Tessa had a bit of a meltdown today over finances, and as much as I want to help her, I feel like this is one area in which I can offer naught but a friendly shoulder to rest on thank god that's usually enough. I have several solutions about getting out of debt, but they involve changes that we may not necessarily want to make. Besides, one thing I've noticed in my 34 and 11/12ths years knocking around on the planet: sure, "life is short" and all that, but life as you live it tends to be rather long, and things work themselves out in ways you never could have predicted (or perhaps could have predicted, but would have subsequently been accused of bad storytelling). One thing that therapy is teaching me is that denial can be a really healthy thing – my problem is that I like to push myself to see how anxious and/or depressed I can get. It's sick, perverse, macabre and joyless, but that never stopped me before.
We're supposed to be at the farm tonight, but at the last second I planted the idea in Tessa's head that maybe we should stay in town. The movers never called back about the pool table - which is the main reason we were going up - and if I stayed, I could really get my act together in Brooklyn. After stewing on that for a while, Tessa also agreed it was the best thing for her as well. I looked at the weather report upstate and it said 71 and sunny for Sunday, which lends credence to my hunch that we're deliberately trying to miss all the good weather at the farm.
More people keep falling into line for Memorial Day weekend, speaking of which, so I'm going to have to get creative with living spaces. I can put two of the single beds in the carriage house, and I can build a day bed for the living room, bringing the total number of people who can sleep in the house to 15, which ain't bad. Throw down some air mattresses and the futon, and you've got around 20, except that you might step on human flesh on your 3am trip to the bathroom.
I'm suddenly reminded of the place on Freret St. in New Orleans where we all stayed for Mardi Gras '92 ("The Best Mardi Gras Ever"). As I recall, every single inch of floor space was taken up, and that includes hallways and one of the staircases. There must have been 35 of us packed into that shotgun house. And worst of all, I slept on the floor between the two twinjuns, and during the night, the keg leaked into the carpet, traveled by transference up into our sleeping bags, and we woke up sopping with awful beer. Auch, the humanity.
Did you know that the first air conditioner was built into the White House so that James Garfield could recover from an assassination attempt? They blew air over 5000 tons of ice so he wouldn't expire from the humid, putrescent Washington weather, and it reduced the room's temperature by 20 degrees. He died anyway, of course.
The Celextant, May 3, 2002
The fatigue waned a bit today, as did the headaches. I don't think I took any aspirin today at all, strangely enough. Still capable of an incredible amount of rage (like when I left Tessa's bag across town) and depression (everyone's bleak financial situation engendered a powerful hopelessness). So I wanna know: when do I start skipping down the street singing songs from "Carousel"?
Posted by at May 4, 2002 12:39 AM