First, here's the last thing posted here to talk about the state of things:
That that was also a comment dump probably says something about where I am when it comes to actually writing things.
(Bear in mind that what follows involves stuff taken from three different places. There is plenty of duplication herein.)
Wondrously Hyperlinked Table of Contents:
February 15th (↑) -- Disqus Comment. Link to original context.
I collected the comments I made in open threads here about how I've been doing and what's been going on into a post at Stealing Commas.
I made a post to answer the question of if there's anything people can do to help me. I wish it didn't boil down to "Here are multiple ways you can spend money." Unfortunately, that's the state of things. I need to deal with serious financial problems, and I need fiction to serve as both escape and inspiration, and the only fiction that's working for me right now is not even close to free.
I also need calories, but I feel like telling people on the internet "You could have pizza delivered to me"* is courting logistical catastrophe.
* Delivery is great when you lack the energy to do much of anything, and the Portland Pie Company makes fantastic pizza.
February 16th (↑) -- Disqus Comment. Link to original context.
As noted somewhere or other, primary computer is working again.
If I can pull myself together enough to make the attempt, I might go back to the "Maybe I could do let's plays" idea I was considering before primary computer stopped working. The idea being that I'd really like to be producing something (I feel so very useless and worthless when I'm not) and taking a break from myself and the real world by playing games is something that I'm doing anyway, since it makes life bearable.
Whether or not I manage to do that, I am at least able to play games again.
Yesterday I reinstalled and played a game called AER: Memories of Old it's really good. In particular, the flying is . . . it's probably not perfect, because nothing ever is, but it's good enough that I can't see any way to improve upon it. It's exactly what you want from the bird side of a game where you can turn into a bird.
I spent a good long while yesterday just flying. I did save the world at some point (because: why not?) but I spent significantly more flying for flying's sake. Zipping through trees, skimming along clouds, occasionally going through waterfalls or holes in the floating islands.
So, yeah, I totally recommend that.
February 20th (↑) -- Disqus Comment. Link to original context.
[I've never heard anyone ask for a plumbing content note, but given that we're talking about shit here, I figured people might want a warning. This is that warning.]
There's a plumbing problem in my house. It's almost certainly a clog caused by the fact that, when toilet paper ran out, my housemate used paper towels. This is nothing against my housemate, by the way, I didn't know either.
It's kind of obvious in retrospect: paper towels are made so you can clean up, sometimes with scrubbing, things that are wet. That is to say, they are specifically designed to not dissolve in water. Toilet paper is designed to dissolve in water, and plumbing systems rely upon that fact. Substituting paper towels for toilet paper might work once or twice (though I wouldn't recommend testing that, because it also might not) but done at any length it will result in disaster.
There already was a problem because of that. I managed to fix it (it was not fun) but my current theory is that while I fixed the immediate problem, I didn't get everything out. I mean, I was fishing stuff out with an unwrapped coat hanger, not any kind of plumbing tool, so it's pretty reasonable to assume my results weren't perfect.
Pause to note something. First, I actually have asthma, but it's minor exercise induced asthma. So when I talk about not being able to breathe, unless it's something that happened during or immediately after exertion, it's not a matter of asthma.
That wasn't the thing to note, I just wanted to have that disclaimer before I noted the something in question. My breathing is less than ideal when confronted with smells or fumes of a certain character. It feels like the two are linked, but I couldn't go into any great detail about the feeling.
For fumes it tends to be at a far lower level. The reason I stay in the car at a gas station is to avoid discomfort (sometimes silent, sometimes involving lots of coughing) for sufficiently large smells, it's on another level. (This feels like a difference of degree rather than quality, as noted.)
Certain types of shit, certain types of rot, and (possibly) urine produce the strongest reaction. It's kind of like a gag reflex, but at the same very much not like a gag reflex. I lack the words (or perhaps the points of reference) to describe it properly. The smell hits me and I can't breathe. I've never tested how long the inability to breathe lasts for. I remove myself from the smell, breathe, and (if necessary) return and repeat.
So, for example, when it falls on me to change diapers, I have to do it in stages.
Fishing paper towels out of your sewer pipe smells a lot like changing diapers, but there's no cute child, and there's no readily apparent limit. One knows that it can't go on forever, but until you actually reach the point where you're not finding more, there's no end in sight.
So, like I said, fixing the original problem was not a pleasant process. Definitely not something I had any desire to repeat.
My best guess on what happened is that, while I got a lot of stuff out (and things flowed properly again), I didn't get everything, and what remained eventually collected together to form a new clog. I don't know whether or not that's true, but it's my best guess.
Originally I was going to try to fix the current problem myself, but two things happened. One is that I couldn't bring myself to even start the attempt. Why? See above. I may not have known what would be involved in full, but I know the smell and how my body reacts to it. The other is that if I'm right about what happened, the present problem is because I wasn't thorough enough the first time; who's to say that I would be this time?
So I got a professional, which wasn't easy because severe depression does not, for me, mix well with phones.
Professional came today, professional did what he could, turns out the current clog is in a bad place. It's outside the house. I was afraid that might be the case. It's far enough outside the house that special tools need to be used. Even though the clog is almost certainly composed of paper towels, we're talking the kinds of tools they'd use for if a tree were growing through the pipe.
(I'm not actually sure if this is because such tools are the only ones he has that are that long, company policy, or some regulation or other. Just that the guy either can't do it, or isn't allowed to do it, without breaking out those tools.)
This in itself isn't a terribly big problem. The guy showed up in a big company truck that had those tools and doubtless many more. The problem is that the sewer / main drain pipe,* by a combination of design and necessity, is in the least well traveled corner of the basement. The basement that is used for storage.
While the space available is more than enough to fix most potential plumbing problems, the equipment needed to fix this one needs more space than currently available. (And it also needs to get there.) Again: the least well traveled corner of a basement being used, primarily, for storage.
So, in closing, fuck.
* I'm not sure which is the correct terminology, but I've definitely heard both. "Sewer" because it's the one and only pipe in the house that connects to the sewer, "main drain" because it's what all the other drain pipes drain into.
February 25th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
Not eating enough finally caught up to me. I can barely hold my head up, I doubt I could stand for long. Sitting on the couch, trying to keep my eyes open, but it isn't a "sleepy" kind of tired. I just don't have any energy.
Yesterday my sister's sorta-boyfriend came to help clear the space the plumber needs to work in the basement.
He and housemate, who was my sister's friend before my sister turned on her and became outrageously emotionally abusive, are currently cleaning my kitchen, which is not in the basement.
The only reason housemate is my housemate is that she had literally no place else to go, and the choice of "become homeless or keep getting abused" wasn't fair, so I offered my home. I don't like having other people in my house, but housemate kept to herself so it was ok.
If I had the energy (and I managed to cope with dealing with people) I'd be in the kitchen, and almost certainly telling them not to fucking do half of the things they're doing. I can hear them talking and working (and maybe I'm misinterpreting, but), it definitely sounds like why I don't ever accept offers of help cleaning: no one ever does what the fuck you tell them.
They do what they think is best for you. They do what's easy or obvious. They operate on a combination of, "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission," and, "She thinks she doesn't want this, but she'll thank me in the end."
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for my kitchen to be clean, and it will be, but either my future is going to involve digging through fucking garbage bags (which will, of course, be mostly filled with actual garbage) or I'm going to lose stuff I don't want to lose.
If people could be trusted to just do what I ask them to do, my house would have been cleaned ages ago because I wouldn't be constantly turning away help. With my depression how it is, though, its possible that I never would have gotten it done anyway. It's been three years since things got bad, two since things got worse, and . . . I don't know, eight or nine months since things got even worse than that.
So, anyway, that's going on. On the one hand, nice people are being helpful. On the other hand, it's incredibly stressful.
February 28th (↑) -- Disqus Comment. Link to original context.
I wrote a thing. Said thing being a conversation (and accompanying thoughts) in the Equestria Girls 'verse that touches on moons as a unit of measure (in light of the difference between a sidereal month and a synodic month), the smell of old books, probability, question begging, and hastily made cover stories for other dimensional duplicates.
I posted three things at Patreon, but if you can read them you probably already got automatic email notifications. Still, here's a list.
First we had my proposed remake of the game The Last of Us (now with 100% less killing off of teenage lesbians.)
Second is something that's free to everyone, but that's mostly because it's been freely available at other places for positively ages. It's the first chapter of an Equestria Girls story called Fractured Friendship. I mostly posted it so that there would be on-Patreon context for the last thing.
Finally there was a fragment of Fractured Friendship that will eventually be the beginning of Chapter 2. Not sure when exactly that will happen, since I've been trying to write the rest of chapter two for a very long time and had no progress.
The three things at Patreon are old things I dug up rather than any kind of recent writing.
Februrary 28th -- Fimfiction Blog Post. Link to original context.
Figured that I'd check in. Things are bad. Things have always been bad. Things had already been notably bad for six months before I became a member here. They've only gotten worse since then.
At this point the best I can say about where I'm at is, "I'm not suicidal yet," which isn't nearly as positive as it sounds because in days gone by I would have never imagined it might be necessary to tack a "yet" onto the end of the sentence, and now I feel it is.
Here's a rundown of where my stories stand:
Fractured Friendship
⊙ 971 words have been written for Chapter 2
⊙11,727 18,010 words have been written for later chapters
(That figure is inflated because some are redundant while others are superfluous.)
A New Path Forward
⊙ 0 words have been written for Chapter 3
⊙ 1,702 words have been written for Chapter 5
⊙ 287 words of bare dialogue have been written for a yet to be determined later chapter
⊙ 813 words from a different yet to be determined chapter have been written
From the Ashes
⊙ 104 words have been written for Chapter 1. (The only published chapter is the prologue.)
⊙ 1,389 words have been written for Chapter 2 or 3 (won't be sure which until I get there.)
⊙ 5,760 words have been written for another chapter, I know not which.
⊙ 526 words have been written that likely belong in one or both of the previously mentioned chapters.
Down the Memory Hole
⊙ 0 words have been written for Chapter 2.
⊙ 331 words have been written for a later installment. (Late enough to be circa the climax)
Those are the in progress stories that have words actually written instead of just plans in my head.
Stories I'm not actually writing (including eleventy billion alternate Anon-a-Miss ideas)
⊙ 45,992 words have been written.
Let's close with a random snippet from the story I didn't actually end up writing for the second Imposing Sovereigns contest:
February 28th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
I should be asleep, but I decided that eating was important and set out to make myself a pizza.
It never occurred to me to check to see if someone might have placed meltable plastic in my oven. It never occurred to me to check to see if someone had placed stuff that doesn't belong in an oven in my oven in general.
Through the beauty of preheating I have destroyed one or more things, I know not what. In the morning, when said things have had a chance to cool down, I shall inspect the damage. No pizza tonight.
February 29th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
So, on the one hand, real progress toward getting plumbing fixed. Space needed for plumber to work has been cleared, then need to clear the way to get there (because, to avoid stairs, it's via a door I literally nailed shut last winter), then work is done and plumber comes tomorrow morning.
That's good. Especially if it makes people stop "helpfully" cleaning my house.
On the other hand, I'm drenched in sweat and I can't take a shower or wash clothes until the plumbing is actually fixed. When the work is done, I'll change into less dirty clothes, but that's not remotely the same as being clean.
As a complete aside, I've been having nausea for this whole ordeal. It seems to be a result of not doing much in the way of eating.
February 29th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
Yesterday I got a massive thing of cookies. They're a great thing to eat when (because you haven't been eating) you don't have the energy to eat much of anything.
In entirely unrelated news, yesterday I published a blog post the gist of which was:
Only response:
March 1st (↑) -- On a Discord Server
So, I got help setting up the thing with the plumber because I can't do phones right now. Would have been nice if the person helping had told me that the plumber in question was cash or check only before we set up to have the guy come here on a day when the banks are closed. (Also, the first of the month isn't the best time for cash.)
As such, I'm sitting here hoping that enough of my patreon income is processed in time, so I can send it to paypal (which is thankfully instantaneous) and then run across the street to get that money out of an ATM.
Fun.
I just took a shower. Being clean is wonderful.
And, yeah, if I'd known I needed cash I wouldn't have had the plumber come on a day when banks are closed and my online income was being processed. If I could have gone to the bank, I could have gotten the cash. By this time tomorrow my patreon income will be processed and that (once I transfer it to Paypal, which, again, is instant) can be gotten from an ATM, no bank needed.
The communications breakdown was actually fairly simple, I would have assumed I needed to pay in cash, except the previous plumber (who flaked out on finishing the job) took credit and I expected the person helping me to inform me of any major differences for non-flaky plumber, needing to be paid in a different way being a major difference. Person helping me saw the situation as "Not taking credit is the default option, so it goes without saying."
March 2nd (↑) -- Patreon Post Link to original context.
[Contains: plumbing problems, feeling helpless in one's one home because people are "helping", flashlights, glassware, stuff, things, things and stuff, and dead plants.]
A while ago, early November maybe, I went up to help my sister for, I think, a weekend. It was definitely three days. The plan was to arrive on one day, work on what needed doing until it was time to sleep, spend the whole next day working, and then work until my mom arrived to take me home on the third day.
No work got done.
On the ride up my sister told me about how she wanted her then-housemate gone but didn't have the heart to throw her out because, as she had nowhere else to go, that would make her homeless. Even though housemate tried to stay out of sight, my sister spent the first day too preoccupied with housemate do do anything. That night I thought I was going to have to do a lot of awkward and uncomfortable work to fix things.
Before I got out of bed the next morning, my sister told me, at great length, how horrible housemate was. (Housemate woke up to this.) It was pretty clear pretty fast that things couldn't be fixed. My sister spent the day yelling at housemate and threatening to throw her out right that second. Housemate spent most of the day crying in her room. She called everyone she could think of and asked them to come and give her a ride away. No one was simultaneously willing and able.
To be clear, she was only asking for a ride from these people. There was no other home she was trying to get a ride to. The plan was to be homeless in Portland, because she knew (from experience) that she could survive being homeless in Portland, and the same couldn't be said of being homeless in the less populated area where my sister lives.
I offered housemate two things. One was a ride out of there when my mom came the day after. The other was an empty room at my house. The hardest part was convincing my sister to just fucking wait until the next day, instead of kicking housemate out right then.
The third day was completely different. My sister tried to convince both of use to stay for two more days and actually get some work done.
First off, the reason that work hadn't been done on days one and two was that my sister wouldn't stop going on about how horrible housemate was and how she couldn't endure another minute of having housemate in the house, which left no time to do actual work.
Second, she'd been trying to get rid of housemate this whole time and it was a constant struggle just to get her to wait until day three because another night (or indeed another hour) was, apparently, too much time spent with housemate in the house. Now she was asking for two more days and nights because . . . bwah?
As you might imagine, we got the fuck out of there.
For the record, I am in no way saying that housemate was not at fault in the relationship. I wasn't there, I don't know what the fuck led to that point. Housemate is obsessive about my sister, and she makes no secret of the fact that the love she feels for my sister isn't exactly the chaste familial kind. (My sister loves her back, but it is the familial kind. It's the same type of love our father had for the two of us when we were kids: tainted fucked up love.)
I legitimately have no idea if the things my sister said about housemate were true or not. I just know that when I was there it was completely one sided with a clear victim.
Anyway, now housemate is my housemate which worked out to be far less disruptive than I expected on a day to day basis.
Fast forward to late November and my sister's truck runs her over. This is, naturally, a "Drop everything and help out" situation. Housemate tried to do the same --they'd managed to work together one time since housemate had come to live with me and my sister did request her presence-- but that worked out not in the least. So housemate went back to my house while I was at my sister's and at the hospital. House ran out of toilet paper; housemate used paper towels. Don't ever do that.
In retrospect the problem is kind of obvious: toilet paper is made to come apart in water, paper towels are made to hold together when wet (so one can scrub.) That being said, I could easily have made the same mistake if I'd been at home, run out, and my depression had been too severe for me to make a trip to the store.
Anyway: bad idea; don't ever do that.
I was the one to notice there was a problem, figure out what it was, and try to solve it.
Fishing paper towels out of a sewer pipe with a tool you've improvised from a wire coat hanger is not fun. I had at least one involuntary gag reflex per attempt. There were a lot of attempts (usually successful) because the paper towels seemed to go on without end.
I went back up to help my sister before I finished and was informed that the job had been completed by a family member in my absence.
While the immediate problem might have been solved, the job had not, in fact, been completed. There were still paper towels in the system, and they collected to form a new clog further down the line. Far enough down the line that it was outside the house (but not so far as to become the city's problem.)
This wasn't noticed immediately because some previous plumber had broken a clean out cap. They'd twisted the fitting right off, leaving a hole in the middle. I have no idea how long ago that might have happened. Years for sure. A decade? maybe. Decades plural? Could be.
There had never been a problem that interacted with that hole. Now there was. In what was, arguably, the most remote corner of the basement. For a while I could tell that something was wrong, but I couldn't tell what or where. It wasn't until I was downstairs when the washing machine was draining and could hear the water coming out through the hole in the cleanout plug that I figured out what was wrong.
At this point it's probably important to mention that my depression was making it basically impossible to make phone calls. Eventually we did get a plumber to come, he determined that the problem was far enough in (more than six feet) that he'd need to use a tool that took more space than was available, and he said he'd have a quote for the rest of the job when we called up to tell him we'd cleared the space.
We never got that quote.
Housemate thought we'd need help, getting the help took several days. One too many days for the plumber, who retroactively decided that he considered the conditions unsafe and was afraid to come back. That deserves some attention.
I didn't think to ask the plumber "How much space do you need?" when he was there, because sometimes absurdly obvious things go right over my head. So when we'd imported the helper housemate thought we'd need to clear the space, we were suddenly faced with the fact we didn't know actually know what that space was.
So we called the plumber, or rather the company he worked for, to ask. This was actually the day after imported helper arrived, because the day of arrival wasn't a particularly good day for any of us, so we decided to rest, recover, and then get to work the next morning. At that point we discovered that the plumber had told his boss, the previous day, that he wasn't coming back here.
That means that he came here, determined that the problem (in spite of just being paper towels) required big honking equipment (so, again, don't ever let paper towels go down the drain), told me to call him back when we'd cleared space for it, spent several days ready and willing to return to my house, and then, after several days of considering the house a safe working environment, decided, sight unseen, that it had somehow mutated into an unsafe one.
Now, it turns out that when a plumber in that company decides they're not going back to a house, the company stops sharing information like "It's best to have an eight foot by eight foot area cleared when using the thingamajig in question" or, "Here's how much the job would have cost."
So the operator couldn't give us any of the answers that had been sitting around ready to be relayed until the plumber got cold feet and changed his mind the day before we called. She could, however, say to the plumber, "They're literally asking you what conditions you want and offering to provide exactly what you ask for, no matter what that may happen to be, so could you at least tell them what it would take for you to do the job?"
This left us in a weird situation. We didn't know what we had to do to make the plumbing possible and we also didn't know if we should call a different plumber. We did have three people to do the work.
In the end it turned out that we didn't need three people to do the work of clearing the area. Imported helper and I were able to clear it, tons of extra space, and several adjacent spaces in one day (during which housemate was in a depressive slump that prevented her from helping.) We did this after getting a new and different plumber who was willing to tell us what he needed in order to do his job.
Here's the thing, though. The day after arriving, imported helper started to clean the kitchen, which is not in the basement and had no bearing on the plumber (the equipment needed was less than ideal for going down stairs, so the plumber entered through the back door and never needed to visit the ground floor.) Several days were taken on that, and other things, before we even called the new and different plumber who actually did plumbing.
On the first day, not eating caught up to me and I could barely hold my head up. I spent the whole day sitting on the couch because a lack of calories meant I didn't have enough energy to do much of anything else. That meant that I was stuck sitting there listening while housemate and imported helper cleaned the kitchen which sounded like breaking glass and ceramic and would have been stressful anyway because I wasn't there to separate the good stuff from the trash.
I had food delivered and ingested sufficient calories that night, in the following days I was more able to do stuff. That said, the clanging of pots and pans (remember: kitchen) proved to be too much for me, and I had to give up on helping one day because of that. Too much noise; had to hide.
The lack of eating nausea didn't go away nearly as easily as the lack of energy from the lack of calories. That limited my involvement too. Just the fact there were two of them left me feeling outnumbered. With the exception of the day that depression had housemate too out of it to engage, both housemate and imported helper have way more energy than I do.
It's not quite that I feel unsafe; I know that neither of these people would intentionally hurt me. That said, outnumbered, out powered, and not remotely in control. Especially since, whether I'm able to help or not, they could ask me things, and they don't. They just do what they think is best.
People cleaning my house for me without needing any effort on my part sounds nice in overly simplistic theory. The thing is, I don't trust them. It's not that I expect them to steal things or anything like that. They are generally nice and trustworthy people. I just don't trust them to do the job properly.
They say the right things, but the results speak differently.
The rooms they've cleaned are clean. There's no doubt about that. They're also empty. Desolate. It isn't hard to see why.
It's easy to clean the threshing floor when you don't separate the wheat from the chaff. Just throw out everything, and you're done. It's so very quick and simple. Sure, you don't have any actual grain at the end of it, but it's not like that matters, right?
I had a sense from the start that, "We're cleaning!" actually meant, "You're going to have to dig through a bunch of trash bags one by one to pull things out." I've been assured that, because they understand and respect that it's not their house, that won't be the case and they're leaving everything for me to go through at leisure. Only things that are very definitely undeniably obviously trash are being sorted as trash.
I was given this assurance without ever needing to state my misgivings, by the way.
One of the bags of "Yup, only trash here," burst some days ago, and they haven't gotten around to picking it up yet. (Fun.) I had a look through it today. Laid out on the ground I did indeed find some trash. Also a lot of my silverware. Canned food. (All of my fucking peaches.) A flashlight.
My depression has been so bad that I haven't watered plants like I should. Many have died. I am not proud of this. I do have a question, though. Who throws out the vase because the plant in it has died?
Apparently the answer to that is "Housemate and/or imported helper."
The plug for the kitchen sink. Several glass cups, not a chip on them. (Impressive given that they were thrown in a bag with metal cans, metal silverware, and so forth, carried in it, and then fell on a paved driveway when that bag broke.) Neon green frosting, unopened.* Flash cards for Ancient Greek, somehow dry and pristine (in spite of being left outside in the wetness of late winter since the bag burst) and still bound by elastic into one easy to cycle through thematic group. My tuna strainer (and its concentric extension for times when you get an oversized can.) Pliers.
Let's pause for a moment on those pliers. They were lost. Part of cleaning is finding lost things. You find your lost pliers and you don't need to waste money on new pliers when you have perfectly good pliers already. That, of course, only works if you don't throw the fucking pliers out.
Not everything was lost. I knew where the canned food was, and the only thing needed to use it was having the will. (And a can opener, but that's nailed to the fucking wall, well . . . to the copulating cabinet.) The plug to the kitchen sink probably could have used some cleaning and both the silverware and the cups definitely needed cleaning, but I knew where all of these things were.
The tuna strainer I'm not sure about. Once upon a time we did lose one and ended up buying a new one. This was long enough ago that "we" meant my mom and I. I have yet to come across a situation where I needed two, so I've been pretty laissez-faire** when it comes to keeping track of the second one (whichever that happens to be) when I've got a firm grasp on where the one I'm using is. The one that got thrown out might have been the one I wasn't keeping track of, it might have been the one I was. There's a decent chance I'll never know.
The neon green frosting I could have located (probably, we'll never know for sure now) in spite of not knowing precisely where it was. The kitchen has, or rather: had a general "cake stuff" area.
The flashlight, the flash cards, and the pliers, though? Those were very definitely lost. Again, one of the best parts of cleaning --real cleaning instead of this "throw out everything" shit-- is finding lost things. I've already gotten into the details of the pliers. Recap: I'd have needed to buy new ones if I hadn't found them.
The flash cards are different. They're a reminder of one of the few good things in a very bleak part of my life. They're something that could finally spur me into actually re-learning Ancient Greek, which I've been meaning to do forever. And, whether I start that project now or later, they're functional.
The flashlight is complicated. Right now, I could use another flashlight in the house. That may continue to be the case. On the other hand, it could turn out that when this ordeal is over I have more flashlights than I could ever want or need in the house. (I know that won't be the case with the pliers, but for flashlights it's possible.) In that case, there are various possibilities.
I've been in plenty of situations where it would be useful to have a spare flashlight to loan to someone, and in many of those situations it would be even better if you could just give it to them. I'm pretty sure that I have family members who could use flashlights in their cars, but don't have them. Having a dedicated flashlight for something means that wherever you take that something, you'll always have a flashlight. It could be a tent bag. It could be a purse or a backpack. It could be a first aid kit. (Not all injuries happen in well lit places.) It could be basically anything.
As one final thing, I can make something out of it.
Like what? you may ask.
So, anyone who's seen me in a place where there's free or obscenely cheap stuff has probably noticed that I have a tendency to grab things of clear patterned glass. For example, I have at least two (possibly three) Wexford pattern clear glass cruets in spite of the fact that I have never once thought to myself, "I need something to hold liquid condiments such as oil or vinegar."
But, Chris, you could possibly say but probably wouldn't, those things are nothing. You can get them online for five to twelve dollars.
This is true. I've only just learned that it's true as a side effect of trying to figure out what those damned things are called. That being said, first off it's better when it's free and, even when it isn't free, it feels more significant when you find it yourself and hold it in your hands before getting it.
Ok, but you still haven't said why you want them or what it has to do with flashlights, the hypothetical interlocutor I've been calling "you" will now say as a cheap way to advance the narrative.
The answer is, quite simply, this:
Now, the first thing to note is that that's not one of the aforementioned cruets. I have no idea what this lidded glass bowl is called, and I do not, in fact, have two of them. It does, however, have a flashlight in it.
But, Chris, hypothetical you says again, that looks like crap. The light is all concentrated in one spot, you've braced the flashlight by doing something ugly with the wrist strap, and everything's massively uneven and uninspiring.
Right you are, hypothetical rude person. That doesn't look terribly good and leaves a lot to be desired. However, the reason it doesn't look all that good and leaves a lot to be desired is because the flashlight in question is one I use as a flashlight.
After sticking it in there, taking a few pictures, and finally using lid as beam spreader so that I could hold the flashlight like a torch while I walked around the house during that power outage (assuming I'm remembering correctly), I separated the flashlight from the glass kitchenware so that the flashlight could easily be used as a flashlight in future times (which by now include past and present times) and the kitchenware could sit on a shelf being pretty.
If, however, I didn't need the flashlight to continue to be a flashlight, I could have ripped it apart, altered it to suit the intended purpose, and made a much nicer lamp than the improvised and temporary fare you see above.
That only works if the unnecessary flashlight is in my possession instead of in the trash, though, which brings us back to the central thesis of this post:
One would hope that the pretty glass thing made it into the "temporarily removed" pile instead of the "trash, get rid of it" pile, if only because in the first pile it seems less likely to be broken.
There is something I like about such things beyond just shoving a light source inside of them, though. (And beyond their obvious mundane aesthetic appeal, I mean.) Shine a laser into the lidded glass bowl, and the effect is beautiful. I never looked into it as much as I intended at the time, but it seemed like it might be possible to make a light source out of that effect, provided the surrounding area were sufficiently dark. Even if it couldn't be used for practical lighting, it's still pretty.
Ok, so, we're done with the burst bag of trash that included a bunch of non-trash, right? The flashlight was the last thing to discuss, as I recall. So, let's stick an asterism here so that the wall of text is punctuated by non-text. (I'll retroactively insert some up-post as well.)
Wait, that wasn't the end of it. Plant pots, and . . . other stuff. I've totally forgotten. (This is the last thing I'm adding to the post, having come back to stick it in after writing the rest.) The plant pots are significant just because not everything comes down to matters of hydroponics. That there were more not-trash things than listed above is significant mostly because the list really did go on (and on.) In a single bag. That contained pounds of perfectly good canned peaches. (Canned diced tomatoes too.) And was supposed to be entirely trash.
Here's another fun tidbit. There are three places in my house where I keep plants. There are two that housemate and imported helper haven't come near yet, and the one place they've dealt with. The place they dealt with had only one plant that survived my depression-induced lack of watering.
When the plants all disappeared, I had (for the first and only time) cause to believe that maybe this cleaning wouldn't be as bad as I imagined. While the dead plants were gone without a trace, the live plant had been carefully laid aside and kept safe. I was going to put it back in the window, but I couldn't find anything to put it in. (If those vases hadn't been thrown out, it would have been a different story.) This happened while I was the only one in the house.
So I was forced to wait so that I could ask housemate and imported helper, "Where'd you put all the stuff that could hold a plant?" By the time I had a chance to ask, the plant had mysteriously vanished.
The only kitchen plant to survive my depression, and the neglect that came with it, killed by cleaning. I mean, there's a slim chance that I'll find it before it's dead, but it's probably outside. Even if it has survived the night so far, and it's really not made for that, come Thursday the low is supposed to be below freezing.
I can't look through that much "trash" in that amount of time and expect to find something that small.
So, here's the thing, or one of the things, about having to look through bags of trash to find the stuff that shouldn't have been thrown out instead of putting trash in the trash while putting non-trash where it goes: bags of trash have trash in them. (Usually.)
That means that the whole thing is a good deal less pleasant than dealing with the original mess. It also means that any time you put something icky in the trash, it's with the knowledge that you're going to have to deal with that shit later.
Eat a banana, throw the peel in the trash. Unless you looked through that bag and verified it was all actually trash immediately before throwing the peel in and then took it out of the trash can, tied it up, and put it wherever you store curb-ready trash immediately after throwing the peel in, you're going to meet that peel again.
No matter how unappealing (pun not intended, but acknowledged) that peel is when it goes in, it's going to be worse the next time you meet it.
The smart thing to do, other than saying, "Please, for the love of God, stop fucking cleaning my house!" would probably be to have a private secret trash bag into which I could safely put things like that banana peel because, since the others didn't know about it, I wouldn't have to worry about someone not-me putting non-trash in it. (If I were to put non-trash in it, that would be my own fault, and thus qualitatively different.)
I'm not actually gonna do that.
Have another picture of a flashlight:
There are still a bunch of trash bags outside filled with a mixture of trash and not-trash. Given how heavily the not-trash skews towards things that respond badly to water (including fucking books) this is a very stressful thing for me.
The people who bagged all of this up and took it outside, and kept on doing so after there was no space remaining in the garage which, while hardly the safest place, at least has a roof over it, are in another city/town right now. This is probably a good thing since flaying people alive is supposed to an over the top threat rather than a means of non-verbal interpersonal communication.
There would be less to stress out about if they'd bagged things up well, since trash bags are waterproof, but many of the bags are quite thoroughly perforated at this point.
It probably would have all fit in the garage if they'd used any sort of care in packing, because I keep finding empty containers and cardboard boxes that haven't been broken down meaning that much (possibly even most) of the volume is taken up by empty space.
But the kind of people who bag well and/or with care probably wouldn't have thrown out half of the things they threw out.
March 13th (↑) -- Disqus Comment. Link to original context.
It's raining today. That, in itself, is stressful. You see, there are still a large number of bags of "trash" outside. I've been spending a lot of my daylight time, perhaps even most of my daylight time, going through those bags. I've pulled out a lot of things that don't respond well to water. (Electronics, books, and loose-papers-with-important-things-written-on-them stand out.)
The trash bags are water poof, which is good, but the lack of care with which they were filled has led to many of them becoming . . . perforated. Water can and does get in. I have seen it. (Though, mercifully, only rarely.)
It's also the case that whenever I remove a bag and make progress on separatingthe wheat from the chaff not-trash from the trash, I might be putting at risk something that was, up to that point, perfectly preserved. Without the removed bag there, new holes may be exposed. It could be that right now, as I type this, the most important thing to be thrown out is being destroyed because a bag I went through yesterday is no longer playing blocker.
Entirely apart from the fact that we're talking about the fact my books and jewelry and so forth have been thrown out, the way these bags were filled is downright absurd. The reason it took so many bags, which is probably the reason that the bags of "trash" didn't all fit in the garage under the roof thereof, is because the volume is largely empty space. (As near as I can tell, based on what I've gone through so far.) Boxes were not broken down. Containers were not opened.
The rolling suitcase/dufflebag I use when traveling for a week or more was thrown out (which it shouldn't have been) empty. That's a pretty decent volume of air and a relatively small amount of plastic and canvas. When it's in a large black trash bag, though, it looks like any other pile of trash.
It occurs to me now, when it's definitely too late for the storm that's here, that I might have done better to open up all the bags, take out the big empty things, and then see if I could fit what remained somewhere safe.
A hug part of the reason it takes so much time is because of how damned slow it is to go through the little stuff. If I'd focused on the big stuff only, instead of going one bag at a time, maybe I could have had everything safe by today. Fuck.
I'm alone today. In human terms at least. My sister's dog is still here. Not really fit to take care of her properly, but given how neglected she was in the past, it's probably still a step up. I don't really know why I'm alone today. The housemate and extended-stay house guest were supposed to be spending a single night away to test out a possible living and working arrangement. That night was two nights ago.
I would love to be able to enjoy their absence, but I'm way too worn down, it means that the dog is solely my responsibility, and it means that the things they said they'd do which I probably can trust them to do (washing the dishes is the only thing that comes to mind) won't get done unless I take time away from the thousand other things I need to do because of their past actions, recuperation, or both.
I can't cope with this shit, and yet I have no choice.
All of this, including the plumbing problem that set off these adventures in ["When we say, "Clean," we mean, "Toss everything important to you in the trash"], is because I tried to be a decent human being. The relationship between my sister and housemate was toxic as fuck, housemate was begging people to get her out of there even though she had no place else to go. Her plan, insofar as it existed, was to be homeless in a city she knew (from experience) she could survive being homeless in instead of a countryside where that wasn't true.
I offered her an empty room at my house, so she'd have a place to go. I don't regret that and if I had known about (but somehow been unable to change) all of the bullshit that resulted from it, I'd still have made the same decision, but it still feels massively unfair that doing something good has led to this.
That that was also a comment dump probably says something about where I am when it comes to actually writing things.
(Bear in mind that what follows involves stuff taken from three different places. There is plenty of duplication herein.)
Wondrously Hyperlinked Table of Contents:
- February 15th -- Disqus Comment (things done that week)
- February 16th -- Disqus Comment (games and hopes)
- February 20th -- Disqus Comment (plumbing and problems with it)
- February 25th -- On a Discord Server ("cleaning" begins)
- February 28th -- Disqus Comment (things done that week)
- February 28th -- Fimfiction Blog Post (mental health, story progress)
- February 28th -- On a Discord Server (stuff that doesn't belong in stoves)
- February 29th -- On a Discord Server (progress toward plumbing fix)
- February 29th -- On a Discord Server (cookies, expectations)
- March 1st -- On a Discord Server (plumbing, cash, communication)
- March 2nd -- Patreon Post (Recap, needing to dig stuff out of trash, so on)
- March 5th -- On a Discord Server (photos in the trash, my dead uncle)
- March 5th -- On a Discord Server (back from the wake, open caskets, memory)
- March 6th -- Disqus Comment (why there's a dog, dealing with the ongoing "cleaning")
- March 7th -- On a Discord Server (spreading misery never helps)
- March 13th -- On a Discord Server (how people prepare for pandemics)
- March 13th -- On a Discord Server (rain, proper packing of trash)
- March 13th -- Disqus Comment (rain, attempting to rescue stuff, general state of things)
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February 15th (↑) -- Disqus Comment. Link to original context.
I collected the comments I made in open threads here about how I've been doing and what's been going on into a post at Stealing Commas.
I made a post to answer the question of if there's anything people can do to help me. I wish it didn't boil down to "Here are multiple ways you can spend money." Unfortunately, that's the state of things. I need to deal with serious financial problems, and I need fiction to serve as both escape and inspiration, and the only fiction that's working for me right now is not even close to free.
I also need calories, but I feel like telling people on the internet "You could have pizza delivered to me"* is courting logistical catastrophe.
* Delivery is great when you lack the energy to do much of anything, and the Portland Pie Company makes fantastic pizza.
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February 16th (↑) -- Disqus Comment. Link to original context.
As noted somewhere or other, primary computer is working again.
If I can pull myself together enough to make the attempt, I might go back to the "Maybe I could do let's plays" idea I was considering before primary computer stopped working. The idea being that I'd really like to be producing something (I feel so very useless and worthless when I'm not) and taking a break from myself and the real world by playing games is something that I'm doing anyway, since it makes life bearable.
Whether or not I manage to do that, I am at least able to play games again.
Yesterday I reinstalled and played a game called AER: Memories of Old it's really good. In particular, the flying is . . . it's probably not perfect, because nothing ever is, but it's good enough that I can't see any way to improve upon it. It's exactly what you want from the bird side of a game where you can turn into a bird.
I spent a good long while yesterday just flying. I did save the world at some point (because: why not?) but I spent significantly more flying for flying's sake. Zipping through trees, skimming along clouds, occasionally going through waterfalls or holes in the floating islands.
So, yeah, I totally recommend that.
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February 20th (↑) -- Disqus Comment. Link to original context.
[I've never heard anyone ask for a plumbing content note, but given that we're talking about shit here, I figured people might want a warning. This is that warning.]
There's a plumbing problem in my house. It's almost certainly a clog caused by the fact that, when toilet paper ran out, my housemate used paper towels. This is nothing against my housemate, by the way, I didn't know either.
It's kind of obvious in retrospect: paper towels are made so you can clean up, sometimes with scrubbing, things that are wet. That is to say, they are specifically designed to not dissolve in water. Toilet paper is designed to dissolve in water, and plumbing systems rely upon that fact. Substituting paper towels for toilet paper might work once or twice (though I wouldn't recommend testing that, because it also might not) but done at any length it will result in disaster.
There already was a problem because of that. I managed to fix it (it was not fun) but my current theory is that while I fixed the immediate problem, I didn't get everything out. I mean, I was fishing stuff out with an unwrapped coat hanger, not any kind of plumbing tool, so it's pretty reasonable to assume my results weren't perfect.
Pause to note something. First, I actually have asthma, but it's minor exercise induced asthma. So when I talk about not being able to breathe, unless it's something that happened during or immediately after exertion, it's not a matter of asthma.
That wasn't the thing to note, I just wanted to have that disclaimer before I noted the something in question. My breathing is less than ideal when confronted with smells or fumes of a certain character. It feels like the two are linked, but I couldn't go into any great detail about the feeling.
For fumes it tends to be at a far lower level. The reason I stay in the car at a gas station is to avoid discomfort (sometimes silent, sometimes involving lots of coughing) for sufficiently large smells, it's on another level. (This feels like a difference of degree rather than quality, as noted.)
Certain types of shit, certain types of rot, and (possibly) urine produce the strongest reaction. It's kind of like a gag reflex, but at the same very much not like a gag reflex. I lack the words (or perhaps the points of reference) to describe it properly. The smell hits me and I can't breathe. I've never tested how long the inability to breathe lasts for. I remove myself from the smell, breathe, and (if necessary) return and repeat.
So, for example, when it falls on me to change diapers, I have to do it in stages.
Fishing paper towels out of your sewer pipe smells a lot like changing diapers, but there's no cute child, and there's no readily apparent limit. One knows that it can't go on forever, but until you actually reach the point where you're not finding more, there's no end in sight.
So, like I said, fixing the original problem was not a pleasant process. Definitely not something I had any desire to repeat.
My best guess on what happened is that, while I got a lot of stuff out (and things flowed properly again), I didn't get everything, and what remained eventually collected together to form a new clog. I don't know whether or not that's true, but it's my best guess.
Originally I was going to try to fix the current problem myself, but two things happened. One is that I couldn't bring myself to even start the attempt. Why? See above. I may not have known what would be involved in full, but I know the smell and how my body reacts to it. The other is that if I'm right about what happened, the present problem is because I wasn't thorough enough the first time; who's to say that I would be this time?
So I got a professional, which wasn't easy because severe depression does not, for me, mix well with phones.
Professional came today, professional did what he could, turns out the current clog is in a bad place. It's outside the house. I was afraid that might be the case. It's far enough outside the house that special tools need to be used. Even though the clog is almost certainly composed of paper towels, we're talking the kinds of tools they'd use for if a tree were growing through the pipe.
(I'm not actually sure if this is because such tools are the only ones he has that are that long, company policy, or some regulation or other. Just that the guy either can't do it, or isn't allowed to do it, without breaking out those tools.)
This in itself isn't a terribly big problem. The guy showed up in a big company truck that had those tools and doubtless many more. The problem is that the sewer / main drain pipe,* by a combination of design and necessity, is in the least well traveled corner of the basement. The basement that is used for storage.
While the space available is more than enough to fix most potential plumbing problems, the equipment needed to fix this one needs more space than currently available. (And it also needs to get there.) Again: the least well traveled corner of a basement being used, primarily, for storage.
So, in closing, fuck.
* I'm not sure which is the correct terminology, but I've definitely heard both. "Sewer" because it's the one and only pipe in the house that connects to the sewer, "main drain" because it's what all the other drain pipes drain into.
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February 25th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
Not eating enough finally caught up to me. I can barely hold my head up, I doubt I could stand for long. Sitting on the couch, trying to keep my eyes open, but it isn't a "sleepy" kind of tired. I just don't have any energy.
Yesterday my sister's sorta-boyfriend came to help clear the space the plumber needs to work in the basement.
He and housemate, who was my sister's friend before my sister turned on her and became outrageously emotionally abusive, are currently cleaning my kitchen, which is not in the basement.
The only reason housemate is my housemate is that she had literally no place else to go, and the choice of "become homeless or keep getting abused" wasn't fair, so I offered my home. I don't like having other people in my house, but housemate kept to herself so it was ok.
If I had the energy (and I managed to cope with dealing with people) I'd be in the kitchen, and almost certainly telling them not to fucking do half of the things they're doing. I can hear them talking and working (and maybe I'm misinterpreting, but), it definitely sounds like why I don't ever accept offers of help cleaning: no one ever does what the fuck you tell them.
They do what they think is best for you. They do what's easy or obvious. They operate on a combination of, "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission," and, "She thinks she doesn't want this, but she'll thank me in the end."
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Don't get me wrong, I'd love for my kitchen to be clean, and it will be, but either my future is going to involve digging through fucking garbage bags (which will, of course, be mostly filled with actual garbage) or I'm going to lose stuff I don't want to lose.
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If people could be trusted to just do what I ask them to do, my house would have been cleaned ages ago because I wouldn't be constantly turning away help. With my depression how it is, though, its possible that I never would have gotten it done anyway. It's been three years since things got bad, two since things got worse, and . . . I don't know, eight or nine months since things got even worse than that.
So, anyway, that's going on. On the one hand, nice people are being helpful. On the other hand, it's incredibly stressful.
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February 28th (↑) -- Disqus Comment. Link to original context.
I wrote a thing. Said thing being a conversation (and accompanying thoughts) in the Equestria Girls 'verse that touches on moons as a unit of measure (in light of the difference between a sidereal month and a synodic month), the smell of old books, probability, question begging, and hastily made cover stories for other dimensional duplicates.
I posted three things at Patreon, but if you can read them you probably already got automatic email notifications. Still, here's a list.
First we had my proposed remake of the game The Last of Us (now with 100% less killing off of teenage lesbians.)
Second is something that's free to everyone, but that's mostly because it's been freely available at other places for positively ages. It's the first chapter of an Equestria Girls story called Fractured Friendship. I mostly posted it so that there would be on-Patreon context for the last thing.
Finally there was a fragment of Fractured Friendship that will eventually be the beginning of Chapter 2. Not sure when exactly that will happen, since I've been trying to write the rest of chapter two for a very long time and had no progress.
The three things at Patreon are old things I dug up rather than any kind of recent writing.
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Februrary 28th -- Fimfiction Blog Post. Link to original context.
Still Alive (and an update on where various stories stand)
Figured that I'd check in. Things are bad. Things have always been bad. Things had already been notably bad for six months before I became a member here. They've only gotten worse since then.
At this point the best I can say about where I'm at is, "I'm not suicidal yet," which isn't nearly as positive as it sounds because in days gone by I would have never imagined it might be necessary to tack a "yet" onto the end of the sentence, and now I feel it is.
Here's a rundown of where my stories stand:
Fractured Friendship
⊙ 971 words have been written for Chapter 2
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(That figure is inflated because some are redundant while others are superfluous.)
A New Path Forward
⊙ 0 words have been written for Chapter 3
⊙ 1,702 words have been written for Chapter 5
⊙ 287 words of bare dialogue have been written for a yet to be determined later chapter
⊙ 813 words from a different yet to be determined chapter have been written
From the Ashes
⊙ 104 words have been written for Chapter 1. (The only published chapter is the prologue.)
⊙ 1,389 words have been written for Chapter 2 or 3 (won't be sure which until I get there.)
⊙ 5,760 words have been written for another chapter, I know not which.
⊙ 526 words have been written that likely belong in one or both of the previously mentioned chapters.
Down the Memory Hole
⊙ 0 words have been written for Chapter 2.
⊙ 331 words have been written for a later installment. (Late enough to be circa the climax)
Those are the in progress stories that have words actually written instead of just plans in my head.
Stories I'm not actually writing (including eleventy billion alternate Anon-a-Miss ideas)
⊙ 45,992 words have been written.
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Let's close with a random snippet from the story I didn't actually end up writing for the second Imposing Sovereigns contest:
“Equestria was almost conquered, twice, by a creature whose sole power was the ability to steal magic.”
“Ok, but Equestria is almost conquered all the time,” Sci-Twi said. “After the first eight times, it stops sounding impressive.”
“Your incredibly rude and tasteless point is well made,” Celestia said.
“Thank you.”
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February 28th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
I should be asleep, but I decided that eating was important and set out to make myself a pizza.
It never occurred to me to check to see if someone might have placed meltable plastic in my oven. It never occurred to me to check to see if someone had placed stuff that doesn't belong in an oven in my oven in general.
Through the beauty of preheating I have destroyed one or more things, I know not what. In the morning, when said things have had a chance to cool down, I shall inspect the damage. No pizza tonight.
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February 29th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
So, on the one hand, real progress toward getting plumbing fixed. Space needed for plumber to work has been cleared, then need to clear the way to get there (because, to avoid stairs, it's via a door I literally nailed shut last winter), then work is done and plumber comes tomorrow morning.
That's good. Especially if it makes people stop "helpfully" cleaning my house.
On the other hand, I'm drenched in sweat and I can't take a shower or wash clothes until the plumbing is actually fixed. When the work is done, I'll change into less dirty clothes, but that's not remotely the same as being clean.
As a complete aside, I've been having nausea for this whole ordeal. It seems to be a result of not doing much in the way of eating.
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February 29th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
Yesterday I got a massive thing of cookies. They're a great thing to eat when (because you haven't been eating) you don't have the energy to eat much of anything.
In entirely unrelated news, yesterday I published a blog post the gist of which was:
Things have gotten so bad that the only good thing I can say is, "I'm not suicidal yet."
Also, here's a status update (with exact word counts) for every one of my stories that has progress beyond what's published.
Only response:
I'm still waiting for some chapters for Fractured Friendship.
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March 1st (↑) -- On a Discord Server
So, I got help setting up the thing with the plumber because I can't do phones right now. Would have been nice if the person helping had told me that the plumber in question was cash or check only before we set up to have the guy come here on a day when the banks are closed. (Also, the first of the month isn't the best time for cash.)
As such, I'm sitting here hoping that enough of my patreon income is processed in time, so I can send it to paypal (which is thankfully instantaneous) and then run across the street to get that money out of an ATM.
Fun.
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I just took a shower. Being clean is wonderful.
Any idea what that fee is lookin like?Yes, you can ask. It ended up being $190 and my dad was able to come over with cash. (Which is good, because Patreon processing is still at $85 and change.)
(wait can i even ask that sry)
hoh damn, I'm glad the dad came throughIn more ways than one. I'm convinced that human shit is the worst smelling shit in the world. (Chickens try really hard for the title, though.)
Because that was a shituation right there
And, yeah, if I'd known I needed cash I wouldn't have had the plumber come on a day when banks are closed and my online income was being processed. If I could have gone to the bank, I could have gotten the cash. By this time tomorrow my patreon income will be processed and that (once I transfer it to Paypal, which, again, is instant) can be gotten from an ATM, no bank needed.
The communications breakdown was actually fairly simple, I would have assumed I needed to pay in cash, except the previous plumber (who flaked out on finishing the job) took credit and I expected the person helping me to inform me of any major differences for non-flaky plumber, needing to be paid in a different way being a major difference. Person helping me saw the situation as "Not taking credit is the default option, so it goes without saying."
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March 2nd (↑) -- Patreon Post Link to original context.
How we got to the point that I need to put scare quotes around "helpful" and "cleaning", and what it's like now that we're here
I'm going to stick this one inside a collapsible.
[Contains: plumbing problems, feeling helpless in one's one home because people are "helping", flashlights, glassware, stuff, things, things and stuff, and dead plants.]
A while ago, early November maybe, I went up to help my sister for, I think, a weekend. It was definitely three days. The plan was to arrive on one day, work on what needed doing until it was time to sleep, spend the whole next day working, and then work until my mom arrived to take me home on the third day.
No work got done.
On the ride up my sister told me about how she wanted her then-housemate gone but didn't have the heart to throw her out because, as she had nowhere else to go, that would make her homeless. Even though housemate tried to stay out of sight, my sister spent the first day too preoccupied with housemate do do anything. That night I thought I was going to have to do a lot of awkward and uncomfortable work to fix things.
Before I got out of bed the next morning, my sister told me, at great length, how horrible housemate was. (Housemate woke up to this.) It was pretty clear pretty fast that things couldn't be fixed. My sister spent the day yelling at housemate and threatening to throw her out right that second. Housemate spent most of the day crying in her room. She called everyone she could think of and asked them to come and give her a ride away. No one was simultaneously willing and able.
To be clear, she was only asking for a ride from these people. There was no other home she was trying to get a ride to. The plan was to be homeless in Portland, because she knew (from experience) that she could survive being homeless in Portland, and the same couldn't be said of being homeless in the less populated area where my sister lives.
I offered housemate two things. One was a ride out of there when my mom came the day after. The other was an empty room at my house. The hardest part was convincing my sister to just fucking wait until the next day, instead of kicking housemate out right then.
The third day was completely different. My sister tried to convince both of use to stay for two more days and actually get some work done.
First off, the reason that work hadn't been done on days one and two was that my sister wouldn't stop going on about how horrible housemate was and how she couldn't endure another minute of having housemate in the house, which left no time to do actual work.
Second, she'd been trying to get rid of housemate this whole time and it was a constant struggle just to get her to wait until day three because another night (or indeed another hour) was, apparently, too much time spent with housemate in the house. Now she was asking for two more days and nights because . . . bwah?
As you might imagine, we got the fuck out of there.
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For the record, I am in no way saying that housemate was not at fault in the relationship. I wasn't there, I don't know what the fuck led to that point. Housemate is obsessive about my sister, and she makes no secret of the fact that the love she feels for my sister isn't exactly the chaste familial kind. (My sister loves her back, but it is the familial kind. It's the same type of love our father had for the two of us when we were kids: tainted fucked up love.)
I legitimately have no idea if the things my sister said about housemate were true or not. I just know that when I was there it was completely one sided with a clear victim.
Anyway, now housemate is my housemate which worked out to be far less disruptive than I expected on a day to day basis.
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Fast forward to late November and my sister's truck runs her over. This is, naturally, a "Drop everything and help out" situation. Housemate tried to do the same --they'd managed to work together one time since housemate had come to live with me and my sister did request her presence-- but that worked out not in the least. So housemate went back to my house while I was at my sister's and at the hospital. House ran out of toilet paper; housemate used paper towels. Don't ever do that.
In retrospect the problem is kind of obvious: toilet paper is made to come apart in water, paper towels are made to hold together when wet (so one can scrub.) That being said, I could easily have made the same mistake if I'd been at home, run out, and my depression had been too severe for me to make a trip to the store.
Anyway: bad idea; don't ever do that.
I was the one to notice there was a problem, figure out what it was, and try to solve it.
Fishing paper towels out of a sewer pipe with a tool you've improvised from a wire coat hanger is not fun. I had at least one involuntary gag reflex per attempt. There were a lot of attempts (usually successful) because the paper towels seemed to go on without end.
I went back up to help my sister before I finished and was informed that the job had been completed by a family member in my absence.
While the immediate problem might have been solved, the job had not, in fact, been completed. There were still paper towels in the system, and they collected to form a new clog further down the line. Far enough down the line that it was outside the house (but not so far as to become the city's problem.)
This wasn't noticed immediately because some previous plumber had broken a clean out cap. They'd twisted the fitting right off, leaving a hole in the middle. I have no idea how long ago that might have happened. Years for sure. A decade? maybe. Decades plural? Could be.
There had never been a problem that interacted with that hole. Now there was. In what was, arguably, the most remote corner of the basement. For a while I could tell that something was wrong, but I couldn't tell what or where. It wasn't until I was downstairs when the washing machine was draining and could hear the water coming out through the hole in the cleanout plug that I figured out what was wrong.
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At this point it's probably important to mention that my depression was making it basically impossible to make phone calls. Eventually we did get a plumber to come, he determined that the problem was far enough in (more than six feet) that he'd need to use a tool that took more space than was available, and he said he'd have a quote for the rest of the job when we called up to tell him we'd cleared the space.
We never got that quote.
Housemate thought we'd need help, getting the help took several days. One too many days for the plumber, who retroactively decided that he considered the conditions unsafe and was afraid to come back. That deserves some attention.
I didn't think to ask the plumber "How much space do you need?" when he was there, because sometimes absurdly obvious things go right over my head. So when we'd imported the helper housemate thought we'd need to clear the space, we were suddenly faced with the fact we didn't know actually know what that space was.
So we called the plumber, or rather the company he worked for, to ask. This was actually the day after imported helper arrived, because the day of arrival wasn't a particularly good day for any of us, so we decided to rest, recover, and then get to work the next morning. At that point we discovered that the plumber had told his boss, the previous day, that he wasn't coming back here.
That means that he came here, determined that the problem (in spite of just being paper towels) required big honking equipment (so, again, don't ever let paper towels go down the drain), told me to call him back when we'd cleared space for it, spent several days ready and willing to return to my house, and then, after several days of considering the house a safe working environment, decided, sight unseen, that it had somehow mutated into an unsafe one.
Now, it turns out that when a plumber in that company decides they're not going back to a house, the company stops sharing information like "It's best to have an eight foot by eight foot area cleared when using the thingamajig in question" or, "Here's how much the job would have cost."
So the operator couldn't give us any of the answers that had been sitting around ready to be relayed until the plumber got cold feet and changed his mind the day before we called. She could, however, say to the plumber, "They're literally asking you what conditions you want and offering to provide exactly what you ask for, no matter what that may happen to be, so could you at least tell them what it would take for you to do the job?"
This left us in a weird situation. We didn't know what we had to do to make the plumbing possible and we also didn't know if we should call a different plumber. We did have three people to do the work.
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In the end it turned out that we didn't need three people to do the work of clearing the area. Imported helper and I were able to clear it, tons of extra space, and several adjacent spaces in one day (during which housemate was in a depressive slump that prevented her from helping.) We did this after getting a new and different plumber who was willing to tell us what he needed in order to do his job.
Here's the thing, though. The day after arriving, imported helper started to clean the kitchen, which is not in the basement and had no bearing on the plumber (the equipment needed was less than ideal for going down stairs, so the plumber entered through the back door and never needed to visit the ground floor.) Several days were taken on that, and other things, before we even called the new and different plumber who actually did plumbing.
On the first day, not eating caught up to me and I could barely hold my head up. I spent the whole day sitting on the couch because a lack of calories meant I didn't have enough energy to do much of anything else. That meant that I was stuck sitting there listening while housemate and imported helper cleaned the kitchen which sounded like breaking glass and ceramic and would have been stressful anyway because I wasn't there to separate the good stuff from the trash.
I had food delivered and ingested sufficient calories that night, in the following days I was more able to do stuff. That said, the clanging of pots and pans (remember: kitchen) proved to be too much for me, and I had to give up on helping one day because of that. Too much noise; had to hide.
The lack of eating nausea didn't go away nearly as easily as the lack of energy from the lack of calories. That limited my involvement too. Just the fact there were two of them left me feeling outnumbered. With the exception of the day that depression had housemate too out of it to engage, both housemate and imported helper have way more energy than I do.
It's not quite that I feel unsafe; I know that neither of these people would intentionally hurt me. That said, outnumbered, out powered, and not remotely in control. Especially since, whether I'm able to help or not, they could ask me things, and they don't. They just do what they think is best.
People cleaning my house for me without needing any effort on my part sounds nice in overly simplistic theory. The thing is, I don't trust them. It's not that I expect them to steal things or anything like that. They are generally nice and trustworthy people. I just don't trust them to do the job properly.
They say the right things, but the results speak differently.
The rooms they've cleaned are clean. There's no doubt about that. They're also empty. Desolate. It isn't hard to see why.
It's easy to clean the threshing floor when you don't separate the wheat from the chaff. Just throw out everything, and you're done. It's so very quick and simple. Sure, you don't have any actual grain at the end of it, but it's not like that matters, right?
I had a sense from the start that, "We're cleaning!" actually meant, "You're going to have to dig through a bunch of trash bags one by one to pull things out." I've been assured that, because they understand and respect that it's not their house, that won't be the case and they're leaving everything for me to go through at leisure. Only things that are very definitely undeniably obviously trash are being sorted as trash.
I was given this assurance without ever needing to state my misgivings, by the way.
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One of the bags of "Yup, only trash here," burst some days ago, and they haven't gotten around to picking it up yet. (Fun.) I had a look through it today. Laid out on the ground I did indeed find some trash. Also a lot of my silverware. Canned food. (All of my fucking peaches.) A flashlight.
My depression has been so bad that I haven't watered plants like I should. Many have died. I am not proud of this. I do have a question, though. Who throws out the vase because the plant in it has died?
Apparently the answer to that is "Housemate and/or imported helper."
The plug for the kitchen sink. Several glass cups, not a chip on them. (Impressive given that they were thrown in a bag with metal cans, metal silverware, and so forth, carried in it, and then fell on a paved driveway when that bag broke.) Neon green frosting, unopened.* Flash cards for Ancient Greek, somehow dry and pristine (in spite of being left outside in the wetness of late winter since the bag burst) and still bound by elastic into one easy to cycle through thematic group. My tuna strainer (and its concentric extension for times when you get an oversized can.) Pliers.
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Let's pause for a moment on those pliers. They were lost. Part of cleaning is finding lost things. You find your lost pliers and you don't need to waste money on new pliers when you have perfectly good pliers already. That, of course, only works if you don't throw the fucking pliers out.
Not everything was lost. I knew where the canned food was, and the only thing needed to use it was having the will. (And a can opener, but that's nailed to the fucking wall, well . . . to the copulating cabinet.) The plug to the kitchen sink probably could have used some cleaning and both the silverware and the cups definitely needed cleaning, but I knew where all of these things were.
The tuna strainer I'm not sure about. Once upon a time we did lose one and ended up buying a new one. This was long enough ago that "we" meant my mom and I. I have yet to come across a situation where I needed two, so I've been pretty laissez-faire** when it comes to keeping track of the second one (whichever that happens to be) when I've got a firm grasp on where the one I'm using is. The one that got thrown out might have been the one I wasn't keeping track of, it might have been the one I was. There's a decent chance I'll never know.
The neon green frosting I could have located (probably, we'll never know for sure now) in spite of not knowing precisely where it was. The kitchen has, or rather: had a general "cake stuff" area.
The flashlight, the flash cards, and the pliers, though? Those were very definitely lost. Again, one of the best parts of cleaning --real cleaning instead of this "throw out everything" shit-- is finding lost things. I've already gotten into the details of the pliers. Recap: I'd have needed to buy new ones if I hadn't found them.
The flash cards are different. They're a reminder of one of the few good things in a very bleak part of my life. They're something that could finally spur me into actually re-learning Ancient Greek, which I've been meaning to do forever. And, whether I start that project now or later, they're functional.
The flashlight is complicated. Right now, I could use another flashlight in the house. That may continue to be the case. On the other hand, it could turn out that when this ordeal is over I have more flashlights than I could ever want or need in the house. (I know that won't be the case with the pliers, but for flashlights it's possible.) In that case, there are various possibilities.
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I've been in plenty of situations where it would be useful to have a spare flashlight to loan to someone, and in many of those situations it would be even better if you could just give it to them. I'm pretty sure that I have family members who could use flashlights in their cars, but don't have them. Having a dedicated flashlight for something means that wherever you take that something, you'll always have a flashlight. It could be a tent bag. It could be a purse or a backpack. It could be a first aid kit. (Not all injuries happen in well lit places.) It could be basically anything.
As one final thing, I can make something out of it.
Like what? you may ask.
So, anyone who's seen me in a place where there's free or obscenely cheap stuff has probably noticed that I have a tendency to grab things of clear patterned glass. For example, I have at least two (possibly three) Wexford pattern clear glass cruets in spite of the fact that I have never once thought to myself, "I need something to hold liquid condiments such as oil or vinegar."
But, Chris, you could possibly say but probably wouldn't, those things are nothing. You can get them online for five to twelve dollars.
This is true. I've only just learned that it's true as a side effect of trying to figure out what those damned things are called. That being said, first off it's better when it's free and, even when it isn't free, it feels more significant when you find it yourself and hold it in your hands before getting it.
Ok, but you still haven't said why you want them or what it has to do with flashlights, the hypothetical interlocutor I've been calling "you" will now say as a cheap way to advance the narrative.
The answer is, quite simply, this:
Now, the first thing to note is that that's not one of the aforementioned cruets. I have no idea what this lidded glass bowl is called, and I do not, in fact, have two of them. It does, however, have a flashlight in it.
But, Chris, hypothetical you says again, that looks like crap. The light is all concentrated in one spot, you've braced the flashlight by doing something ugly with the wrist strap, and everything's massively uneven and uninspiring.
Right you are, hypothetical rude person. That doesn't look terribly good and leaves a lot to be desired. However, the reason it doesn't look all that good and leaves a lot to be desired is because the flashlight in question is one I use as a flashlight.
After sticking it in there, taking a few pictures, and finally using lid as beam spreader so that I could hold the flashlight like a torch while I walked around the house during that power outage (assuming I'm remembering correctly), I separated the flashlight from the glass kitchenware so that the flashlight could easily be used as a flashlight in future times (which by now include past and present times) and the kitchenware could sit on a shelf being pretty.
If, however, I didn't need the flashlight to continue to be a flashlight, I could have ripped it apart, altered it to suit the intended purpose, and made a much nicer lamp than the improvised and temporary fare you see above.
That only works if the unnecessary flashlight is in my possession instead of in the trash, though, which brings us back to the central thesis of this post:
People are "cleaning" my house, and I want them to stop, but am conflict averse (and one of them lives here now and thus ought to have a say regardless), and all of this means that I'm going to need to dig through a bunch of trash bags because: sweet fuck people, you can't just throw out everything!As an aside, while the two Wexford pattern clear glass cruets I definitely own are (somehow) still on their shelf in the kitchen, the illuminated glass bowl, with cover, pictured above is not on its shelf. This does not mean that it's been thrown out (though it might have been) because housemate and imported helper cleared almost every damned thing out of the kitchen with some subset of it intended to be returned at a later time.
One would hope that the pretty glass thing made it into the "temporarily removed" pile instead of the "trash, get rid of it" pile, if only because in the first pile it seems less likely to be broken.
There is something I like about such things beyond just shoving a light source inside of them, though. (And beyond their obvious mundane aesthetic appeal, I mean.) Shine a laser into the lidded glass bowl, and the effect is beautiful. I never looked into it as much as I intended at the time, but it seemed like it might be possible to make a light source out of that effect, provided the surrounding area were sufficiently dark. Even if it couldn't be used for practical lighting, it's still pretty.
Ok, so, we're done with the burst bag of trash that included a bunch of non-trash, right? The flashlight was the last thing to discuss, as I recall. So, let's stick an asterism here so that the wall of text is punctuated by non-text. (I'll retroactively insert some up-post as well.)
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Wait, that wasn't the end of it. Plant pots, and . . . other stuff. I've totally forgotten. (This is the last thing I'm adding to the post, having come back to stick it in after writing the rest.) The plant pots are significant just because not everything comes down to matters of hydroponics. That there were more not-trash things than listed above is significant mostly because the list really did go on (and on.) In a single bag. That contained pounds of perfectly good canned peaches. (Canned diced tomatoes too.) And was supposed to be entirely trash.
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Here's another fun tidbit. There are three places in my house where I keep plants. There are two that housemate and imported helper haven't come near yet, and the one place they've dealt with. The place they dealt with had only one plant that survived my depression-induced lack of watering.
When the plants all disappeared, I had (for the first and only time) cause to believe that maybe this cleaning wouldn't be as bad as I imagined. While the dead plants were gone without a trace, the live plant had been carefully laid aside and kept safe. I was going to put it back in the window, but I couldn't find anything to put it in. (If those vases hadn't been thrown out, it would have been a different story.) This happened while I was the only one in the house.
So I was forced to wait so that I could ask housemate and imported helper, "Where'd you put all the stuff that could hold a plant?" By the time I had a chance to ask, the plant had mysteriously vanished.
The only kitchen plant to survive my depression, and the neglect that came with it, killed by cleaning. I mean, there's a slim chance that I'll find it before it's dead, but it's probably outside. Even if it has survived the night so far, and it's really not made for that, come Thursday the low is supposed to be below freezing.
I can't look through that much "trash" in that amount of time and expect to find something that small.
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So, here's the thing, or one of the things, about having to look through bags of trash to find the stuff that shouldn't have been thrown out instead of putting trash in the trash while putting non-trash where it goes: bags of trash have trash in them. (Usually.)
That means that the whole thing is a good deal less pleasant than dealing with the original mess. It also means that any time you put something icky in the trash, it's with the knowledge that you're going to have to deal with that shit later.
Eat a banana, throw the peel in the trash. Unless you looked through that bag and verified it was all actually trash immediately before throwing the peel in and then took it out of the trash can, tied it up, and put it wherever you store curb-ready trash immediately after throwing the peel in, you're going to meet that peel again.
No matter how unappealing (pun not intended, but acknowledged) that peel is when it goes in, it's going to be worse the next time you meet it.
The smart thing to do, other than saying, "Please, for the love of God, stop fucking cleaning my house!" would probably be to have a private secret trash bag into which I could safely put things like that banana peel because, since the others didn't know about it, I wouldn't have to worry about someone not-me putting non-trash in it. (If I were to put non-trash in it, that would be my own fault, and thus qualitatively different.)
I'm not actually gonna do that.
Have another picture of a flashlight:
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* It comes in packs of multiple colors, so sometimes you have to set one or more away for the next cake because the current cake doesn't need every color. They're sealed completely air tight (you have to physically cut the container open to get at the frosting) so that it will keep until the next cake comes around.
** Yes, I did have a long discussion about economics today.
March 5th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
Adventures in having "helpful" people "cleaning" my house, part n:
I've spent all morning in the driveway going through trash bags. Most of it really should have been thrown out. In the recycling instead of the trash, but that wouldn't be so much of a problem.
I found photographs, which are definitely older than me and possibly older than my mom of my grandfather and others. I didn't look through them, so I can't really say who was in them in any detail. One person who might be in those photos is my grandfather's brother Andy. Andy died two Tuesdays ago (February 25th), and today is his wake and funeral. (Not burial, though. You have to wait for the ground to thaw.)
Not long after I found the photos, one of the helpful cleaners noticed that I was going through the trash and announced that she was going to stop helping because she couldn't work if it was going to be for nothing. I very much hope she's serious.
(Another thing being thrown out: the newer better phone that's supposed to replace my crappy current phone. Fun.)
March 5th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
Back from the wake. I would have stayed for the funeral, but neither of the person who gave me a ride there had to head off well before that and the one who gave me a ride home hadn't been planning on staying and I didn't want to impose. Said person way my mom, and her uncle just died (obviously), so it's not a good time for imposing. (Besides which, even though I would have stayed for the funeral service, it's not like I would have gotten much out of it. It would have been more of a perfunctory attendance.)
Didn't mean to get side tracked on logistics and scheduling.
What I wanted to say, instead, was this: they never look right.
Never.
They're too big in some places and too thin in others and they never look right.
(this me quoting a story someone else on the server wrote)
I saw him not long ago. A few months maybe. I don't remember what he looked like, not really. I saw his corpse an hour ago, perhaps less, I don't remember what it looked like, not really.
My memory doesn't work that way. It's probably why I take so many pictures, even of things that really, honestly, there's no reason to take pictures of. Instead there's this . . . sense, a feeling, like trying to get a firm grasp on something from a dream you're in the process of forgtetting. I know the idea of what he looked like, and that would be enough to recognize him in an instant, and it's certainly enough to know that the thing in the casket doesn't look like him.
I should have shot fucking video the last time I saw him, even though we weren't talking about much of anything and I, as I so often do in conversation, sounded like an idiot (I'm pretty sure.) Because now I'm never going to see him again, and I don't remember what he looked like.
My uncle Andy (technically great uncle, but we didn't call him that) was the last of his generation in the family. Everyone else was already gone. I can't explain why that matters, and I'm pretty sure it shouldn't, but for some reason that just adds to the . . . everything.
March 6th (↑) -- Disqus Comment. Link to original context.
Nothing new this week. Nothing old that I've dug up and posting. I did come across some old writings of mine, possibly high school era, in the past week, but I've been way too much in "I have to rescue things before the people
Wait, I did have something new. At patreon I wrote a post called How we got to the point that I need to put scare quotes around "helpful" and "cleaning", and what it's like now that we're here, but if you're not paying me that link is pretty worthless. I have an incomplete post for Stealing Commas that will cover much of the same territory while also placing it in a larger context (basically: the last three years), but I didn't manage to finish it.
[Not being in control of my own house, pet violence, coercion by threatening to put a pet down, memories of a different pet being put down]
Anyway, in the course of trying to save stuff from the "helpful" people "cleaning" my house I cam across some old stuff of mine. Poetry and prose both, very possibly from high school, and if not then likely early college. I haven't had a chance to look at it, because I'm spending my time going through bags of "trash" and pulling out large quantities of not-trash.
The plumbing problem has been fixed. Finally taking a shower was great.
My sister never trained or properly socialized her dogs. This resulted in some kind of vicious dog to dog violence. My sister called up andbasically said that no. She flat out said that if I wouldn't let her dog stay at my house she would put it down, herself, with a fucking shotgun.
Apart from not being house trained, the dog is fine as far as dogs go. I'm not really in a place, mentally, where I can take care of a dog. Housemate will probably do much of the work, and right now the person we brought in to help clear space for the plumber (furniture needed to be moved) will also help until he heads back out. Both of them have some level of experience with training dogs, so that's theoretically good.
When I say that "we" brought him in to help clear the space . . . *deep breath*
Housemate didn't think two people would be enough. Two people was enough. (She was out of it due to her depression being set off, hard, the day we actually cleared the space in question.) It was sold to me as him coming to clear the necessary space for plumbing. Apparently everyone else on earth knew that he was coming to help clean the whole house.
I was well aware that people "cleaning" my house would in fact be "Me being forced to dig through fucking trash bags to pull out non-trash" which was why I wanted it to just be about clearing out space for the necessary equipment for the plumbing.
March 7th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
You know the thing that almost all Anon-a-Miss fics get wrong? No matter how justified the anger, verbally ripping people down and making them feel bad doesn't make you feel good. Not really. In the moment you can sometimes ride a wave of righteous fury and feel like you're accomplishing something, but in the end nothing has been fixed and you're empty.
Housemate and temporary housemate were away for much of today. I was going through the giant pile of trash bags they'd created pulling out the non-trash things. This shouldn't be necessary in the first place, but I'd kind of gotten used to it.
Things started to go wrong when I found a tarot card, then several more, then several more again, then went into the house so I could use the kitchen table to help in putting them in order (easiest way to check what, if anything, is missing.) It's the second full deck of tarot cards I found in the stuff they threw out.
Then I found my glasses. They needed to have the frame fixed, so I've been wearing backup ones that aren't my actual prescription. Trouble with finding my glasses is, I only found half of the frame. Also my-- Wait, before that I found my favorite shirt. Not the first clothing I've found, but this was very definitely very completely clean. Then my glasses, and the doubly emergency backup glasses for situations like if someone threw my glasses into the trash, and then something happened to backup glasses too.
Then jewelry. And books. Books have been a stable of what they've thrown out. Home improvement supplies, new in their boxes. So on.
And I was left to stew on this for much of the day while I raced against the setting sun to find everything that had been dumped in that particular bag especially, I hoped, the rest of my glasses. (I didn't.)
They came back from where they'd been, a photo shoot with a friend of theirs, and as soon as both of them were in the house I unloaded on them. So they went from a good day to me berating them. Ruined their day with enough force to cause emotional whiplash; my day (and my mood) have not improved. Because that never works.
They fucked up, the behavior was downright assholic, but me tearing them down fixed nothing. I just brought more misery into the world, nothing more.
That's the thing that all of the "Yell at the Rainbooms and/or CMC" fics miss. It never makes you feel better, not really.
March 13th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
Wait . . . the reason it was difficult to get toilet paper is because people thought it would save them from a pandemic and started stockpiling it?
Sweet fuck do we live in a strange world.
March 13th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
It's raining today. Hard.
* It comes in packs of multiple colors, so sometimes you have to set one or more away for the next cake because the current cake doesn't need every color. They're sealed completely air tight (you have to physically cut the container open to get at the frosting) so that it will keep until the next cake comes around.
** Yes, I did have a long discussion about economics today.
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March 5th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
Adventures in having "helpful" people "cleaning" my house, part n:
I've spent all morning in the driveway going through trash bags. Most of it really should have been thrown out. In the recycling instead of the trash, but that wouldn't be so much of a problem.
I found photographs, which are definitely older than me and possibly older than my mom of my grandfather and others. I didn't look through them, so I can't really say who was in them in any detail. One person who might be in those photos is my grandfather's brother Andy. Andy died two Tuesdays ago (February 25th), and today is his wake and funeral. (Not burial, though. You have to wait for the ground to thaw.)
Not long after I found the photos, one of the helpful cleaners noticed that I was going through the trash and announced that she was going to stop helping because she couldn't work if it was going to be for nothing. I very much hope she's serious.
(Another thing being thrown out: the newer better phone that's supposed to replace my crappy current phone. Fun.)
wait why are they cleaning your entire houseBecause that seems to have been the plan from the beginning, and I just wasn't let in on it. Also, as of yesterday I'm stuck with one of my sister's dogs. I am not in a mental state where I'm able to take care of a dog right now, so I kind of need extra people around, which removes the only option I hadn't tried yet: yelling at them to get the fuck out.
(also my condolences...¿)
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March 5th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
Back from the wake. I would have stayed for the funeral, but neither of the person who gave me a ride there had to head off well before that and the one who gave me a ride home hadn't been planning on staying and I didn't want to impose. Said person way my mom, and her uncle just died (obviously), so it's not a good time for imposing. (Besides which, even though I would have stayed for the funeral service, it's not like I would have gotten much out of it. It would have been more of a perfunctory attendance.)
Didn't mean to get side tracked on logistics and scheduling.
What I wanted to say, instead, was this: they never look right.
Never.
They're too big in some places and too thin in others and they never look right.
(this me quoting a story someone else on the server wrote)
It looked nothing like Sunset Shimmer.Every fucking time there's an open casket. They never look right. They look strange and wrong and foreign and unknown and fuck my memory!
It looked exactly like Sunset's corpse.
I saw him not long ago. A few months maybe. I don't remember what he looked like, not really. I saw his corpse an hour ago, perhaps less, I don't remember what it looked like, not really.
My memory doesn't work that way. It's probably why I take so many pictures, even of things that really, honestly, there's no reason to take pictures of. Instead there's this . . . sense, a feeling, like trying to get a firm grasp on something from a dream you're in the process of forgtetting. I know the idea of what he looked like, and that would be enough to recognize him in an instant, and it's certainly enough to know that the thing in the casket doesn't look like him.
I should have shot fucking video the last time I saw him, even though we weren't talking about much of anything and I, as I so often do in conversation, sounded like an idiot (I'm pretty sure.) Because now I'm never going to see him again, and I don't remember what he looked like.
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My uncle Andy (technically great uncle, but we didn't call him that) was the last of his generation in the family. Everyone else was already gone. I can't explain why that matters, and I'm pretty sure it shouldn't, but for some reason that just adds to the . . . everything.
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March 6th (↑) -- Disqus Comment. Link to original context.
Wait, I did have something new. At patreon I wrote a post called How we got to the point that I need to put scare quotes around "helpful" and "cleaning", and what it's like now that we're here, but if you're not paying me that link is pretty worthless. I have an incomplete post for Stealing Commas that will cover much of the same territory while also placing it in a larger context (basically: the last three years), but I didn't manage to finish it.
[Not being in control of my own house, pet violence, coercion by threatening to put a pet down, memories of a different pet being put down]
Anyway, in the course of trying to save stuff from the "helpful" people "cleaning" my house I cam across some old stuff of mine. Poetry and prose both, very possibly from high school, and if not then likely early college. I haven't had a chance to look at it, because I'm spending my time going through bags of "trash" and pulling out large quantities of not-trash.
The plumbing problem has been fixed. Finally taking a shower was great.
My sister never trained or properly socialized her dogs. This resulted in some kind of vicious dog to dog violence. My sister called up and
Apart from not being house trained, the dog is fine as far as dogs go. I'm not really in a place, mentally, where I can take care of a dog. Housemate will probably do much of the work, and right now the person we brought in to help clear space for the plumber (furniture needed to be moved) will also help until he heads back out. Both of them have some level of experience with training dogs, so that's theoretically good.
When I say that "we" brought him in to help clear the space . . . *deep breath*
Housemate didn't think two people would be enough. Two people was enough. (She was out of it due to her depression being set off, hard, the day we actually cleared the space in question.) It was sold to me as him coming to clear the necessary space for plumbing. Apparently everyone else on earth knew that he was coming to help clean the whole house.
I was well aware that people "cleaning" my house would in fact be "Me being forced to dig through fucking trash bags to pull out non-trash" which was why I wanted it to just be about clearing out space for the necessary equipment for the plumbing.
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March 7th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
You know the thing that almost all Anon-a-Miss fics get wrong? No matter how justified the anger, verbally ripping people down and making them feel bad doesn't make you feel good. Not really. In the moment you can sometimes ride a wave of righteous fury and feel like you're accomplishing something, but in the end nothing has been fixed and you're empty.
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Housemate and temporary housemate were away for much of today. I was going through the giant pile of trash bags they'd created pulling out the non-trash things. This shouldn't be necessary in the first place, but I'd kind of gotten used to it.
Things started to go wrong when I found a tarot card, then several more, then several more again, then went into the house so I could use the kitchen table to help in putting them in order (easiest way to check what, if anything, is missing.) It's the second full deck of tarot cards I found in the stuff they threw out.
Then I found my glasses. They needed to have the frame fixed, so I've been wearing backup ones that aren't my actual prescription. Trouble with finding my glasses is, I only found half of the frame. Also my-- Wait, before that I found my favorite shirt. Not the first clothing I've found, but this was very definitely very completely clean. Then my glasses, and the doubly emergency backup glasses for situations like if someone threw my glasses into the trash, and then something happened to backup glasses too.
Then jewelry. And books. Books have been a stable of what they've thrown out. Home improvement supplies, new in their boxes. So on.
And I was left to stew on this for much of the day while I raced against the setting sun to find everything that had been dumped in that particular bag especially, I hoped, the rest of my glasses. (I didn't.)
They came back from where they'd been, a photo shoot with a friend of theirs, and as soon as both of them were in the house I unloaded on them. So they went from a good day to me berating them. Ruined their day with enough force to cause emotional whiplash; my day (and my mood) have not improved. Because that never works.
They fucked up, the behavior was downright assholic, but me tearing them down fixed nothing. I just brought more misery into the world, nothing more.
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That's the thing that all of the "Yell at the Rainbooms and/or CMC" fics miss. It never makes you feel better, not really.
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March 13th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
Wait . . . the reason it was difficult to get toilet paper is because people thought it would save them from a pandemic and started stockpiling it?
Sweet fuck do we live in a strange world.
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March 13th (↑) -- On a Discord Server
It's raining today. Hard.
There are still a bunch of trash bags outside filled with a mixture of trash and not-trash. Given how heavily the not-trash skews towards things that respond badly to water (including fucking books) this is a very stressful thing for me.
The people who bagged all of this up and took it outside, and kept on doing so after there was no space remaining in the garage which, while hardly the safest place, at least has a roof over it, are in another city/town right now. This is probably a good thing since flaying people alive is supposed to an over the top threat rather than a means of non-verbal interpersonal communication.
There would be less to stress out about if they'd bagged things up well, since trash bags are waterproof, but many of the bags are quite thoroughly perforated at this point.
It probably would have all fit in the garage if they'd used any sort of care in packing, because I keep finding empty containers and cardboard boxes that haven't been broken down meaning that much (possibly even most) of the volume is taken up by empty space.
But the kind of people who bag well and/or with care probably wouldn't have thrown out half of the things they threw out.
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March 13th (↑) -- Disqus Comment. Link to original context.
It's raining today. That, in itself, is stressful. You see, there are still a large number of bags of "trash" outside. I've been spending a lot of my daylight time, perhaps even most of my daylight time, going through those bags. I've pulled out a lot of things that don't respond well to water. (Electronics, books, and loose-papers-with-important-things-written-on-them stand out.)
The trash bags are water poof, which is good, but the lack of care with which they were filled has led to many of them becoming . . . perforated. Water can and does get in. I have seen it. (Though, mercifully, only rarely.)
It's also the case that whenever I remove a bag and make progress on separating
Entirely apart from the fact that we're talking about the fact my books and jewelry and so forth have been thrown out, the way these bags were filled is downright absurd. The reason it took so many bags, which is probably the reason that the bags of "trash" didn't all fit in the garage under the roof thereof, is because the volume is largely empty space. (As near as I can tell, based on what I've gone through so far.) Boxes were not broken down. Containers were not opened.
The rolling suitcase/dufflebag I use when traveling for a week or more was thrown out (which it shouldn't have been) empty. That's a pretty decent volume of air and a relatively small amount of plastic and canvas. When it's in a large black trash bag, though, it looks like any other pile of trash.
It occurs to me now, when it's definitely too late for the storm that's here, that I might have done better to open up all the bags, take out the big empty things, and then see if I could fit what remained somewhere safe.
A hug part of the reason it takes so much time is because of how damned slow it is to go through the little stuff. If I'd focused on the big stuff only, instead of going one bag at a time, maybe I could have had everything safe by today. Fuck.
I'm alone today. In human terms at least. My sister's dog is still here. Not really fit to take care of her properly, but given how neglected she was in the past, it's probably still a step up. I don't really know why I'm alone today. The housemate and extended-stay house guest were supposed to be spending a single night away to test out a possible living and working arrangement. That night was two nights ago.
I would love to be able to enjoy their absence, but I'm way too worn down, it means that the dog is solely my responsibility, and it means that the things they said they'd do which I probably can trust them to do (washing the dishes is the only thing that comes to mind) won't get done unless I take time away from the thousand other things I need to do because of their past actions, recuperation, or both.
I can't cope with this shit, and yet I have no choice.
All of this, including the plumbing problem that set off these adventures in ["When we say, "Clean," we mean, "Toss everything important to you in the trash"], is because I tried to be a decent human being. The relationship between my sister and housemate was toxic as fuck, housemate was begging people to get her out of there even though she had no place else to go. Her plan, insofar as it existed, was to be homeless in a city she knew (from experience) she could survive being homeless in instead of a countryside where that wasn't true.
I offered her an empty room at my house, so she'd have a place to go. I don't regret that and if I had known about (but somehow been unable to change) all of the bullshit that resulted from it, I'd still have made the same decision, but it still feels massively unfair that doing something good has led to this.
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