peddling

on Monday I had a premonition (anxiety) that i will be laid off. that i will be laid off this Friday, specifically. so this morning, anticipating further restriction on personal-care-related purchases in my oracled future, i ordered online a pair of overalls that i had been wanting to buy for a while, for working in the garden, and i made sure to buy them probably a size too large because as i learned in the 1990s there's nothing i hate more than well-fitting overalls. they were $70 and not even made in america and even without my premonition i don't think i should be buying anything except food right now but, well, i bought them, i love clothes. i may even be able to justify my regrent if i do get laid off because if i get laid off i will be spending most days in the garden wearing my baggy overalls and trying to grow vegetables and other now-common pursuits that make middle class people feel like we have some self agency even though every aspect of our lives is linked to our jobs under capitalism. anyway. i am excited about my overalls, they are brown, and i have been wrong about premonitions before. also right. we'll see.

yesterday at 9pm i was already in bed and the local fire station siren went off, which lately in western sonoma county, california, is always a nerve-wracking experience, but it's also pretty common because the volunteer fire department is the only agency out here with medical first-response capabilities, so the fd gets the call when there is a car accident or when little timmy falls down a well or when so-and-so has shortness of breath that turns out to be just anxiety and not the virus, we hope, and they blare that damn siren so loud you can hear it a mile away every time they get a call, which i think is because they are notifying the volunteers to report to duty, or maybe it's just a macho flex, who knows. what it does is notify me that i will not be sleeping much this particular night and when i hear it i always jump out of bed and pace the dark house, peering urgently out all the windows, as though i could see the emergency coming in the dark (which if it's a real, run-away-right-now kind of fire, i actually could, i guess). i did this duty and then took more of these herbal droplets called DEEP SLEEP that i got when the local herb store went out of business, and had a terrifying dream about a tidal wave.

also yesterday i decided (anxietied) that i was coming down with the virus and so was my partner because we spent last week in the city doing things like getting takeout and renting trucks, in order to finish our Big Move (previously planned, not virus-exodus-related) from the apartment where i lived for fifteen years to the cottage my partner and i bought a couple years ago a couple hours north when we were in anticipation of being displaced. we were early on the drop with the cottage but the displacement did eventually happen, as it tends to; some tech people bought the apartment building and after a very long and tense process paid us not-really-enough-money to leave it this month. a common story these days in cities, especially san francisco, but one that always hurts. i don't want to write about it yet. or rather i don't know how to write about it without become a peddler of cliche. anyway. we moved. during a pandemic, which was epic but overall it worked out just fine, except now i don't know where to donate all the objects that i tearfully thanked for their service and put aside as they no longer bring me joy and as our house only has two closets, once of which has to be for clothes, so really there is like no storage space and there is a garage but it gets mold in the winter, we live in the forest, so you can't keep anything in there that has touched human sweat glands. so it has been a stressful couple of weeks and yesterday i had some digestive issues and my partner had a bad headache and i felt very warm (it was 80 degrees out) and i decided (anxietied) that i had the virus. i took our temperatures with my unreliable old drugstore thermometer and they were below human-average and we went to bed at 8pm and then at 9pm the fire siren went off. this morning i saw that a barn at a local nonprofit farm, a mile away through a thick wood from our house, had indeed burned down. they stopped it. this time. 

last week while running around the city not being careful enough because sometimes you just have to do a thing, like move your entire life to a different place, i sat on the dusty floor of my apartment (my apartment, it'll be a while before i stop saying that) and i looked through twenty+ years of memories in a box that i labeled "mementos" and then kept around and threw crap in over the years. i was glad i had kept them and not thanked them for their service and retired them to a minimalist fate. the crap in the box—receipts, letters, old event tickets, phone lists, scraps of papers and notes to myself on post-it notes and to-do lists and photos and maps and really anything made of paper-like thickness that might be capable of capturing a memory in its body—helped me remember all the lives i've lived, and how they are all mine. i got rid of some of them but kept a lot, and sealed the box back up, and packed it in a truck to be driven north to live in one of our two closets. i have been dreading this event for so long, so many years, and yet felt weirdly okay to say goodbye to a city that is nonoperational, a city that is now not even its new-self-that-doesn't-want-me-and-that-i-don't-like-anymore-anyway. everything in our neighborhood was boarded up anyway. on the way out, headed for the golden gate bridge, my car packed with our artwork as my partner separately wrangled the moving truck north, i sat through an entire green light on Fell Street just stopped in my car and crying and no one even honked at me. i guess these are common experiences right now, vacancies, gaps, and lags. see cliche peddling, above. 

after i ordered the overalls i got an email from an acquaintance who has been laid off but so far i still have a job and no one from my work has even emailed me yet today. it's wednesday. my partner is outside talking on a conference call and watering the juvenile apple trees. i am inside supposed to be working on my book for two hours before i check work email, which i already did. there are tiny new blooms on the dozen rose bushes that our neighbor gave us this past winter. on the back deck there is a cluster of potted succulent plants that same neighbor just gave us last week, because they have to move away and sell their house, because they lost all their retirement money in the stock market last month, or something like that that is vague and sad and related to the current economic moment, i didn't ask too many questions, just took the plants and promised to care for them.

the lupines in the flower bed are taller than they were last year, and the columbines we planted turned out to be yellow not blue. there are little bite marks and holes in the petals on all the rosebuds but they're still flowering and it's still ridiculous to me that roses even exist, there's a cliche if i ever saw one, that smell, that color, fucking beauty, robust growth from dormancy, these are the days, i guess,

xo
m.