“High” School and absent friends

Took me a little walk down memory lane this morning. Cat woke me up real early, again, and I decided to stay up rather than stare at the ceiling.

It came to me that I don’t really want to adult today of all days. Gonna have to a little, as I have things to write, but that gave me several hours to screw around in. I hatched a plan.

Went across the street and got a 2-liter diet 7-Up and a pack of rolling papers. Came back, poured the 7-Up into a pitcher, turned the bottle into a bong in the time-honored fashion (of course I have an old bongshaft in my toolbox — who doesn’t?). Ground up a goodly amount of herb, rolled two joints, and then rolled two more.

I dug out my old ear buds, charged up an old TracFone, outfitted it with a playlist. Found a short-sleeved shirt that fit me (was my style in those days to wear a short-sleeve over a band shirt), collected my quarters, stuck my oxygen tank in my backpack. Headed out. To high school…

First stop was Church’s chicken. I sat on a curbstone and smoked the first joint, remembering when I used to do that in the parking lot of KFC, at 75th and Clarendon Hills rd, instead of going to first hour study hall. I would read instead. I had my kindle with me, and I read from something period — John Brunner’s extravagantly excellent The Shockwave Rider, which I had gotten from the library the first day in school, when I noticed it in the window.
My friend Dave Trojnair thought that was just weird. He thought it even weirder when I explained it. That never discouraged me. I had a different book every day. I read them while everybody else was finishing their work.

I was only at that school for a few months. Circumstances dictated that we had to move, and so we did. New friends time. I moved too. I got on the bus and rode to Campbell and Glenn, to the “Old Chicago” restaurant there. Old Chicago was the name of an indoor amusement park/mall that used to sit at I-55 and Rt. 53, in the Romeoville/Bolingbrook borderlands. It was there that I used to stop before 1st period, to brighten up my day.

I sat in the parking lot and smoked my second joint, remembering the day I saw an old friend from South Hinsdale named Jim Jackson, at the record store in the mall (I was buying “Love is the Drug/Both Ends Burning”, by Roxy Music). We laughed, remembering when I borrowed his 8-track of “In the Wake of Poseidon”, leaving my “Dark Side of the Moon” as damage insurance, and got all the way back to his house on my rickety old bike, with the tape in my hand, running into a stone in the driveway and flinging it high in the air. Jim got to keep “Dark Side”. Later that week, the B. Dalton at the mall stocked all of the John Holmes Ballantine Lovecrafts, and I bought the set.

I remembered my friends Bill and “Brother”, whose real name was “Leydelle”, but he didn’t like to go by that. Bill was totally into Bowie. I remembered talking him into buying Genesis Live, which he hated, and gave to me. I remembered eating a huge plate of manicotti and then getting on the Rotor. (interestingly, Old Chicago isn’t listed in the wiki article…but the ride was there for sure.) That didn’t end well. Slops!

I laughed, and watched the opening cooks drain the grease trap. That was smelly, so I took the cue to depart.

The next stop was more problematical. My third school was in the middle of the inner city of Joliet, and looked like a castle. I went in for sports at first there, but soured on that all and went in for pool-playing, auto theft, and coffeeshop ennui instead. It was just as well. I was an outfielder then, and Jesse Barfield was at the school. Mark Grant was a few blocks away, at Joliet Catholic, on my way home along Jefferson st.

Eventually, I came up with a solution, and got back on the bus(es).

There’s a metal-working shop on Ft. Lowell that has a little castle out front, with what looks like a haunted house next door. I sat on the grass between them and puffed away on the remains of the second joint and some of the third one. I watched people head for work. By now, the mixtape was about midway.

I walked home from there to the strains of UFO, forgoing the second stop at Church’s, having covered half of my high school years. The second half, the employed half, was about to begin.

The two-liter bong needed water. I filled that up while getting the music ready for the next stage and having a few hits. In my files, I have an abortive attempt at doing ELP’s “Knife Edge”. The keyboard part is complete…which is what I needed. I got my guitar, tuned it, plugged it in, got the thing going, closed my eyes.

I was back jamming with my friend Al Dvorak, gods rest his soul. I remembered the eagle painted directly on the wall, and the weird stuff I painted that night while seated on the left hand of my good friend Mr. Natural. “Just a step cried the sad man
Take a look down at the madman
Theatre kings on silver wings
Fly beyond reason
From the flight of the seagull
Come the spread claws of the eagle
Only fear breaks the silence
As we all kneel pray for guidance…”

We shouted in unison. Ba ba ba babbaba ba babbaba ba, said the instruments.

Just to make things perfect, I scraped some resins out of my bowl, and smoked that, and made an egg concoction for breakfast. Scott wasn’t there this time — he usually was. I had bong hits for all three of us with my coffee, and got to work in lieu of school.

School’s out forever.Engine summer’s here, 1979.

I spent the summer in school, too, getting my grades up for a bid at a better school. I took graphic arts, making tshirts and posters out of scrawlings and ruining a jean jacket with a bad silkscreen job. That was the summer that I developed my writing method, which stands to this day, the hippie speedball method, and finished my second novel.

Was not very innocent, but life was cleaner then. Purer. There were times when emotions were unmixed, when things didn’t overcomplicate themselves…hoo boy, it’s getting DEEP in here.

Gimme a break, me. I’ve just aged four years in an hour. I’m for a nap.

 

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Updates, January 23

Sorry. That resolution to blog every day, or even more frequently, didn’t go very far. Where were we? I dunno. So…this is what’s been happening. I wrote stuff, made some music. Here, try some Bowie cover:

I have a story in this book, a short entitled “Eddie”, based on a fragment I wrote fifteen years or so ago. Just a little bit of shock and awe. Really cool cover. Ran Cartwright does good work. I have a round robin piece that I’m puzzling over, and have launched into a piece that has more detail about what Brown Jenkin did while he had the Silver Key. Both are for book appearances (hopefully, anyway), as I move along the path from unknown to virtually unknown to little-known.

Little-known is not so bad, and I’m also working on the better-paid part. Because I have bills too. A grand a month, a little writing money and my babysitting money, that’s not so much to live on.

But I don’t want to be entirely mercenary…I’m still planning a series of shorts for shoggoth.net, and I will release some music gratis. But the days of just letting everything out there are probably over.
I’m older, and sick, and tired. I’m trying to work on less pieces and make them count instead of just spinning and spinning and spinning. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be willing to slug toe-to-toe with anyone else working weird.  The same for guitar, composition, et cetera.

Handsome volumes of Duanestuff and plastic cd cases of modstuff are right around the corner. Before Crazytown will be back on sale at Amazon in February, with a print edition option (yay!) I’m not going to re-up with Amazon exclusive, though. Didn’t deliver as I had hoped. The book will move to Lulu next year, and will stay at Smashwords.

I’m investigating physical cd/download possibilities for a couple of things — the Brown Jenkins blues tune will be one, and discs of literary tributes, cover songs, and vocal versions of previously-released material are not far behind.
Been sitting on that stuff for a while.

And Cub Tracks seems to be going well. We’re undergoing a format change, and there are a few nay-nays, but the articles in general are well-received, with some getting tremendous readership numbers (at least the ones I can collect). I’d be interested to know what the sticky factors are. Maybe I should ask Al Yellon, who runs the site. He might know. He hasn’t said a peep to me about any pieces being substandard or anything like that — I’m allowed, even encouraged, to continue. So that’s a plus.

I enjoy crafting the articles. They’re aggregations of links, but they can be massaged into different media presentation styles, looked at with new eyes. I do quite a few with “themes”, essentially framing devices more or less related to some of the linked content. Mixed reviews, I’m afraid, but that’ll change as things gets more baseball-related. I’m still just drilling down into what works for the audience..heh, to the point that I just up and asked them what they wanted.

It turned out that they didn’t know.

So it goes back to what Al likes. He’s the boss, the editor. If my copy passes his desk, then things are good.

I have some ideas about form that I’ll use tomorrow. Have to cut down on the time it takes to do those articles. The last one took most of the day, since the girl was over. Like eight solid hours of mostly gruntwork, copying and pasting, then cutting and pasting. Structuring the whole document as a baseball game, with a lead-off man segment, ten innings, extras beyond that. Nobody said anything about that, and I’m operating on the principle that no news is good news there. Like when I used to slip my tape into the party music player, and nobody complained, I knew I was good. It was acceptable.

The girl. Ohhh boy. She’s been a problem since her parents called the other day and told her that he’s working again, and that they planned to visit. She has this fantasy built up, you see, where they turn out to be real human beings with competence and financial wherewithal, and take her home to live happily after. That this has been repeatedly proven to be abject nonsense doesn’t dissuade her, and consequently she turns into demon child when she speaks to them because she’s caught on the horns of the dilemma — give up the fantasy, grow up and deal, or be childish and believe in the Easter bunny.

I just want the drama over. There are papers that the parents need to sign for the custody to be permanent, and those need to be signed. And then the child needs to be removed from negative influences as much as possible, and go sit in a corner with her thoughts, and deal with those.

She’s afraid to. I understand. But she’s also eleven, too old to be playing “look at me, aren’t I cute” instead of doing her assigned work, far too old to be snuggling up to such forlorn possibilities. Time to put on the big girl panties, I tell her.

She was such a colossal pain in the ass today that I got a migraine. Defiant, selfish, willfully ignorant. She screwed up her English homework to get attention, took out her calculator and started doing her math homework with it (!) like I wasn’t three feet away. She played the food game. This is where she takes real little bites, and chews slowly, a hundred time each mouthful, and stares wall-eyed at the tv screen.

Fuck that. People have been letting her get away with it for years. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, and it’s over, at least under my roof. 1/2 hour, and the food gets thrown away, and she goes hungry. Her choice. She wasted so much time scewing up her homework that she didn’t get to go across to her house and feed the pets — so the small creatures had to wait until after dinner. Animals like the security of being fed at the same time every day. But she screws that up too, so she can get attention.

She refuses to go after positive attention, even though she claims to like it better — largely because it takes effort to do good things instead of being lazing about wallowing in one’s own ignorance.

Great model, as least character-wise, for Cassilda, who I’ve been writing up recently also.

Yeah, I’m mad at her, and mad at several other someones. It’s a GOOD thing that I don’t have the ability to wish people into cornfields or anything like that. All I can do is to have them die horribly and slowly in stories…

Wait. That gives me an idea.

’til next time.

Blue Instead of Yellow

Yeah, I know. I skipped a day, and promised to talk about KIY shit…but life intervened. Because of the weather, seasonal depression is on my mind.

I suffer from occasional bouts of depression. PTSD from my hospital stay, circumstances, aftermath. The interludes of depression can be long-lasting. Some have lasted months.

Others are worse off. Yeah, I know that. I’m not throwing a pity party.

But it’s like this: I have maybe 25% lung capacity on a good day. Most of my alveoli were destroyed by fluid incursion following a bout with a still-and-always-idiopathic lung-wall-destroying disease (all signs point to valley fever but there was no way to diagnose it by the time they got at me). My lungs are largely scar tissue, and don’t inflate completely anyway. Essentially, as my friend FJM pointed out, I live at 45,000 feet.

I live on generated or canned air. While I do have portable tanks, they last a couple of hours each, and weigh 12 pounds. It’s a complete pain in the ass to go anywhere – especially as any exertion taxes my oxygen-processing apparatus.

When I’m short of breath, I don’t think straight. I cannot diagnose things with my usual facility. Plus the need to breathe makes me panicky.

So I usually don’t go anywhere. I don’t have a car, and public transportation takes time, which is what I have the least of. Left cabin fever behind years ago.

I hate it. Just existing is so frustrating that sometimes I just want to ball up and cry. But I refuse to do that. The anxiety and frustration get channeled into art, and I keep on keepin’ on…just as I did with my lungs trashed and double pneumonia.

Don’t know any other way.

But this really ain’t about me, or my seasonal depression brought on by my body’s painful response to cold. It’s about the invisible diseases people suffer, and how they’re viewed by others, who haven’t the empathy or imagination or common decency to behave properly when confronted by something that they haven’t directly experienced.

I’ve had people ask me for cigarettes, smoke right in my face, blow smoke at me. I just shake my head sadly, and move away. What else? I could upbraid them, but what would that change?

Let’s think about that seasonal pain. It’s fibromyalgia. I know several other people who suffer from it. Used to be called neuralgia. For me, it feels like a cloud of below-freezing pins and needles lancing a lake of lava. It’s mostly in remission, thankfully, as my insurance company no longer covers the drug that made things bearable.

It has un-remissed. Made me more productive as I fill every waking moment with activity in order to sublimate the pain as much as possible. At least I have that mechanism. Many don’t.

But the point is, you can’t see fibromyalgia. Not with any instruments a common physician has. Certainly not with the naked eye.

Can’t see diabetes, lupus, many other debilitating disorders.

Have a care. Walk a few steps in the other guy’s shoes. You never know what’s in the rest of the iceberg.

 

We Have a Deal?

I made the girl a deal today.
I’ve been stressing over the time it takes to watch her, since she can’t be trusted alone and refuses to toe the line enough to be allowed privileges. That means I can’t write or make music or anything else because she wants constant attention, like an oversized infant.
She’s never learned how to work for and achieve positive attention. We’ve tried–the lessons just don’t get absorbed.
And this has been my issue since she was introduced to our household, and I was deputized to take care of her (nobody told me she was coming), without my knowledge or approval.

The Best I Ever Had…

Had to knock off early to watch the child, and didn’t manage to finish the stuff I started.
We had a running conversation about “ownership” of tasks after she did a crap job of sweeping the front room, angling to go outside.
Nuh-uh.
I explained what we want if she runs into a roadblock (ask for help), since she claimed to be stymied by the bird crap and seeds that were stuck to the floor. She couldn’t SWEEP them up, you see, so the task became impossible.
Kids.
I watered the area a little (can’t use a cleanser cuz Dammit Bunny​ might lick it) and scraped the poo up with the poop scooper. It dried in a few seconds, and I used the hand broom to brush it into the dustpan.
So she saw how it could be done.
“You know,” I said. “This is where your OCD should kick in (she has a bad case of it). You’d get so much more done.”

She just looked at me blankly. She was not having a good time.

Wah.

We continued to talk some about owning her tasks, and this was parlayed into the writing of her chores on the daily calendar in the hall, so she knows what she is to do each given day, since she almost never has homework any more.

Her homework consists of reading a half hour daily. She insists that twenty minutes is the figure, because that’s what her teacher assigned, but I tacked on the extra ten long ago, because she desperately needs to acquire some kind of vocabulary.
She’s very hard to understand. She does not express herself well, and she habitually lapses into this little-baby-girl quiet voice, which one can’t hear over the constant noise of the parakeets.
I hate that. It makes me virtually foam at the mouth. That and the refusal to answer a direct question. Those are the pettiest of my peeves.
And the more I ask her, tell her, to speak up, please, the more she does it. Agh!

She was disobedient about a couple of things before that–everything was all about getting to play. I understand the urge, but she knows very well what the score is, and copping an attitude isn’t going to gain her any freedom.

She ended up with a time in the corner, to think things over. I went through and re-swept the front room, and did the hallway, the kitchen, and the bath, while I was at it.
Told her she had an hour after she started scuffing her feet and scratching, intending to give her fifteen minutes or so and then releasing her to blow it all off.
She was still in a mood later. So was everyone else. The floor was made of eggshells.
But it was mostly a positive afternoon. Something to build on if she can live up to her promises.
Go you.

Sometimes…

Sometimes I don’t want to wear the big boy pants. Especially when I’m not feeling so adult, or even competent.
I need to listen more, and to learn not to spread myself so thin. I get caught up in things, enthusiastic, and sometimes will go off without completely understanding what I’m trying to accomplish, or why.

There are times when I miss key details. Because I want to badly to DO GOOD. To be PART OF THINGS.
“Yeah,” you say, “don’t we all?”

Well, yeah. But I’ve been a certified “weird person” all of my life. Couldn’t help it. I’m still a misfit most places. Hell, everywhere.

How Those Famous Guitar Players Got Really Good

Yesterday, “Brook” got her birthday present a week early-a 1/2 size hot pink acoustic guitar:She has been practicing. She now knows Em, E, D, Dm, and has made inroads toward making G and A ring. This morning I showed her the blues scale and a minor pentatonic scale, and we discussed how improvisation is done and how songs are put together. Once she has the G and A down, I’ll introduce C and F and we’ll start building a repertoire for her.
Purple Haze and Nights in White Satin will be the first ones. We’ll also work on composing our own material, augmented by the dozen or so percussive gizmos I have lying around.

The world’s newest guitarist will have plenty of additional time to practice. She’s grounded again. Can’t spend five minutes outside without forgetting about the simple ground rules. “Stay in earshot” “Don’t go over to the ghetto-ass kids’ house to play” “Stay out of the parking lot”.
I predict that, at this rate, she’ll be famous by the time she’s 11.
The ghetto-ass kids’ dad is next door working on the cabinetry in the recently-abandoned apartment there. I sincerely hope he heard my lecture.
The littlest one, age seven, who goes by the nickname Yaya, is a yeller. She likes to scream and shout to try to get her way. Faith goes outside and she is told “If you play with my sister, you can’t ride my scooter any more.”
Instead of turning around and saying “Li’l bitch, we gave you that scooter, and your sister is more fun anyway,” Faith gets upset and tears around the complex on a borrowed bike, therefore being out of earshot when I call for her.
Ten minutes later, she drags her scooter into the kitchen and bugs right back out again before I can say anything.
I look out, and she’s on the back of Chi-chi’s (the older sister, all of nine) bike, going around the corner of a building about fifty yards away, in the parking lot.
I slap a tank together and go out the other way, to head them off at the pass, but no. They double back and go back in the ghetto-ass apt.
Sitting on the patio, biding my time. I water the plants and look over the gate periodically.
Eventually herself sees me and comes over.
“Get inside,” I say. “We need to talk. And take that scooter gear (kneepads, elbow pads) off–you won’t need it anymore today.”

The ensuing conversation ended, unfortunately, like so many do, with grounding and a turn in the corner, facing the wall, butthurt. During the course of the dialogue, the phrase “I don’t know” was repeatedly used to justfiy actions taken, as was “I just like to play”. The latter is okay. Not so in-depth, but excusable, depending on the behavior it’s used to represent. But the first is one of the two things that are guaranteed to makes things take a bad turn (the other is to lie to my face and have me catch her).

The child knows this. She is apparently incapable of considering the results of her actions, despite repeated preaching, beseeching, reasoning, back-patting, and other conditioning methods used to reinforce a positive behavior pattern.

She doesn’t like thinking. It makes her head hurt.

It makes my head hurt to think of another ten years of this mindless impulse-following. I’m afraid sometimes her head will just collapse in on itself. Either that, or fill up with cats (who abhor a vacuum, you know).

I’m fairly strict. I expect a lot, I’m told. Too much–I expect literacy and some degree of self-awareness and self-knowledge. I want to see some intellectual curiosity and the ability to tell right from wrong and to act accordingly.

Very little of that going on. So I’m looking at music as the way to get that sort of patience and determination going.

Fingers, eyes, legs, toes crossed. Only can only hope.

Happy Hallowe’en

Samhain is upon us. Ghouls and ghosties and long-leggity beasties, and things that go bump in the night. The origin of the celebration of the Harvest is buried in the wanna-be-scared commercial-bonanza interpretation of the holiday.

Like everything else. It’s no surprise that corporations have taken over everything. It’s a running joke, and one muttered uncomfortably, lest THEY hear.

You know, the ones in charge, whoever they are. The ones behind it all.

Whoever they are. Everyone has a different interpretation. Some are more credible than others. But even the incredible beliefs are held with a deathgrip. Because people are like that.

I was reminded of that a little earlier, when someone accused me of being closed-minded because I like to throw darts at Christian beliefs. Generally I do this for a reason–because I am being preached at. I know preachers who don’t preach to me, but to their flock. I don’t have a problem with that–it’s consenting adults and their progeny. The progeny will have the chance to expose themselves to other belief systems in time.

There was comparison made to the condition of fibromyalgia (neuralgia previously), and community disbelief in what few experienced themselves, and to the “existence” of Jesus of Nazareth and the apostle Paul. I pooh-poohed this idea, based on the premise that what people were directly experiencing was not hearsay, was provable (as it seemingly has been). No independent sources exist that discuss Paul or Jesus. Quod erat demonstratum.

Some folks believe that other folks should behave as they do, and will go to great lengths to maintain this superiority.

Others still will believe nonsense, and will go to great lengths to maintain their fantasy. My grand-daughter stubbornly holds onto the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and others, despite being well past the age where I had even given up on in invisible guiding hand in the sky.

The point of that is that such beliefs are childish. (imo)
I don’t believe we are going to advance as a species until we get over the idea of divinity.

The ideal is another thing. Bestowing benevolence is to be lauded in any case. People in need should be able to find some succor.

I’m disabled, on SSI. Five months after having another mouth come to live with me, my food stamps were cut down to 17.00/month. Thanks, Republicans. I would have died back in February 2010 if you had your way.

So I have some vested interest.

But that doesn’t negate the point. One doesn’t need faith to believe in charity, in hope. One just needs to have a sense of right and wrong.

 

where it’s at

Oops. Well, I forget to post here for a bit. There was way too much life happening. Some of it had to do with the increasingly wayward child, some of it had to do with deadlines (most of them self-imposed), some of it had to do with other folks. During the last month or so, we’ve had to relocate for two days so that the complex could spray for bugs (seems to have worked), I’ve finalized the cover and contents of my book. somehow finagled renewing most of my web properties despite not having enough  money to do so (I spent the money on eating out during the two days we were in the hotel), and cooked a semi-gourmet meal damn near every night.

Did see the new pulmonologist. He spewed some hope, saying that there had to be some reason why the scarring in my lungs isn’t healing, and they’re not returning to full capacity. The last guy said that to, and tried to put me on the Atkins diet to fix it.

Wrong answer. I distrust fad diets, and, though I’m sure he had his reasons for recommending that (mostly having to do with my weight), I have my own reasons not to do it. We’ll talk about willful disobedience later. though, and in another context.

Speak To Me (Breathe)

An old Pink Floyd title sums it up best.

Lately we’ve had a rash of not-really-well-thought-out remarks, on all sides. It makes things rancorous and the drama expands exponentially. Each tiny verbal molehill carries the potential to evoke a spate of vitriolic invective.

It could be a coincidence that two out of the three of us are sick with a cold or flu. Just maybe.

But my wife feels that I’ve been guilty of it, too, especially regarding the child. She wants me to lighten up some, to not have such an impossible standard.

She may be right. I honestly don’t know. But I’m willing to try things her way.

Couldn’t hurt.

This flu, on the other hand, is a bastard. I’ve been sick since Thursday, and sick SICK like lying down most of the time since Friday. The kid got just a brush of it, or so it seems, but the wife is down for the count-has been sleeping for the last four hours.

It’s one of those that comes complete with fever and chills and is mostly body ache and congestion. Really debilitating sort of symptoms. Just nasty, no fun. I’m hoping to see the end of it soon–I’ve been moving around a little, and my doctor is coming for her monthly visit this afternoon, so I’ll have some professional opinion to bring to bear.

It’d be nice to get shed of it.

Anyway, while I’m able to move around, I’ve been piddling with the book and with the new tracks, just polishing and brainstorming really. Just to keep my hand in, keep my brain going.

Though it would surprise some people, I am taciturn by nature. I don’t require much communication, and my wife and I both have that type of personality whose happiness is expressed as quiet satisfaction.

The rabbits would seem to concur, and the cats also. We are all quiet beings, going through our days with a minimum of noise or movement. Just as much activity as necessary, conserving energy for when it’s needed.

The birds, not so much. They twitter back at the tv when it’s on, making fun of newscasters and other talking heads, and rooting for the teams that wear green or blue uniforms. They get loud sometimes, but I don’t think it would be as prominent in a larger space. Our apartment is tiny.

I’m really hoping I get well soon so that I can transfer my computer and these boxes and my guitars into the master bedroom, even if I have to stack everything like cordwood. This so we can get the child, now variously named Brook, Nicky, and Pita, into her own space, where she can babble happily to the bunnies and her zillions of stuffed animals.

My stars, does that kid blabber. She does it all the time, as soon as she gets happy. She starts just talking, about anything and everything, and singing tunelessly or humming loudly. She calls all the animals “baby” and wants to fee them every ten minutes.

Don’t dare get up! For you will have a tail anxiously inquiring about a s-n-a-c-k or can-we-go-to-the-pool? This last hasn’t been done for a week as it is the prime penalty of disobedience or misbehavior, and I’ve been sick to boot.

I’d like to have a swim myself. My incision has healed, though the navel still swells with fluid from time to time and will likely need some attention. I’d at least get in the water for a few minutes. I dunno how long I could go without oxygen at present:it’s hard to take a shower without the cannula right now because of the coldfluey thing.

But the kid just can’t curb herself, which goes back to the premise of communication, or the lack of it, my main hobbyhose in life. She has no impulse control whatsoever. Not the slightest shred of self-discipline, at least not for more than a few seconds at a time.

She’s never had any rules to speak of, and it’s damnably hard to get to to stick to any. The consequence of ANYTHING is that she gets attention for a bit.

You understand. There’s literally mustard on this kid. She spilled it on herself. She’s more of a hotdog than notorious bad sport Willie Montanez.

Diva.

Her teacher told her to wait ten seconds before she says anything, in order to get her to consider her words.

She doesn’t. She just stops talking. It looks like she just vegetates, counting to ten, and then turns the spout back on again.

When she’s by herself, the stream is nonverbal. It’s kind of disturbing, like we’re raising a feral child.

It’s really like that.

I’m thinking that sign language is an option.

“Brook” knows the sign for “I love you”, though in her hands it often becomes the Dio devil horns. She flashes it and she says it often, which, as said previously, is the greatest thing ever.

But she broke her new scooter trying to adjust the handlebar so she could do wheelies, which would probably break the cheap aluminum piece of junk anyway. That doesn’t matter to her. She has no concept of the value of anything and as so is completely generous. She had four dollars Friday morning.

She came home broke with a Code Red slurpee and told my wife about her three new friends. It wasn’t hard to put together what happened. It probably went something like this:

Brook opens folder, with envelope containing $4.11. The girl sitting next to her sees it.

“Wow, Brook, what’s that?”

“My money. I’m going to Circle K after school and get a slurpee.”

“Lucky you. I don’t have any money.” Chin hangs down dejected.

Gulli-bull “I’ll get you one.”

I’m sure you can fill in the rest.

It’s amazing that she didn’t try to spend more than she had. Maybe there are some math skills, laying in wait, just waiting for a trigger to evoke them.

I hope so.

I can’t wait to get back to work. Since I don’t have much company, and can’t get out as much as I want because of the oxygen and there being nowhere nearby worth going to, my writing has become the bulk of my conversation.

As much as she loves to to babble, I’m hoping to get Brook to learn and love her words. That would be a fine gift, I think. The Mrs. can give her the numbers.

We started Wind in the Willows recently. Today I hope to alternate a chapter or two, depending on how well my throat holds up.