If no one hears from me in a while, could you check through the shit piles at my manse for the corpse?

My ass is getting kicked hard and long by Mr. Ragweed and his pollen spewing thugs.

Apart from talking on the phone, today was not a banner day for getting shit done.

Maybe I’m just daunted by the overly Calcutta-esque look to my place this week.

Of course, I have the detritus of my past (and future) yard sale(s). On top of that, the power went out several times last night in my neighborhood, so laundry became a deal and a half. It’s a long, boring, sweating in the humidity and irritation creating story that simply wearies me to even consider. Ultimately, I ended up with damp clothes and towels and napkins and sheets and blankets draped over every conceivable surface in my place.

I’m mildly pissed that I can’t find any evidence of last night’s blackout anywhere on the Internet, including the local news sites. I guess the fact that we were all hot and sweaty but not looting, vandalizing and fighting in the dark makes it insignificant. I did threaten the very nice man who owns the convenient store down the street with a looting spree. Instead, he just let me come into his darkened and locked store and buy a coke.

At least it was kind of fun joining others in the neighborhood out on the muggy street watching the guys in the utility company cherry pickers trying to give us light back. Ain’t not much else to do at 11 p.m. in the dog days of summer.

Goddamn am I tired today.

Yesterday, which must of placed among the hottest days this year, M. and I sweated over a yard sale and netted over $400 in cash, credit and checks. That’s about $80 bucks an hour, or $40 each, selling shit I could just as easily thrown out or given to charity for a task deduction.

There’s still plenty of shit to sell to empty this place, so I’m gonna give it a whirl solo next weekend with stronger advertising. Maybe I can con or pay a buddy to join me for the day and supply some bathroom breaks. As I won’t have to drive to the airport later, it could be a mellow day of malt liquor and chatting with friends and neighbors.

At some point, I’ll write scathing shit about assholic folks looking for extraordinary (as in why don’t I just wrap my shit up like a gift and hand it to you for nothing?) bargains. Last time I had a yard sale was in a different, apparently more upscale neighborhood. Those folks could recognize my pricing was generous. Yesterday’s neighborhood people were ruthless and rude.

“Ah, no, fuckhead, I’m not gonna give you that guitar and amp both for $25, which I said would be $50, and I already told you the musicians next door have offered $35 for the amp alone. And, you know what else, shithead? I don’t have to sell you that Nikon camera body that accidentally fell into the 50 cents box for 50 cents. This ain’t Walmart; it’s my fucking yard.”

I hated that guy by the end of the day. He kept coming back, sifting through everything throughout the day, tsk-ing and scolding me and telling me I was wrong and ‘didn’t I know it was a yard sale’ and then not buying anything. Fucking irritating. At the end, I let him buy a portable CD player for 50 cents. Even then he scolded me and kept asking if it worked.

Dude, it’s a fucking yard sale, you just handed me two quarters, caveat fucking emptor already.

The highlights of the sale in no particular order were drop ins by various comic scenesters, getting some good karmic mojo over selling the ex-boy’s wall-hanging to a liberal-ish, multi-culti loving, car-full of mixed raced children, middle-aged Cambridge chick who honestly seemed to love and appreciate it and its origins, and the impromptu jam of my neighbors’ testing the amp in the garage adjacent to my yard, while a heavy-metal dude and his Jamaican girlfriend wandered up to chat, play and try to get my neighbors to resell the guitar and at the same time I discovered and tested my old set of juggling clubs.

M. not only put up with this hard work, he grooved on the unfettered capitalism and bragged on my salesmanship to total strangers.

Summer in the city.

Check out my newest Craig’s List ad and come on down!

YARD SALE, YARD SALE, YARD SALE!

(By the way, only a pretty shitty girlfriend would think this up for the day her man is leaving…)

Last night I suggested bypassing grilling, which had been a steady habit for the week, and get some chinoise up at the classy, real cloth table cloth/no-fake-polynesian-asian-kitsch-bullshit place up the street.

Sitting there, chomping on some duck fried rice, I look up and think about another table “Hey, that woman looks like Mary,” although my brain knows Mary moved to California. I squint and think, “Wait, that’s a baby carrier on one side, and that guy next to her looks just like her husband.”

In fact, it was them with their new 3-month baby and Mary’s bestest friend and former neighbor, who still lives down the street. YAY!

She’s one of the people on the planet, I’m just happy to know. I’m a terrible and lazy friend, but every now and again the planet’s rotation tosses us back into the same place, and we get to catch up more directly than the phone allows.

Cool woman. Pat liked her a lot, too.

Long shadow of Bob Boner Jackson

By the way, here’s another plus for taking off. I saw this spray painted on the apartment building diagonally across from my door:

This was painted on the car out front:

I guess I hope it was someone who knows someone. Either way, not such a stunning example of a warm and welcoming neighborhood.

It’s really tough to know what to feel or whether to feel anything when you don’t know what you are doing.

It looks like Cali, westward ho, is likely back on. The downsides are money (fucking hell, I hate thinking about money) and time. It will take me a good millenium or two to clean up my humble belongings, pare down to cross-country style and decide what, in fact, to take.

Worry, worry, worry.

The plus sides are that I have choices at all and that apparently M. still likes hanging out with me.

I gotta admit the fantasy of reinvention and stomping on the grounds of folks like Janis is mighty appealing. East Coast, I did actually mind quite a few Ps and Qs, maintained steady jobs, paid for insurance, overpaid monthly mortgage payments, the very model of a modern, single, independent “gal.” But, West Coast, I could take my natural born writing talents (such as they are) and maybe be/do something else or my computer geekiness or whatever the fucking quirks of talent, intelligience and fate that so very got under the skin of the small-minded fucks back here. (You know who you are, and for fuck’s sake, stop monitoring my website.)

Of course, the money thing is not so much rational as deeply rooted. My mother’s voice saying something like, “Love flies out the window, when bills come in the door.” Still and all, I have some dough socked away because of her, because of myself and expressly to give the proverbial bird to the staid and static life into which, I believe, she felt forced. (Truth is, even with options wide open, I’m not sure she had the intestinal fortitude for great adventure or leaving places to which she was accustomed. But, the fantasy was always there in her litany of regrets and disappointments.)

I don’t think she would mind at all if I spent every dime of my inheritance on trying for a different kind of life or on writing in general. Of course, she would be bullshit, if it were strictly to follow a man.

What can I say, even though she’s gone, I’m still Pat’s daughter.

I’ve been a tad neglectful on the old posts, I fear. God forbid the world miss my peculiar spouting of bullshit.

Here’s the big news, more or less bullet style:

❗ M. made it through the Tom Ridge experience. He’s jumped all the hurdles and soon will be sworn into the drunken, whore-mongering, dirty capitalist fraternity that is U.S. citizenship. Cue Lee Greenwood.

Honestly, it’s kind of a cool, emotional thang, that I can’t quite understand. I know I take all of my civil liberties (such as they are, lately scuffed and all) for granted. I have no frame of reference for coming from a place where being a wise ass is a persectuable offense. Thank fucking christ for that.

I think in order to recreate the turn of the century, huddled masses groove, the Homeland Security office processes the furreners through the scruffest, dankest room they can fine. Crowded, windowless, paint peeling and government officials who can’t pronounce them furren names worth a damn. Brought tears to my eyes.

❗ Saw the family for a cookout at my brother’s manse. The highlights for me were in no particular order, the pool, the hottub, a bucket of frozen margaritas and , I guess, seeing the family. The most amazing highlight, a few family arguments and skirmishes, and I was in exactly none of them. A fucking miracle that’s what that is.

❗ Shows, doing shows. If I was half a comic, or at least not an idjit, I would post more announcements about shows. But, I am most assuredly an idjit with no marketing sense. Since M.’s visit began, I’ve dragged him to two semi-legit shows, two crappy with a capital CRAP open mikes, and one show we both just watched. Not sure if I would date me if the shoe were on the other foot or some other opposite cliche.

❗ Whined about having a yard sale. I piled up shit upon shit in the hallways in anticipation of his arrival (see note above in re whether I would date me). The plan was to jettison it last weekend, but it never happened. (In retrospect, that is a very good thing, since as Citizen M. day approached, his nerves were nervouser and nervouser.)

NOW, the plan is YARDSALE, Saturday morning, August 28, 10 a.m. I’ll be listing something on Craig’s List later today.