By Lucy

They cancelled Colbert.

I almost started crying when I heard. It was like hearing someone had died. I screamed, confusing everyone in the lunch room, then I went outside and screamed some more.

All the guys were having a smoke around the corner.

“What are you losing your mind about?” Terry asks.

“What mind did I have to lose?” I say sarcastically, knowing he wouldn’t care.

“True that.”

Sunday, I slept a lot after the circus. Like, I slept for almost 12 hours straight. Probably makes sense, had to catch up, but it was disorienting and I felt groggy when I woke up.

I’ve been getting to the store later and later. No reason to get there any earlier than 5 minutes to. The store is closed before we get there on Sundays anyway.

Cops were at Home Depot when I got there.

“Thief?” I asked Terry.

“Probably.” He took a drag from his cigarette. “They found some guy hiding in the store. Said he was waiting for a girl.”

“A girl?”

“Yeah, his girlfriend.” Another drag. “Couldn’t tell them what her name was, though, said “she has many names”.” He snorts. “Not a very good thief, huh?”

Yeah. Or he was waiting for me. Even I can’t keep track of my names at this point.

Brr.

Janessa shows up in a Bikers Against Child Abuse shirt. The logo is white and red.

“Is that safe for you to wear?” I ask. Are they 81 affiliated? I can’t remember. The colours are the same.

“What?”

“Angels.” Terry says, “I built a fence for them once, one of their guys. He was super nice, polite, on time.”

They are. It’s funny how they have such a reputation for living outside the rules, because they stick quite rigidly to their own rules.

Work is slow and tiring and hot and frustrating.

We’re all losing weight, it’s not just me. Terry’s been complaining that he’s running out of holes in his belt, and I can see his gut receding day by day. Night shift can go one of two ways; you binge, or you can’t find your appetite. We’re going the second way.

The sun rises almost half an hour later now than it did when I started this job, which helps a lot.

I slept for more than 10 hours Monday. Life is passing me by.

I hate it.

Me and Paul get into a discussion about “red right hand” and “good scars vs evil scars”. As a cripple myself, I’m loathe to include “symbolic” scars in a bad guy. But you also don’t want everyone to be perfectly healthy, at least not in the story I’m telling. It’s like the debate Bioware had about making the Dreadwolf bi vs straight. Do you risk the unfortunate implications to make a point, or is that the whole point.

The rains starts Monday night and doesn’t let up for three days. The beams come in all wet and dirty, and the wood planks are soaking for days. And of course, when wood gets wet it goes soft and expands, and then it starts getting moldy and smelling ripe.

Some flies are breeding in the rotting wood around my leaking window. Just little wee flies, but they’re annoying. And, of course, they won’t stop until it’s fixed, so there’s nothing I can do, cuz it’s not like there’s some offending piece of fruit I can throw out or a drain I can unclog.

Tuesday I drag myself from another deep slumber, turn on the computer, and get another unpleasant headline.

Ozzy Osborne, dead at 76.

“No!” I yell, jumping out of my chair.

I mean, it’s not surprising. What is surprising is how he lasted so long, really. And yet, it still hurts. One of the greats.

My Factor box showed up at Jeremy’s, so I went there to grab it and drag him out jogging. We waited for half an hour, cuz Kev was late, and then as he showed up it started pouring rain again.

Back to zombie mode.

“Dinner with the Swansons?” James asks me as I microwave my Factor meal.

“Basically.”

I got slightly distracted as the week went on. I found a man on a forum and admittedly, he caught my eye because his profile picture looks like the Vagabond (in real life, they look nothing alike). As we started to talk, I learned that he’s nothing like him but an interesting fellow in his own right… if a bit flighty.

Janessa didn’t show up Thursday night. She hopped on a plane to Winnipeg to buy a cherry red ’68 ‘Stang someone was selling in Brandon, and drive it back.

We had pizza night. It’s funny cuz 6 pizzas cost, what, 100 bucks? Maybe 150? Less than they pay any of us for a single day of work. And per person, maybe 20 bucks. What a paltry bribe. But the number of temps has been slowly dwindling and it’s too hard to deal with turnover at a short term job like this. 8 hours is a long time to lose.

Still, we had enough pizza left over that I was able to take an entire pizza home. And it was a good time, relaxing and eating with everyone.

I agreed to OT Friday and I regretted it. What the price for another night of my time? OT is another 200$ on my paycheck. but it seems so small when Zack is being rude… again.

Jenna, his second in command who is in charge of the temps, is not great either. She has no problem ordering us around even though she has even less of an idea what we are doing. James even texted me “did she bite into a lemon? She looks like she’s gonna make a great ex-wife someday”.

I got asked to move my car for some truck driver who can’t drive straight. His grill, as you can see, was a Spiderman.

Can’t sleep…

Can’t sleep…

I woke up around 5. I had plans to hit the busker’s festival, but of course thick black clouds rolled in just as I stumbled out to the living room to make a tea. Why is it always profoundly hot and sunny when I’m sleeping, and raining when I want to go out? And the rain doesn’t even cut the heat, it just makes it muggy.

I was supposed to meet my gentleman friend at 7:30, which would have given me time to walk around the busker’s festival with Kevin, but his ride was late. 7:30 rolled into 8. I went to the festival by myself as the rain cleared. There wasn’t much there to begin with, and even less now that everyone had packed up from the rain. A lady doing henna, a man in tight leopard skin pants doing some sort of fire-eating/ comedy show, and a lady from Winnipeg selling chicken paintings that I actually quite liked.

Then to Superstore to grab a few things while I had time to burn. At 8:30 he finally said he was on his way, so I went to the appointed coffee shop, ordered a coffee, and waited.

“Hello, I recognized the Majora’s Mask right away.” He said, gesturing to my shoulder. “I’m sorry for being late – “

“Spare me. The time at which you said you might be late was already past apologies. I know how much money you make and you should have got a taxi at 6, 6:30 if you really respected my time.”

He nodded. “Understood.”

The rest of the meeting went fine after that. I like talking to him quite a bit, he can keep up with me and we’re interested in a lot of the same topics. He lives outside of town and I offered to drive him home now that it was clear he wasn’t gonna shiv me. ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’ came on the car and we both belted it out as the car rolled down Arthur St.

This is fun!

I’m still not quite sure I trust him, which is always anathema to friendships.

After that, I went to Jeremy’s and we watched Breaking Bad all night and ate the free pizza from pizza night. Around 4:30 I went home to lie awake in bed all day and regret working overtime.

I’m not sure I’ve made it clear enough, but I never liked Walter and I never had sympathy for Walter. It’s quite obvious that he’s a control freak who’s only happy when he’s the smartest person in the room and can lord it over everyone. I don’t like Skylar in the sense that I couldn’t imagine myself enjoying having to talk to her over coffee, but the way that Walter manipulates her is spine-chilling.

Especially the first half of season 3. Walter is playing all the hits of coercive control; pretending to go along with what she wants, showing up with food to try to either manipulate her into letting him in or playing on social norms to force his way in. Both my mother and the Vagabond have played those cards, my mother in particular.

My biggest problem with it is the scene when Skylar calls the cops to report Walter as breaking and entering. Admittedly, it might be different in the good ol’ U S of A, but in Canada, if you had already kicked your husband out of the house and he was actively living in another location, the cops would tell him to just leave and go back to his apartment. They wouldn’t be like “well he didn’t hit you so it’s fine”. They know there’s more to abusive situations than that, they also know that in that scenario it’s extremely likely that they will be called again and again and they don’t want to waste their time by being repeatedly recalled to a house where things are obviously not fine.

I’m also 100% on board with her sleeping with Ted. I’m amused by people being upset with her for it like she’s sneaking around or something. She kicked Walt out and asked him for a divorce, she’s a free woman and she can see whoever she wants as far as I’m concerned! Her prancing home and waving it in his face was a little petty, but I’m here for it. You go girl! Get some!

It’s gross if you do the math on their relationship. Walter was older than 30 and a PHd with ownership in a company, and Skyler was maybe 22 cuz there is a 12 year age gap between them. He really did just go trawling for some pretty little thing he could push around.

I like Mike Ermentraut. He does kinda remind me of Garry, but I also just like the way he is quietly competent at his job, in a show that is full of idiots who blow up their lives over petty little things.

I also realized, Bob Odenkirk is so copying Oscar Acosta for his character!

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I often wonder about my parent’s loneliness.

I tried listing my dad’s friends in my head and that list ended at 0. I’m sure my dad had friends at one point – he definitely has stories of them – but by the time I have conscious memory, they had exited stage left. And it’s not like my dad isn’t congenial or funny. Both James and Brian even listed not talking to dad anymore as one of the things they would miss when we broke up, because he’s great in a conversation. I’ve met coworkers of his who had nothing but great things to say. He just didn’t hang out.

At one point my dad did make an off-handed comment about losing his friends when he met my mom, but apparently the cognitive dissonance got the better of him and he walked it back and never elaborated.

It’s also worth remembering that my dad grew up in Nova Scotia and only moved to Ontario in his thirties, so all of his childhood friends are back in NS.

And my mother…

The article that prompted this was an article about how when people become parents, they join parents’ clubs and have friends who are also parents and forget about their single friends, and mine didn’t do that. Although they did have friends who were parents.

There was Elizabeth, who knew my mother in high school, but I know for a fact they lost touch before reconnecting after I was born. I remember, both distinctly and vaguely, my mother ran into Elizabeth again when I was a kid and she already had her own kids, my age.

There was Monica, who my mother met at the park with me and my brother. My mother started chatting to Monica because she was talking to her kids in fluent German. I resented Monica for the longest time because her kids learned German and English and my mother was mad at us for not learning German from her, but I now recognize that was my mother being a bad teacher and not a failure on my part.

Angie I mentioned. I’m not sure when my mother met Angie, but I’m pretty sure they were friends when she was with her first husband. I also think Angie had kids young; if I recall correctly, her daughter was a teenage when I was young (remember, my mother was older than 30 when I was born).

There were parties when I was young. I remember groups of adults standing around in the garage, in the way of Canada in the 90’s, beer in hand, cigarettes too. I don’t know when or why they stopped.

I dunno… the list kind of peters out. Did my mother lose track of all her friends from high school? I struggle to recall any. Did she join any parent clubs and decide they weren’t for her? Or did she not bother?

Did people notice she was abusive and raise the subject with her, and she decided to isolate rather than accept the criticism?