2024-07-01 (Monday) — In A Heap

Got up sometime around 8:00 something, I think, at least for the last time. I wake up a gazillion times during the night. That’s just normal for me. Rarely am I ever actually deeply asleep.

I started off the morning sorting through bins, trying to find all my clothes because, well, lots of them are missing. 🙃

Maybe I’ll just go buy more. My days of car repair as a profession are done, so… I guess I can move on in the clothing department as well. 🙃

Pretty much the only thing I own is clothing to work in that’s dirty and stained.

I have very few items of clothing that are actually presentable. 😅

Anyway, so I sorted through my bins looking for bins full of clothing, and then aggregating them all together back in my work van so that I can have my clothes in my van instead of outside in the bins where the ticks are literally waiting for me to wake up and go out there and grab stuff.

One of the things that happened this morning that was a precursor for the kind of day I was going to have was that as I opened up one of my bins, there on top, was my unturned-in business property tax assessment.

Due yesterday.

😕

So that means I’ll be paying another couple hundred dollars in overdue fines despite all the crazy hard work I went through to get this done.

I got it done, tried to turn it in, but the building was closed because of the tornado… And then all the moving stuff took over, and I forgot about it completely. Stashed away in the bin.

So I drove all the way to Bentonville to turn it in because the Rogers office is still closed from the tornado.

Speaking of tornado, As I deal with the emotional tornado in my own brain, I’ve forgotten completely about the physical tornado. As I drove in, the devastation caught me off guard.

It’s not anything like the Joplin devastation from some years back, but still, it’s pretty gnarly.

When I got back, my mom met me at my little greenhouse staging area to grab the books that were going to be donated to the local children’s place, or whatever it was. She also grabbed a bin of books to give away at the distribution center that she works at.

As she got out of her car, the ticks were coming so quickly, that I had to warn her and have her just stay in her car while I loaded everything. Just in the short while that she was out in the grass, she had like three or four ticks crawling up her ankles.

😶

Bad tick year indeed. Also, now that I have learned that ticks are smarter than I thought they were, congregating where they have seen me be multiple times instead of just hanging out all over the place and then coming running when prey is near, I realize I need to be even more careful. Clearly, the ticks had seen me go back and forth to where my truck was with bins of stuff multiple times, And there was a huge concentration of ticks right there at my truck waiting for me.

In fact, one of the bins of books, the only one that I actually had out on the ground, had I think six ticks waiting on the lid for someone to come by and pick up the bin, so that he could scurry up that person’s arms.

😶

It’s just nutty.

I’ve probably mentioned it before, but I wrap duct tape backwards, just a little above my ankles, and that keeps them from going up, gratefully. I still periodically get a few above my ankles, on my legs, butt, armpit… 😩

Anyway, got Mom loaded up and gone, and I started to burn a little bit more in the burn barrel.

Then I fixed my gaze on my little VW and decided that today was the day I was going to get it fixed enough to sell.

It’s probably dumb, but for my mental health, I need to get one of those projects done that’s been hanging over my head for so freaking long. I need some progress in my life that’s visible and been on my mind for a long time.

So I put stuff in the burn barrel, and I started getting the tools and parts together to work on the Volkswagen.

For whatever reason, Volkswagen was dead, so I jumped it and moved it back out of the tall grass to where I had mowed in an effort to reduce the tick population at my work area.

Took two different jump boxes to get it started, got it jacked up and started working on it.

Rosanne came by, angel that she is, and brought me a cooler full of ice and water and soda and a thermos and a bag of swedish fish.

She’s such a wonderful person.

We chatted for a little bit, as I was already not in a very good place when she came by. She had great advice, except for that my brain can’t do what she recommends. 😅

Anyway, thank you, Rosanne, for your kindness and generosity and love.

After she left, I kept working on the VW. I was wanting to replace the radiator support, but as I started pulling everything apart, I realized that I had to take the fenders off just to take the front bumper cover off.

😶

In learning that, it cemented for me the reason why I’m not going to be working on cars again for a living. Good freaking crap, Volkswagen. No need. No freaking need at all.

I don’t know how I’ve done it for 7 years plus anyway.

No thank you. No more. I’m like that little droid in The Rise of Skywalker… “No, thank you.”

Talk about wasting my life… destroying my body… ugh.

So I gave up on trying to change the radiator support and just decided to put the fan in to get it at least drivable so that it wouldn’t overheat since I had removed the fans.

Unfortunately, the reason I had removed the fans a year and a half ago was because there was a problem with the cooling system , which I completely forgot about. So I put the fans back in, but they wouldn’t turn on. And I didn’t remember the diagnostics I had done back then, so I didn’t remember that the fans themselves were okay and that there was some other problem . I didn’t remember any of that until I had done all the testing again, taking the fans back out to test them.

Once I relearned that the problem was electrical and not related to the fans, I spent only a very little while trying to figure out what was going on before I gave up and decided I was going to wire in a backup switch to override the other stuff.

Not optimal, but at least they could drive and not have to worry about fans and overheating issues.

Everything I did working on that car went sideways. And then sideways even more. It was like everything was cursed… right down to the missing electrical tape, which ended up being the last straw that broke my back.

I’ve got rolls and rolls and rolls of the stuff. A whole little bin of it. Don’t I?

None in my van. None in all the piles of stuff that I brought down from the garage which is where my stuff was.

None.

You’re getting the reader’s digest condensed version at this point of all the sideways crap.

Why? Why can’t these things just be normal? Why are there so. many. major. issues with so many things? Why can’t the problems be mostly straightforward with a few challenging ones?

By that point, I was so far gone that I completely melted down in an angry, agonizing horrible fit. Yelling and cursing and throwing things and slamming my sledgehammer into the bumper of my work van (bending my thumb nail back nearly half way in the process) and just… sobbing–begging God to just take my life and let me be done with everything…

And that just minutes, maybe seconds after threatening to take his life if I could.

😞

My mom showed up just a couple of minutes into the sobbing portion of my meltdown. She was coming to bring back the empty bins from the books that she had donated.

I walked toward her still crying, taking a minute for her to realize what was going on. When she saw me she of course was super concerned, and I grabbed the bins out of the back of her car and set them down by my van and just crumbled into a sobbing heap. She just came over and held me, but I was worried about her getting ticks, so I wanted her to sit on the trailer. She held me anyway for a little while, and then she sat on the trailer while I talked through my day.

Going back over my day I was calm a little bit for the first bit, and then the anger and rage started coming back, and I repeated my meltdown from before, this time in front of my mom.

Along with it all, a lot of anger boiling to the surface at how I felt we have been treated in getting kicked out of where we were living… that it happened at all, and how it was done, and how so much pain and agony and even financial challenges have resulted from their… choices.

(sigh)

There’s just nothing left of me. I have no resilience. I have only the fleeting shadow of a hope of a better future.

I just want it to all be over.

Mom stayed with me after I calmed down a little bit, and she helped me sort everything that was on the trailer. I gave up on keeping just about any of it for myself. I just need to be done. Done.

Please, just let me be done. 😞

Thanks pretty much completely to Mom, we got the trailer organized and separated, so things could be donated to the Haven Hill community barn more effectively instead of haphazardly with everything in random, disorganized piles.

Without her, I don’t know what would have happened, but I certainly don’t think I would have gotten that done and off my list. With the extra moral support, we got it done.

We unloaded it to the barn with the help of Jim and Landon, and then I dumped the trash in the dumpster, and drove the van and trailer back down.

My mom and I then drove to Pea Ridge and grabbed some food from Wendy’s and ate it in the Walmart neighborhood market parking lot.

After we came back, I lost my phone, which in my mental state led to… more than just a search for the phone.

😞

After finding my phone, I bid good evening to my Mom, started tending the wounds on my ankles, two of them looking really bad, with scalloped holes underneath the scabs, and the scabs coming off super easily.

Might just be a function of all the sweat and being soggy all day long for days but they certainly didn’t look good, and I spent a good long time cleaning them.

Unfortunately, after having amassed more clean time than I have in a very long time, I relapsed.

Fitting end to a miserable day.

😞

Bless my mom for being wonderful.

Bless Roseanne for being wonderful.