cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't even know what to hope for from Monday. Alex texted me yesterday after two months of silence. She said that she owes me an explanation and wants to meet. Yeah, no shit. We're supposed to meet up at some yet to be specified place and time after 6 pm on Monday. I don't know if this is just an apology, a post-mortem, or an attempt by her to repair things and start over. Whatever it is, fine. Mostly. If she wants to get back together, there will be rules and stipulations. Seeing each other at least once a week, having a normal relationship where our kids and families are part of what is happening. I don't know if she is capable of it. I'm not pissing away another year of my life having what is apparently an affair with a lesbian who hates her live-in girlfriend and doesn't have the guts to kick her out. Today I took the good Lindsay on a field day to the bottom of the spillway of the dam of the Ch@rlottesville Reservoir. It is an under-rated experience. To stand there a few feet away from this huge, rushing wall of water after days of heavy rain. We went poking around in the shallows and there is unfortunately an invasive population of Ch1nese Myst3ry snails. I wrote a whole chapter on them in one of my books. We gathered up a few dozen and she suggested that we try them as catfish bait. Nothing was biting, which is not surprising because it wasn't late enough and there has been a lot of rain lately. We were supposed to go to the Ch1nchilla Cafe afterwards, but I was dumb and didn't realize that this week's show happened Friday night and not Saturday night and I totally missed it. That was a bummer, because I rebuilt the railing for their deck last week and was looking forward to seeing it in action and being the minor hero who fixed it. Right now I am sitting on dozens of killer ideas for stories with no place to put most of them. I found out where there is an invasive, breeding population of feral miniature pon1es in far Southwestern V1rginia. I know that there are a few fishing boats in Virginia that are catching l0bsters and selling them to a few restaurants and a roadside shack hawking "M@ine lobster rolls" without anyone knowing that there are literally local V1rginia L0bsters. I have the recipe for the famous sn@ke oil that had no snake in it and was sold as a medication, and I would like to recreate it because it looks a lot like Vick's Vaporub and I think it probably worked pretty well for a lot of ailments. I have the name of a collector of DNA from dead famous people. I am bursting out with astounding real stories to tell and I have nowhere to place anything except for SP1N Magazine, and they are a real pain in the ass to deal with. I'm stuck dealing with B1g Lurch's girlfriend in the process of arranging that interview and she is a total fucking idiot. She's trying to get payment for the interview, which is not something that any serious journalistic outlet would ever do. This is not The National Enquirer. I don't think that Lurch himself is the problem. She is just playing gatekeeper. I might need to send him another letter explaining this, asking him to write back rather than run emails through this stupid woman. Driving for Grubhub is fucking killing me. I need to pay the bills and this barely does that. It leaves no time for me to be on my laptop and applying for jobs or pitching stories or editing the draft of my book or doing anything whatsoever that moves my life forward to a place of actual agency or comfort. Nor have I been fishing or crabbing or going to enough shows. Every fucking night it's just driving for money from 4 or 5 pm until 11 or midnight. Collapse at home. Find something to eat. Read news. Watch something for a few hours, drink a bottle of wine. Fall asleep. Wake up around noon to 2 pm. Read the news, shower, deal with email. Run errands. Try to get an oil change, usually fail because they don't have people to get to it. Get gas. Eat something. Start driving. Repeat. It is fucking awful. I need at least a week of sustained days of applying for science communication jobs to get hired a month or two later. But I can't stop doing the delivery driving or else I won't be able to buy food or put gas in my car or make my car payment or cell phone bill. It's just fucking awful. The days at the book store are nice. I am really, really good at that job. I talk to people about books and help them find either what they are looking for or something they didn't know that they wanted. It turns out that I have read a hell of a lot of books, and know a lot about many others, and I know how to appraise old books, and have read a fair bit of ancient literature, and am generally exactly the right guy to help people at the weirdest, oldest, most labyrinthine bookstore in Ch@rlottesville. I've cleaned places that have not been touched in twenty years. I'm installing smoke detectors. I'm vacuuming brick dust that has been falling on books and shelves for decades. I'm establishing new sections for authors. Many of the people who work at the book store are volunteers. Retired friends of the owner, who is in a motorized wheelchair and is generally accompanied by his wife. They don't do anything other than sit at the desk and ring up books. So decades have gone by without fixing or straightening or cleaning anything. Most of them love what I am doing. A few are resistant. It is a shame that no matter how good a job I do, I will be paid $15 an hour for 2 or 3 days a week. No matter how how well I transform this place, no matter how many first editions I excavate from the storage rooms, they will never offer to pay me a living wage. If I come up with a system for putting our rare stuff on Alibris or Abebooks or ebay, it will still be part-time starvation work for $15 an hour. So as much as I enjoy doing this, it will have to end soon. I will have to get a job in one of my fields that pays a real living wage/salary. I am still not fucking the good Lindsay again, even though we used to fuck in the early pandemic. She lives with her ex-husband now, and it is usually not ok for me to come inside her house to hang out. Not really what I am looking for after this debacle with Alex. If you are totally platonic with your ex, then why can't I come inside at 7 pm to change clothes after we've been fishing for hours? I don't need this level of sketchy again. If I am going to deal with that level of sketchy, it is going to be with Alex where at least the reward is the object of most of a life of fixation. Alex looks more and more like an NPC as time goes by. I keep hoping that she will surprise me. Monday is perhaps her last opportunity. 3:01 a.m. - 2023-07-09 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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