Catching Up With Your Past

There's really no escaping it, for better or worse.

Things I thought I'd dealt with and cremated are coming back to life almost in front of my eyes. This sludge bubbling up from the depths is making icky puddles in what I thought was a healthy patch of grass.

It's stuff I don't know what to do with. I've run out of mental cartons. Like the stuff that keeps piling up on my kitchen counter. I have no real place to put it.

I need to purge this crap from my head, but I'm not ready for a lobotomy. And there's no Goodwill drop-off for this kind of crap. What a sad thrift store that would be. Thousands of urine-stained mattresses.

The Universe has a way of forcing us to confront our issues. Change it or accept it and move on, but you won't be able to escape it. Not for long.

One thing, or person, I'm glad to have not escaped entirely just got in touch with me through ye olde past-facer, Facebook. He was a friend from my former life and when I left that life, I cut all ties to it. My own witness relocation program.

He happened to speak with the ex (after 12 years of cutting him out of his life) and afterward, felt compelled to track me down to tell me I'd done the right thing. That was great. It's been 13 years since we last spoke and after exchanging emails, it was like no time had passed. He's still a solid, good person and it's a pleasure to be reconnected.

As for the other crap, I expect The Universe will help me build the appropriate cartons to cram all that negative shit into and light it all on fire. But I need to do it quick because I'm running out of space.

Biding

It feels like we're marking time now... waiting for the end of winter, waiting for warmer days, waiting for the economy to improve, waiting for the invention of no-calorie doughnuts...

I'm waiting to get back home for a long-overdue visit and still waiting for the invention of a personal teleportation device.

In the meantime, we pass the time as we usually do - trying to figure out how many more cats we might be able to fit into the family.

When not working on that algorithm, I notice all sorts of things that irritate or confuse me.

For example, the Crest Pro-Health toothpaste I bought at Costco last month... The daytime toothpaste is in a lighter-colored tube than the nighttime tube, and that makes sense, but the paste is dark blue, whereas the nighttime toothpaste is white.

Wouldn't it make more sense for the daytime product to be in the lighter colored tube and white, and the nighttime product to be in the darker tube and a darker color?

Then there's the exploding soup commercial. No one on that team consulted with women while developing that campaign, or any women that clean their own kitchens.

I think it's an ad for soup crackers or maybe it really is for tiny bombs that make a bowl of soup explode into a gigantic mess. Whatever it is, I don't want it. Every time I see that commercial I wince at the amount of cleaning that product would require, so whatever it is, I'll never ever buy it.

Fascinating, isn't it, what's taking up space in my head these days? No, I know it isn't. It's all I've got at the moment.

The other day on Facebook I saw a friend's status update about meeting someone for coffee. It occurred to me how long it's been since I met anyone for coffee. What a lovely thing that would be. If only I had some friends here.

I'm not whining. It's my own fault for moving 900 miles away. I obviously didn't think this through. The longer I'm here and the more isolated I feel, the more I shut down.

It sucks to feel so far away from my life. This, being here, is not my life. It's a detour on the path back to life, back to reality... It's going to be an ongoing challenge to keep cracking the cocoon.

So, now I have to figure out what to do with my time while I'm here. A few ideas include: becoming fluent in Canadian, learning how to unload the dishwasher telekinetically, creating new dishes with fat back, and teaching Henry how to swear in French.

What a Difference a Bob Makes

After seven years of never-ending Bobness, he's finally gone and the entire block has come out of hiding.

Yesterday I spoke to a neighbor across the street I've never said a word to before because she's always been securely contained inside her car or rushing into her house - much like everyone else on our block, myself included.

We started talking about landscaping and within seconds remarked how much nicer the neighborhood is without Bob. She, like me, stopped spending any time in the yard because that creepy freak was always all up in everyone's business.

One down and one to go. We still have the Shitty Bitch on the corner who tried telling our arborist to cleave the oak tree in half so there wouldn't be any branches on her side of the property.

When he told her he couldn't do that or else the tree would fall onto our house, she said she didn't care about that. What a sorry sack of shit. Her broken hip/stroke/heart attack can't come soon enough.

And here's the kicker - when we had the garage sale a few weeks ago, she waddled over to chat with some of the neighbors. When she heard we were moving, she enthusiastically asked if we'd be renting out the house. I told her most likely, yes, and then she asked if we had anyone lined up to rent it. When I said no, she said her son would love to rent it.

Her son, with two of the brattiest kids I've ever seen. Those kids would destroy the house and that shitty bitch would be over here every day looking for something she could steal.

When my grandmother died, I mentioned it to her in passing one day and the first thing out of her shitty bitchy mouth was that my grandmother had told her she could have an antique tea cart. Klassy, eh? But yet, she was allowed to breed.

At any rate, the moving process continues. Selling more stuff (what did we do before Craigslist?), donating a ton of other stuff - soon there won't be much to pack other than a large bag of cats.