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Sunday, October 30, 2016

Hell is time spent with my family

Can I start with "FUCK!"?  Because, seriously, fuck.

Today was just supposed to be shoring up the fence.  That was it.  That was all of it.

So of course we don't do any work on the god damned fence for forever and then my sister says she's leaving and I keep on asking what's happening to me because she's the one with the car and she won't god damned answer but it eventually transpires that we're going to my mother's concert and I could use some advanced notice about these things but I have time to rinse the top layer of sweat and dirt off of me and change into non-sweat drenched clothes and we arrive late and I'm naturally malnourished and dehydrated as all hell which means that the fact that the new conductor (this was sort of the old one's retirement celebratation) has roots in percussion which means "Hit shit with other shit but make it fucking loud," probably isn't for the best because I have a headache on a level that can only be topped by a concussion (which I thankfully do not have at the moment) and after the concert things get bad.

If I hadn't been worked too hard and fed and watered too little the concert probably would have been great --I like my mom's band and the things they usually play-- though the fact that we were late was a problem and the fact that I rushed myself into new exhaustion to not make us later with the speed of the rinse and change and then we didn't move was kind of a problem.

But there was also a Jensen.  And that's a good thing.  Three and a half year old full of innocence and fun.

But things were already headed to shit and I'm not talking about my dehydration or lack of nourishment.  My mom's boyfriend is an ass.  There was a time when I was less open about saying that.  I'd talk about being worried about possible warning signs in wishy-washy ways.  I'm passed that.  He's a fucking asshole and whatever positives he has had better be pretty damn amazing because my mother deserves better than "asshole".

Plus, she already had that with my father who has mellowed significantly but is still an ass to this day, but we get off topic.

Halloween is tomorrow, my sister is supposed to have several hours to work on Jensen's costume before handing him off to my mom because my mom is supposed to be going to dinner with her boyfriend (where he'll presumably show his positive traits, the ones I never see) except he's thrown a fit and is ready to leave her in the lurch as soon as he can find an L word to do it with.

So now my sister has no idea what the fuck is going on and is trying to do work on the costume during the concert, he storms out soon after we arrive, though in a show of his neutral traits the acknowledgement he gives me as he passes is perfectly acceptable.  I've seen him neutral.  I've seen him, usually at a remove, bad.  I've never seen him good.  But he does neutral with all of the skill that many overt assholes lack.

At the end of the concert my I bring Jensen on the stage with me, he says hi to my mom, he calls her Bee instead of something meaning "grandmother" for whatever reason, and I lead him through the process of picking up and putting away his first music stand.

My sister and I have helped the band pick up since we were small, but I very much doubt we did it at three and a half.  So that's cute.

But then my mother is trying to contact her boyfriend to find out what the Hell is up and he's not answering, and my sister is complaining about the fact that she needs to go right now because she left part of the costume at home and she's not legally allowed to take Jensen home and so we need to part ways and she needs to go which she's not doing because she's fucking talking about needing to go instead of going like she needs to and FUCK!

For future reference, if you need to go right now this is what you do:
Step one: Say that you need to go right now.

Step two: Leave already.
Yes, she needed to establish that my mother was taking Jensen, but since that was done . . . fuck.

Members of my family have perfected the Vogon poetry genre that is, "I need to go but not nearly so much as I need to bombard you with words about how I need to go until blood starts dripping out of your ears."

It's a much wider genre than you'd think, and oh my fucking god is it painful.  Sometimes we forget that words, ordinary words as opposed to something like hate speech or bullying, can hurt.  Let me remind all readers: words can hurt.  [Insert death by torture comparison here, probably explicit and gory crucifixion description along with praise of how much more merciful it would be.]

Eventually we (my mother and I) get Jensen to a playground to work off some of his energy.  Could be where I lost my fan.  Did I mention how hot the concert was?  Fuck do they need better air conditioning.  It was a very nice folding fan with wood frame and orange fabric of some kind, almost certainly not silk, as the fan surface.

My mother still makes excuses for her boyfriend.

My aunt is still evil.

Everything is still shit.

Lawyers dwell on small details.

We picked up pizza.

That was supposed to have us arriving at our eventual destination at the same time as my sister who is going back to the house Jensen can't legally be taken to to pick up the missing costume part.

Eventual destination is my dad's place, and anyone who knows anything about my family could reasonably conclude, just from the words ahead of the "and" in this sentence that this is not going to end well.

Lots of waiting for my sister during which tempers flare.  At some point I note that the person talking about how much better it would be if we just knew where Jen was is the proud owner of a cell phone and could just call her.  Apparently that's not as fun as complaining, but things do settle down for a time.

Jen arrives, this is the time she was supposed to be working on the costume while my mom was with her boyfriend so she gets to work on that but my dad goes from peeved to pissed off to "why didn't we install cooling rods in this thing, evacuate everyone downwind because this will make Chernobyl look like the most non radioactive thing in the history of things that aren't radioactive," at a decent clip.

When he finds out about the whole, she was supposed to have more time to sew, and there isn't that much to sew, so this wouldn't have been a problem if things had been as they were promised he calms down a bit, but then time drags on.

And on.

And I didn't sign up for this shit.  I didn't know about the concert, I certainly didn't sign on to be sitting in the middle of this pit of anger and harsh interactions for hours on end.

I was just supposed to work on a fence.

I'm trying to keep my head down and doing most of the interaction with Jensen, everyone else seems to be putting great effort into getting their most abrasive side forward and rubbing.

While I avoid any direct confrontation, the shrapnel hurts.

It all would be done much faster if people didn't insist on taking time out to be irritating to one another.  Except it should be noted that the previous "seems" (two paragraphs back, look and you shall find) is indeed just a "seems".  In fact they do this by nature and god help us all if they ever start mindfully acting in such a manner because that is a force that could tear civilization itself apart.

Then it's done.

Is that the end of it?  Of course not.

My dad's trying to insist that everyone else leave, and when no one listens he talks about leaving (his own home) himself.  Let me repeat myself:

Members of my family have perfected the Vogon poetry genre that is, "I need to go but not nearly so much as I need to bombard you with words about how I need to go until blood starts dripping out of your ears."

And it's done, and every fucking person but me and the three and a half year old are complaining about how they have to go now, and NO ONE IS GOD DAMNED LEAVING.

More suffering.

I don't know who I'm leaving with.  I was thinking and hoping it would be my mom.  Was my dad.  He's bad enough when he doesn't have legitimate grievance.

Some asshole turns the corner ahead of us, switches to reverse, backs back around the corner, and back down the road, when he shows no signs of slowing my dad beeps at him.  No good.  He stops where he was apparently planning on stopping anyway, which happens to overlap with the space our car is in.  Apparently no real damage was done but . . .

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I'm not entirely convinced the fact that I made it home alive is a good thing.

And taxes are due next month.  $65o-something?  $670-something?  It's the same every time but I always have to look it up.

So yay.  I'm still dehydrated.  I'm going to drink some water.  If I were to actually drink enough to be hydrated it would take so long that I'd be able to add sleep deprived of the list of things I am.

Fuck.  Fuck.  And did I mention "Fuck"?

-

And this doesn't even get started on the shit going on with Jensen's biological father.

On the good side while he will be in Maine instead of New York where he was pretending he just moved to get custody, he doesn't want to see Jensen for at least two weeks.  If we could make it two decades that would be better, but I have so little to take that I have to take what I can get.

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