Off to a good start

At 5pm, I shut off the library computers. “Yay, let’s go, 2021!” And as I ran out of the room, my belt loop caught on the door latch, and it swung me around to slam face first into the wall.

Nice touch, 2020.

Annual questionnaire 2020

1. What did you do in 2020 that you’d never done before?  Rescued a rooster impaled clean through with a steel dart. Made Julia Child’s chicken fricassee (whoa). Had a gallery show. Got weird about romance novel covers.

2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions? The theme was “get the ball rolling”. Let’s check in on how that’s going:

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? My friend's baby 'Meaty' arrived in March! And the world shut down. Coincidence?

4. Did anyone die? Mjolnir. Mike's grandparents are both in the hospital with covid. My cousin died of the virus. And my step-grandfather. And a family friend. And my co-worker’s neighbor. My friend Philip died of a heart attack. My colleague Rick died in a plane crash. An egg-bound chicken died in my arms. My aunt almost died after her son smashed her finger in the car door like a candy cane and it went septic, necessitating an IV of antibiotics for a month. If spotting the Spectre of Death were like spotting shooting stars, it was a meteor shower of a year.

5. What places did you visit? lol

6. What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020? I’d actually like to keep the masks, thanks. I have a face that would really suit a beard, and this is as close as I’ll get. I'll take the vaccine, though. And a plane ride with my new star-spangled driver’s license.

7. What moments from 2020 will remain etched upon your memory?

Zenny vs. the roofing nail. 

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Gallery show! That is all. I sat at the library door and felt my life drain away for the rest of the year.

9. What was your biggest failure? Being nice to patrons while sitting at the door feeling my life drain away. 

“You must be so glad to have people back inside the library!”

No. 

“MASKS DON’T WORK I HAVE A MEDICAL CONDITION.” 

Ffs.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? I burned my hand pretty badly on a roast beef.

 
11. What was the best thing you bought? We made a point of buying food from small restaurants every Friday to help keep our town alive, and discovered a place nearby that makes fresh calzones and stromboli. Good citizenship and wadded up pizza. This was a win.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Gavin got his driver's license and has been applying to colleges and Apple internships. Leif learned to play piano. Zenny started reading chapter books. Mike worked from home and got all the kids through distance learning without losing his shit. I am not on this achievement list.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled? I always make fun of tv shows where the characters speak to each other from 4 inches away, right up in each others' lunch breath, but HOLY SHIT PEOPLE REALLY DO THIS. They just charge right up like they're going to kiss you or trample you. I want my desk back.

14. What did you get excited about? I broke up half a dozen fights and wrote a bunch of security reports, that’s kind of like being excited.

15. What song will always remind you of 2020? 

Between Volcano Man and My Stick, there has been a lot of terrible singing happening in our house.

This is the song that caught me crying in the car, though. Thanks for the permanent brain connection, radio.

 

 

16. Compared to this time last year, are you:

a) happier or sadder?  lol
b) thinner or fatter? This is going to become more a matter of mass distribution as the years go by. My meat is still affixed to it’s assigned portion of my skeleton, mostly.
c) richer or poorer? I think I’m coming out ahead somehow. For now. 

17. What do you wish you’d done more of? I was really wanting to rejoin the figure drawing group this year, just in time for it to be disbanded indefinitely. I need more painting models in my life, my kids are tired of me and have started assigning cats.

19. "So! How's your love life?" 

 

20. What was your favorite TV program?  What we do in the Shadows, Mandalorian, and Atlanta. I tried a few Korean dramas, and of those my favorite was Signal. I am here for the grumpy tired guys with strong codes of honor. And vampires.

21. What was the best book you read?

 

Troubled Blood. I know we're all mad at JK Rowling, but I like her stories. Your heroes will change throughout their lives, but your relationship with a song or a book or a painting is personal. It’s okay. You are a speck of electricity in a meat suit on a rock hurtling through a void around a ball of fire; just like what you like.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, was good, too.

I liked Devolution: a Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, but it felt like a first draft. Write it again with more character development and less “this is going to be a movie with Chris Pratt”, Max.

22. What did you want and get?  I got to keep my job in an age of economic ruin. Also: giant rubber lobster claws.

23. What did you want and NOT get? Oh hey, there is still a MASSIVE ROCK PILE where the back yard should be. I’m going to start trailing gravel around the neighborhood in my pant leg, Shawshank-style, if someone doesn’t get that dumpster situation sorted out.

24. What was your favorite film of this year? Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I also liked Parasite, and The Eurovision Song Contest. 

25. Did you make some new friends this year? lol

26. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? Rum strong enough to blow the figgy pudding off the table. Flaming desserts are the only holiday fireworks I fully endorse.

27. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2020?  “I Bet I’d Look Good in Clown Pants”. Surprise: I do not.

28. What kept you sane? That train somehow stayed on the tracks without any help from its driver. I sat back and looked out the window all year.

29. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy? 
 

Cormoran Strike in absolutely stupid Musketeer pants.

 

30. What political/news issue stirred you the most? There has been a lot of very troubling news this year, and I was as stirred as anyone (the wildfires, protests, and Rick’s plane crash) but the news item that made me laugh was the failed Russian underpants poisoning, solved by calling the assassin and telling him he was in trouble.

31. Who did you miss? Nothing like a plague to make you think about the people you haven’t spoken to in two or sixteen or thirty years, and wonder if you’ll ever see them again. 

 

(Except you, S. You can stay fucked off at this point, I’m not sending any more Christmas cards into the void.)

32. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020. Nah. I’m going to pass on this and learn two things next year, instead. 

Cats and Carnations

It’s back to work tomorrow after a long weekend. Had time to paint for the first time in more than a month. Feels like catching a big breath before hitting a flip turn and swimming back the other way.

It’s cool and blustery. Massive apple bread pudding and meatloaf in the oven. I’d like another week of days like this.

Christmas 2020: the grinchening

Santa had a terrible realization and went skidding into the living room to chug milk and stuff cookies into pockets at 4:47am. Leif came bursting into the bedroom and whisper-yelled “IT’S CHRISTMAS” at 4:59am, causing me to leap 3 inches straight off the bed.

Close call there.

Last week I accidentally destroyed the vacuum, crushing and snapping off the top half of it. 

“I hulk-smashed the vacuum!” I bragged. 

“That is what you get for buying a vacuum from the thrift store,” my family said. No appreciation for my appliance-crushing abilities. 

“Well, I also broke the food processor.” Still no applause. These people.

So I was very happy when my mother gave me a robot vacuum for Christmas. I am gets-excited-about-vacuum-cleaners years old. Oh no.

After the house was destroyed, my mother packed up her overnight bag and went back home to feed her cats, and I chased the kids around with the robot vacuum while they scrambled to get legos out of its path. 

In the afternoon we packed up the leftovers and puff pastry and went over for meat pie and flaming figgy pudding.

Except it turns out that the horrible jet-fuel rum I had gotten in my eyeball the day before and tipped down the kitchen sink had been the flaming pudding rum. I have no idea how that bottle of poison ended up at my house when it usually lives safely at the back of my mother’s liquor shelf collecting dust until we set it on fire, but we must have been trying to light the grill with it or something, because there it was. Gone. 

We had to light the pudding with the good booze, instead, and it barely gave a flicker before burning out. No ring of fire for us this year.

It tasted way better drenched with $60 cognac, though. 

It’s all soup and painting for the rest of the weekend. The rain looks like snow, keeping the neighborhood quiet and off their new hoverboards. Almost feels like Christmas over here or something.

Christmas Eve

(Edited to fix dates - drink to forget, etc)

HO HO I am drinking.

After euthanizing our cat, I went to work and sat at the library door live-streaming a funeral with my co-worker because her neighbor, who worked at the airport, died of the virus over the weekend. 

It was an open-casket zoom meeting. 

It was super weird.

But spending a couple hours with a dead person is a traditional holiday spirit power-move. It could be worse. It HAS been worse. It WILL be worse. So buy the biggest goose you can find and stop being an asshole. 

Absolutely right. Even with a dead cat and a phone funeral, this year doesn't even crack the top 5 Worst Christmases I Would Punch a Ghost to Avoid Revisiting. 

Christmas 2004 2003: father-in-law told Mike he was "pussy whipped" because he didn't make me cook Christmas dinner with a 103 degree fever while staying in the unheated basement with a sick baby.

Christmas 1994: traveled to Vancouver to see my dying grandmother, who then died, and in her absence my mother's 6th grade class wrote "condolence" cards which included ones that said "I don't care that your mother died" and "I'm glad she's dead". 

There were others. Divorced, dumped, pregnant, sick, regifted gifts from the previous year. Most were good, though.

So, you know, basically I can do whatever I want now. Think of your worst christmases. Is fucking up the roast going to top that? PROBABLY NOT.

So what I want to do is bake until everyone is happy. Breakfast took two attempts because of a sausage mishap and I got 140-proof rum in my eyeball while soaking pie cherries, but then I started making gin spritzers and things started going smoothly.

SO FAR:

Eggnog Pie (as yet un-stepped-in).

Apple tart with lychee glaze, because I didn't feel like making apple pie. 

And a terrible selfie with the cat in the wrapping-strewn ruins of my bedroom while the kids watch the Grinch.

There will be roast beef. And Yorkshire pudding. This year was stupid and we can do something about it right now.

This has been your annual reminder to take the holiday by the neck and shake it until joy falls out, folks.

It’s over

He went outside and ran for a couple seconds, chasing a lizard, then sat and watched butterflies, had a pee in the grass, and napped on the couch with us. All the other cats licked his face before he left. 

We’ve all got eyes like boiled eggs. Making soup.

Things I don't want to do

Two people walked up to the library. "Remember me? I was here yesterday taking pictures of everything? Today I brought the director."

The director looked around. "Offices there. Build walls over there. Okay."

"Alright! You've been chosen for filming! You're a police station now."

Thanks? 

So the film crew for the new I Know What You Did Last Summer series is arriving today to scope out the sets they'll need to build to cover up the fact that we are a library and not a police station. I wore my best police station desk clerk outfit, in case they want to offer me a job.

Okay, I don't actually want the job.

Meanwhile, because we have the “day off” on Boxing Day but don’t get paid for it, we have to come in this weekend, instead. What a treat. This means I have one day to finish everything for the holidays. 

And that one day includes euthanizing my son's cat.

Before having to shop for stocking stuffers, my second thoughts add bitterly.

Unless I shop for stocking stuffers first, then kill the cat in the afternoon, say my third thoughts. Third thoughts are assholes. They're the ones that think, "damn, those were good pants" as they're being cut off in the emergency room, or "don't sob too hard or you'll be too ugly to get out of the car when you get to work" while you're crying into your steering wheel.

I am heartsick about Mjolnir. His body is ruined, but his brain is fine. He's still our guy in there. I don't want to do it to him, but it isn't fair to make him suffer another week just to get through Christmas. Death is a terrible house guest to have hanging around at the holidays.

Hate this.

Edited to add: right after getting off the phone with the vet to schedule the euthanasia, we got a call from New York to say that grandma is in the hospital with covid, courtesy of thanksgiving with the cousins. Fuck this year.

eighteen

My first baby is grown.

Gavin is as patient and kind and funny as you could wish for when ordering your hypothetical child. He’s a solidly good person, hard working and unselfconscious. In elementary school, he was the only person who would wear the worm costume for the class play of James and the Giant Peach because it looked like a giant dick, and he killed the audience with his comedic timing. On a robotics trip, he won a novelty giant squid hat and wore it to all the meets for the rest of the season. Nobody bullies him because he’s just the kind of guy who pulls that kind of thing off, and all the elementary kids loitering around the high school can identify him as the “the kid in the cat headphones who knows the WiFi password.” When his robotics team kept forgetting to turn off their robot at night, he put a sensor on it and programmed it to scream when the lights went out. He gets through things with a relaxed humor that attracts like-minded friends, and I love his assortment of gentle nerds and techie surfer boys.

This year the boy earned his driver’s license, applied to colleges, and sat his SAT in a pandemic. His best friend’s parents panicked about the end of the world and moved to Idaho, and the boys conspired to wire the off-grid Big-Brother-proof cabin right back into the digital age in order to play games and trash-talk together every night until they can reunite in college. There is no avoiding the Eye of Sauron with teenagers playing with the palantirs, sorry folks.

He loves cats, he tinkers with computers, he wants to work in AI so he can thwart the Boston Dynamic dogs when they get turned to evil. He sends me cute kitten videos when I'm stuck at the library door, builds sword holders and small furniture with his dad, and would like a full suit of armor, please. Which he would wear. 

He's the best kind of person. He'll support your endeavors, join you in boring chores just to make you feel better, protect lizards from the feet of stomping playground kids, and climb into a highway ditch to save a baby animal.

I love him so much.

Happy Birthday, my grown son!

Droopy

Droopy Cat. Droopity Poopity. The handsome boy. Yeah, I painting the oval crooked, but it’ll trim down.

 

Droopy was supposed to have a dignified name, but the first time Gavin greeted him, he walked in and said, "Awww, he's a droopy cat! Look at that droopy face." And that was that. Sorry, Droopy.

Droopy turns into quicksilver when the front door opens, and right after posing for this picture, someone walked in and he squirted out the door. We spent the next 5 hours looking for him, walking up and down the Christmas-lit streets yelling, "DROOOOPY". This is how we learned that the up-the-road-neighbors have 6 ENORMOUS HOGS in dog kennels on their front porch. This is like having 6 full-grown men pooping in dog kennels on your porch. Not a nice situation for neighbors or pigs. Giving myself permission to stop feeling embarrassed about my badly behaved chicken and the rock pile in the back yard.

(I'll still feel embarrassed, of course, but I have permission not to.)

Droopy came home at bedtime, uneaten by pigs. What a little stinker.

Chiggens

Uninfected, back at the library door. Forever. I’ll be guarding this door in the afterlife, causing people to shiver as they pass through me, mistaking the chill for air conditioning. 

Last week, the library chickens started screaming and I ran outside to see a man on a bicycle trying to stop his unleashed dog as it ran around in a frenzy, chomping up baby chicks to feel them crunch. The dog looked up when I screamed, and the man managed to get hold of its collar. He picked up one of the fluffy bodies and just stared at it, looking horrified and unsure of what to do, with the dog lunging at the end of his arm and one leg still over his bike. I did not help him. I shooed the mama hen to safety with her remaining chicks and went inside to put my head on my desk. It was awful to see. 

Then yesterday, back at home, one of the semi-wild chickens hatched four fresh yellow chicks in the one place we would never look; the actual goddamn chicken coop. 

We do not need more chickens. 

But maybe I needed these ones, a little bit.