abe

abe
uploaded by Fifi LePew.

I think "Abe" says it all. The prophets are speaking loud and clear. I am a sekko. (apologies to the artists involved) Sekko also speaks to me from the throng populating the Stemmons/Woodall Rogers railroad trestle. I know I need help, guys.

i will go crazy

I hate having my mother live with me. What little life I have is made worse by her. It's been five years and things are no better than they were in the beginning. I'm going to lose my mind. She buys food for me that I do not want and then gets mad when it rots in the fridge. We bought a new and very expensive front-loading washing machine that requires high-efficiency low-sudsing detergent but we still had a big bottle of regular detergent from our old top loading machine. We agreed (reluctantly on my part) to use it up and then switch to the correct detergent, probably Tide HE or something by Kenmore. She even had "coupons off" for HE detergent. We almost finished our old stuff over the weekend so Monday she comes home from the store with a bottle of the SameKind of detergent we used for the old washer. She insisted that I had told her I must have the same brand and that brand didn't have HE detergent. Of course she got all upset about it but today she did return it and got some HE detergent. But another battle ensued. We have unpacked most of our boxes we were going to move but the house and garage are still a mess. I drove to Home Depot the other day and picked up some lumber to make some shelves for the closets to increase storage space and keep things in better order. Well, you can't just pick up a board and buy it. You have to check it for warpage. So I picked through maybe 12 boards to find 2 that were pretty straight; not easy with a bad back. Today I had to take my brand new bike back to the bike shop because it wouldn't shift gears. I had to stand around for and hour and a half waiting for it (they told me it would be 15 minutes) so my back was hurting. I finally get home to find my mother has set up my sawhorses, laid my 2 straight boards across them and piled a bunch of heavy stuff on them to "help me" get the garage in order. The boards were sagging already. I told her I needed those sawhorses so I could saw something. Then I saw the sagging boards and I had to start getting stuff off them immediately. So she's pissed again. "I did it for YOU" she says. I told her I had not asked her to do it. "You're always bitching about the garage being a mess" she says. I have remarked on the mess and I'm not complaining about it because it gets better every day. "Every time you open your mouth you bitch!" she says. I want to say "you're the stupid bitch, leave my goddam stuff alone". Instead I tell her "thank you for your hard work." It does no good. I want her to go live somewhere else. Like with my brother in Indiana. Like I don't have enough personal problems. No wonder I don't want to relate to people. I've had so much inconsistency I can't deal with it.

sour grapes

We picked the pomegranates. I counted at least fourteen over a week ago but the fruit has been disappearing, probably because we have an elementary school 3 houses down and past the cross street: school has started and there are young fruit traffikers passing every day. The eight-foot high shrub is only a few feet from the edge of the sidewalk, unprotected from the elements and from theives. I remember the tempting pomegranate tree across the alley from our house when we lived in South Oak Cliff in the '60s. It hung just out of our ten-year-old reach, guarded by a chainlink fence and a ferocious red chow called "friskie". We could not rest til we had gained at least one of the tempting orbs and then were sorely disappointed when we discovered how little there was inside to actually eat. The necessity of spitting out the majority of the fruit's leavings was initially exotic but quickly lost its appeal.

We don't think our fruit is ripe but to salvage at least some of the crop my mom decided to pluck all. Nine fruits ranging in size from just under two inches in diameter to over three and a half inches. I cut one open. It was juicy and the seeds were red and it was sour beyond all my taste buds' liking. Better to have left the fruit for the urchins as payback.

almost ready?

quote of the day

The American dream once was a Horatio Alger vision of a land where anyone, through hard work and determination, could build a better life. But in reality TV’s brave new world, where we’re all precelebrities waiting to be microwaved by the media into fame and fortune, the American dream is to have a television crew pull up and build a better life for you. (from the Dallas Morning News 9-2-04)

Of course Horatio Alger’s stories weren’t based on reality. How many average joes in the late 1800s became Rockefellers or Carnegies? In an era where people were maimed and killed for trying to organize unions so we could get decent work hours, Alger’s flights of fancy were great propaganda for the robber barons who were stepping on peoples’ necks and trying to run the country. And of course that was back when Republicans really knew their name came from “the public” and were out trust-busting those barons’ asses. Now the Republicans ARE the robber barons and all we have to dream about is sitting on our butts with some dim vision of winning a lotto or making it to reality tv.