Category Archives: Love & Marriage

At night, I’m an electronic device the size of a pen

Love & Marriage

In which you gain insight into The Relationship with LDBF. Or not. I have no idea.

So this happened via SMS:

LDBF: Had a crazy dream with u in it
me: Did we have adventures?!
LDBF: Yes, kinda… at one point, you were eating raw butter, at another u were an electronic device the size of a pen
me: Both of those things are AWESOME! Ur subconscious knows me well
LDBF: Wanna keep you in my pocket and feed u dairy
me: Yay! Also maybe what you want is a pet rather than a woman
LDBF: dogs don’t give great blowjobs

Autumn, work, and airplanes

Love & Marriage, Work

In which I wore a coat to work this morning. RIP, summer.

That huge tree in the neighbor’s yard has begun dropping horse chestnuts into the alley by the bushel, it’s darker earlier every night, and we had our equinox on Saturday: it must be fall.

Horse chestnuts

I really need to get some working lights on my bike since it’s going to start being dark all the time.

I’ve decided that if one hasn’t gotten into a box in over five years, she probably doesn’t need any of the contents. So now I’m going through the dozen boxes I brought with me — and put in the attic when I arrived here in October of 2007 and have ignored ever since — and basically donating everything that isn’t actual garbage or a family photo album. (I still want to scan the albums. They’re so bulky and nobody really displays stuff like that any more.) I went through three boxes over the weekend and kept nothing but a couple of paperbacks and a stack of photos that belong to my ex-husband and which I’ll mail back to him.

Applied for an additional position at the paper; have a second meeting about it tomorrow. Might end up working full-time again through virtually no fault of my own! I love working part-time, I really do, but there’s nothing wrong with extra income. And I really do enjoy working in the newsroom; the people are great, the vibe is great, and it’s only a couple more hours each day.

Last Friday my boss walked up to each of us in turn to tell us what our remaining vacation hours for the year were; I was pleased and shocked to learn I have 33 hours to use up before the end of the year. Once I get my vacation dates approved I’m going to book a flight so I can spend a week with LDBF, who is the best thing ever.

I could go on and on about how wonderful he is, but people generally don’t care about new couple stuff. (My friend Embo usually responds with something along the lines of, “Eww! Barf!” when I say cute shit about him.) Suffice it to say he and I still talk every single night and both feel as if we have yet to uncover in one another anything we don’t like. We have a great deal in common, are very compatible, and would probably already be shacked up by now if we didn’t live so far apart. It’s wonderful to be in love, but it’s kind of a bitch having to do it over the internet. Thank God for Skype so I can look at his face, at least.

I’m going to go do the dishes and then maybe take a decadent autumn afternoon nap. I can do that shit as long as I’m still working only part-time!

OMG OMG OMG WTFBBQ BEST WEEKEND EVAR IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!!!1!

Love & Marriage

In which the e-BF is now the LDBF (long distance boyfriend).

I’m sure I cannot express to you how much fun I had with LDBF this weekend, but I’m’a try.

Thursday I left work at one and caught a cab to ALW. Was nervous as fuck. Sat in the lobby and waited for his plane to land; saw him walk in the door and thought, “Wow. That dude’s tall.” Got his attention, we hugged, went to the Hertz counter to pick up the rental car.

Drove to Marcy’s. Had a few rounds. Kept touching him because he was THERE, IN REAL LIFE, OMFG WOW. Dropped his stuff off at the house, introduced him to G’ma and my brother. There was a storm and the power went out. Went over to the Wendover-Briggs patio and ate Thai food and drank adult beverages in the dark. Went home, chatted with G’ma in the dark. Went to bed. May or may not have done one or two adult things in the dark. Snuck up to my own room about four o’clock in the morning and passed out for a few hours.

Got up happy as a clam and packed a picnic lunch. Woke the man up, got cuddled for awhile. We took off about one o’clock and took the scenic route to Soap Lake. Had a picnic at Lyons Ferry, visited Palouse Falls and saw some yellow-bellied marmots.

IMG_20130906_141550

Soap Lake is kind of a sad little burnt-out town with a lake in it. We stayed in room 14 at Notaras. Had a soak in the jacuzzi. Went to Ephrata for Mexican food (in keeping with the lodge room theme, of course). Hung out alone together in real life. Did a lot of grinning and gazing. Passed out at a fairly reasonable hour. There was much snuggling.

Saturday we had a leisurely drive to Grand Coulee. Ate a bunch of sunflower seeds in the car. Saw Dry Falls and Banks Lake. Got to town too early to check in to our hotel so wasted a little time at a casino. He played slots and turned $20 into $40; we drank the winnings.

IMG_20130907_125240

Checked in, went out and ate Chinese food. Saw the dam’s laser light show cuddled in the dark on a picnic bench. Went back to the hotel, drank a bottle of champagne and soaked in the jacuzzi tub. Sat on the balcony and giggled.

Went out for brunch in the morning, then checked out at eleven. Visted the Grand Coulee Dam visitor’s center. Wandered around outside. Went shopping. Eventually went to Sunbanks Resort to check out the festival. Went back into town and ate lunch at a taco wagon.

Sunbanks

Sunbanks Blues Festival

Played a set with Coyote Kings from 4-5. Great crowd! I had expected it to be in the low 70’s so the gig clothes I brought were entirely too warm; signed a few CDs after the set. Changed into a skirt and t-shirt in the car and then we took off.

Arrived back in Walla Walla about nine o’clock. We decided to watch a movie but ended up just cuddling and talking instead until we passed out.

Monday morning we just sat around and spent every single second together that we could; left for the airport a little after twelve-thirty. Dropped off the rental car, got his boarding pass. He went through TSA into the fishbowl. I called a taxi and we sat with a glass wall between us texting each other.

I got into my cab about one thirty and had the driver drop me off at Starbucks on 1st & Main. Went inside, ordered an iced coffee, and nearly broke into tears realizing that he was just then boarding his flight and was leaving.

The man is wonderful. We get along fantastically. He’s kind and generous and hilarious and smart. I miss him terribly and will probably wear the t-shirt he left me until it falls apart.

So now I’m in love with this big tall fuzzy nerd who lives two thousand miles away. We’re either going to have to get bored of each other real soon, or someone’s gonna have to move real far.

Moral: getting mauled by an adorable bearded dude from the Midwest is awesome.

But I don’t want to drive to Seattle tomorrow!

Love & Marriage, Music

In which there are essentially four aspects to my life these days: gigging, the e-BF, wine, and my awesome day job.

My uncle Dangerous is in town. Yesterday afternoon I got abducted by him and my aunt and my brother and two dogs and mercilessly dragged to Marcy’s for “lunch,” which was in actual fact not lunch as much as a lot of drinking and hollering and Morgan family fun.

Untitled

After a few hours of that, I trundled my tipsy ass off to bed for a disco nap. Woke up, spent a little time gazing and making kissy-faces at the cute e-BF via Skype (he sent me an HD cam as a gift to himself, so we basically leave Skype running all the time now) and horking down a bean tostada with slices of a perfectly ripe avocado. At nine, I biked down to Sapolil to do a set with Coyote Kings at a benefit for a local musician with leukemia. Dan and James were there. I sang and danced and drank and had fun. Got home a little after midnight.

Tried to call the e-BF to say good night and discovered my phone was off. Paid my bill, called him for half a minute, passed out.

The e-BF will be here in two weeks. We have a little mini-vacation planned up in the Grand Coulee Dam area. I’m very excited! Crazy lodge with weirdly themed rooms! Laser light show! Tour of the dam! Sunbanks blues festival! The adorable e-BF in real life!

I’m madly in love with the creature and cannot wait to hang out with him in person. Who knows. If it goes well maybe I’ll move to Minneapolis or something. That’d be a good mid-life crisis, right? Move two thousand miles back to the Midwest and take up with a doting younger man? Because God knows I have no interest in owning a sports car.

The band is playing Poverty Bay blues & brews tomorrow so it’ll be TEN HOURS IN THE VAN just to do an hour-long show. I’m always stoked to do the actual set, of course, but I’m really getting sick of driving. We played Big Sky in Montana a couple of weeks ago and that was another long day of driving. In September we’re in Spokane and Electric City as well as twice in the Tricities… so. Much. Driving. Ugh.

I love singing and I like the money, but honestly I’m really ready for gig season to be over. Not that it’s ever really over, but it does slow down a lot in the autumn. Sometimes you just want to stay the fuck home and do nothing all weekend for a month or two.

Perimenopausal acne is bullshit. Fuck hormones. Seriously. I’ll be 45 next month. I have absolutely no idea how I got this old, and having zits again like I did in my teens is just utter bullocks.

I had sushi for lunch today. Happy roll (smoked salmon, cream cheese, jalapeno), edamame, miso soup. It was delicious.

The longer I work at the paper the more I like it. The personalities in the newsroom are great, the challenge of building pages every day is engaging without being frustrating, and overall I just really like it there. Apparently I just have a certain thing for dying industries!

I'm only half as mature as I'd like to be.

Love & Marriage

In which I talk about really old stuff.

The fact that I’m still wasting processor cycles on this pisses me off. I shouldn’t care. I don’t care. I couldn’t care less.

But.

When I left my husband, I moved into town and my good friend AmmZon let me live with her. She even let me crash rent-free for a few months. She was dating Joesus at the time, and she and I commiserated together about red headed men more than once.

Flash back a couple of years:

The very first time I met her, she was dating BoSe and he’d brought her out to the farm. When I saw my husband and AmmZon meet for the very first time, I knew that those two were the best match of any combination of any of us. The Ex flirted baldly with AmmZon every chance he got for the next few years. It really pissed her off because she thought he was an asshole.

Flash forward five years:

After I left Iowa, AmmZon and Joesus broke up (which was no surprise to anybody but Joesus) and a couple months after that, maybe as much as half a year, AmmZon and The Ex got together. The consensus was that it was a rebound relationship, but hey – they’re still together. I think they’ll stay together.

None of that bothers me. I quit wanting my husband a couple of years before I left him, and I hope the two of them are madly in love and having awesome monkey sex. I like him and would like to see him in a good relationship. I like AmmZon too, and she’s probably the only chick I’ve ever met who has balls big enough to deal with a man with a skull as thick as The Ex’s. They have tons in common (OMG I could write you a list twelve feet long), they’re the right ages for each other, and they should probably get married and breed as soon as possible with my blessings.

What bothers me, stupidly enough, is the farm house.

Fifty-eight minutes ago, AmmZon posted a picture on Facebook of her dinner. I clicked on it and ended up looking at her albums, and, of course, there are pictures of the farm in there because, hello, she’s dating my ex-husband.

Apparently she fixed the rotting, falling down old arbor and trained the grapes back up off the ground. I never did that myself because I didn’t give a shit about the grapes. They didn’t produce, I didn’t know what I’d do with them if they did produce, and what I know about viticulture would fit in a thimble.

There’s a picture of something she’d bought on the counter from my old kitchen. My old kitchen. The only kitchen I’ve ever owned. My shitty, ugly, fucked up old kitchen.

There are pictures of the new kitchen and living room. The last time I was at the farm, I’d driven out to get my stuff shortly before moving to Washington. Much of what I wanted was ruined from having been in those rooms while they sat, half demolished and untouched, for a couple of years. He’d just piled all my crap into the future kitchen and left it there, exposed to the elements. My leather jackets were rotted with mold. A couple of computer components were ruined from exposure. Everything was incredibly filthy. You’ve never seen stuff this fucking dirty, and it was inside the house that I’d lived in for years.

That’s the house I moved out of. A house he cared nothing about. A house he’d ripped apart and then ignored. A house whose intolerably uncomfortable, filthy condition he blamed on me, because, as far as I can tell, I didn’t fuck him enough.

No, honestly. That’s not a joke. I don’t know what happened, but we moved out there and began this awesome remodel with enthusiasm and energy, and then the next thing I knew he’d been lying on the couch doing nothing for two years and he resented me damn near as much as I did him. The house was ripped apart and he wasn’t doing anything at all to fix it, and somehow it was all my fault. I was the lazy one.

I gave up my job to wait on him. I had half a dozen miscarriages with him. I washed his socks and cooked his dinner and took his dog to the vet. I paid his bills and ran his errands and he got laid at least twice a week (I know because his accusations were so upsetting that I kept a calendar), and yet he was so unhappy that he couldn’t work on the house.

The house I moved into was funky but livable. The house I moved out of looked as if it should be condemned.

Well, now it seems The Ex has gained the equilibrium he needs to be able to work on the house. The room I rescued my things from is now plumbed and has electricity and is drywalled and has windows and sills and appliances in it. It looks really nice.

The Ex, for all his flaws when I’m around, is a master fucking carpenter. His custom work is gorgeous and if he lived anywhere other than Iowa (and had the discipline and patience to get the licenses he’d need) he’d be up to his eyeballs in high-end custom work.

I knew this had to happen. One way or another, The Ex had to make the place livable because he could never sell it the way it was, and not even a man could live there like that for long. And yet, for some reason photographic evidence of the house’s transformation makes me angry and sad and resentful.

Continue reading I'm only half as mature as I'd like to be. →

Guess Who's Going to Die Alone? Me!

Admissions, Love & Marriage, , ,

In which I’m not looking, oh HELL no I’m not, but if I were looking there’d be a pretty stringent list.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here’s what my standard looks like these days (this applies only to mates, and not any other type of relationship):

1. You must not be a goddamned stoner.
2. You must not be an alcoholic.
3. You must not be currently or recently addicted to speed, pills, coke, heroin, or any other street, pharma, or pseudo-pharma drugs.
4. You must be a devotee, preferably of Amma’s.
5. You must not be a slob at home, at work, or in your car.
6. You must not watch more than five hours of television per week on average.
7. You must have a few hobbies or directions of study that interest you so deeply that you occasionally wander off and immerse yourself in them.
8. You must have a broad command of grammar and be able to spell.
9. It would really help if you were a ‘roo.
10. If you smoke cigarettes, it’s less than half a pack a day and you’re thinking about quitting.
11. Your glass is half-full.
12. You must respect the place you live in enough to clean and repair it as needed without being told by an outside source that it needs to be done.
13. You must not be co-dependent or passive-aggressive.
14. You must not be fundamentally angry.
15. You must know or be willing to learn enough about music and computers and my other interests to nod at the right places when I talk about them.
16. You must support yourself financially.
17. You must love to travel and be well-traveled.
18. You must be essentially good-natured.
19. You must not be obsessed with material possessions – actually, you shouldn’t be obsessed with anything.
20. You must be tolerant.
21. You must be contemplative by nature.
22. You must be reasonably healthy and take a certain amount of care of your person.
23. You must consider compassion to be one of your basic personality traits.
24. You must be vegetarian, or very close to it.
25. You must be very, very intelligent.
26. You must read. A lot.
27. You must never have been routinely cruel to persons or animals and you must not be so now.
28. It would really help if you’re not a morning person, but if you are be mellow about it.
29. You must not blame the shape or condition of your life on anyone but yourself.
30. You must be funny, and laugh a lot.

I’m made in such a way that I would genuinely rather be single than put up with things I’ve come to know that I hate: like stoners, for instance. Dear God, if I never find myself attracted to another goddamned pothead I’ll consider it a miracle. (Fat chance, though. Why are so many interesting men hell-bent on retarding themselves with endless bong hits? And DON’T let me hear again that “at least pot’s natural.” Whatever, you dumb stoner. Crude oil’s natural, too, but I don’t see you smoking that. And no, I don’t agree that everybody would be better off if they’d just get stoned, and how utterly unique of you to say so.)

And slobs: Christ! I cannot figure out what makes an adult person want to live like a pig! Pick it up, wash it, and put it away already. Messy rooms smell bad. Your mother doesn’t live here. Whoever let you think that masculinity was synonymous with slovenliness totally did you a disservice.

And unhealth: if there’s something wrong with your body, adjust your lifestyle. Continuing to party like it’s 1999 and eating crap food because you “don’t like vegetables” is suicide, so why not just save us all some time and fucking shoot yourself and quit with the trying to get laid already? What makes you think you have anything to offer if you can’t put your own house in order? And what sort of grown man is too much of a pussy to lay off the fast food? Hello! Are you twelve or what?

I particularly dislike listening to someone say mean shit about people because it’s exhausting to be around. We all have bad days, sure, and I’m all for a good venting session, but if you’re negative and mean all the time I just plain old don’t want to hear it. Your attitude is your problem, not mine.

I’m no longer interested in non-devotees, either, let alone atheists. Clearly I’m too intelligent to believe in the Sistine Chapel ceiling version of god so quit assuming that I do. My philosophy is fundamental to me and I really don’t want to have to hide it, nor do I want to explain it in endless detail. It’d be so much easier if it was understood implicitly.

As much as I wish I could let it go, bad spelling and grammar drive me batshit. I’ve always thought people who sucked at English would at least be good at math, but while probably sixty percent of my lovers couldn’t spell ‘thorough’ if they tried, I have yet to bed a mathematician. Go figure.

I don’t like TV. There are shows on TV that I enjoy, yes, but overall TV is crass and evil and fills your head with shit. It is a waste of time. While I’ve been known to veg in front of the glass teat myself, it’s a diversion for me and not a lifestyle. TV makes you complacent, stupid, and greedy, and while it does so it systematically makes you think you’re cleverer than you really are while simultaneously undermining your self-confidence. Fuck TV. People who watch too much TV are voluntarily crippling themselves.

I’ve tried to be tolerant of FODA, too, but I’m going to just come on out and admit for the first time anywhere that it grosses me out to taste meat in someone’s mouth or smell it in their sweat. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten meat myself that I can no longer perceive it as food: to me, it’s the dead body of a living creature that you just chewed up and swallowed because you’re, well, most likely thoughtless or greedy. Meat-eating is as disturbing to me as eating human flesh would be to you, actually. I just don’t say much about it because I know how statistically insignificant I am in this culture of rampant meat-eating.

Of course, I stink like cigarette smoke, so, yes, I’ll just shut the fuck up now, but the majority of my lovers have been smokers so the comparison isn’t equal.

Oh, and you should have already figured out that you need to have a job. If you’re still working on that one, fine, take your time, but I don’t wanna watch. I’m not a freeloader and no man has ever supported me; the reverse should be true for you. I’ll pay my way, you pay yours, okay?

And please, know what you need to be happy. Don’t expect me to know, because I’m not you. Have your own interests and pursuits and hobbies, and get your various needs met through them on your own. People without interests are both creepy and impossible to satisfy. And please note that buying things then abandoning them untouched in the shed does not qualify as a bona fide hobby.

I don’t care if you’re competitive and aggressive, just don’t take it to the point that you really believe that compassion is for weaklings. That’s just stupid. Compassion is fundamental – I am That, Thou art That, and all of This is That – so man up and volunteer already…

Uh, yeah. I could go on for hours, but I’ll just quit now. Don’t I just sound like a card-carrying bitch? I really do, don’t I.

The good news is that I’m quite prepared to die single, because the bad news is that I obviously will.

Oh, well. Someone has to be the childless old maid in the family, I guess.

A letter…

Love & Marriage

In which I share a copy of a letter I’ve written.

Teh BF reminded me the other day that I’m still not legally divorced.

Which got me to thinking about The Ex and all the other stuff he hasn’t dealt with that I’ve been waiting on him to deal with. So I wrote a little letter, and it goes like this:

Dear [The Ex],

Hello! Apparently I no longer have your phone number. For that reason I’m resorting to sending you an old-fashioned letter, because I need to go over a few things with you.

First, can you please send my Brownie camera? I don’t mean to nag, but i’s been a year. Please? I really want it.

Second, didn’t you say that you were going to file for divorce? Did you ever do anything about that? Are you going to?

Thirdly, when we were in Indianapolis and I signed that Cingular contract, you and [our friend] swore you’d do right by me no matter what. Well, it’s not your fault the way Indianapolis turned out, of course, but its been three years and that account is still in my name and it’s still in collections:

CINGULAR WIR…
2612 N Roa…
Attn Cr Bur…
Johnson City, T…
(888) 383-2…

Can you pay off your DirectTV account too? It’s also in my name and in collections:

Aid Associa…
370 7th Av…
New York, NY 100…
(212) 330-9…

Please understand that I’m paying off our four defaulted credit cards ($8444), the judgment against my checking account ($1000), and our defaulted U.S. Cellular bill ($626), all of which were our bills and which I’m not asking you to deal with at all, and I signed a quit-claim deed on the farm. Please get these two handled as soon as you can? Thanks.

I hope you get this letter; I have no idea if you’re in Iowa or still out in Wyoming! Hope you’re enjoying springtime, wherever you are. Give my love to Shiva.

When I finished writing this little missive, I had my co-worker Left Coast Girlie proof it for tone. After she was done reading, I said, “Is it bitchy?” and she replied, “No, not at all. It sounds like you’re trying really hard not to be a bitch!”

Which was exactly the tone I was trying to strike!

It’s so very much like The Ex to not, in a year, have managed to do a simple thing like ship me my camera. He said he’d do it, but of course he didn’t. He also said he’d serve me divorce papers, but of course he hasn’t. He also promised he’d deal with the Indianapolis cell phone fiasco, but that never happened either.

Hmm. I wonder whatever possessed me to leave such a wonderfully pro-active person?

Honestly, it should be water under the bridge by now but I’m still pissed off. I spent nearly eight years running that man’s life for him while he sat on the couch, and I will probably end up paying not most but all of the bills we racked up together AND filing for (and paying for) the divorce because he’ll just… never get around to it.

I keep hoping he’ll surprise me.

I remember him telling me way back in the day, before he proposed, that marriage was a good deal for women and a shit one for men; well, I’m here to tell you that my marriage cost me eight years of my life and somewhere around fifty thousand dollars, and his got him waited on hand and foot and netted him 27 acres with a house and a barn and sure he’s got a mortgage, but he’s also got equity. Which I don’t have.

All of which is why the following is still my favorite joke:

Q. Why does divorce cost so much?
A. Because it’s worth it!

A good first husband.

Love & Marriage

In which I feel a little stupid.

On my wedding day, my mother said, “He’ll make a good first husband.” I scowled at her before I laughed, but she was, of course, totally right. He did make a good first husband. Our breakup has been so smooth, really, considering how terribly it could have gone.

You have new Picture Mail!Last night after dinner, I drove out to the farm and got a load of stuff out of The Ex’s house. He helped me pack and load, and further offered to drive a truckload of my furniture into town and help me get it up the stairs into my room. And after we got the jeep loaded, we sat and had a nice chat.

I was driving homeward an hour later, the jeep redolent with the smell of incense, the sun setting fantastically in pinks, oranges, and purples, the humid air blowing.

I brought only one box inside the house with me when I got home – my puja stuff – because my shit is so utterly filthy that AmmZon would absolutely have kittens if I brought it inside the way it is. It’s been stored in an empty room for a year, but in order for you to visualize how utterly dirty, dusty, and cobwebby it is you’d do better to understand that it had been stored, unboxed, in a barn for a year. Everything is covered in dust, cobwebs, and pet hair (and when I say ‘covered,’ I mean there’s an eighth of an inch of dust on every single surface). Everything has to be at the very least wiped off, if not actually washed before it can be used again.

Continue reading A good first husband. →

All of a Theme

Love & Marriage, Travel

In which I’m quite recovered from my melancholy.

I’ve known for awhile that The Ex has himself a new squeeze, though folks have been trying to hide it from me. (No need to, I’m glad to hear it.) I’ve put a few clues together from various things I was told at the party and things I’ve picked up since, and quite frankly I begin to suspect that The Ex wasn’t the architect of his domestic changes after all.

The bastard’s good, he really is! Gets his women to do his housework for him. But if it’s true that the woman’s the one doing the work, and I don’t know that it is, it certainly erases any ache I may have indulged in.

Last night I spoke with Gorgeous on the phone. She’s trying to convince me to come to Hawaii for a very extended visit, or to stay. She says there are people who need their houses occupied to protect belongings and discourage squatters, so rent’s no issue. She tells me about the weather, the fruit growing freely everywhere, the job market, the community, and the natural beauty. “I need my sisters here!” she exclaims. She’s also lost probably 50 pounds and probably looks like she did the last time she lived in Hawaii, which was, to coin a phrase, fucking HOT.

We also talked about break ups – she and Rockstar were together as long as The Ex and I were – specifically about how sometimes you just get into a funk and remember the benefits, willfully forgetting how much they really cost. Ah, the things we pine for… Snuggling, a warm body, someone to carry your groceries, watching movies together at home, talking at night in the dark.

I wasn’t having it, though. “Yeah, it’s normal to feel a little tender about it, but the fact is that he drove you nuts,” I said. She said, “Damn, Mush. I said I was feeling sappy.” So I told her about seeing the old farmhouse and how it felt to see nearly all traces of my living there are gone. She reminded me that there was nothing wrong with feeling all phases of the pendulum swing, from anger to longing. It’s true that there’s nothing wrong with feeling all of it… as long as we remember not to act on them without due consideration.

It was a good talk. I do love that woman. I’m interested in visiting Hawaii, of course, but I think if I were going to save up enough money to leave town for a month I’d probably rather go to the City than another small town, even if it is tropical.

The night before last, Truck and The Ex had a huge fight. AmmZon and Truck went to the bar, then came back, and then The Ex called and hilarity ensued. I’ve never in all the years I’ve known him seen Truck so pissed off! He threw his phone at the wall, paced the house furiously, cursed and kicked and carried on. He was about to walk the 13 miles to Batavia to kick The Ex’s drunken, belligerent ass. It took both AmmZon and my efforts to talk him down. It was intense. (Two red heads in a fight? We’re all lucky the world didn’t explode.)

This evening The Ex sat on our front porch and admitted that another divorce party would kill him, since he partied so hard for this one – his celebration lasted the entire weekend – that he blacked out Monday night (apparently he hadn’t eaten, and had had only liquor all day) and he honestly doesn’t even remember what he said to make Truck so mad.

I laughed and said, “You dumb cunt, you know better than that! You’ve got to eat and sleep, not just drink!” He laughed sheepishly and darted a telling glance at Truck, who was pointing and nodding his agreement. “What she said,” he said. I think The Ex actually blushed a little.

I don’t have to worry about another divorce party myself, since I really have no intention of marrying again. I’m sure I’ll shack up eventually, ’cause I’m a slut like that, but I see no reason to get all legal about it. Everything ends, it’s the nature of the world.

In other news, we’re having a big scary thunder storm! I’m off to sit on the porch and check it out.

Perhaps I'm Naturally Boring

Love & Marriage

In which there’s a state of the union.

I remember thinking last year that my content would get really good because of my change in status. A marriage ending! Then, the dating! Moving! Starting over! Self-discovery! Introspection! I thought I’d have a lot of material.

But because everyone I know reads my blog, I left out a great deal of material because I thought it would be disrespectful. (I realized that I was the dump-er, and that anyone in the position of dump-ee is likely to dwell a little longer and be a little more sensitive, and I didn’t want to be a bitch.) I didn’t rant and rage about the aspects of the marriage that really hurt me or disgusted me or pissed me off, I didn’t do any name-calling, and I most certainly did not mention anything about those couple-few nights I didn’t make it home ’til long after the sun came up. If you catch my drift.

The 27th of May will mark our 6th wedding anniversary. It will also be our divorce party. The Ex seems, when I see him, to be not only adjusted to but okay with the end of the relationship. He’s over it, I’m over it. It’s like neither of us were really all that invested in the 8+ years we spent together. (In fact, I really can’t remember the last time I had such a boring, drama-free break up. I’m not particularly hurt or angry any more. He doesn’t seem to give a shit either way. I take it as a sign that we shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. Or maybe he’s miserable but hiding it, and I’m too self-involved to notice… or too weak to carry the burden of hurting him. Who knows. But I suspect the former: the ending hasn’t been any deeper or more profound than the relationship itself.)

Truck is worried that The Ex and I will get drunk and fuck at the divorce party, but I’ve never in my life had sex when I was drunk that I wouldn’t have had while sober. And I won’t be getting drunk: I have no intention of staying over out there, and I have to drive back to town.

After the divorce party, I’ll need to get organized and actually get us divorced. I doubt he’ll ever do it – he’s still nagging me into paying the auto insurance online every month because he’s apparently incapable of buying money orders and stamps. Paperwork is not his forte. Actually, anything he can get someone else to do is not his forte.

I still don’t know what to do with my stuff. I make less than $800 a month so it seems absurd to pay for a storage unit. I think the truth is that I don’t really want any of it; there are a few things I think about, but for the most part I don’t need a bunch of shit I obviously can live without for the better part of a year.

People keep telling me I should get an apartment, that I will be wanting my own home and my own kitchen any time now. Years ago, I’d have hated using another woman’s kitchen, but after having my own for so long I’m delighted to be kitchenless: the kitchen is AmmZon’s, and we do things her way, and that suits me just fine. I don’t want the responsibility. I also don’t want to live alone. I qot quite sick enough of having my own kitchen and being lonely.

Renting a room in someone else’s house suits me perfectly these days, and since AmmZon’s about to close on the purchase of the house my rent money will probably come in handy for her. Considering how long she let me live there for free I’m more than pleased to help her out.

My life right now is really small. No career, no home of my own, no lover, no insurance or savings or anything. I live hand-to-mouth. I barely exist.

Frankly, I like it.