. Raccoon! which, I then thought, was awfully patriarcho-normative of me, because it could well have been Mrs. Raccoon or Miss or Ms. Raccoon or even, of course, the Honorable Raccoon. But! While it was a lovely raccoon and I have not seen a raccoon in a while, it has nothing to do with this post. This post is about what I think I might actually honestly genuinely be planning to do starting in the spring!

Which is, in the short version, to sell my house, quit my job, get rid of most of my stuff and put the rest in storage, take a chunk of the money from the sale of my house, buy a camper van or a pickup with a cap, and drive around America for a year or two. With Perdita, a laptop, a smart phone, several cameras, a futon and a camp stove. And by America, I mean America: all of it. Canada. Mexico. Maybe even all the way down, as far as you can drive, to Tierra Del Fuego, that improbably named end of the earth. Maybe up to Alaska, because I have always wanted to go to Alaska. I want to see all the places I have never seen or at least those I can drive to. I want to see all my friends, who are scattered all over the continent, conveniently scattered, actually, so I can go from place to place to place to place and mooch showers. And while I’m at it, I want to take a lot of pictures, be better about updating this blog and maybe write a book – everyone wants to read a book about a middle aged woman and a dog driving around America, right? Heh. But at the least, maybe I can figure out what the hell I want to do with the rest of my life.

No, I’m serious. Really, honestly, serious. As death and taxes.

I have just been getting unhappier and unhappier and feeling more and more trapped and eventually, enough is enough. I am dirt poor, but I am land rich, and this half acre of prime West Asheville real estate would probably sell for enough to keep me going for a while with some left over to buy a little house with a little yard in some saner real estate market somewhere. Somewhere that I could even find a job where I could sit down and have weekends and holidays off and make enough money to actually live on without freaking out every time I spend $20. Somewhere, some small paradise – that I will find during my wanderjahr.

I thought when I bought this house in the reeling, terrible aftermath of my mother’s death in 2008 that I would never leave it. I will be buried from this house, I thought, perhaps even in the backyard or the side yard next to my cat Pebble although okay, that is pretty fucking creepy except think of the joy it would bring to some hapless digger a century in the future. I mean, everyone wants to find a skeleton and I would be delighted to be that skeleton. That is the bones of the thing, you see: there is a finite amount of time left before I will in fact be a skeleton. And I am not, after all, sure that I want to spend all of it in this wacky 60s West Asheville house, working in the bookstore, barely scraping by and grumbling about my children in the basement. It has been, if not an entirely good, than at least not an entirely bad and definitely an interesting seven years, but I think it is time to move on. West Asheville no longer feels like home to me: it is too expensive now, too trendy, too full of hip and earnest wealthy young people and slightly less hip but definitely earnest wealthy old people. I am just a poor slacker malcontent middle aged person, and I don’t fit in. West Asheville has changed, I say, and I want a divorce. Really we have both changed, I know. I thought in 2000 when I moved here that I would never leave again, that finally, for the first time in my peripatetic life, that I would have deep roots and stay in one place. And I did, longer by far than I ever lived anywhere before. And it’s been great, but. Well. Perhaps I was not meant to be so rooted after all.

So I am not getting younger and eventually – not all that eventually, even – I will be, like the Queen of Bohemia is now, bounded by the edges of my living room and that will be enough for me. It isn’t enough now. I don’t have a career – let’s be real, while I like being the Director of Fictions and I love my coworkers and mostly enjoy my job, it is not as if I am leaving some big old capitalist Career, here. No, I used to have one of those – well, sort of – but now I have a job. And jobs come and go. My children are all grown up. By the time I was the age of the youngest one my oldest one was four and I was divorced, so yeah, they are Grown Up. It will actually be good for them to not have a mother around for a while. I love them and they love me and it’s time we stopped living together. It’s time for us to spend some time talking on the phone once a week and irritatedly braving holiday traffic a couple times a year for a rushed few days of slightly resentful togetherness, as is our American birthright.

And the Queen of Bohemia? That’s partly what moved this whole idea from the realm of driving home talking to car fantasy to the realm of you know what I am going to do this because goddamnit I am. If all continues as it has been these last few weeks, it looks like she may well be moving somewhere awesome where she will be safely taken care of, and that will be the for the best. I will call her every week and that will be okay.

I am scared! This is a crazy idea! I can come up with a million and one reasons why this is a bad idea! And yet, you know, if I don’t do it now I will never do it and there will never be another time as good as the time right now.

And besides, the other day on Twitter I saw a post from a photography site I follow and it said, 10 Tips for Taking Pictures of Foxes and I laughed and thought, yeah, is the first tip Find a Fox? Because honestly I have only ever seen a fox maybe three or four times in my life and only on one of those did I get a picture and then it was a pretty terrible picture. Today at work I saw an old book, Travel Photography Tips or something like that, and it was full of awesome pictures of monkeys and ruined temples and papyrus boats, the tips, clearly, being to travel to cool places. To be, in short, where the foxes are. I am not, usually, where foxes – or monkeys, or papyrus boats – are and when I am, like my brief encounter with the Honorable Raccoon this evening, I am not prepared to take pictures because, you see, I am too busy with all the minutiae: the come home from work, take son to work, feed dogs, hurry, hurry, worry, worry. But maybe it doesn’t have to be like that forever, world without end. Now, perhaps, this is my chance, and my last chance at that, to be there, where the foxes are, with time to stop and take a picture. So I think I will do this thing, this crazy, irresponsible thing. Don’t let me chicken out.

Hi. Remember me? I used to have a blog. Well. I wish I could say that a whole lot has happened since my all too brief fall vacation – hell, I wish I could say that I was sold into white slavery, thrown into an opium den, nearly sacrificed to the Great Ancient Ones, escaped by the skin of my teeth through antediluvian tunnels under the Appalachians, joined a secret society of sorcerers dedicated to stamping out evil and eventually made my way back to the bookstore, all without wifi, which is why I haven’t updated – but it would not be true. Entirely true, that is.

I did start writing a novel for Nanowrimo: a horror novel based on that vacation – not the vacation itself, it was awesome – but the town, which has taken scarecrow fetishization to a high and unholy art. I had great hopes but as usual it only got to be a few pages long and then I stalled out altogether again. Ah well!

Mostly I have just been going to work and coming home, stopping quite occasionally at the Desoto Lounge, seeing my friends and relatives here and there, making food and eating food and resultantly attempting lackadaisically to diet, keeping up miraculously with the picture of the day and, um, I think that might be it. Making some art, here and there, which has been nice. I am quite happy with some of it and thinking there may be more. Whoo! Let’s see, what else? I took photos of small children and their grandparents at the preschool where Audrey works, for which I will be rewarded with a pool pass next summer. I went to my friend Charles’ semi annual fry party. I didn’t do anything much for Halloween. Thanksgiving was very nice; Audrey and Miles and Miles’ girlfriend Jordan were here along with my friends Kyle and Jay and Bill who came over for dinner and Helen and Zen who came for dessert. There was enough food that we ate Thanksgiving steadily for a bit more than a week. See above re, diet. My brother gave me his old iMac and I have been trying with limited success to transfer my computer life to it. Which I have sort of given up because the learning curve, it is steep. Macs don’t make sense. I took a couple of days staycation and I went and looked at a few nursing homes, which is a whole other topic in itself. I took Theo to the vet and paid $135 to find out that he is healthy, which is still annoying me. And right now I seem to have a cold.

Time has sped up lately, which might be a function of age or might be a function of this wildly technological era in which we find ourselves flailing or might be the zeitgeist or might be a sign of the coming apocalypse or maybe it’s climate change: I don’t know. I just know that one minute it is August and the next time I look around there are Christmas lights everywhere. I am a bit disheartened and down these days but I think, as my mother used to say (I paraphrase, here) that if you can look around you at this world and not be depressed you must not be very bright and so the hell with you. Also it’s probably the cold, because things are more or less okay, really. I mean, we are still very very poor and that takes a surprising amount of time and energy. But the bills are almost paid and we pretty much have a roof over our heads (don’t stand in that one spot in the living room and you’ll be fine) so, all good! Anyway, I have just added August to the July – December gallery page, and there was much rejoicing. I will get to work soon on September. And October. And November and then, oh lord, December. It takes about three hours a month, phew, but hey, I think it is worth it. See what you think!

Whooo hoo! Momentarily I will be boarding my trusty 16 year old green Saturn, Batly, and heading out to parts unknown, or, well, unknown to me, anyway: Ellijay, Georgia. I am going to meet my dear friend Elizabeth in a cabin – ok, apartment – in the woods and for the next three days we intend to drink too much, eat too much and lie around doing pretty much blissfully nothing except possibly we might go tubing or, equally exciting, window shopping in swingin’ downtown Ellijay. Why Ellijay? Because she lives in Birmingham, AL and I live in Asheville, NC and my limited Google map skillz indicated this place as roughly halfway and AirBNB indicated that there was a place to stay that we could afford. So, hurrah! I have packed the cooler with wine and cheese and cucumber infused vodka! I have made bruschetta topping with the last tomatoes and basil from the garden! I have dithered ridiculously over what to wear, particularly when you consider that I am going to rural Georgia, not Paris, France. But I have everything, I think, or hope, and it’s all packed into the quilted patchwork duffel bag the Queen of Bohemia bought at the Portobello Road market in the 60s and I am OFF. Only about an hour or two later than I planned to leave, too! Small miracles! I will be back on Wednesday with way too many pictures.

So I lost my shit on Twitter last night. Twitter is a bad place to lose one’s shit, in part because it’s where I usually go to say things like, wow, I sure lost my shit! And now that I have done it on Twitter, I don’t have anywhere to say that. Which is probably why I’m saying it here, but also because I sort of want to examine what it was exactly that made me lose my shit. The immediate cause was yet another bad meal in yet another overpriced West Asheville restaurant but there’s more to it, more underlying that issue. It would be easy to say, well, I was just drunk, but, uh, I wasn’t. Or not very.

I went to the bar with some friends after work, had a couple of drinks, met my friend Jay there and the two of us decided to go out to eat. This is expensive for me, eating out, and I’ve been doing it more than I really should lately – I really shouldn’t do it at all, like ever, like period, full stop, never – but, okay, let’s just go somewhere cheapish. How about this place nearby? OK, let’s go there, I went there once when they first opened a fairly long for West Asheville time ago, it wasn’t very good, I never went back. But let’s give it another try. Well. It was a Saturday night so I suppose I should have expected it: that place was packed. It also had a huge TV screen going and tons of hip young people in their twenties and thirties and many, many shrieking children. It was bright and jammed and loud and horribly trendy in a kind of weird fake way like you would expect more in the suburbs: yeah, no. So we said, okay, let’s go somewhere else, what about this place? Oh it is too far to walk, I don’t want to drive, let’s go to this place, I went there once, when it first opened, it wasn’t very good, but let’s give it another try. It was mostly deserted, which should have been a clue.

It has gotten kind of absurdly tough to be a vegetarian in Asheville, which is interesting in its own right and functions as a handy metaphor for a lot that has changed here in the last five or so years. This used to be the most vegetarian friendly town maybe anywhere, but, no longer. I think some of that is that the children raised by vegetarian hippie parents have all grown up and demanded bacon and lots of it but some of it is, yes, the gentrification and standardization and, oh god, I could and probably will go on and on. Suffice it to say that there is not a lot on the menu at this place – or at any place these days that isn’t purely vegetarian – for vegetarians. So, of my two options, I ordered a beet burger. A beet burger, it turns out, is some beets beaten up with egg and flour, fried, and served with half an avocado and a slice of tomato on top and a pot of mustard. That’s it. No discernible seasoning. No sauce. No anything, really. I looked at it and it looked at me and I tried, I tried slathering mustard on the beets and then I thought, what the FUCK am I doing? This is ridiculous. Worse, this is $9 worth of ridiculous and I’m hungry and it takes me about an hour to earn $9 and I don’t want to work an hour for unseasoned beets. It is not like it’s hard to make a sauce for beets, you know, you can do a sour cream one with dill or a white sauce or a tzatziki – there are options here. Mustard should really not be one of them.

So I sent it back – I have hardly ever done this in my whole life but I did it last night – and the waiter was very nice, which is why I overtipped him for taking it back and I got the stinkeye from the kitchen crew and paid $10 for a small glass of Spanish bubbly white wine and so by the time I got home I was in a fine mood, let me tell you. I had a similar fiasco at a different West Asheville restaurant about six weeks ago and so I thought about that and about the pizza we ordered from a West Asheville place about three weeks ago that took two and a half hours to arrive and when it did was stone cold and nearly inedible anyway. And then I thought, who the fuck were all those shiny people watching football with small children, what was that bright, sterile, trendy place and where did my neighborhood go? Where am I? There didn’t used to be a lot in West Asheville but what there was was dependably mediocre and affordable and comfortably grotty. Now, what we have is so expensive it is enough to break my admittedly tiny monthly budget and it’s pretty much horrible across the board. The only really good restaurant meal I’ve had in Asheville in the last YEAR was at Kathmandu. And that, in this “foodie” city, is bullshit and a goddamn shame.

But then, the taxes keep going up and the water bill has just gone way up again and meanwhile, the infrastructure is crumbling around us and there is less coming back to the citizens than there used to be and that is a goddamn shame, too. There are probably more cops, but there are less festivals. Well, you have to pay more, they say, because there are more people now and so the infrastructure needs fixing. Well, hello, perhaps the ones who lured the new people to town should be fixing that. Maybe the developers who have added more than 30 houses in a six block radius around my house in the last three years should have to pay a rather hefty percentage of their budget into infrastructure updates. Maybe we should say, FUCK NO, there can not be any more growth. Maybe we need to stop this shit. Enough, you know, is enough eventually. Or so you would think, but it is too late anyway.

I just, I don’t know, I am tired of this. I used to love my city and my neighborhood and I used to be okay with being poor – but now I am poorer than I ever was before and it wears on you after a while. I need to fix my roof and my plumbing and a whole host of other things and I can’t. I will probably have to beg you all for money to pay the house taxes this year and eventually, you know, this sort of thing gets old. It was one thing when we were all in the same boat – and I think there are a lot more of us who are a lot poorer than people will admit to or say out loud (which is the subject of whole other essay I want to write someday) but lately, in this neighborhood, I feel like the odd one out, the last surviving poor person and sometimes it is very goddamn tough to go on being nice about it.

I went to the doctor for my UTI, which turns out not to be a UTI after all but instead something that nobody knows what it is. Maybe kidney stones. Maybe, huh, who knows. My doctor checked all my lady parts, even unto doing one of those vaginal ultrasounds that are not much fun. I have an ovarian cyst, hurrah me, and, she said, sounding dissatisfied, “Your uterus is completely normal. Absolutely ordinary.”
“Wow,” I said, “Go normal uterus! Rock on in your ordinary way!”

So whatever is wrong with me, if there is indeed anything wrong and I’m not just making it up, is a mystery. My kidneys hurt and my bladder hurts but I have no other symptoms, so, oh well. These things happen and I guess I will just go along. I got another prescription for antibiotics. I think instead of taking them I will fill it and keep the drugs on hand for the inevitable apocalypse that signs and portents say is coming along any day now. It’s not doing it very fast. Sometimes I think I’ve spent my whole life waiting for the apocalypse and I am not the only one: every single day almost we have somebody coming in to the bookstore asking for either books on how to deal with the end of the world when it happens, like how to grow crops and kill people, or fictional books about how very tough fictional people have survived the same. There is a whole thriving sub genre of these, ranging from the apparently infinite action adventure series of the Outlanders and Deathlands, which I suspect are not written by just one person or indeed necessarily by a person at all, through the slightly better thought out works of Margaret Atwood, Peter Hellman and Cormac McCarthy. And then there are the current crazy screeds written by A. American – the A stands for ANGRY, of course it does – which have been trickling slowly in and rapidly out of the shop.  Everybody likes a good apocalypse yarn.

I have noted before that people seems to expect that as soon as the apocalypse comes, everyone will immediately start killing each other. I kind of doubt this – yes! There is a place where I am actually somewhat less cynical than the average American! – but I am in the definite minority. I just have trouble believing that the only reason people are not out there murdering 24/7 is the presence of the Code of Law, which is to say cops and marble city buildings. I think people generally would prefer not to murder other people if it can possibly be avoided. Among other things, it’s so messy – and then you have a corpse to dispose of, which is not easy. I know it isn’t easy, because my dogs murdered a possum last week.

The first I knew of this was last Friday, when I got home late from work, crawled into bed and turned on the window fan, which, along with the whole house attic fan, is what keeps my home bearable during the summer months. Alas, the air the fan brought in that night was not just air, no, it was, like an early John Waters film, in full on Odorama. To my sorrow as the owner of predators, I am familiar with the smell of Dead Things and this was indeed vintage Dead Thing. I thought about going out to deal with it but I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that venturing out into the darkness to find a Dead Thing seldom ends well. So I just kept tweeting (twitter was made for stuff like this; I love twitter so) burying my nose in the pillow and bemoaning my fate. The smell came in waves. Things mostly do.

A couple days later, after writing a bad poem about the dead possum on the front door – have I mentioned that I painted the inside of my front door with chalkboard paint? I think it is the single most genius thing I have ever done, no, seriously – I got my son, who by virtue of being male is the Appointed Disposer of Dead Things in our sexist household, to get rid of it. He put it in a trashbag with the shovel and thence to the outdoor trash can, which will never recover – the smell was, uh, pungent. “It’s kind of interesting,” he said, “how things decompose.” And it is, actually: the fur all falls off first and then it goes on from there, or at least I think it does, because I can’t look longer than necessary to note the absence of fur, which does not improve animals aesthetically, no, far from it. Although I think bald men are actually quite sexy, so there is that exception.

In other news, I went to the Mountain State Fair before it opened and helped out hanging some of the artwork, which I used to do every year but haven’t in the past four or five. I have always kind of liked doing it – it’s fun to be at the fair before it opens and it’s fun to see what people have entered. I don’t do the judging anymore, though, because one year I insisted on giving a blue ribbon to a ballpoint pen drawing of Ozzy Osbourne on a napkin instead of to one of the lavishly framed PBS painting show inspired laborious oil landscapes which are so popular and I believe there was something of a stink about it. The fair is not really a hotbed of groundbreaking contemporary art, go figure. I also used to always drag some suffering friend or family member along, sweetening the deal by throwing in cocktails or at least beers in styrofoam cups. This is also not what you are supposed to do, but hanging weird art just goes better with vodka.

Also, then I get to take brooding melancholy photos of ferris wheels.

And that is all I have to say this week, but hey, the gallery is almost totally up to date! Even July is done, so look on my works ye mighty and be mildly impressed.