...
It has been almost a year since he began doing desperately-needed handyman jobs for me... and he hasn't finished a one of them. He hasn't even started the most important ones. My home's still in utter disarray and not much closer to becoming somewhere from which I can function something like I'm supposed to be functioning. I suspect him of stalling me till I won't need the improvements because I'll be too feeble to function.
He is a nice man. He is a competent worker. He is slower'n molasses in January. And, he never shows up when he says he will. Things never take the amount of time he says they will. You can't give him a large bill with which to purchase some needed material because the change won't come back right. Nothing huge, just more than the already more than you could afford you thought you were spending going in. Everything stays in disarray. Never any satisfaction of accomplishment.
The other night I had to give him some money to buy some more calking and paint for the shed renovation. I only had five ones and a fifty, and so I had to give him the fifty. I asked him to please bring me back a dark chocolate bar, too, because I was jonesing for some chocolate hard, and, no, don't go crazy stocking me up on the stuff, I need the most change from that fifty as we can do because we're in the grocery money zone here.
And, Snail, dear, PLEASE don't leave this till the middle of the night. I have to get to bed at a decent hour. Right, right, check, yes, right.
That took place at about 7:30pm.
My phone rang at 11:30pm. He was going to walk to my place from his because his muffler is almost shot and it will wake up the neighbors. He comes with his flashlight and hands me my dark chocolate... and a box of Baby Ruth bars... and a bag of Dove chocolate covered almonds... and twenty-something dollars change... his coveted two-dollar-bill as well.
This was after me having a bad meltdown at about eleven over how not even when I am emphatic and being reasonable and bone honest can this guy not fuck off into his life distractions, costing me more than money. Always costing me much more than that.
My house is still only mostly painted and it's to the point where finishing it will make the paint clash as badly as it has since he left it only mostly painted last October. My shed is now fixed up so it won't disintegrate into the yard so soon and almost finished. I have no idea if these will EVER be finished. I have no idea how many more winters will transpire before the roof repairs take place. I have no idea if the planter boxes he's building for me will be here before the disintegrating ones no longer even loosely hold their contents.
The need to yank all the rugs from in here and put up shelves for books and other items is as great as it was last year, though I am not doing the monster project for Catherine that we thought I would be doing back then. The rugs are making me ill... and the dust from what grows in the rugs and what doesn't get vacuumed up is so bad things need to be scrubbed every other day to keep them from becoming outright grubby with sickening layers of vaguely rug-colored dust.
I breathe in here.
Snail knows this.
Everyone knows this.
Tough shit.
...
So, notwithstanding everything, lately, I have been about recovering from my hurt back and scientifically coming up with just the exact amount of extremely weak cannabutter to get to sleep at all and to improve the quality of what sleep I get. I have been succeeding.
I don't know yet if this stupidly slow and wimpy approach to titrating my intake of cannabis just to the point where it works without sending me into the heart-pounding panicky discomfort zone before it works will end up getting me past that uncomfortable part for good, or if it'll just be forever staying under that threshold for whatever benefit can be wrung. Whatever. I'll take what I can get. The sleep thing is out of hand and it is seriously unhealthy to sustain this sleep deprivation.
So, except for the nights where I have not eaten my little drap of wimpy cannabutter before bed, I have gotten to sleep and gotten to dream for the first time in too long. Mostly it's been just knowing that I dreamt, but yesterday morning I woke up knowing what I dreamt.
Something woke me early, and I had to pee, so I got up and peed and was debating if I should treat this as time to get up or if I should get back in bed and finish sleeping. I sat here for a moment. I very zenly inquired. Nope. Get back in bed because I have not had enough Phase IV.
So I did.
...
There was all kinds of commotion, and I was looking for the source. It was Snail MacGyver tearing down my house. I was out there to ask him about this, but he was more interested in showing me his slick new dandy shoes. They were impressive... impressive. Suede pimp boots in brown and black and grey and white rectangular patchwork.
His whole outfit was quite a production. Sort of steampunk... well... maybe very steampunk. The shoes were the only brand new part of this anti-handyman sartorial selection, but he was pointing out each piece of it to me. He was tearing my house down, but his raiment was the important part. It didn't alarm me.
In fact, in the wreckage I found brand new really fine tools I knew I owned but somehow never used, hadn't even taken them out of their packaging. A gorgeous axe was in my hand. It was small and made of ultra-fine state of the art materials. There were a couple others right there near where I'd picked it up, and it was pleasing to me that I could collect up all my unused brand new tools, put them in pristine order and use them to make something marvelous.
Something good.
...
It's not, I hope, going to be anything like my barging in on Sturgill thing. I think that taught me a lesson... made me able to find my new tools in my rubble and not just be accidentally using them all unawares like that. It won't do to have a bumbling old broad wielding these fine instruments.
always and any time....
