office, before and after
Thursday 26 July 2007 | someone left a cookie
Sure, okay; so most of it I jammed in the closet in confoundment. Your point?
But I felt I absolutely had to have a calm place in which to work. Was this self-care or self-sabotage? Given that I now have approximately 80 hours to finish the book before what the Professoressa calls “teaching camp” starts at the sparkly hour of 8 am on Monday morning, and thus both procrastination and anxiety have reached new frantic heights. I’m hungry but can’t eat anything but yogurt cups or a handful of almonds at a time; exhausted but can’t sleep more than a couple of hours. There’s brief distracting respite in talking to Mandarin or the Brujo on the phone, in disassembling boxes efficiently with my orange locking knife, or in suddenly deciding to rip apart an evil-looking section of “fence” in the back yard, removing a stacked-up rubble of broken concrete blocks, scrap lumber with vicious-looking nails sticking out of it, rusted chicken wire and pasture fencing, lengths of metal pipe and even a long blue ratchet ribbon, knotted and wound like drunken spiderweb around the shards of wire and board. After completely dismembering this misguided, multiple-author cheveaux-de-frise, I then sawed three lengths off a 2×4 mysteriously hanging out in the yard and (with my trusty electric screwdriver) bolted them to a short piece of 1×4 and then to the rest of the fence. Et voilà, safe yard for dog and cat. I’m handy as a pocket on a shirt, let me tell you.
Except when it comes to earning the final payment from Herself, cash which the bohemic Brujo and I so desperately need. His clothes in tatters, his shoes unnaturally ventilated. Our first household bills ever, on the way.
Outside in the briars the feral kittens yowl disconsolately in the rain. As if it weren’t bad enough that I destroyed their dank decaying cardboard home and then the heavens opened, Pyewacket (perhaps roused by her inability to attain the jarred lizard) chased them out of the yard, hissing triumphantly. Just wait until Fiona gets here; they’ll really be convinced then that we moved here specifically to ruin their lives. And then there’ll be animal control managing to catch only half of the family, leaving the other half bereft and disoriented. To say nothing of euthanasia. Oh, brain! As “small-town pariah” wrote one night (whoever s/he is): You are supposed to be on my side!
It’s nearly two a.m. and I must put myself to bed. “Remember who you are, and why you are there,” advises the Professoressa. But I can’t quite. A poet, says the Brujo? It’s been years since I wrote anything with a line break. I haven’t even started the program and am already thinking about our selling every cardboard box full of nonsense and fleeing to Baja in a Toyota pickup with a pallet in the back for a bed. Except of course for the fact that the B. will leave me in a few months and I’ll fall on the floor and die. And on that cheery mood-plummeting note I leave you, to choke down a quesadilla and the magic sleepy pill that will shove me under until tomorrow’s nicely steamy dawn.
someone left a cookie
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