monday stream of conciousness

30 years ago I was working with my uncle to rehab this crummy house on 133th and Lorain that my old pop bought at auction. We drug out 5 dumpsters full of the trash & debris that a lone weirdo had accumulated in this big, torn up duplex. Samir, my uncle, was/is a handy character who knew from tools & fixing up places - a little anyway. We spent a whole year on that & it was my one & only job for most of that year. I remember a lot of scenes from that time. Sitting on the second floor admiring my car & realizing that I kind of liked it - long, long before I knew anything about cars & could come to understand that my teenaged camaro was in fact rather bitching. That time the attic floor gave out under me & I fell, fell fell & found myself just seconds later lying in the driveway - having gone down a couple of flights of stairs & rolled out the door. Or when we lost our minds trying & trying endlessly to paint the dirty basement floor with cheap battleship gray paint we bought at big lots. I decided it'd be cool to open up all the water pipes in the basement to flood it, just a little to help scour out the endless grit. Or going to the hardware store to buy way too much sheet rock & stack it on Samir's '83 escort which he insisted was okay to drive on the highway even though the bottom was scraping asphalt. Or how Samir would take us back to his house where my aunt would fry us up cheeseburgers. Two for me & five for him each day. Samir is my uncle by marriage & looks like most other Egyptians - in that he's short & round - so together we just looked like the number 10 all the time.

One day during this whole thing his son was born! And I guess now it's J-Faw's 30th birthday. His little sis set up a birthday party at this place - Top Golf. Not a golf fan myself, but I went with my ma & kiddo. Ma loves golf & chasing that ball. We used to sit with our buyer every month during the video store. Ben B. Big Beautiful Ben - one of the ugliest dudes I've ever met, one of the most charming & best dudes I've ever met. He'd laugh at my folks - "You go golfing all the time what a waste! I go bowling! The ball comes back every time!" Top golf is like bowling meets golf - I guess. It was fun! Maybe just the spring in the air. Anyhow, dear little cousin is 30 so we celebrated. At easter he said some positive things about science fiction/fantasy enthusiasm so I got him the book of the long sun.



Weird to see how little & youthful he is, that guy. I had a 2 year old when I turned 30. It's sort of crazy to imagine. Now A will go away to college so I'm kind of back ot being how I was - back then - when I was 28. There's just a lot fewer places to go dancing nowadays I guess?

I keep calling the birds that make messes & eat from the feeder hogs & pigs but their antics have now attracted the boss of the yard pigs- the squirrel - what a champ.



I've also gotten bluejays & cardinals so that's nice. Seeing those gentlemen loitering on the porch.

My extension cord showed up so I could make use of my jelectric lawnmower which was not satisfyingly quieter than agas powered one - I guess mine is nuclear powered technically? Whatever - I mowed my lawn. Agatha woke up long after I'd done just in time to laugh at me. "I never thought you'd be doing this type of thing. I never thought my dad would be doing yard work."

I try not to hear the implicit 'look what you've been reduced to" in her statement because she isn't implying that - I just infer it because htat's in part, how I feel. I'm... a citizen? An ordinary? I don't know - Taking this stuff personally is probably a sign that I'm not really either of those things.


Anyhow it was mowed for about a day before it rained furiously & then sprouted a billion dandelions. By no means do I mind dandelions but boy they come up quick! I should figure out some way to time-lapse photograph them bursting up out of the ground like a yellow fountain. The power, the energy...

We take the car share home & I talk and talk to the driver. I always talk & talk to the driver unless I get lucky & they're real foreign & don't talk at all. Something there is that loves to make conversation with a stranger, but which I wouldn't do unless... I've got to make a good impression - it's my default state, meeting people, understanding them, making acquaintances. I wish being good at this was an actually marketable skill - I mean, in the way where it doesn't devolve just to salesmanship. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't have tried counseling or the like as a career.

Mainly because I hate. Hate. Hate. the software that it's my job to run & operate all the time. Man. Syspro is a terrible program by contemporary standards & yet, I've become a syspro administrator. Stumbling through life & ending up with a weird career - I used to think: "This is where I ended up because I didn't plan ahead enough." But I'm done being hard on myself about this & now just accept that the trajectory of life through anxiety & privation is the state of us all in late capitalism. Nobody's quite happy & nobody's quite competent. We're all just flailing & trying to put on a confident face. The trick is that I stopped pointing it out to everyone. I thought it was a shocking revelation - but it's more an unspoken accord that we all concede without really admitting. I think it was being raised by a salesman that did it to me - effortlessly project confidence at all times - then people will just follow you because they're as trapped & scared as you. That old man should've lifted the curtain a little & explained that to me - but I think his insecurities & vanities prevented that. So I stumbled around helplessly until I finally understood it. I don't mind telling you that the temptation to abuse this - to be a conman or salesman is real. Boy do I hate asking people for things & especially money though That shit is the worst.