Underwhelmed/Overwhelmed

 In a corner, I think and listen.

Trying to plan and trying to relax.
Trying to do and trying to be seen.
I shout. It's quiet.

All of my ideas are open in unorganized windows.
Thousands of tabs with myriad icons representing the sites I'm neglecting.
Sometimes I shut it all down. It makes me scream inside wondering what I'll miss.
What if?

Did I remember to file that?
Will I have time to write this in a way that I'll love and when its done, will I want to share it?
What if I said the wrong thing and everyone hears it?
What if I didn't ask the right question and miss the opportunity to pull vital information from someone I'm communing with?
Are my mistakes myself?
Are the things I forget to do a sign of how much I care?

I want to be seen as the person I want to be, but I often doubt that my efforts equal my intentions.
What if all I'm doing is staying busy to fool everyone that I'm important?
How can I accomplish anything that'll satisfy me?
Who will care and when will it happen and, when it does, is it going to be precious enough to me that I can simply keep it to myself or will I have to broadcast it like I do every other minute detail in my life?

I draw a picture of myself in colors I've never dreamt were real.
That's how I want to be seen: unique.
How unreal. Is anyone truly one of a kind?

It's not a person, but a coin with many details etched into its faces.
It has two. I have many, but really one and I want to be seen.

It's all too much.

It's never enough.

My cat is on my lap asking for attention that I'm not sure I can afford to give her.

Her mewing tells me that if I don't take action now, she will perish and I believe her.

Sometimes the world is as simple as cuddles and purrs.

Sometimes the cat is me or everyone I love and cherish.

Meowing and pawing lovingly as I pull down my hood in an effort to focus and prove myself to people I don't know.

Take all of my unwanted stuff all at once. Also be good?

If you're trying to stay woke and make humane decisions with your unwanted but useable stuff...whattya do? I've heard that either Salvation Army or Goodwill (or both?) doesn't feed nearly enough of their profits to rehabilitation/unhoused/community programs as one might expect, so that feels shifty. I do also think about the idea that at least they're helping a little? But there have to be more structurally solid answers out there. I know; a lot of corporatized thrift operations are that way—not REALLY not-for-profit, if analyzed. I am also aware that a good number of them are founded, funded, supported, or run by religious organizations whose morals and beliefs don't align with my own. I can see doing commerce with a person or company that subscribes to ideals that differ from my own. There are hard caveats. Be: pro LGBTQI+ , be pro women's rights, do not discriminate etc. I'm an ally to all the good humans. I want more on board. THOSE are the companies I want to do commerce with. Yes, I know that sounds impossible. I bargain what I can with decisions that are as sound as possible. I also have a horrible history of collecting stuff that loses value or use in my life, if it ever really had any to begin with. Over the years, I learn to take less in and purge a little more here and there, especially to offset what's coming in. Family passes on, relatives get a chance to take home knickknacks you've held onto for too long. You sit with a thing for a time, then realize you could easily live with much less than you have. Maybe ONE box of VHS tapes.

It's perfectly fine to have one version of Monopoly. Maybe even two. I don't need another box of Monopoly nor any more versions of Clue. Worst part about getting rid of board games is the transitionary time between "I'm getting rid of this" and "I am driving away from the place I've donated this." What an awkwardly shaped item. If I had 10 board games I wanted to be rid of all at once—that makes much more sense. You can stack them all together, maybe even there's a box that works to fit a bunch.

If I have 2? All of a sudden it's like the idea of a box is entirely new. You don't want to stand up the game and have all the pieces fall out. You don't want to tape this 68 year old version of Connect Four together because, when anyone takes the tape off of the brittle box, all of the print goes with it. Also...why WHY does that thought live in my head? IT'S A BOX WHO CARES.

The Boy, The Bike, The Blunder

Fewer people have been driving about since the shelter in place orders have been in place. When traffic was heavier, especially when Garden Highway was under construction, the half of our neighborhood across West El Camino went unseen by us.

Fewer people pass by now. It's sometimes quiet enough to remind me of playing on the freshly paved road in front of my grandparents home from childhood. When my wife and I are on walks in the evening, the traffic and distance to a crosswalk usually deter us from venturing across. Yesterday, as we left the house, I noticed the quiet again.

We'd already trotted across the street once in the last couple of weeks. We discovered one road back there that is entirely lined with tract homes; all similar shades, shapes and landscapes. There's a home tucked away under a canopy of old trees, a yard littered with unaltered felines of all colors and temperaments — truly, most of the cats are awful. Yesterday, we also discovered one of the neighborhood kids and his new electric dirt bike.

Keli and I had just turned the corner to see what all of the tract houses looked like up close. I heard the buzzing of some sort of electric toy vehicle coming closer, but just assumed it was a power wheels or a scooter and didn't look around until I heard the commotion.

As he'd turned the corner to the street we were now walking down, this young skinny boy overestimated his ability to maneuver on his toy. Down he came, thin long legs in shorts, one of his adidas slides fell off and the bike landed on top of him.

It would have been quite the gruesome scene, were this a real dirt bike. Luckily, the boy just had a heap of thick blue and silver plastic with an electric motor on his leg. There was a look, though. The look comes to everyone at different ages. The idea of being absolutely invulnerable was dissolving before him.

But before that comes is a surveying of the scene. As if thinking, "Did anyone see me? Am I hurt? I'll bet I'm hurt. I don't think this is ok and it makes me sad..."

"You doing ok?, " I asked, turning fully towards him and stepping into the street, then lifting his bike from on top of him.

He leaned up on his elbows, then let out "I'll NEVER do this again! OUCH! OW OW!," so Keli approached him too, to give him a once-over.

"You seem to be ok. Maybe you scratched your leg. Oh yes, a little here," she said over the sound of his sniffles and more cries of "ow!"

With surprising speed, he shambled to his feet and brushed himself off, looking closely for the origin of his pain. I could tell he was indeed hurt, but nothing a hug from a loving adult and a band aid wouldn't help. Hell, if I'd taken a similar tumble, I'd have scraped and chipped quite a lot just knowing my clumsy ways.

I too would want a hug.

My Movements

I prance through puddles with delight.
If my feet get wet because there are holes in my shoes, I chuckle
at nature's opportunity to get one over on man.
Though it's truly me getting one over on myself for not mending my old shoes.

I walk in grass without shoes, without socks.
My skin being poked, tickled, caressed by blades of grass and petals of flowers emerging from the weeds.
This is the cheapest therapy, even when I have to pluck burrs from my feet at the end of the day.

With headphones pressed firmly into my ear canals, I listen to music at irresponsibly loud levels.
It won't matter the genre, you hear more that way.
I want to hear Nancy Wilson as her fingers roam the strings of her guitar.

As often and as loudly as I am able, I laugh.
To some, it may be too loud and too often.
You may say "there's a time and a place", but my time is life and my place is here.
Take no offense for I'm more often than not laughing at myself.
I'm the greatest audience of one.

Throwing all cares and caution to the wind, I love immediately.
I can tell you need it. I know I need it. I have it to spare.
I love hard and I care until it hurts to carry on doing it.
I'll listen undistracted, hoping you might someday return the favor.
If you don't, has anything been lost?

I love being lazy more than most anything.

To me, comfort food is a very broad term.

Description Addict

I can see it in my wife's eyes. I don't even realize it when it's happening until it's too late. She has lost all interest and some of her consciousness. I've been overly-describing something for at least a full minute.

Everything I write is far too long. My blog posts (obviously),  emails, texts, conversations, and even in articles I post for the school paper (at least my initial drafts). With great flourish and minimal effort, I thoroughly describe anything I have even the slightest bit of enthusiasm for. There's a lot of ego involved in my motives. I can admit that, but more than that I'm addicted to employing extravagant ways of telling people about the things I want them to be interested in.

That's where the ego comes in. I do WANT them to enjoy that joke I heard on that 8 year old podcast episode just as heartily as I do. I love or enjoy a thing or it made me laugh or smile so, in my personal ideal of the world, everyone will and should also enjoy it. I do this for movies, podcasts, tv, people, jokes, animals, food, and most especially with music. I will break myself trying to convince the listener (or reader) that their next step should be to consume the thing I'm telling them about.

Minute details don't necessarily get the spotlight for every tiny aspect of the thing I'm expounding on, but I do dig further in than I'm sure anyone else might (let alone more than anyone has a tolerance, desire, or need for).

How about an example:
One of my favorite things to hold and use is a freshly sharpened pencil. I can't let the lead get even the slightest bit dull before the temptation to hone the end of my #2 starts to knock at my concentration. I try to stave it off by spinning the wood, littered with fingernail and teeth marks that come during my most contemplative moments. This does help for a time. I love the feel of the small, sharp edge of the lead as I spin it 45 or 90 degrees and scratch the paper with rough, acutely ridged tip of this unused side of the writing utensil. It always happens, though that after a few minutes, I've worn all of the smaller points of the tip of the lead and begin feeling the itch to sharpen and regain the narrow lines of my writing.

With movies, my habit of launching into a bright and thorough enthusiastic retelling of the entire plot including character profiles and setting descriptions started when I was a little kid. I think this is actually quite a common ideal: that on your way home from the movie theatre, the child tells you all about the movie you two just watched together. I get the feeling other people grow out of it. I would say I just evolved.

Many times, when I am able to empty out my thoughts into a writing like this, it helps me to process my bad and good habits and make a change. I can tell you now that writing this post will do very little to reduce the amount of descriptions nor shorten them. It's just too much fun to be creative with my adjectives. Upon my first compeltion of this post, I was proud that it was only four paragraphs...Obviously my creativity moved me to squash that idea.

They Shot My Gift Horse in the Mouth

The journey to the door of my first apartment was very much that: a journey. I'd packed up way too much stuff in all of the wrong box sizes and freighted my possessions via U Haul three and a half hours westward from Sheridan; my trusty Buma in the passenger seat. Of course we got lost.

A year later in 2003, I moved out of the cozy two bedroom, two bathroom place on Range ave when my roommates and I decided to part ways. I'd moved out with two friends from high school, one of which was pursuing education as an English teacher at Sonoma University. It wasn't explained why we were doing this to ourselves and each other, though I'm sure my 19 year old idiocy played a part in it. After a year of adventures in Santa Rosa with my roommates, we simply moved on.

I found my next roommate, a Costa Rican (called "M") who'd moved to the area from Minnesota, through a coworker. Based on the hindsight and a memory bank rife with unsavory antics this roommate and I got into over the next two years, I really should have been smarter about trusting the judgement of my coworker and passed on his recommendation.

After moving in with M, my coworker (Called "T") spiraled into a raving lunatic before my eyes over the next few months. I've always suspected T's downfall was a result of some chemically synthesized narcotic. You know...the kind that makes you speak quickly, spit while talking, tap your feet while sitting, sweat profusely, and yell "YOU'RE A RAT! YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE? A RAT" at the top of your voice into my face on a Thursday morning while we're stocking denim pants before JC Penney opens for business.

Our first apartment had the largest living room known to man. When you're a bachelor young enough to get turned down when you set a six pack of PBR on the counter, interior design isn't such a high priority. I had plenty of room to put all of my kitchy junk, allowing me to fool myself into thinking this was "Home". Miguel hated it, being a minimalist himself. It didn't matter how loud the traffic was outside of my bedroom window, we had free cable.

This gift from some kharmic deity was such a delight to me, Mr. Raised on TV. Moving into an apartment with free cable is like finding a one dollar bill on the ground, shaking it off, then realizing it's actually a hundred dollar bill...every. single. month. We were so happy to have this free portal to entertainment until the day the knock came upon the door.

"Hello! My name is [no way, lady. I did not store away your real name to recall at this moment]. I'm stopping by to tell you about Comcast Cable. Do you have cable?" and I froze. I'm not supposed to have cable. What if she knows there's a feed active into our apartment but she doesn't know it's not being paid for? What do I do?

"Yeah we actually have comcast." escaped my mouth before I realized what I was saying. 'Well...that should be ok. We have it already. Maybe she'll go away now.'

"We have an offer going on right now for premium packages. If you add on HBO, you can get that and Showtime free for three months."

What a sucker, this lady. We have free cable already. They probably won't be able to figure out what's going on and we'll be able to keep the whole thing. Maybe someone else is already paying for this. I signed up for the additional channels and sent [still can't remember. Sorry, ma'am] on her way.

Three months and one day later, M and I were sitting on the couch looking at the television. "Idiot," he mumbled as we clicked off the television. Black and white static dimmed to black and an image of two defeated young men on a couch became clear in the reflection of the glass television screen.
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I play back the scenario over in my memory at least once a year. There's always at least one event annually that reminds me that I may be witty but I make terrible, uninformed mistakes. Over the last two weeks, I learned that the bad luck associated with my younger self's free-cable-fumble is hereditary.

Some time in February, I noticed a profile had been added to the Hulu account my parents allow my wife and I to share. I am unaware if Hulu cares about shared accounts, but I know that I care when I see that Cam is trying to make their way into the family plan. I don't know a Cam. No friends or relatives are named Cameron or Cammy or Campbell. I swiftly deleted the profile and went back to watching that week's episode of Law and Order: SVU.

My mother doesn't know any Cam, so I figured I'd solved the problem. I should have advised her to change her password immediately, but thought nothing of it and moved on. A few days passed and, after a full day of work and school one day, I sit down with my wife to enjoy old episodes of Fresh Off The Boat...or at least to try.

"Did you change your password? Can't log into Hulu" I texted my mother. I didn't receive an immediate response, so we sought entertainment through Netflix. The next day, though, I started to feel something very familiar as I read my mom's response.

"Didn't change passowrd. I can't log in. I'll look into it later" wasn't the response I'd hoped for, but I know how many times I forget my password and lock accounts, so I assumed she'd work it though. Ten days later, she'd spent a full day on the phone with support, tried resetting the password, and had no luck.

K and I were and are despondent. In the solitude put upon us through the Covid-19 related mandated quarantine, it's going to be important to maintain a varied source for entertainment AND to comfort ourselves by watching series we'd already invested our time and emotions in. That resource has been tied to a skiff and gently and lovingly been shoved off of the banks of our entertainment shores.

"Unless I open up another account, we're not going to worry about activating this hulu account. There's so much you an find on the Ruku," my mother explained, mispronouncing the popular streaming meta-platform like a true Boomer Captain.

"Why are you doing this to us! You're getting the whole thing free from Apple! Who cares if they're none the wiser?" I clung desperately to the idea that this defeat was not final. My mother worked for Apple as a customer consultant over a decade ago, so the sweetness of this resource and the bitterness of its loss is intense.

This metaphorical skiff now meanders toward the fading horizon, heavy with our dreams of laughing at Officer Jake Scully, Eddie Huang, and Daria Morgendorffer. Resting against the corpse of our access to commercial free (TRULY FREE) Hulu access are koffer's filled with hopes of watching Lieutenant Olivia Benson track down the fiend who left that poor immigrant girl naked and afraid in the abandoned subway tunnels under New York City.

How will we ever survive with only access Amazon Prime, HBO Go, and Netflix?

The Nursery

     Buma, which is the nickname I've had for my mother's mother my entire life, will be cremated when she's finished her adventures are done. In a relatively ideal situation, she'll be the first to go, then my mother, who will also be cremated, then eventually myself. When they squabbled, which wasn't too often considering They both live on the same property, I always threatened to mix them both with cement and create a sculpture of one of them doing something terrible to the other. They scoffed at my version of it, but they didn't object to being used in a sculpture.
   The most delightful aspect of their request is that ultimately, neither of them will have much sway over their final shape. Neither my mother nor grandmother have ever seemed all that bothered by the prospect of death. As far as their concerned, the body goes back and "they" go to heaven. Why should they get upset if their kin want to mold their remains, tempered with sand, powder, and small rocks?
   This last week, I started reading a book of case studies that was recommended to me by a coworker. It seems she wants another weirdo to bounce off her reactions to the ideas in the book. I was warned. This is an easily dismissable subject. The interviews transcribed in the book are hypnosis sessions in which a psychologist's patients access and described the transition between this life and the previous (and further back in the soul's supposed cycle). 
     I appreciate how the book is organized. If any reader was to consume this book with an open mind or even an enthusiastic agreement with the content, the stages the author takes us through are in a necessary order for a layman to properly understand the dynamic of the doctor-patient relationship as well as the increasing layers the doctor reports to gain access to in the book.
     I've made it just over half through and I'm enjoying the read. I have chosen to try to remain neutral in my belief of the theory being tested by the doctor. In fact, the book expresses great evidence to support the reality and believability of nearly every case the doctor explores. I want to believe that, in some form, we continue on and are given a chance to reflect on our mistakes, plan for the necessary improvements, and attempt life again in some other form, until graduation is attained.
     IF I were to adopt the believe the matriarchs of my immediate and extended families, I'd subscribe to the idea that heaven is an experience where you get to remain content forever. I'm quite sure that a large part of my section of heaven would be a beefed up copy of Fair Oaks Boulevard Nursery.
    I finally convinced Eagle Stout to pursue purchasing predator bugs for the garden. I mean ACTUALLY LEAVING THE HOUSE. Together. To run errands. As a team. WE DID IT!
     I mean...when one of your errands is to spend an hour +/- dazed, overwhelmed, filled with joy, and enjoying fresh oxygen produced by a hearty and diverse inventory of plants...hell...I might have to stop writing to go back before they....nope. I just checked. They've closed for the day.
     We got the bugs. THEN I re-researched what to do. I may have just wanted $10 on the ladybugs because they need food to wake up to tomorrow. Some people on forums and such report that they may return or at least beef up the local population. We'll see. We also got mantis eggs, which is so tantalizing! I can't wait to greet 100-200 tiny, hoppy, excited little mantids.
     When I die, please let there be a heaven where there are several hundred species of plants nearby just starting their journey to a garden or yard nearby. A heaven filled with interesting or kitchy pottery and cloth planter bags. I want large rubber black tubs one might grow koi fish in. One might also fill one of these tubs with hot water to have a redneck hot tub (ME).
    I want blooms and pollen all over and bees and insects too. In my heaven, and african violet is more than a cute pot with one flower and several soft leaves...wait, the flower wilted...and now there are brown leav....it's dead...IT'S BEEN FIVE MINUTES. African violets will thrive. I'll actually be able to help an orchid THRIVE! And I won't have to learn how to, which is something I should do but there are video games and school and work guys. I have priorities.
     There will be at least one cat. Just like the cat I saw today. 'I'm not friendly, but I'm beautiful.' The cat transmits into your mind with it's movement. 'You wish.' Then the cat is gone, to be found later in the bisected wine barrell, napping. The cat will allow for the insects to thrive. We can all get along fine.