Trapped on Tattooine: Where I’ve Been for So Long

Strap yourselves in, kiddies, ‘cause this is gonna be a loooong one. No names have been changed, to condemn the guilty. Events as written may not necessarily follow actual chronology. Our story begins shortly before Thanksgiving of last year.⁴



Ral & Teferi: He warned you.



At that point, my aunt Binki had been housing and taking care of my uncle david for 8 or 9 years, when she suddenly said to me and my Mom, ”He’s your problem now!” My aunt Po’s husband had just died about a half year beforehand, so me & my Mom were in agreement that she shouldn’t be shouldered with the burden of dealing with david. More on that later. It was agreed, after a bit of arguing on my part against having him sleep in my room (because, being the youngest, I always am the default for getting shafted), that he'd reside in the den. At that time, we had a godawful couch that my Mom had bought online, based on looks alone, that came in two sections that were held together after assembly by two bolts.



Two. Fucking. Bolts. Not three, or four, but TWO!! If you look at an L, the bottom is the sitting area, and the top is the backrest. A lot of wear and tear would be put on the backrest, as people relax and lean back into it, so guess where the TWO FUCKING BOLTS were located? Go ahead, take a guess. I’ll wait.



IN THE FUCKING BOTTOM, THAT’S WHERE!! RIGHT INBETWEEN THE TWO CUSHIONS, WHERE NOBODY EVER SITS, WHERE THE LEAST AMOUNT OF STRESS AND STRAIN HAPPENS!!!



Oh, and you read that right, there were only two sections. We gave up a three-sectioned couch (which was admittedly a little too big¹ for the room, but I solved that problem by clever rearrangement of a bookshelf; my parents disagreed) for this ugly, uncomfortable, backbreaking p.o.s.² This is what my uncle had to sleep on for a few months. We eventually got him an adjustable bed (the feet-dragging was because of insurance⁵), and I got to reenact that famous scene, Still blarin’ and everything, with an axe no less, while my uncle watched on and enjoyed the catharsis. I even used a guillotine kick, and my fists at one point!



So, Thanksgiving comes, and we’re invited to spend it with Therese, a friend of the family’s⁶. I made cranberry and golden berry ketchups, and a potato and kabocha casserole with porkfat and a special seasoning consisting of toasted Borodinsky crumbs and matured sumac (sumac takes a few years to mature, and when it does, the overwhelming lemony flavors have mellowed into more pleasing meaty flavors, with a pleasant lemony finish). Her daughter Kat was also there, with her new beau, Justin. Justin’s from Louisiana, and expressed an interest in learning about new and exotic fruits, so I offered to take them on a tour of Super King and 99 Ranch. They loved the idea, but they had to buy a new car first, as their old one was totaled shortly after Thanksgiving. I’m still waiting to hear back from them if we’re still on.



Anyway, fast forward to December, and this happens:

If you look real hard in image 5, you can see the copper piping that was the cause if this whole mess. Sprung a pinhole leak right at the solder of the elbow joint, this had been spraying water for weeks to months. As if that wasn’t enough, there was asbestos contamination. Fun! So, for a few months, our house looked like the last quarter of E.T.. During the rebuild, our contractor⁷ found that that off-white sleeve around the heating duct is 1) asbestos, & 2) has been further compromised in the cleanup, thereby releasing even more contamination.



We’re three pages in, and I haven’t even gotten to the reason I’ve been out of commission for so long. This is just laying the groundwork & backstory.



During the cleanup & decon(tamination), the entire kitchen and dining area were blocked off with plastic, so to get from the den to the bathroom, you’d have to go outside, and come in through the front door. My house is L-shaped, so it goes



/|\North

Covered

Car Park



Den



Kitchen

&

My Bedroom My Bathroom Master Bathroom Entryway Dining Area

Hallway

Master Bedroom Office Living Room


Our Wonderful Editor has provided a sketch:




These are, obviously, not to scale, but you get the general idea. When I was a wee laddie, I used to stay up all night watching tv in the den, and it was a real struggle trying to keep the volume at a level where I could hear it, but it wouldn’t wake my parents. Not helping was the fact that commercial volumes weren’t regulated, so they could be as loud as they wanted.⁸ Really not helping were Crazy Gideon’s commercials. Picture this: you’re a little kid, it’s 2 or 3 am, you’ve got the tv volume down to about 12-15 (that’s volume setting on the tv, not dB), suddenly ”I’M CRAZY!!! at about 87 dB. I used to think that Dad couldn’t get to sleep if I was awake, and now I kinda have that same problem with my Mom. For years, I’d been asking for a door for the den, and for decades, no door. As soon as david moves in, we’re all talking about installing a door to the den. See what I mean by my constantly getting short-sticked?







Where was I? Oh yes, asbestos contamination. Because of that, we had to landfill every single electric appliance in the kitchen & dining area. Microwave, my toaster (it had 2 double-&-a-quarter-wide slots, so you could actually fit an entire slice of sourdough bread in there, not that I get very much sourdough⁹), the fridge/freezer that we’d just gotten less than 5 years ago, and the washing machine with a superbly user-friendly set of knobs and one or two buttons. The p.o.s. we’ve got now?

You might notice that this piece of fuckery is wi-fi enabled, because that’s a feature that’s really needed in a fucking washing machine!!! The previous one, you set temperature, set water level, set washing style, and you’re good to go. This one? It’s all preprogrammed presets, and god help you if you dare try to deviate from their divine plan for your clothes!



So yeah, errything electronic must go! I felt a little like Circuit City on January 16, 2009, and if you get that reference without googling it or looking it up on Wikipedia, here’s 10 Cool Points.



AAA, our insurance co., had us keep track of all food purchases during the time we had no kitchen access, with the promise that we’d be getting a full refund. Guess what happened when it finally came time to pay up?



If you guessed “They started applying terms and conditions in order to weasel their way out of paying the full amount, like they initially promised”, then congratulations! You’re knowledgeable enough about U.S. policy to know that it’s an utter shitshow that should prolly be razed to just below the bedrock, then rebuilt bottom to top. First, it was “Well, we’re not gonna pay you back for groceries, as those you would’ve bought anyway.” Nevermind that we had no way of keeping that food, beyond an old Igloo brand cooler from the 80s (with a neon color scheme that just screamed its temporal provenance to any unfortunate enough not to wear eye protection whist gazing upon it), nevermind that even the best icepacks give out after a few hours (and we had to make do with this situation for MONTHS), nevermind that we lost several items to spoilage because of this, AAA said nay-nay to groceries.



So, like good little bitches, we spread our cheeks further and asked “Is this how you like it, Sir?” Metaphorically, I mean. Apparently, we were using just a smidgen too much lube, because they then said that they’ll only be paying out 80% of whatever was left of our food expenses. 80%, at most. Any system that immediately sends you into murderous ideation after even cursory contact with it is a system that should not be.



So anyways, the roof collapsed, asbestos contamination, weeks of cleanup and repairs. Most of the cleanup could be, and was, done while we were up north for Passover. We’ll get to that in a bit. After we got back, our plumber made a bit of a miscalculation with their repairs, Juan thought they need to excavate an area right in the entryway, in addition to one in the kitchen, but it turns out that they only needed to dig up the kitchen. They figured this out only after they dug up BOTH areas! Juan & Giovanni usually do EXCEPTIONAL work, so we let this one slipup slide. Unfortunately, this meant that we had two areas of bare slab foundation concrete in a couple of high-traffic locations, so there were lots of trips & falls, especially by david. Kurtis, the guy Dad hired to do the rest of the repairs (the one who we go weeks without seeing) only got around to retiling the kitchen a few weeks ago.



I realize this narrative is a little scatterbrained, so if you’re still following me, cut it out, it’s disturbing good on yer; why don’t you take a little break, have a spot of tea or sumting? I’ll wait.



Back? Ok, good. I feel the need to take some time to explain a few things about david, things which will, I promise you, lead right back to where we left off.



Actually, better idea, let’s get to Passover.



So, round about early September 2019, me, Mom, Dad, & Bink went up for Passover, where Po put us, and a great many others of the extended family, up at this AMAZING rental place that’s pretty close to her actual home. No, I’m not giving any more details than that; I don’t want any stalkers for her. If you look around NNW and zoom in, you’ll see some wavy steps surrounding a patio table, chairs, and umbrella; this area abuts a forever pool, jacuzzi, and firepit, the covered area just West of the steps houses a BBQ and almost full outdoor kitchen, and just East of the pool area are honest-to-fucking-god grapevines, like professional vintner’s hillside setup of grapevines. We’ll get back to those steps in a little while. Just past the front door is a full-length pool table, with a framed picture of the Rat Pack playing pool on the West wall, just to the left of the pool table. The media room, just to the west of the front door, is bigger than quite a few apartments I’ve seen; there’s a ludicrously huge basement bedroom, with its own leather couch, queen bed, bathroom, & tv; there’s two bedrooms with three beds among them down the main hall; and the master bedroom and bathroom are even bigger than the media room. Just look this palace up on vrbo, I’m sure you’ll find it.



The reasons I brought up that specific date are twofold: 1) right at the area that splits off between the master bedroom and the stairs down to the basement bedroom is a little panel near the floor. Naturally, being a curious sort, I opened up that panel, and found a Selesnya Locket and a couple of other Magic cards, the three of them looking a little beat up. & 2) I distinctly remember designing these in that basement bedroom.



Wow, that was quite the tangent. To be fair, I did say Passover. I just never specified the year.



Ok, this time for sure! Pesach 2022! End of March & beginning of April! Here we go!



Ral: Oh shit, someone let Writer’s Block out again! Hey, chief, you ok up there? You were just about to finally start telling the story of what caused you to go offline for so long, and you just froze up.



Woo, I’m back. Ok, Passover 2022. So, david has been living with us for a few months, and oh my god, does he have problems! He used to be this brilliant psychiatrist and mental health diagnostician (he even once helped diagnose and catch a serial killer in Poland), but now, he almost doesn’t even qualify as human. One of the medications he’s been taking for years gave him Parkinson’s syndrome, so his neurologist finally had him start weaning himself off of that a couple months ago. He’s almost completely off it, but the symptoms remain, meaning that it’s most likely full blown Parkinson’s disease.



Ral: You’re never gonna get there, are you?



I’m just establishing backstory. So, david’s condition is further complicated by some personality quirks, like lying about things. Our master bathroom used to have a metal and glass shelf just below the windowsill, but david kept using it as a support bar, a function for which it was most decidedly NOT designed. The metal bent, the mountings were eventually pulled right out of the drywall, and the whole assemblage was ripped off the wall. When asked what happened, david’s immediate response was “I didn’t do it”, followed quickly afterwards by “I’ll pay for it.” To anyone who deals with preadolescent children, this pattern should be painfully familiar.



Oh, and just so you all know, david falls a lot, I no longer go into the master bathroom anymore because of him (more on this later)--



Ral: How many “more on this later”s is that?



and Mom is usually gone all day, so he most definitely DID completely wreck Mom’s shelf. In addition to lying about what he’s done, he’s also had Moments where it’s been nearly impossible not to think that he has at least a mild, intermittent case of Munchausen syndrome, as there have been times where he’s claimed to not be able to do anything, and when called out on it (or even just me walking away, not wanting to engage), he’s done the exact thing he claimed not to be able to do. One example is he claimed not to have the strength to even get into bed, and when I walked away, I saw him literally jump into bed. I mean like total Grandpa Joe moves.*



Other times, he’s asked me to fix his belt, and while I was doing so, I had to pull on his belt, which imbalanced him forward. Rather than involuntarily throw out a leg to brace himself, he actually just pivoted forward at the ankles and fell. How does someone suppress the involuntary survival mechanism, so bedrock to life that it came into existence very shortly after life itself did, and just let a catastrophe like that happen?!



I could go on like this, but I feel it would be better if I do so in a somewhat cohesive narrative form.



Teferi: First time for everything.



Ral: Niv-Mizzet, Teffers, you must really be getting pissed off at him for not getting to the point. That level of snark is usually reserved for me.



Teferi: Listen up, the two of you! I’ve got my synapses wrapped around a very vital blood vessel in your brain, so if you two don’t stop calling me Teffers, and if YOU don’t fucking get on with it, I’m going to squeeze us all out of existence!



Ral: Jeeze, calm down, Teffersz—



Ow, my head. Point taken. Ral, knock it off, or I’m replacing you with Jund.



Ral: Oh please. He hasn’t been relevant in years—



Like you have?



Ral: And I know for a fact that you were getting burnt out on writing his brand of violent imagery, plus all the problems you’ve had in remembering his fontface—



Keep it up, dear boy; I’ve my agent on speed dial as we speak, and a braising liquid all ready for you.



Ral: I’ll be quiet.



Teferi: You know, you usually only get into this character dialogue when you get sleep-deprived. Are you staying up to write this again?



Well, it gets so hot during the daytime, and my daily routine usually takes so goddamn long, it leave very little time to write this otherwise.



Teferi: And yet, you’ve been Fred Tomlinson singing these five hours now. Just go to bed, you can pick it up in a few hours.



Ok, yeah, you’re right, Tef—



Teferi: Ah-ah-ah!



Dude, my word is my bond! I was gonna say Teferi.



Teferi: Alright then. G’night, get some rest.







And we’re back! Where were we?



Ral: About 8,000 9,001 years from getting to Lafayette.



Teferi: Dude, you’re starting with this lunacy?! Never a good sign.



Would you two just shut up and give me some time to think?! I need to go back and review what I wrote.



Ral: Go ahead, take your time. It’s not like this has taken multiple days already.



Ok, so, we’ve got asbestos decon happening, so this would be a perfect time to fuck off someplace else, right? Luckily, PESACH 2022!



Ral & Teferi: Fucking finally!



On the ride up, we all had to keep detailed notes of our expenses, save receipts, all the fiddly little things that make forensic accountants cream their jeans, I’m led to believe.



Ral: Dude, it’s hard to imagine ANY branch of accountancy doing anything so interesting, much less be anything other than asexual blobs of tailored suit.



Moving right along, we get there, and Po, not having seen david in months, if not years, takes one look at his deteriorated condition¹², and immediately jumps on the phone to get him some in-house care for the duration of our stay. This is given additional urgency after the first night, as it turns out he has zero bladder control, so he habitually and compulsively wets the bed. Every. Single. Night. We get him some Depends, Po breaks out a couple of pee pads from when her son, Asher, was just a baby, and we finally get someone to watch over david throughout the night, and help him to the bathroom, and get him up off the bed in the morning.



Throughout this whole process, Po was on top of things like the sky tops the ground¹³, taking charge, comparing services and pricing, fighting for reduced rates, just being an absolute baws at it. Meanwhile, her two sisters¹⁴ are completely useless. Let me remind you all that Mom and I agreed that we shouldn’t fob david off on Po because she was still grieving, and would be in no state emotionally or psychologically to take on such a burden. Po handled the situation expertly, leaving us all wondering (still to this day), why isn’t david living with her?



The Seder goes off beautifully. We use the same Haggadot Po’s husband Bill used for years, dedicating the proceedings to his memory. Po made Bill’s Mississippi roast (omg, this thing is delicious--it’s slow-cooked with pepperoncini, so the meat has a nice, slight heat to it; just enough to set the lips a-tingling), and I made a roasted Brazil nut pesto that went well with EVERYTHING, even the dessert items!¹⁵



I’d mentioned to several people there the brilliance of the Mouth series, including a young female cousin (I’m sorry I can’t remember her name). I’d told her how Mouth Sounds opens, explaining that it was All Star cut to Mussorgsky. While playing pool a day or two after the Seder, I finally got to play it for all to hear, and I’ll never forget the sudden, almost violently quick-change look of surprise and bewilderment on her face when she heard it. It is a memory I’ll treasure for the rest of my days.



I’d brought my Magic murder bag, so I could possibly play with Asher, having taught him a short while ago. As it turned out, I ended up teaching another cousin, Liam (the brother of the abovementioned female cousin), how to play, and he took to it like an anatid to dihydrogen monoxide, if you’ll excuse the Woosterish verbal prevarication. Asher even offered up (and eventually straight up donated) a couple of Commander precons to teach him. This must’ve been either May 31^st, April 1^st, or April 2^nd, 2022, because part of teaching him how to play was showing him Arena on my laptop, on April 3^rd, at that rental house. Outside. By the pool. Near those wavy steps I mentioned way back at the beginning.



Ral: Who the hell can remember that far back?!



There’s one step that’s too short to even be called a step, but just tall enough to, you guessed it, cause some major damage if you put a foot wrong on it. I had my laptop in my hands. I stepped on that quarter-step. I no longer had my laptop in my hands, as it had crashed against a wall. I thought everything was fine, and it was, until that night, when my entire hard drive became completely non-discoverable.



April 3^rd. April. Fucking. 3^rd. All my data, gone! Literally decades of my life, poofed out of existence, seemingly wasted. My trusted friend, boon companion, and portal to the world electronic, reduced to a very expensive, and costly, paperweight. To say I was devastated would be to pass up a perfect opportunity to use the words catatonic, inconsolable, and quasi-suicidal.



Luckily (or so I thought), david has an account with best buy’s geek squad¹⁶ (for which he pays a few hundred bucks a month; huge ripoff for tiny, miniscule, severely inadequate return on investment). Let me just warn you all right now: NEVER USE GEEK SQUAD! IN FACT, BOYCOTT BEST BUY ALTOGETHER! I had to buy a 3.635 terabyte external hard drive, at $136.84.¹⁷ I also had to shell out $360 for a Level 2 data recovery (whatever the fuck that means). This is where things get, let’s just go with “difficult”.



I’m there, in person, at best buy. I pay for the external hard drive. I verbally request that they fix my laptop, and recover all my data. They tell me that they’ll get right on it, but it’ll take 3-6 weeks, and it may cost between $300 and $600. I’m trepidatious, worried that I might not have the funds when they ask for it, but I thank them, and ask them to proceed.



I wait three weeks, the whole time, Dad’s riding my ass about it, without hearing a single word from them. At the end of three weeks, I call them, asking for a progress report. They tell me that they haven’t started, because they need me to verbally verify that I want them to proceed. Apparently, there’s a rash of people just randomly requesting repairs on the computer equipment of complete strangers of which I was unaware. This is their policy, that nobody told me about beforehand. It only gets worse and more Gilliam-meets-Kafka-meets-Heller-and-they-all-kvetch-about-how-boring-and-stupid-bureaucracy-is-esque from here. I give them the verbal go-ahead, and wait another three weeks.



This time when I call, I’m informed that no, they haven’t started, because I need to give the go-ahead in person. Again, this is their policy, that nobody told me about beforehand. I was just there six weeks ago, I brought my laptop in to be serviced¹⁸, any normal person would assume that that would be verbal confirmation enough to proceed! But not best buy, and not their geek squad. I don’t know of any true geeks OR nerds who’d give anyone this amount of runaround; they don’t even deserve the appellation. And it’s not over yet… I go in, in person, to give them the go-ahead, and wait some more.



I wait two weeks before finally getting fed up and calling them early on June 13^th, asking for yet another progress report. They tell me that no, they haven’t started, because the geek squad account is in david’s name, so he has to give verbal authorization. Again, this is their policy, that nobody told me about beforehand! Would’ve been nice to’ve known about these things, and I even complained about it to the lady on the phone, but she said that all these policies are in their t.o.s. I call bullshit, bullshit I say! Just to be on the safe side, I confirm over the phone that david can confirm over the phone, no need to come in in person. She says yes. “Are you sure?!” I say with barely contained vitriolic bile frothing at the back of my throat. I’d say by this point, my frustration is fully justified. She says yes, so I hand her off to david.



I need to take a break from the story to fill you in a little about david during this time. Among his many other problems is frequent bouts of intense constipation, and no wonder, when the most common item he eats are jimmy dean egg “mc”muffins & plain eggo waffles. Additionally, his personal hygiene is violations of the Geneva Conventions bad. This isn’t even an exaggeration. There have been multiple times when he’s taken a dump, and somehow, shit has managed to end up outside the master bathroom, which he’s practically taken over from Mom¹⁹. I’m not even kidding.

• 00000 00000 00000 00000 00000 00000 00000 00000 00000 00000

This is the bare slab concrete foundation right in front of the front door, where Juan mistakenly dug up the pipes. You see that group of black dots that vaguely looks like an emperor penguin? That is the stain left over from when david somehow managed to get a round conglomerated ball of shit about twice the volume of a golfball all the way to the entryway. In doing so, he’d fallen down somehow. All I know is, there was a crash, he cried for help, I found him on his back, and this hard, brown, lumpy, stinky ball in front of the door. His fingernails were all brown as well, as if he’d been digging it out of himself, and now I feel ill. I’ll say again: this exact scenario, of him falling down, with his own shit under his fingernails and shit smeared outside the bathroom, has happened more than once.



Ever since that day, my germphobia OCD has been ruling my nearly every decision, and is it any wonder? Someone with their own shit under each of their fingernails touches something, whatever was on their fingers & hands is now on that something, and nobody else knows. Someone else touches that something, it’s on them now, too. This is how pandemics happen.



I used to be able to shave in the master bathroom, as that has an unobstructed wall mirror, as opposed to the mirror in my bathroom, which is above the sink. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to shave while constantly bent over a sink, but it hurts. Now, most days I can’t even walk past the master bathroom without being assaulted by that godawful old man stench of pre-rotting meat and stale urine. He used to clog the toilet almost constantly, and just leave it there, for days. Fortunately, that stopped after I woke him up in the middle of the night, marched him to the toilet, and waited for him to unclog it, with the warning that if he ever clogs it again, he is not to leave the bathroom until the clog is gone.



This is what I’ve had to deal with this whole time, at least until the caretaker was hired; again, thanks to Po, and again, we’ll come back to them later.



Teferi: At least you’ve managed to come back around to a couple of those “come back to it later”s.



Getting back to best buy, that other shitstain…sometime after david gave the ok, I get a call from best buy’s out-of-state subcontracted data recovery place (and if those two modifiers aren’t setting off at least three additional warning sirens in your head, on top of all of the über-klaxons & hypertannoys already bursting your mental eardrums due to the nearly nine week wait time, you haven’t been paying any attention now, have you?), they’ve finally, finally finished with the data recovery, claiming 100% success. So, four days after david gave the ok, he & I went in to pick up my laptop, and have his phone worked on.



A quick note about that phone: it’d been through the washer AND dryer, multiple times, because he never ever empties his pockets before putting his clothes in the hamper. Actually, scratch that, I don’t think he even puts his clothes in the hamper. He never takes his belt off of his pants, either.²⁰ The screen was so cracked—



Ral & Teferi: How cracked was it?



It was so cracked that a piece of the screen had broken off to start its own angry, leftist news channel Come on, guys; are we really gonna do this caliber of lowbrow humor coupled with obscure references?



Ral: Never stopped you before.

Teferi: Your Honor, I present Exhibit A: the defendant’s entire previous writing history.



They’ve got you there, dear boy.



Oh my god, did you three just conspire to spontaneously do a stealth pun?



Mmmayybe.



Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Be upstanding for the Right Honorable Chief Justice Jundge, now presiding!



Oh, Mel, not you too?

Ral: Piss off, kid!



So anyway, we get to best buy, and I’m going through what they claim is all my data, and all I find are hyper-Matryoshka’d folders upon folders within folders within a cubic fuckton of subfolders, most of which terminate in an empty folder, all of which contain so little of any of my actual data, its percentage wouldn’t even be a fraction of statistical relevance! And these folders are labeled in inscrutable ways, with letters and numbers sometimes combined, sometimes not. What little of my data I can find is partitioned in ways that make absolutely no goddamn sense, like two folders I had right next to each other on my desktop being separated by several folders in between the top folders containing them, and several hundred levels of folders down within, sort of like this:

• 1 {This folder contains a folder 18 layers down that holds some of the representative shortcuts to some of the data and programs I had on my desktop, but not the actual data or programs.}
• 0
• {rando folders 2 through g}
• 0
• A1200845 {this folder contains a folder 100 layers down that has a similar situation to 1}

In amongst this mess that they claimed was “just how it populates during the recovery process” was, I kid you not, a video file a few seconds long that I’d watched years ago, then immediately threw in the trash and deleted. To say I was furious would be to pass up a perfect opportunity to use the words apoplectic, paroxysmal, and paralysed with rage. They didn’t even get my laptop up and running again, something I had asked them, multiple times, to do, which they’d had me verify, multiple times, that that was what I’d wanted them to do! They may have even had the audacity to say right to my face that I’d never said I wanted them to fix my laptop, only to recover my data, and they didn’t even do that, either!



Afterwards, david is getting help with his phone, and he keeps leaning back and to the left, and I keep righting him. After about the fifth time, he tells me “Ok, Travis, that’s enough!” As he’s saying this, he’s already staring to lean again. I tell him “If you fall, I’m calling an ambulance.” *THUMP!* “Call an ambulance” I say, turned to the geek squad member. David bumped his head on a table leg on the way down, so of course I wanted an ambulance to make sure he was alright. david, otoh, did not want an ambulance, possibly because of the cost. I’m right there with him on that front, #SinglePayerNOWffs, but we needed a hospital stay and transfer for him to an assisted living facility in order to get him the 24 hour care he so obviously desperately needs and we in no way are equipped to provide. I explained this to him, possibly badly, but he kept rebuking me, saying I didn’t know what I was talking about. This is a bit of a sore spot for me, as I’d heard it from my immediate family (mostly my sister) far too many times growing up.



The fire dept. showed up, the paramedics showed up, david refused any and all treatment beyond just a basic on-location checkup. Throughout his entire stay at my house, I’ve found myself muttering the mantra “IwanthimgoneIwanthimgoneIwanthimgone” after even the briefest time interacting with him. We need him gone, for his health and safety, and my mental wellbeing.



I’m also dealing with a lack of phone, as boost shut down its 3G network on May 31 of this year, and I just have a dinky little drug dealer’s special burner flip phone, with a cracked inner screen that leaked the liquid crystal all over the display, so I couldn’t read texts, because almost the entire screen was obscure by a big black blob. I tried to get my data transferred from my phone, but boost’s system is only set up to operate via texts. Not email, not a phone call, not any way that I could actually use, exactly zero alternatives, and even fewer people willing to work with me to get my phone’s data back. No one in that meeting to decide how to set up this system thought “Huh, these phones are pretty cheaply made, mebbe there’s a chance the screen could break, and the customer would be unable to see any texts—” and that’s already thousands of times more thought put into any decision involving massive profits to those at the top than any of them have ever done in their lives combined. capitalism, yo! So, I lost access to several pictures, and an entire address book, that mean a great deal to me. One last fork on this tangent about phones: my dad is very pennywise and pound foolish, and decades ago discontinued our long-distance service in order to save money on the phone bill. Can you even imagine being unable to talk to anyone outside of a few local area codes? He also discontinued modem service in the den at around the same time; I think it was to punish me for playing online so much (ah, StarCraft, Broodwar, WarCraft III, & The Frozen Throne, how I miss you all, even at shitty internet speeds; y’all remember the days of dialup?). Yet more shortsticking.



So, once the paramedics left, I called Dad to come pick us up, because I didn’t want to have to deal with any rideshare strangers, and told him we’d be at the Gelson’s next door. I get in there, and I realized two three things almost immediately: 1) I was actually relaxed for the first time since david started staying here; 2) I hadn’t been properly grocery shopping in months, mebbe even years; & 3) grocery shopping is my retail therapy. And I mean real grocery shopping, the kind where you have to go to multiple stores, you fill up the entire vehicle with enough food for the month (almost more food than can fit in the fridge & freezer), and yet you still somehow end up running out of food (and money) before you run out of month. Ah, SSI: just enough to barely stay alive month to month (so long as you have no housing or vehicle costs), not enough to do much else but live the life of a serf. With all the overwhelming Olympus Montes of evidence proving that almost all of society’s ills can be solved by giving money to those who have none, why aren’t we doing that?



Ral: capitalism, yo!



So, I just happened to have an 18 gal. trashbag with me, because the decon crew took errthing that was porous (meaning plastic, which has no pores, but not wood, which does, because reasons?) along with errthing electronic, so we were in the market for new trashcans, and Dad insisted that I check best buy for them. Guess what else best buy is useless for?

• 00000 00000 00000 00000 00000 00000 00000 00000 00000 00000

You’ll notice I’m masked & gloved, that’s how I always go out, anywhere, ever since COVID started. You might also notice that I’ve had a bit of a glove failure.



Fortunately, Dad had found an actual, reputable data recovery specialist, so on the way home, we dropped my laptop off. Eman was very knowledgeable, he put me right at ease, and he had nothing but gentle contempt for best buy. A job that took the geek squad over two months (repairing my laptop, replacing the disc hard drive with solid state), he did in two or three days, and he said he might be able to recover 80-100% of my data, but that would be a 50/50 shot. But if I wanted to risk it, I should bring the old hard drive in, and he’ll do his best. This was June 13^th. I was able to pick up my now functioning laptop no more than four days later. Mind you, this was my laptop, but it had none of my data on it, like Nancy Makuhari at the end, so I’m fiddling about with what is, for me, an empty shell for a few weeks. Due to godawful heat, I didn’t bring the old drive back to him until July 22^nd. He worked on it all weekend, and called me up on the 25^th. Full data recovery. Imagine what it’s like to have a lost limb regrafted onto your body after months of it being missing. I actually let slip “Oh my god, I could kiss you” to Eman.



david has a caretaker from 10a-1p**. On weekdays, it’s Gerard (or Gerald, I can never be sure, as his accent is so thick), on weekends it’s Rollo. Both are Filipino. I bring this up, because on the 25^th, it was Gerard who drove us to PCTech, on one of the hottest days this year. Now, Gerard is a pretty decent guy, but this is what he drives:

I took these photos on August 15^th, four days after my 39^th birthday (dear god!). You’ll notice all of the poorly-applied carbon fiber, as well as other ill-matched aftermarket additions, including the nra sticker and the blue lives matter decals. I have no idea if this is Batesian or Müllerian mimicry, as this is a man who is quite obviously, in looks and voice, outside of the racist white supremacist’s comfort zone. I tried to get a good shot of the driver’s side passenger window, to show that it was stuck open a couple inches, like when he drove us to PCTech. It doesn’t show up so well because a) I’m using a shitty iphone camera; & b) he managed to get it closed about an inch & a half.



So, we’re in this utterly uncomfortable shitbox, with leather addons to the seats, on one of the hottest days of the year, with a window that can’t fully close, and an AC that is barely up to the task at hand. I learned quite a few things about Gerald that day, things that I never even thought I’d wanna know about him; like, he likes Emo, and I mean classic Emo, from the mid-aughts. Also, that he’s the kind of decent sort who will keep driving you around long past his time to clock out. He’s been really good for david, and he’s expressed interest in taking on full-time care for david. So he’s kind of the hero of this story, along with blessed, sainted Eman, who recommended that I got back to best buy and request my money back. Oh, and also Auntie Po.



Speaking of which, on the 7^th of this month, I did just that, bringing the external hard drive, my laptop, my financial records, and all the documentation from both best buy & PCTech, and demanded my money back. The money for the external drive they can have, as that works and I bout it fair & square, but they made promises they did NOT deliver, and needlessly delayed the job for months by withholding information about their policies that, while I understand that they’re in place to ostensibly protect their customers, actually did none of that, and only served to lose them my business. And when you lose my business, you lose my business. I am prolly the most brand-loyal person in the world, but the flipside to that is I boycott for life, and I stick to my principles, dammit! A manager was even called over, and she tried that whole “Now, normally, any fees for servicing¹⁸ are non-refundable” bullcrap, but she continued with “but since I see you’ve been a loyal customer for years, I’m going to give you the full refund.” The first time I’d ever stepped foot into that best buy, or indeed bought anything from their entire company, was that April 14^th, at the start of these whole-ass troubles. The whole time she’s saying this, I’m hearing Veradux in my head saying “Just shut up and nod, Sonny. Shut up and nod.” Once she refunded the $360, she said, in all seriousness, “I hope we’ll see you again sometime.” I just turned my head towards my dad and whispered “They’re never seeing me again!” It was only by the grace of david’s years of settling for whatever he got in the first place that allowed me to get my money back. I guess extreme brand loyalty can also be seen as total brand inertia.











Fuck best buy, AND their geek squad, right in their collective asses with their own amputated cocks, fuck whomever it was that installed that goddamn quarter-step instead of a ramp, and I AM OFFICIALLY BACK, BABY!!!