AND ON THE BOIL...

I just spent $55 I don't have on a doctor's visit and some incredibly expensive medication to treat what I thought was the flu and my doc thought were allergies. I was about to ask the pharmacist how it could cost $25, when I remembered the times we live in and asked instead how much it cost without insurance: $104.

Good grief. Now I have to figure out whether I think that my "dust allergy" is real, whether I got it sleeping on the floor. But I haven't been sleeping on the floor for the past week, and it got worse, not better...

OK, I have the perhaps unusual habit of sleeping a week on my kids' sheets in which they've only spent one or two nights, and they were here the week after Christmas, so the sheets probably WERE a bit... dusty. I have three kids, and that's three weeks of dust collection. Hmmmm...

I was asked about my symptoms, and sang the whole song about fatigue and feeling feverish, and said in fact I was feeling pretty punk right then. Parboiled, in fact. My actual temperature? 98.6. So much for the fever theory. Could someone please tell me why I felt like I was being boiled down for my plenteous if not exactly savory fat... shades of Fight Club...

What the hell do I know?

Well, I now own this stuff, so I guess I should use it. Spooky, if you ask me: the instructions are about a mile long, and would be complete gibberish to anyone who wasn't schooled in geek-speak. Who do these people think are buying their products? No matter what anyone may tell you, we did not all go to Harvard. In fact, most people have a hard time remembering that only about 30% of us have any kind of college degree at all. I say, let's require everything to be couched in terms someone with a 10th-12th grade education could grasp. Just THINK of the possibilities... the probabilities, on the other hand, are depressingly predictable.

The Goat is coming up next weekend. At least, that was the original plan. Then we somehow wound up meeting half-way at a B&B. [I tell you, it's summer-people heaven out there in the Wild West]. It's run by a really nice gay couple, friends of friends, and probably the only gay men in the state I know whom the Goat hasn't known for decades. But that's another story...

I was running around trying to get a plan together, because I had been pretty much comatose most of last week: making B&B and dinner reservations, planning ahead a little for his visit here [HERE!] in early February, and what I get for my pains is the complaint that I am trying to nail things down too much -- I should plan less. Be free. OK, then we don't get a B&B room, for example. Or a table at a decent restaurant. Why should I care? I don't really, I just hate getting called on the carpet because I'm the only person in the world who actually tries to make arrangements ahead of time...

It's certainly true that he doesn't. Or doesn't like to. And yet I notice that he books his escape flights six months in advance, and that... oh, screw it. I'm the one who chose to take up with an aging hippie; I should just "release it," as a New-Age friend of mine used to say... I suppose that if I live with the Goat long enough, I will have released most things, to some extent. Or I won't be there anymore.

Why am I feeling so cranky? Well, part of my weekend in the mental fog was spent watching movies, including The Namesake. Not as upsetting as some of the other movies I watched [Sansho the Bailiff, which made we weep buckets, or Water, which made we want to go out and torch the houses of rich old men. Oops, maybe I am one...] No, in The Namesake all that happens is that Gogol/Nikil's mother is advised to do the Joseph Campbell thing: close your eyes and remember when you were last deeply, quietly happy. Not ecstatic, just happy. Then follow that bliss.

Here's the rub.

"Ecstatic" I have all the time at the moment; "deeply, quietly happy" I basically have been in recent memory only when "the five of us" sat down to dinner together [because at least one of us regarded the family home as something to be escaped, dinner was the one time when we all came together regularly...]. And that is a bliss I can no longer follow, however much I may yearn for it: I have cut it off forever.

I may, indeed I do, live in hope of new, different "deep, quiet happinesses" to come. But the "bliss" I am meant to follow is a dead-end street as of last year, a limb I cut off of my own free will... So, maybe it's not such a surprise that I'm a bit cranky today. Aside from the fact that I'm cranky most days, that is.

Hang in there, cranks and all.
C