Have you ever noticed that people with bird feeders hate squirrels? Cuddly, beautiful, smart little animals. But they prefer the flashy and noisy birds. They loathe squirrels.

What’s to like about Virginia? I should give it that side of the story. Well, it’s hot and damp. The plants and animals enjoy the heck out of that. Verdant, green, growing, full of life. Cardinals, robins, chipmunks, raccoons. Fireflies! Those are pretty.

And there’s the hills. I don’t really appreciate the combination of hills and high humidity, but I’m getting incredible exercise out of my daily walks. A mile here is worth three anywhere else, if you want to be in good shape. I actually ran part of the way, yesterday. Not for long, no. But the idea would have been improbable a month ago.

Went past a lady on the way to the store. She said, “You’re harrassing me! White men are always harrassing me! I’ve talked to my neighbors!” …was she talking on the phone? No, she meant me. I kept moving. “I won’t put up with it! You’ve got to stop this!” …right, lady. Whatever.

Virginia.

A thing I liked about Arizona was, almost every day, you could count on being greeted by a wide, blue, sunny sky.

This week’s outlook is good, in Virginia. Partly sunny, Cloudy, Thunderstorm, Showers, Thunderstorms. You can count on being greeted by a small gray haze in what, in other parts of the world, would be a sky.

Sigh…

Dear dad! Stepmom!

FUCK YOU!!! FUCK YOU SIDEWAYS WITH A WOOD RASP! DAMN YOU TO BURNING HELL!

…just an idle thought. Let me know if it gets anywhere. I’ve got others.

So. Where to begin, where to end, and where to middle. That’s a problem.

The dipstick dad and his dubious wife have gone off on their merry adventures. Good start. I guess I can assign blame in two categories: obsessive collecting of objects, Dad. Obsessive cleaning, Dad’s wife. This is a very bad combination. In their absence, obsessive wife has assigned me to dust the whole house once a week, and vacuum the whole house once a week. These are about twelve times more often than possibly necessary. Virginia just doesn’t get any dust, and it’s not like I track any dirt in when I go out twice a week. (You might wonder why I’d object to dusting, before seeing Dad’s infinite museum of childhood curios).

They’re gone. I’m sitting back, having a lot of drinks, and playing games. Ok, I could be more productive, but look. It’s the first time I’ve felt remotely relaxed. They’re judgmental and snippy, which I could deal with better if I felt they had any right to it. The wife is a particular problem, as she has attitude, and she’s a dimwit. You want to give me attitude, you’d better be goddamned good at whatever you do. That, I’ll forgive. You can earn the right to attitude. Dad, eh… I think he’s just stretching out a bit after Mom. Though I can’t help but remember that I told her, once, that I wished I knew Dad better. She said, “no you don’t”. I was baffled about that until recently.

The wife seems to have made a living off of bluffing people with a bad attitude. I’d give her the finger but, she’s my Dad’s beloved wife… I don’t toss one without the other. Which is increasingly seeming like a pleasant idea but, but is probably not entirely practical. Financially, if for no other reason, if the dingbats don’t spend it on goat cheese futures in the meantime.

We had a rare family gathering, today. It’s been the better part of a decade, I guess, since we all got together when Mom died. There is not that much left of the family any more, and we’re scattered all over creation.

The evening starred Uncle F and Aunt M, from New York and/or Florida, with their young weimeraner who redefined the limits of “hyperactive”; Dad and his wife, from Virginia and/or Florida; brother from Hawaii, and myself, lately of Arizona.

A number of things made it memorable, I think, besides the cast. Many of the guests like to drink, so we had a copious supply of alcohol on hand, to which we applied ourselves with some vigor after an excellent dinner. The conversation was stimulating and varied. Step-mom was uncharacteristically quiet, which was interesting. She also proved entirely unable to make the dog take her commands seriously, which hints that there’s no bite behind her bark.

It was a great deal of fun and not a little informative about past family history and current family teases and tensions. I had to about bite off my tongue at some points. Dad: “he married his mother.” …indeed, dear, and so did you. Twice. Although, the second time around, he made sure to marry someone who didn’t overwhelm him intellectually.

Futures, loves, jobs, security, peace, pasts… a little of this, a little of that. Lord, the older folks are obsessive about security, and were they quite as generally fearful when they were younger? And, I don’t know, were their minds and memories a bit more in focus? ’cause I don’t feel at the top of my game, right now, myself, and they seemed a bit fuzzy to me.

Uncle F, at least, had some good advice about the others’ advice. “Don’t listen to them.” I suspect I’d find Uncle F a dingbat on all the particulars, if I had to spend much time with him, but I admire his general attitude, which is independent in the extreme. I respect that. It resonates.

BTW, Dad, sweetie. The phrase is not, “what happens if you fail?” It’s “I know you can do it. I have faith in you.” Practice that for a while, until you can say it without your children cracking up.

And the Dad and the stepmomma went off to do the orchestra, of course. Must do that.

So, I got to spend some time with my brother, whom I’d not seen in many years, and share a clandestine cigarette and a bottle of wine, and our stories, to be sure. Which was fun, and thought-provoking, and– in some basic respects, not all that different than what we might have been doing a good 25 years ago. In other respects, about infinitely so. Time will surprise you.

It was very fine to have the old stiffs out of the house, so we could loosen up.

I dunno, I could swing from buildings by my tongue? Got to work on that one. And a catchy theme song.

Yesterday, ah, ya miss nothin’. Combine my Dad’s obsessive museum with a wife who’s even more obsessed about neatness than he is, and you wind up with a day-long cleaning frenzy the likes of which you cannot possibly imagine. Dusting over and under and around an infinite number of fetishes on dozens of shelves, vacuuming using multiple vacuum cleaners with their own legions of remarkably specialized attachments, waxing and polishing and beating the rugs and, oh, endless fun was had by all.

After surviving that, and smacking down my online courses, and picking up a number of job leads, I was feeling quite pleased with myself until a number of rather snippy remarks about how, in her day, she would have done it differently. with the implication that I was a bum.

Yes, dear, in your day there wasn’t a goddamned Internet, and apparently you lived under toadstools and commuted by fairy dust. It must have been wonderful for you.

Someone got an extra house to drop? Then we can all sing a nice chorus of “somewhere over the rainbow” and take off with her shoes, what do you say?

There is a comic strip in the newspaper that is called The Amazing Spiderman, which is astonishing. But if they called it The Incredibly Boring Emo Whiner, which is much closer to the truth of the case, I suppose it wouldn’t sell as well.

Maybe I’ll change my name to Spiderman. What do you think? Am I good enough at whining, yet, or do I still need more practice?

There are a lot of artifacts of my youth that my dear Dad has stolen for his peculiar museum. Books, models, marbles… it doesn’t much seem to matter, he just collects everything he can get his hands on. It doesn’t matter if it was mine, either, he just picks up everything that has some element of history to him.

The watering can, I’m stealing. So sorry. It’s petty, I know, but it is a thing that I made with my own hands for my mother. It’s copper, and a bit battered by time, but it’s surprisingly well made, I think. And it wasn’t made for him, nor shall he have it.

It’s a small victory, and a foolish one, but it is mine. It is a thing to call my own. I’m taking it. Love you, Dad. Fuck off and die.

You would not think that would go missing, but I think it had. I’m not sure what was running me for the last year or so, but it was a barely functioning simulacrum of a human being. I’ve been spending time with people. It hasn’t been terribly pleasant. But I feel rebooted, kick-started, alive again.

It’s a curious thing that we mostly already know what is right. And we avoid it, to the best of our abilities, because it’s unpleasant. We don’t want to exercise, to eat the right foods, to bathe, to deal with all the random crap that seems to be the basis of existence.

The problem is, it really is the basis of existence. Avoid it all, as I’ve done with some reasonable success, and you find out that you aren’t there any more. Or you don’t, because you aren’t there any more.

There was some twit who posited that the unexamined existence is not worth living. Ignore that. There is possibly some value in examining your existence. On the whole, though, your existence is its own thing, in its own right, and does not require examination. Just do it.