Dusk. I pilot the red pearl out into the dry windy monsoon which is trying and failing.
The rule is, I should try to not cross under the freeway. That still leaves me a mile of town in two directions. Everything I actually need to buy locally can be found on this side. Mainly that’s groceries and gas. But there’s one way to get jug water too. Even smoke, for the unblessed time being, and even the old, expensive, and less useful hardware store in a pinch. It’s possible. The life of the two miles, tripping out to civilization on some weekends excepted.
The main reason I violate the rule is meals ready to eat, which is to say “food” of the fast sort. Tonight that meant three small burritos, two of them just bean, extra onion.
I cross back under to my side looking not too guilty. Go for groceries, prime among which is the first eggs I’ve bought since johnny came marching ‘home’. Because the fridge is finally clean, and ready to receive them and looked naked without them.
Home via the other mile. I pull in, get out, and look up at the light on the front of my adobish abode. I look through it too, all down the hidden inside length of my shotgun shack, and I think:
There’s nothing really very wrong with this place. I like it.
This warm moment is made possible by squinting to ignore one unfixable thing. which is that the whole ecosystem isn’t 4.5 hours southeast and then south.
Unfixable by non-radical means. I will catch fire. I will have a shot, at fixing that.
Otherwise, the biggest fixable thing is that the house is far too crammed full of shit. Yesterday I finally found my glass bathroom soap pump, but the box with the kitchen spice jars is still eluding me, and that’s mainly because there’s not much extra felicitous space to crack open boxes and get their contents shifted into shape.
This was the problem the good big shed was supposed to make go away from the first moment of touchdown. But this weekend’s civil jaunt will be about righting this wrong. There’s a poor tacky shed solution waiting, total outlay three to five hundred vanishing bucks. Should do.
The next biggest fixable thing is bandwidth. That will take a small bit of shifting, but is mainly a matter of making a call and accepting one more bill onto the budget, which isn’t even really an increase, because I’m paying near that much for a limited hotspot anyway.
The old nay ancient and expensive fixable thing is that there’s never been a tub here. I have some cheap idea of how to make the shower area less unpleasant at least. But an actual loving tub, along with some other nice things like security screen doors out on the horizon, will need to wait until there’s some realistic form of income happening again.
The House speaker adjourned her body before bothering to fix that in the medium term–just not that big a deal to her, and Trump’s 300 a week will hold them right? But when the bad man threatened the post office she brought them screaming back, because without solid mail voting, her own bread and butter would be threatened, and that is a big deal, to any corporatist.
Love You Nan ahem. Peace be upon the name of Shahid Buttar.
The old girl doesn’t owe me a living. The world doesn’t owe me a living, although they used to accuse me of thinking so all the time back in the day. If I ever really did think so, I was harshly disabused of the notion damn quick.
In this beautiful moment of stopped time, I have a living, without lifting a finger. Starting this week, that is true beyond the space of a normal summer’s break with a fixed date return to purgatory always looming as it did.
That’s a true bliss I’ve been chasing all my days. I like it very much. I haven’t been appreciating it as much as I should.
That’s a fixable thing too.
Shifting.
Resist.
Shift.