Good morning! Heh, as if you would read this in the morning. No, I just woke up, and I'm putting together a checklist of stuff to do today. Yeah, I was planning on doing jack and shit for my birthday, but now I have a bunch of fucking things to do. I'm going to come back to it later tonight when I write this for real to see how well I did.
There's a new episode of Last Week Tonight! Finally! I'm going to watch it as soon as I'm done with the checklist.
Get my DL renewed.
Get my new glasses.
Make an appointment with the hematologist I finally got the referral for.
Go to the dispensary for my birthday coupon.
Go to Anderson's in Naperville for my birthday coupon.
[CENSORED]
Order copies of my own books in preparation for Printers Row (and possibly the EPL author fair).
Update my bios on various sites.
[CENSORED]
Get money together for bills.
Go to CVS to get my insulin needles and Walgreens for my headache powders.
Read more John Ripley and Gore Vidal.
Write more of "The Big Send Off" and hopefully finish the first draft.
Submit rejected stories.
Find out where the fuck my disability check is.
Yeah, two of those sound familiar from my GMF newsletter. I felt pukey that afternoon and was unable to do these things. But that's the checklist. Let's see how well I did later!
[LATER]
How did I do? Let me count the ways.
Last Week Tonight was great, showing that not only is migrant crime not an actual thing, but overall crime rates have gone significantly down. Not exactly what the law and order party would like you to believe, but who cares about them? They're running a literal felon. Still, all they can say is THEY are coming for us! THEY are sending murderers and rapists to OUR country! And that pisses OUR murderers and rapists off! Keep your murder and rape AMERICAN, dammit!
Let's not get too political. I'm trying to take it easy today. It would be horrible to fuck it up at this late hour.
Not that I needed John Oliver to tell me that migrant crime is bullshit. If you're going to enter a country, legally or otherwise, would you a) keep a low profile so you don't risk having to go back, or b) risk getting sent back home (or to prison in some states, TX I'm looking at you) by committing crimes? These things work themselves out if you apply critical thinking skills and stop listening to dickheads shilling for their own power.
OK. Stop. Breathe.
I tackled EarthMed next. I got my birthday discount, and everything was on sale at 30% off. Except one preroll, which was 25%. Good enough. Tallying everything up, I got some free weed today. Nice.
I got my drivers license renewed next. Even though I had an appointment it was still an ugly scene. But it only took a half-hour out of my day. Compared to the past, that's not bad. I feel like my new picture is kind of a joke. They make you take your glasses off these days. Also I think I'm too tall for their camera. The guy kept telling me to lower my head, and when I got as low as I could he asked me to lower my chin. Fuck. I'm gonna give myself a double chin. Wait a minute. I have a beard these days. Never mind, I'm good. But I felt like my eyebrows were too high. I think I dropped them just as the picture was taken. You can see one of them still up, and I look slightly rakish and sloppy at the same time. Still not the worst DL picture I've ever had. That would be my 2016 picture, which somehow my doctor's office still has on their online profile of me even though I changed it myself on my end.
I took Rt. 53 toward Naperville and stopped off at my optometrist next. I got my glasses pretty quickly and was out the door in five minutes. It usually takes a half an hour. My timing is excellent so far. (Dammit, my fucking eyebrows are acting weird again. How do I stop doing that?)
It took me a while to pick out a book for my birthday coupon at Anderson's. I usually find a couple of maybes in the fiction section, which I'll get if I don't find something in their smallish horror section. If I don't find anything there, either, my last stop is biographies. I got Tom Selleck's autobiography. My dad looked a lot like Selleck during his Magnum days when I was a kid, so I always associate the two of them. I think Mom might have done the same back then.
I stopped off at the Graue Mill to get my reading in. I got through a lengthy Gore Vidal essay on the life and work of William Dean Howells, the only popular author of his time to stand up to the IL governor and the judge in the case of the Haymarket Riot. (Apparently even Mark Twain remained silent on the subject.) I think I need to read Howells soon. Because the State of Illinois murdered four men and drove a fifth to suicide, all because a group of awful people thought the First Amendment meant nothing. That's something I take an interest in.
I also read more of John Ridley's A Conversation with the Mann but not as much as I would have liked. It's the last book of Ridley's that I haven't read, and I'm going to be sad when I'm finished. But I do need to finish it because I have two Joe R. Lansdale books waiting, unread, for me to finish. I'm a Lansdale superfan. That is fucking unheard of for me, but I'm not on disability anymore. I can't be reading more than three books. I'm at three right now.
I got my headache powders from Walgreens, which will help me not rely so much on the opioids. I hope to stretch those out because I don't know when they'll let me get that spinal injection. I also got my insulin needles from CVS, at which point I went home to schedule with that hematologist.
And that's where time got away from me. Calling the clinic was a fucking hassle. I read the referral, and they didn't have a number for me to call, so I called the usual one. After some time I got a new phone number, which I called only to find myself, horror among horrors, on what seemed like an infinite hold. Guess what happened after I was on hold for 45 minutes. Just guess. If you said, "They were the wrong people to talk to," you win the grand prize. They said they could get me over to a scheduler. When I got there it sounded like the first person I talked to. Guess how much help they were. Right. So I'm expecting a callback sometime tomorrow. I said to call around one, my lunchtime, and I'm going to guess that's not going to happen. At least I tried to tackle this. I failed, but I tried.
Since I had so much luck on the phone I decided to find out where that disability check is. It was held up due to mistakes my doctor made while filling out the forms, but the doctor sent everything back correctly this time, and I'm still waiting. I could not get through to them, so I had to leave a fucking message.
Because of all my problems I've been dipping deeply into my emergency money. I NEED THAT DISABILITY CHECK. Because I don't have it, I had to dip deeper to pay off the fucking bills.
Changing the bios went pretty well. It was more or less easy (check out the one for this blog: I removed the part about drinking heavily) except for the one on Amazon. I didn't add anything to the bio. I subtracted from it. And then Amazon told me that there is troubling language in my bio. I'll be damned if I know what it is. Take a look if you care. One of the things I tried to get rid of is the "screaming children" line, so that's not it. Maybe it's the title, POOR BASTARDS AND RICH FUCKS? Unlikely, because, well, dig it. If they didn't censor it there, they certainly wouldn't in my bio. So fuck it. I'm leaving it as is for the rest of my life. Sure, the parts I tried to remove are a bit awkward and more of a young man's kind of thing to say, but Amazon is unreasonable, as are all corp . . . not gonna get political. Not tonight.
The two censored items: I did one of them. The other was a bit too ambitious for today. I took a swing and a miss. But that's all right. There was something else I got sucked into, though, that cost me an hour of time today, and I'm fucking seething over that.
I ordered copies of my books for Printers Row and maybe that local author fair. I also wrote. Not much, but enough to check it off. And finally, yes, I did submit those rejected stories. So all told I handled everything, more or less, except one thing, and I knew that was a longshot anyway. I'm still angry over the hour I lost to a credit card company that's desperately trying to use AI instead of actual human eyes, but I'm about to finish this preroll and go to bed. I hope to have pleasant dreams from that point on.
Goodbye 45. Hello 46. I am now closer to 50 than 40. Yikes.
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