interlude: the good and the bad

The bad:

Lately life has been crazier than a shithouse rat. Remember that scene in Little House in the Prairie (shut up—you know you love it) where James and Cassandra Cooper’s parents were driving their wagon down a steep hill, and Pa Cooper ended up losing control over the wagon? It began violently bumping its way faster and faster down the hill, splintering apart in the process, until finally it smashed into a heap at the bottom—a charnel house of fractured wood—with Ma and Pa Cooper’s bloody limbs poking lifelessly out of the wreckage. Yeahhhh, that’s how I’ve been feeling lately. And remember that scene where Alice Garvey was trapped in the burning blind school, and she had to use Mary’s baby as a battering ram to smash a window in an attempt to escape, and she was shrieking and begging for help but she still couldn’t escape, so they both burned to death? That too. And remember that scene where Albert’s girlfriend Sylvia got stalked, terrorized, and raped by a mime (Walnut Grove’s blacksmith in disguise), and eventually, when he was chasing her, he caused her to fall off a rickety ladder to her death? Well, you get the point.

On top of that, my fucking condo association really pissed me off when they sent me a letter this past weekend saying that the board of directors has passed a resolution banning satellite dishes from being attached to people’s balconies/patios. Instead, all dishes are supposed to be attached to a tripod or a bucket (???) that is sitting on the balcony floor. And if having the dish on the floor means you can’t get a signal, then you’re shit out of luck—you’re not allowed to have a dish. What the hell! It’s not like these dishes are ’80s-era flying saucer-sized eyesores, and it’s not like they’re a new thing, either—people have had them for ages. Why are they just now suddenly realizing that they don’t like them? And doesn’t the board have better things to do with their time than target people’s satellite dishes? So now I have until September 30^th to get a technician to come to my place (and you know how that goes: “Sure, we’ll be there sometime between 9am and 5pm”—gee, thanks), and who knows how much it will cost, and if the new arrangement means I can’t get a signal, then I’ll have to get cable. Grr! Thankfully I face southwest, though, so my odds of getting a signal are pretty strong.

The good:

This past weekend was the first weekend in months where I had no freelancing to do. I actually used the time constructively, giving my car and condo much-needed cleanings, typing up more journal excerpts for the 25-year retrospective I’m running on this blog, reading (I finished Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and began a collection of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems and letters), adding more quotes to my website, catching up on Netflix discs, and, best of all, babysitting Olivia on Saturday. Now, here is where things got good. I knew in advance that we’d be swimming in her neighbor’s pool, so beforehand I went to the dollar store and bought a gaudy silver plastic purse with blue heart-shaped gems on it which came with matching clip-on earrings, and I also bought a blue gem necklace. Then I ripped a seashell from a wedding favor I got at a friend’s wedding back in the 1990s and put all the items in the purse, which got furrowed away in my swim trunks pocket.

On the way to the pool I told her that I’d read in the newspaper that the ocean was getting really crowded, so mermaids were moving to the suburbs and swimming in people’s pools at night. Once we began swimming, I dropped the purse to the bottom of the pool when she wasn’t looking. After 5-10 minutes, when she brought up the mermaid subject again, I pointed to the bottom of the pool and said, “Hey, what’s that?” and I dove to the bottom of the pool to retrieve the purse. I showed it to her and said, without cracking a smile, “I think a mermaid must have left this.”

Holy shit, she went berserkers over this thing, immediately becoming obsessed with it. She commanded me to search the entire pool for more treasure and mermaids, then sat at the edge of the pool, opening and closing the purse repeatedly and pulling out the items over and over and talking about it incessantly, asking a million questions about it and about the mermaid(s) who left it for her.

This set the stage for the rest of the day. After swimming I gave her a bath, and she took the purse into the tub with her. She held it the whole way through Annie (I Netflixed it because I wanted her to see that classic film, which I adored as a kid) and really only put it down when we went outside to play. At night she took it to bed with her, as she was really worried that someone was going to try to steal it unless she kept it beside her. She talked about it nonstop and kept asking, “Why did the mermaid leave this for me?” and “How did she know I would be in the pool and find it?” and “Ella’s going to be really jealous when she sees my treasure, won’t she? But she’s not allowed to have it. It’s mine.”

I do worry that she’ll now expect to find treasure every time she swims. She said several times that she hopes the mermaids leave her a purse with pink gemstones on it next time. The dollar store did have one like that, but I don’t think I’ll be doing a repeat performance. For one thing, I don’t want to give her a reason to expect treasure to materialize every time she swims. Also, magic gets lost when it becomes commonplace.

song heard most recently before posting:
Who Would You Have Me Love?—GMT w/ Hinda Hicks