Leisure Time

I had great plans for today, one of only two remaining Fridays I'll have off before leaving Liberry Land. I was going to revel in decadence, listening to music and drinking wine and journeying to Ixtlan with the help of some plant friends.

But Cha decided to rain on my parade by announcing she'd hired a truck for this morning so we could go to my in-law's old house and haul junk to the dump. That's what we spent the last four hours doing--driving a rental up to Parkton, loading it with wet carpet left out in the rain, old exercise equipment, and a refrigerator full of spiders and snails. Virginia Monologues is renting the house, and she was as amused by my white trash junk-hauling Penn State muscle shirt as I was by her Union Jack boxers. I got to pet her beagle and kitties.

Cha fell in the wet by the truck ramp and bashed her shin on the metal. Bro J was supposed to meet us to help with the 'fridge, but I wasn't about to wait around, and moved that sucker end-over-end onto the ramp and then pulled it up heavy-end first into the truck. Immediately afterward Bro J pulled up.

Turns out our local dump won't allow big rental trucks, and considers them commercial class vehicles. We had to drive way the fuck down Pulaski highway to some abysmal mudpit to get rid of our load. On the way Cha got a call from her office. Some event she spent months organizing and co-ordinating for today got canceled because of a water main break, turning her into a wailing lunatic. She was swearing like a sailor at her boss on the phone, weaving the truck from lane-to-lane, and talking about a cake for 80 people with their artwork reproduced on it that was now going to waste. "I spent $500 yesterday getting brackets so they could hang banners for this event, goddam it! Everything that could go wrong with this fucking project did. Water main break! Fucking bullshit! Unbelievable. AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH." A raging Filipina on 695 driving a rental truck and screaming into her Nextel is a public menace. I consoled myself in the face of a beltway truck crash death that I no longer have a job where people call me with dismal news or emergencies. Slacking through professional life has its advantages. At least Cha got to blow off some rage by hurling trash into the dump. We got extremely mucky doing so in the rain, which kicked up heavily as soon as we pulled in at Day Cove Landfill. Wet carpet sucks--it's heavier than that goddam refrigerator by far, and much harder to wrassle.

Silenus was kind enough to load me up with more pirated CDs: another collection of joyous ditties by the Silver Jews, some Neutral Milk Hotel, a band called New Year. I just did a quick count--I've added more than 120 CDs to the home library since January, by various means. Silenus shares a great deal of the blame for that.

At least I can still do the wine/music part of today's plans.