May 27, 2008

• "Happy Memorial Day" An Oxymoron, YOU MORON!

  
  "She called to wish ya a happy holiday..."
  "What's so happy about it!",  he shouted,  "this day is based in sadness."
  
  I was in the bodega buying a lotto ticket and the girl behind the counter had just hung up the phone and was telling the man selling me the ticket what the caller had said.   He looked at me and rolled his eyes,  then over at the door where the little bell tinkled as another lazy customer ambled in.
  
  "This holiday is based in death, grief and sadness..." the lines in his face told me he knew what he was talking about.  I agreed with a "yap" and took my ticket,  walking out into the unusually hot and unexpectedly slow moving sun.
  
  It was a memorial day to think about my mother a lot.
  
  We went to brunch.  AA lost himself in a day long video game and I had no desire to do anything.  We went to the store and bought groceries on the way home and that was about it.   I took a nap and was surprised to find it  still before noon when I woke up again.   The day was not unpleasantly hot,  but strangely so,  and quiet.  Almost quiet beyond belief.   With the constant construction around the Second Avenue Subway,  three days of near metropolitan silence had dulled my senses. 

  I was startled by a breeze blowing the pin wheel in the flower pot on the window sill, as its blades stroked the screen.   "Time to get up and do sumpin", I told myself,  trying to grin, opening the other windows and trying to decide what to do.
  
  It didn't happen.   The day dragged on,  moments stretching themselves out tauntingly.  A memory jogging wiff of BBQ smoke from the senior complex next door hit my nose and my heart sank, again.
  
  I thought of my mom.   I thought of the day I left California,  and knowing she cried for three days straight... The times I didn't go home,  but could have.  The times I didn't call, but could have.   I wished I could call now, much much too late.
  
  Dry, too tired to cry,   I try and ask AA if he wants to do something.  Oddly, he doesn't.  I don't either and there really is, on this day of holidays,  nothing at all to do.
  
  I avoided stress provoking anxieties,  tax stuff,   paper work.   Struggled to want to write.  Wrote nothing.
  Knocked off a writer's magazine as if it was going to do me good like medicine,  read about my bad habits and how to solve them,   and took a sigh of relief at the sight of the other's with bad habits too.
  I tossed the magazine into the recycling paper bag making AA jump.  
  I had to go walk.
  
  I walked and sat in the bank lobby, away from the sounds of traffic, to have a chat on the phone when a friend called.   I told her I was sad.
  
  I went to the GNC and bought a set of rainbow colored essential oils because they were on sale.  Their orange, purple, yellow, blue, green, red,  not in that order,  satiated my eyes.  I needed something.    I lazily ambled through Circuit City,  buzzing with lazy shoppers and 3.99 DVDs, none of which could catch my interest.
  
  I spent over an hour in Barnes and Noble desperately sifting through novels,  trying to find something to take the time away,  now that I had it, it rains, it pours.   The lack of newly released mass market paperbacks threw me for a loop.   The clerk thought I was stupid for lamenting the huge selection of new releases, now forever lost to author's last name in Fiction and Literature.
  I didn't want to see anything specific.   I wanted to see what was new and easy to carry.   The book world has gone topsy turvy.  
  "I don't stand a chance" I told myself...
  
  I ended up back home with another Victoria Thompson Mystery... an old New York tale to spend my shaking moments in,  avoiding the pain of the real world,  which is the pain or absence of feeling,  not always an even trade off....
  
  I lay in bed another hour or so.  I watched the sun lighted brick wall fade into later afternoon shadow.   Senior citizens danced to big band music which floated up and into my room.  AA played a video game with headphones in silence.   There was nothing antagonizing about the day.   I tore a fiction contest page out of another knocked off writer's mag and pinned it to my bulletin board.  As if....
  
  The sun took forever to go down,  darkening the room.   I ate a box of Good and Plenty and got a sugar high. Falling asleep again,  to be awakened rudely by AA hanging clothes, and fixing the bed.   I drank down yogurt to take medication with and got back into bed.
  
  I didn't even brush my teeth.
  
  This morning, now,  preparing for work,  hearing jackhammers in the street,  radio news,  its raining...   I'm trying to figure out if I regret wasting yesterday or if I actually got something out of it. 
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  • 8:52 am
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