18 January 2026

Doing that thing again of wanting to write and then blanking. No good. Stuff happened, so let’s share!

So after my four days off, I returned to work and apologized to Favorite Co-worker (FCW) for the Sunday I had called in out of exhaustion. She said she was actually happy to get the additional hours (called it!), and she would have even opened that day, but General Manager (GM) texted her instead of calling, and she didn’t hear the text notification. Oops. But they knocked that Sunday out and it was all fine.

Couple days into the workweek I got called into GM’s office. Oh shit, thinks I, maybe she’s mad about me calling off. But no. I thanked her for filling in for opening and apologized about calling in and she said actually, she was glad I called in when I did because she’s had people call her at half an hour til shift start (so, 4:30am when the shift starts at five) or not call in at all and it was hellacious. So I actually did it exactly right and she understood why I’d called in, and please do it the same way in the future if I have to call in again. Cool. Okay. Anyway, that wasn’t why she called me in. Apparently, the state of California in its infinite wisdom decided to raise the minimum wage almost half a dollar. So now it’s $16.90 an hour. Basically, we all got a raise.

I can’t remember if my pay went up to just $16.90 or if the company decided to raise it five more cents than that — so, $16.95 — because I could have sworn she said $16.95, but that may just be my wishful thinking. So I’m going to assume $16.90 until I see some hard evidence otherwise. And speaking of which, I asked her about how to access my pay stubs since I get direct deposit and apparently, employers (or at least this one) in their infinite wisdom have decided that printing, which has become incredibly cheap in the past thirty years, is just too much an expense and I am supposed to access my pay stubs through a one-time temporary login I was given at hire and somehow overlooked and now the link’s dead. But I can ask her any time I want one and she’ll print it off for me. Mmkay. Well, it was any port in a storm and I’ve lasted five months now. One more month and it’ll be a twenty-year fucking record.

Also, a funny: I’ve been grumbling for a while that Other Co-worker (OCW) never finishes getting things ready for me to open when I work Thursdays. Well, when FCW and I closed the day before I called in, we hadn’t put everything back together. GM had to open, and she related to me that she actually liked stuff not being put back together because it reminded her of stuff she hadn’t done yet. That’s all well and good for her, I guess. I’m the exact opposite. I get set in a routine on how I do opening duties and if stuff’s not put together, it throws me off. Different strokes, etc.

—

Had to work for my birthday on the 10th; I joke to people that I got money for my birthday. It isn’t like we get PTO, anyway. When I get off work I usually stop by Walmart because Neighbor got me into the habit what with running errands for him most days, and I haven’t been able to shake it. I grocery-shop like an old-school European now: just enough to get through the day instead of for the whole fucking month. I had decided I wanted Rocky Road ice cream for my birthday, and Walmart carries the Baskin-Robbins brand, which is particularly good. You can also get an individual slice of cheesecake, and I did, along with some other carbs I am not supposed to be eating. You longtimers will recall I am type 2 diabetic.

(You can make cheesecake in a keto version. This was not keto cheesecake.)

Usually I will just feel a bit sleepy after something like that and then maybe have a carb hangover the next day which is quickly banished with caffeine. So I didn’t think anything of it until I was into the daily chores. Felt a bit out of it when splitting wood for L’s woodstove. Still felt out of it when I picked up the food-scraps bucket in the kitchen and went out the back door to the forest, where L has a “compost” area just off the path and up a little hill (it really is little, but it really is a hill). On the way up this little hill, I started having to reach out and touch random trees and slow down, because I felt like I was going to faint. Managed to dump the food scraps, turned around, and headed back…

…and that’s when the fuckery really started.

I don’t know how to describe it except it was like my brain and eyes had stopped talking to one another. I still had vision, I just couldn’t make sense of it. It was almost like walking through thick fog, except I could still see things but there was this huge expanse in my field of vision that made no sense to me at all. I kept having to stop and turn my head and look around just to get re-calibrated. It’s a very short walk from the compost area to the back gate. It probably took me the better part of five minutes when it should have been less than one.

I got to the back gate and Parker, one of L’s Great Pyrenees, was waiting for me. This was not unusual. The unusual bit was she was looking at me with an odd expression on her face as if she was not quite sure what was going on with me. Usually she follows me back to the house from the back gate at her own pace; sometimes she keeps up with me but more often, she doesn’t. This time she walked in front and led me to the house.

Grateful to get back to my room, I sat at my desk wondering what the fuck was going on because this wasn’t my usual high-sugar event. I mean, I had one of those after having some king cake last Mardi Gras season, and I had never lost touch with reality in the process. This time around, I finally decided to check my sugar. I expected a ridiculously high number.

68 mg/dl. Diabetics aren’t supposed to go below seventy. And this was when I was feeling more normal, after the fact. I suspect it went lower while I was out there half-lost.

I keep telling myself I need to get back on track. This is shaping up to be like Dad and booze. It really is ridiculous.

—

I’m still trying to figure out the car situation. Thus far I have:

Carvana, which does not deliver here; I’d have to take at least half a week off and travel to them in fucking San Francisco, which would also involve at least one or two nights in a motel (that, at least, is not hellaciously expensive near the airport — I saw a room offered between $40 and $50 a night — but I’m very afraid that’s because it’s a questionable part of town)

Carmax, which does not deliver here; it does deliver to a dealer, but that’s still a fair drive from here

and

Driveway, which does deliver here, but I’m hearing mixed reviews on how it is to deal with them.

There are local options through Marketplace and I don’t trust a single fucking one of them; also, if I wanted a car with a million problems, I’d have kept the Sonata. I had just had to deal with a dead starter when shit fell apart at Dad’s for the second time and I then moved here. That and the not knowing what insurance would cost (you can never just look that up; oh no, you have to actually talk with a live human being who is, at the same time, trying to pressure-sell you something) or whether I’d pass smog (California’s emissions testing) were why I didn’t keep it. Plus what the actual fuck with the making me pay for registration TWICE IN ONE FUCKING YEAR WHAT THE FUCK, DAD. Anyway. No. And I don’t want to go through that again, either.

Trying to get a local loan will be dicey. My best bet may be to take the referral link to start a Chase banking account and then get a loan through them. I cannot predict how the interest rate will go versus going through someplace like Driveway. The economy has gotten too weird and my credit score is good, but the record itself is not what you’d call conventional. Grumble.

And I have to think about this stuff because I’m still using Neighbor’s truck and I honestly can’t expect that to go on forever. Even if the truck doesn’t develop a serious fault.

—

Because now I’ve pissed Neighbor off. There’s a person he and I are mutuals with on Facebook who has stopped being Facebook friends with L over L’s inappropriate remarks about Iran. L has a track record of inappropriate remarks about the non-Israeli populations of that part of the world anyway, and people who care about what happens with Iran independently of any opinion Israel might have about it are very concerned about how this new “revolution” might turn out; the son of the deposed “shah” looks very interested in taking over, which would be a fucking disaster. Be that as it may. Mutual doesn’t want to see the weirdness anymore. Someone on Mutual’s friends list made some observations about L’s general politics in that area and I shared that a lot of her attitude comes from the rapes Hamas allegedly committed against Israeli women in the October 7 attack, and opined that her position was inconsistent when you consider it’s equally likely that Israelis have raped Palestinian women and she hasn’t seemed to have an opinion about that. And I said a few other things but basically, Neighbor saw the whole exchange and got pissed. I can’t figure out if L also saw it reading over his shoulder (it was a friends-only conversation and that’s the only way she would have seen it) or if he was just trying to set me straight without dragging her into it because his language was pretty ambiguous in that vein, at least to me. Point is, I don’t know if I’m on notice that things could turn to shit, but I can’t rule that out either.

It’s a thing that has been bugging me for a while, because I don’t like feeling like I am an enabling party to racism and atrocity apologetics. What’s also bugged me are Neighbor’s and L’s repeated invectives against “leftists” and “the left” and how “the left” is pro-troon and “the left” wants to “transition” children and how “the left” ruined their careers and basically their whole lives and I’m like… Hello, I’m leftist? This shit is all my fault now? Fuck… you KNOW better. Stuart still claims to be leftist (or he did last I saw, which was not that long ago), too, and fuck only knows why. He’s in Deep Green Resistance leadership now, or else helping them out a lot. What the fuck even IS “leftist” in these people’s world? Whatever it is, I’m tired of being blamed for everything. So between one and the other problem, I don’t even participate in these discussions anymore because the scapegoating has gotten unreal and I can’t be a good conversationalist anyway when two-thirds of my brain is focused on “are you fucking kidding me???”

At any time I expect someone to come up with the “but we don’t mean you, you’re one of the good ones,” and then I really will lose my shit. And we don’t want that, so I’ve stayed out of things for a while now.

(Also because I want to avoid Stuart, but that’s beside the point.)

(Or, actually, they may not want to say “one of the good ones” about me anymore after this latest development — but before I opened my big mouth on Facebook yesterday, that had certainly been a risk.)

Anyway, so now I wait. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can say that if the worst should happen: one, I have enough money to buy a road bicycle and two, I have a lead on a hotel where I can rent a room monthly. It’s where Favorite Coworker is living currently and she’s told me what she’s paying, and I can definitely afford it. It won’t be a great place to live, but it’s close enough to work that taking the bicycle to work won’t fucking kill me. So I do have options if I can’t stay here that would let me keep my job too. So I’m not yet panicking. If they let me use the truck for a little bit longer to get myself resettled, I will panic even less. Who fucking knows.

—

Another thing that’s weighed on my mind for quite a while is not knowing what I want to do next. If I had unlimited money and a good car, I’d just go back to Columbus, because I really miss it. There are a couple other possibilities, including Minneapolis (no, not because of the protests) and Memphis (if anything federally fucked is going on there, not because of that either) and south Louisiana (not terribly likely, but not impossible). I could just end up stuck here in the previously mentioned hotel, of course. You just never know.

It’d help if I could talk about this with people. I’m not trying to angle for anything in particular; if I wanted to do that, I’d bribe my old art-community buddy in Ohio. (With what???) I’m not. There you go. But to just be able to bounce ideas off the wall and see what sticks. If I have to be alone then I want to be alone for real, not stuck in a weird in-between place where I don’t exist unless (1) I piss someone off or (2) someone wants something from me. But I’d rather not be alone if I don’t have to be. So something’s gotta give.

I’ll keep you posted, I suppose.