Too long in the rain

At 12:27 this afternoon, I had the overwhelming urge to call it all off, to just stop in my exhausting tracks. Just stop. And go get a job in a frame shop or another bookstore, in some little Carolina town where it's cheap to live and eat and buy gas, and where it's maybe over 40 degrees for most of the year. Just make it stop - so much to sift through and handle, I'm not over it but I am a little antsy over the minutiae, have to say. And I also don't think I spelled that right. It looks weird.

It's just one of those days, you know, just one of them in a string of them and I'm not sure, really, how it all knits together but I guess it must.

My grandmother fell this morning and has deep lacerations on her toothpicky arm. I called my father on my way from campus where I sat in on a class I know I won't stay in (although it wouldn't be so bad) because I have another option that it turns out will suit me better, I think. I am so in charge of this whole class schedule thing right now - trying them on for size and considering how it'll help my CAREER and my SKILLS and things I never really thought so much about before in my life, in spite of my years of beating myself to death over what said career path would entail, and actually working pretty hard at a string of mostly professional jobs at the same time. It's funny when it just becomes both the big picture and your day-to-day, not just a job or even what passes for a profession in and of itself. I take it so seriously, I think because I waited so long for this, but I don't realize it until I see myself in action and then I laugh at myself (and my school people laugh at me too) because, for real, SO SERIOUS about it. It's quite mentally tiring, this.

I wanted to remind my father to leave the mail key and the key to my mother's car because they go to Mardi Gras tonight and I'm going back home (always back home, God I need a singular home, although I like my new house, for sure, no problems there.) to be with my geriatric dog for ten days, to heat up his turkey and chat with him about all manner of things and let him out a hundred times in an evening and give him his morning and evening medication.

My father was all messed up like I get when I go and help when traumas arise with her, especially when hospitals are involved, because the super value meal of the ER and falling at 5:30 in the morning confuses her and when you go and sit with her and manage the situation she's usually on another plane of experience entirely. I cannot even watch Sicko. I know what it's about. I've seen it in person and I don't want to get more depressed ALL the time. Today apparently she thought there'd been a card game and a boat ride, which all things considered is a better fever dream than lying there as an overlooked elder in an emergency room packed with chronic care and caterwauling pediatric patients.

(My friend Tim just sent me "caterwauling" as the word of the day. Didn't think I'd get a chance to pimp it out so soon.)

And also when you spend that time with her, dealing with a crazy, understaffed/funded/heated/supplied hospital on the one side and an assisted living facility on the other, you get a little mixed up too. So I didn't catch it when my father was like, "What's that song?" in the middle of the grandma update. He said again, "What's that song?" And he started half-singing it, "You know, it goes, 'love, blahblah, the freedom of my chains, looking back, dadada,' is it Emmylou Harris?"

So I'm walking to my car struck morose (ha! Another 50-center.) by the shitty, misty, chilly, cloudy weather, worried about this 80-pound lady who just keeps falling down and picking back up, taking in the realization that my parents are leaving the state to drive to Louisiana, of all places, for ten days and God could things please stay stable for one STUPID ASS TIME when I'm the only member of my immediate family in this state? Again, during the first week of my school semester when I've only had two this time around? Seriously? Please? Could that happen?

And nothing makes me more mildly crazy on top of crazy about relatively important things than not being able to place a song. So I'm trying to listen and walk to the garage and process all of this crap at the same time, and I told him I had to hang up to remember it, and although that didn't happen I remembered it anyway.

"'Looking back, my chains, dadada, freedom...dada', Dixie Chicks, it was the Dixie Chicks."

"Someone else did it first."

"Look, I don't know, but that's the one I know."

"What's it called."

Oh. God.

"I don't know. I'll check. Or I'll think about it. I have to get quiet to remember music."

"I'll figure it out."

I knew I would, probably before he did, because I need time to sing things to myself in peace and also Google and YouTube are my BFFs.

So yeah, Elvis Presley. Well shut my mouth. (And yes, also Tanya Tucker, and Brenda Lee, and Olivia Newton John, and apparently anyone who felt like it.) It is pretty nice..."'Cause I've been too long in the wind, too long in the rain,takin' any comfort that I can." Yes, very nice.

Comfort in cheap Carolina towns, maybe, I don't know, I don't know where it originates. I've stopped looking, for the most part. I just take it as it comes, if and when it does.

Comments

[Jerry]

Sicko does hit close home for a number of reasons.
I hope she is okay.