2005-07-13

20%

31 are the number of days where the average temperature has been 107 degrees.
20% is the chance of the monsoon coming today or tomorrow. 80% is the chance that it won't arrive this week.
How does this apply to me? I can't fall asleep before 2 and I wake up at 6, sweating and smelling the alley behind my bedroom and the cats who insist upon flanking me while we sleep. Touching each other is out of the question; I can't imagine having a layer of cat fur covering me and sticking to the sweat all night. Since they are cats, I am pretty sure they are with me here: "We are only sleeping here because we're not really sure what else to do when you get in your bed. Don't touch. Don't move. If you could work on not breathing, we'll all be happier. Good night."
I wake up smelling the puppy and that's a new smell for me... I've never had a dog and waking up with Rosie in my breath is kind of an assault right now, just because it's new and I'm not in the mood for anything new unless you mean "new car" or "new house" or "new meds". God, I wake up and I feel like I can't open my eyes all the way.
Well, by now, I can't. Sleep deprivation does a number on you in too many ways to count. For now, I'd rather concentrate on the rain I need to help me get back to sleeping.
Only four other times in history has the monsoon been later in the year than yesterday. The latest it has ever been is July 25 and I am COUNTING on monsoon rains before the 25th of this July.
I can't sleep at night because my body acts toward me like I am trying to babysit her and she's a spoiled, slutty teenager who thinks she knows everything but actually has no clue. She tells me that it's cool to be moving around and to do things at night, like clean and play and give my toes new polish. She tells me that her mom totally lets her, so I can, too and because she is spoiled, she talks a good game, and I believe her.
But when I have to get out of bed to go to work the next day, my body fights me and screams profanity at me "You bitch!"
"How could you do this?"
Gone is Lolita, and in her place is the grown-up version, but the one who continued to make bad choices and ended up having a really tough life. This grown-up is a full-on diseased whore, a Working Girl, who is wheezing from all the cigarettes and who is skinny-wirey from being used so many times by so many men. She HATES me for waking up and having to get things done because all she wants to do is move from the bed to the couch and lie directly under the cooler's vent, not caring about the hungry dog and the cats who gnaw her dead body if things got to that lonely point.

I'm so uncomfortable. I've got Valley Fever rash all over my arms, as a reaction to the heat and the dust and this morning, when I was stumbling after the dog at 6 am, (91 degrees), I stumbled into a tumbleweed.
With cactus prickles. Many of them are still stuck on the tops of my feet and that's not really pleasnat at all.
Rash on my arms, rash on my feet, and no sleep 'til Brooklyn, where at least fuckers have enough sense to install window units and not rely on an antiquated cooling system. I was running late this morning but I still stood in a cold shower for 20 minutes and I didn't even notice that it was cold until I stepped out of the shower and into the stale, dusty air of my house.
I have friends for whom I was house-sitting while they went to Northern California and I went over last night to return keys and do a debriefing of their cats' complete lack of activity and general boringness while they were away. The only cool thing that happened was that on the 5th of July, their back gate was wide-open. Nothing was stolen or moved or anything so honestly, it was one of the least exciting house-sitting gigs of my life. And therefore one of my favorite. If there had been a pool, I would have felt a little slice of heaven had been served to me on a watery mermaid's magic platter.

Duh... like I am ever that cheesy. I would have gotten in the pool every night and then bitched to myself that I had to skim it and bitched to the whole world wide web if I'd had to fix anything that broke. Hello? Mermaids? People you know me better than that.


They did have a discussion point that I've been coming back to all day: "When we got back, we were both thinking, 'What the hell am I still doing here'. It's a place to hang out but it's tiring to hang out and having to fix old, shitty things all the time."
I completely agree. It's a transient place and I'm holding out because I still have to build a stupid ladder and once I'm out of the rabbit hole, then I have to have some time to adjust to the real world. God forbid I do anything on a normal timeline. Christ, it took me 1.5 years to get year and it'll take at least that long to go to the next Whiskey Bar.

For now though, I don't care about staying here or leaving or anything but the ache that is in my muscles, telling me that the only thing left to do is to wait for the rains and be very, very, very still.

arizonasarah at 9:00 a.m.

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