Changing plans to show no change in plans

I should have done as Lee (or Grant?) said and improvised from the moment I walked in the door.  Instead I stuck to the script I came up with a week ago; walk in, throw something down on the table, say “to hell with all of you,” and walk out.  But thanks to the timing of a comment about genital bacon, the unasked gifting of hand-me-downs, and the unexpected gifter, it all looked like a different kind of drama.  And I intended the lady none of that, nor any distress, and thankfully got to make it up at least part way after taking a slow amble back from around the block.  Note to self when speeding away from the scene of a little social havok-making:

You never want to be dealing with technicalities while you’re saying goodbye.

Whether it’s sweet or harsh or cold or smouldering, you gotta just think of a wiser, smarter, more mature (and maybe more handsome) person, and what he would say and do. Then you say and do those things. And use lots of mouthwash.

Persnickety it ain’t, and loquacious neither.

There’s all these things that aren’t quite what they might be nor yet what I might be able to frame well enough to acknowledge or accomodate or reject.  There’s the incident report in hand and the incident write-up I wasn’t sent and the written response to the question I infer about where I was when I wasn’t there where I shouldn’t have been expected.

Breathless every day now

The highs are high and the lows are low and it’s the ride in between which makes it seem as if there’s no air, there.

If you’re gonna have an evil cat, don’t name it “Forgiveness.”

The smoothies were good.  Yeah, how was your day?  Yeah, mine was fine.  Driving home.  All of the cross streets turned to schools, and they stood on stage, purple trophies were what they gave.  You held my hand.  You asked me why I wanted to stay.  “But there’s no way to believe all the things I don’t say to you.”–Jim Infantino

I am not a good citizen.

1. I don’t know my neighbors’ names.

2. I don’t know my landlords’ kid’s name.

3. I can’t tell you which district I’m in or which school board member is mine.

4. Never been to a neighborhood watch meeting.

5. Haven’t written to a politician in a year or so.

6. Don’t know when the League of Women Voters is having their next meeting.

7. Don’t know the names of my neighborhood beat cops.

8. Couldn’t tell you which community organizations serve my area.

9. Haven’t done a neighborhood clean-up.

10. I’m ruining the curve for car break-ins.

11. I’ve done nothing yet to offset my 7.6 tons of CO2.

12. I don’t go to free theater enough.

13. I don’t volunteer at my local school.

14. I don’t volunteer at my local library.

15. I don’t know where my neighborhood emergency plans are.

16. I don’t push my landlord to keep the apartment up to code.

17. I don’t know anything about tenant organizations.

18. I don’t have most of the insurance I ought.

19. I don’t know who my local homeless are.

20. I’m not contributing to the “spay feral cats” campaign.

21. I often forget to take my garbage out or bring the bins back.

22. I leave the dvd player on.

23. I don’t speak my mind or heart often enough.

I did not respond to what I did not receive.

There’s an envelope of evals in the corner of the room that I’ll crack open and read, as soon as I get my clipboard in order to start tracking the day and figure out what to do with this bounty of free time.

I didn’t go to camp and I didn’t get the text from the poet saying it was alright to call and I didn’t give myself time to shave my face or head yet and I didn’t say goodbye to my neighbor but now I’m thinking about taking over her apartment.

I checked myself right out from large chunks of the weekend with Jennifer, for lack of getting on to the things I had planned for myself. Now it’s Monday morning catch-up like usual, except that I really do have some time and space to play the game and make up the lengths.

I wore my beach-bum outfit and garnered a few comments; the 7-11 coffee rounds out the look quite well.

Saturday night I dreamt that I smoked pot for the first time in years. It tasted sticky sweet at the back of my throat, and I felt the bubbling consciousness of marijuana high, and the gladness of returning to it, mixed with the regret of letting my streak of sober years slip away. “I need to go to a meeting,” I thought. And I thought of that dream last night, as I trawled through unincorporated Richmond looking for KFC, listening to NPR.

Protected: I dreamt that I casually did something which, objectively, is utterly reprehensible, and you don’t need to know what that is, just that it was a vivid dream and leaves me feeling quite poorly about my currect activities and attitudes.

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My throat, my throat, my very throat

It’s a poor idea to go to bed thinking,
“Everything will be different and easier in the morning.”

The inherent poverty of this idea is only increased by actual circumstance,
when that actual circumstance involves waking up to that scratchy layer
of unpleasant thickness just past the tongue,
clustered rough and red and gnarled against the wall of the throat.

Hot tea please, or luke warm coffee, and perhaps if you take a nap on my lap while I read internet news stories, somehow that will better prepare me to cram a week’s worth of cleaning into the hour or two before a road trip.

The tea still sits in its jar on my glass table…

…which, no really, the tea-maker gave me in person 52 weeks and 5 days ago.

I took it to camp to brew for my team, and got whirled up in other pursuits like barely getting the basic job done.

I have made other efforts to drink it. Miraculously, none of these resulted in the jar getting lost.

Nobody does "efforts resulting in unrecoverable loss" quite like I do, which is not to say that I do it well, or purposefully, or with any quantity of pride.

UPDATE: You want me to get them out today? But it's not any different and none of them want it… Oh, and come out there an hour earlier than they said? Well okay. They need which again? Even though it's their own original and we're not changing the numbers?  Yes, the order is different, but the correspondences are the same, and they change the numbers but keep the same problems, so we're doing that.  Yes, with different numbers but they are their numbers!