6 posts tagged “chaos”
My people, I'm being punished but it's been educational so far. My punishment is this: my parents are moving. After nine years in their house in the 'burbs of Kansas City, they have finally bought their retirement home in the country. (Well, it's Momzilla's retirement home, but Dadzilla is five years younger, so he's transferring to a different office to finish out his time with the Oil & Gas Giant he works for.)
The move will put them 2.5 hours away from me, instead of half an hour. That is good and bad. The punishment is that all the packing and sorting is going on half an hour from me. The last two weekends I have been intimately, horribly, bleakly involved in that sorting and packing. Given a choice, I think I would pick waterboarding. After all, that's only simulated drowning. Helping my mother sort through 65 years of crap, that's the real deal.
Here's what I've learned. Get rid of it now. Get rid of it. Don't know what your kids would do with it after you're dead? Get rid of it. Don't use it? Get rid of it. Don't wear it? Get rid of it.
Don't wait. My mother has stuff she could have gotten rid of ten years ago, but she didn't. Instead she moved it. Stuff she could have gotten rid of thirty years ago, but she's moved it six times now. At that point, it becomes hard to tell you don't need it. If it was important enough to move six times, why not seven?
Now is as good a time as any to look at the things filling up cabinets and drawers in your house. Look at them and ask whether they're not conspiring to be an anchor, chaining you to obligations you don't want.
My family is crazy and my mother is the worst of us, so it's no surprise that anything labeled a "Mother's Day celebration" would be screaming chaos on tall red wheels.
My parents just recently bought a house closer to my four sisters and further from me, but this means that the time has come again for my mother to clean out her sewing/craft room. To give you an idea of the Herculean scope of this task: my mother's sewing room makes your nearest fabric store look like a hobby. She's insane. Dutiful daughters that we are, though, Liberty and Elephant and I make the trek to Mom's house to begin the sorting and disposing of years of accumulated fabric, craft projects, dolls, quilt books, and various miscellaneous.
Since I know you all love the highlight reels, here it is:
Mom: My steak isn't quite done. Maybe I'll put it in the microwave.
Me: Don't nuke your steak.
Elephant: Trade me. Mine's more done.
Mom: Maybe I'll just put it in the microwave. It's bloody.
(Dad goes on eating his steak in stoic silence, because Mom's steak is never right.)
Mom: Did everyone else's get done?
Me: No, mine's bloody. The way I like it.
Mom: So is mine. I wonder if I should microwave it.
Liberty: Happy Mother's Day and quit being a whiny bitch.
Being woken on Sunday morning to a psychedelic light show.
Me: (hissed behind my mother's back at my sisters): No more fucking questions. No more questions! We don't care what that fabric's for. The only question is keep or give away.
Mom: Oh, and these are the scraps from Dusty's quilt.
Me: No more reminiscing! You can reminisce when you unpack the boxes!
Elephant: I can't believe you tell that story on yourself about peeing in a potato chip bag in a canoe.
Me: I have to. It's a preemptive strike. If I tell the most embarrassing story about myself that I can think of, it takes away your ammo.
Me: Cake or death?
Elephant: Can I have a piece of cake and then death?
Me: No, you can't have both. It's cake or death. Not cake and/or death.
Liberty: Pick death. We want your slice of cake.
Followed by the studious sound of the four of us licking the lemon cream frosting off our cake plates. (Amazing cake.)
Mom: I think I'll give that to your Aunt Jan.
Liberty: Yeah, she'll like that. She's a panooch.
Mom: What's a panooch?
Liberty: She's a cunt.
Mom: (after five minutes of laughing): You made me wet my pants.
These are all just moments that weren't a maelstrom of screaming and flung fabric and insults. Those are just impossible to transcribe.
SPECIAL BONUS LAUGH: Just remembered this while talking to Hubbicula.
Dad's lawnmower blew its spark plug, so at the last minute, he asked me to bring him my lawn mower. To beat the rain, I had to skip most of my packing and prepping to leave. Just threw some stuff into my book bag, loaded the mower in the truck and drove. Skipped lunch.
Arrived at Mom & Dad's to an empty house. I stood in the kitchen for a moment, about to go out to the garage or the back yard. Then I noticed in the dog's bowl: an egg roll. Probably from their favorite Chinese restaurant. Just lying there, waiting for the dog to come in and eat it. I admit that for a good thirty seconds, standing there starving and sweaty, I seriously evaluated just how dirty the dog's bowl was. How bad would it be to just fish that egg roll out and eat it? Then Dad came in and I snapped out of it. The dog got lucky.
I was late to work this morning, because--as hard as this is to believe--I got too organized over the weekend. After two weeks of being sick and cranky and disorganized, I decided that this was the weekend to get my shit back together. Clean house, organize, put things away, return to my previously orderly existence.
Only problem, after weeks of disorganization, it's hard to re-acclimate to organization. It's as though our nature is chaos and so it's easy to slip into chaos and live there, but hard to crawl back out of the sucking cesspool of clutter and procrastination.
Here's what made me late: all my clean clothes are put away, so I wasted time going downstairs to get clothes out of the dryer, where they have been for weeks. All the dishes are put away, so I wasted time opening the dishwasher, looking for a spoon, before I realized the dishes in the dishwasher were dirty. I wasted time trying to find the contents of my backpack, which have been scattered all over my desk, before I remembered that I'd organized them and put them in the backpack already.
Is this the same problem with America? Every time we try to get our shit together, we just stumble over the sudden, shocking, totally confounding state of non-chaos, and then plunge back into chaos. We never stay in a state of organization long enough to learn it. We're always looking for change (Hi, Barack!), but we never adapt to it.
Well, the end may be very fucking nigh, as the hour for the NCAA Division 1 men's basketball championship game approaches. Saturday night, 20,000+ crazed fans descended on downtown Lawrence and partied into the wee hours. That was just for the game that got Kansas to the championship game. If KU wins the championship...what? 40,000 crazed fans? If KU loses...I shudder to think.
At any rate, I'm ready. The doors are locked. I've got food and water. I've got guns and ammo. Bring on the end times.
UPDATE @ 22:51: Based on the sounds of death-ecstasy screaming, I guess KU won. I think I'd better maintain radio silence from here, for my own safety.
UPDATE @ 22:57: Here's a live shot from the downtown TowerCam
Okay, folks, just got back from my last minute errand to Euro-swank shop, where I purchased a bar of Vosges' Bacon Chocolate. Unfortunately, since I'm getting ready to fly out, I'm not going to try it right now. It seems like I ought to allow myself some time to really experience it. I'll let you know how it goes.
Look at it. Fucking look at it and weep. It's a bacon chocolate bar. A bacon fucking chocolate fucking bar, my people. Think about that. Two of the world's most magical foods together in a single food experience.
Other people have trinities--Daddio, Laddio and the Big Spook. My trinity looks like this: the foundation is bacon and tomato with a crown of Lindt Milk Chocolate. The thing is--Vosges makes some amazing chocolate. If they made a plain milk chocolate bar, I would probably be addicted to it in the same way I'm addicted to Lindt milk chocolate bars. Vosges, however, doesn't do "plain." All of their chocolate is exotic, but most of it doesn't appeal to me--chili pepper and other weird shit isn't my idea of a chocolate flavoring. Now...bacon, though. Bacon.
The first time I saw one of these bars, I was supposed to just be dashing in to purchase some Lindt while Hubbicula waited for me. Instead, I stood paralyzed for a good ten minutes, staring at the bacon bar, trying to figure out what to do. My gut instinct was to buy one, $8 price tag be damned. As I reached for it, though, I thought, "Oh, crap, what am I doing?" Think about it: two of best foods in the world are bacon and chocolate. Put them together and you have potentially an addictive substance that makes cocaine look like Lik-M-Aid. This is like what happened to Rome. Everything was going along fine, innovation, democracy, indoor plumbing, and then whammo! Something pushed them over the edge. I'm not saying it was a bacon chocolate bar, but perhaps the Roman equivalent of it.
I thought, "If I buy that chocolate bar and it turns out to be amazing, I'll be hooked, buying $8 chocolate bars like a goddamned crack whore. I'll be out back in the alley behind the Euro-swanky boutique shop where they sell it, trying to give blow jobs to 70-year old professors of Renaissance Italian Poetry, just to get my next fix."
Do you know how hard it is to suck off a 70-year old professor of Renaissance Italian Poetry? I'm not saying you do, I was just curious.
So, throwing caution to the winds, I went into Euro-swank last night with the full intention of buying a bar of it. They were sold out. The little pusher behind the counter--a deceptively pleasant looking young woman--said, "Oh, yeah, people have been buying it like crazy." To which I answered, "Of course they have. Everybody wants to taste the candy that's going to destroy civilization as we know it." So much for not wearing my weird on my sleeve.
