Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1473
Day three of Mom Apartment Cleanout
Good morningevening. 9PM Alaska time. Back at the hotel. Just went up to my sister’s house. Forty minutes out of town. Last six are a doozy. Driving in slush is weird. Like… frozen roads I can handle. But I learned today that I sort of rely on the ruts on a rutted frozen road. I know how a frozen rut will behave. It will guide you. It will slow you.
Slush ruts, though? Don’t do anything. you’ll slide right through.
Went to the funeral home today to pick up my mom’s ashes. The old Chapel of Chimes. I stepped in there and was transported back… god 30 years ago? I was in there for a friend’s funeral. Teenager. Car Wreck. It was fucked up. Did not enjoy being back in that room, picking up my mom’s ashes.
Val gut us each these nice little individual creches with a small portion of her ashes. They are made out of antler. The main urn matches my dad’s, and will join him up at the cemetery up by the muscoxen. Yes, Apple. Muscoxen is a word.
Anyway, I think we’re mostly done with the cleanout. I got all my packages shipped back to NC. We packed three cars full of Val’s stuff and drove it up to her house. Cousins stopped by to pick more stuff up. The lady we sold the chair to swung by with a burly man and a hand cart just as Matt and I were getting ready to move that infernal mechanical chair. But we didn’t have to do it. The burly man did it. Looked like a 70’s porn star.
Speaking of porn stars, I don’t usually touch the TVs at hotels, but I did this evening. I missed my Youtubes. Watching Perkins Brothers right now. But I digress. Basically, for every app on this Samsung smart TV, some past guest of this room has logged in and left their login. Lance was logged into YouTube. Christopher into Peacock. And there’s this one service, I don’t really know it. Spark or something like that. And boy does Steven like porn. So much porn. Very generous of him to let future hotel guests use his porn account.
Anyway, a day of a lot of errands. Went to the post office twice. Well, three times, actually, because I went at 9AM and it doesn’t open till 10 WTF. Went to the UPS store where the cashier told me he had been to jail. Went to Walmart, which is really, if I am being honest, so much better than the Chapel Hill Walmart. It has the expanded fabric and crafts section. It has the physical media section with lots of DVDs and BlueRays. It has the gun section, that’s fine. I don’t miss that one. And man, it’s garden section blows ours away.
Plus it’s one of those Walmarts with the fake western town facade like it’s in Vegas or something. I love the kitsch.
Went to the clothes donation place. Went to the Wendy’s my mom used to take me to every Wednesday before choir practice and I sad there kinda sad about it. Went to Sunrise, the behemoth chain of bagel food trucks where my second cousin works. Seriously they have like 10 of these things. They made an amazing bacon egg and cheese bagel sandwich for five bucks. Like yeah, sure, they’re store-bought bagels but so what man. Better bagel sandwich than you can get in Chatham County I’ll tell you what.
Dropped off my mom’s tax documents at the CPA. Stopped by the office of her apartment complex twice because they auto debited her rent yesterday and, well, she’s dead. And they don’t know how to reverse an ACH. Elon come help them. Deep cut joke about ACH Reversals and the city of New York.
I feel like I’m forgetting like three errands. I kept forgetting things. Oh yeah I went to the U-Haul store twice. There are tons of stores here that don’t take “tap,” i.e. ApplePay. So I keep having to go back for my wallet. And I am absolutely not used to needing keys anymore: I don’t need a key for my house or my car. Is this elitist? Is this geographic? Is this cultural? I don’t even know. But it’s very alien to me these days! So I keep walking to the car and then realizing I don’t have the key to it.
Anyway. It is done. Ten boxes headed back to North Carolina. Oh. For those of you who asked, the baleen is from pre-1975, and is documented, and is thus not governed by the assorted laws involving the possession and transportation of baleen.
Oh and then there’s the statue saga. SO. If you’re from Boston, you remember this place, but for those of you from elsewhere, Boston used to have this amazing gargoyle store on Newbury Street. My friend Tiphany worked there. We all loved the Gargoyle store. It was great. So goth. Gargoyles, I mean, come on.
Anyway, in like 1993 or something I purchased this giant statue of St. George and the Dragon. I got it as a gift for my parents. But the thing was huge, I was poor, and I was stupid, so I totally packed it horribly and by the time it got to Alaska it was in pieces.
And I felt so bad I meticulously glued all the pieces back together that I could. I mean, I was not great at it, but I did the best I could, and it mostly came back together.
And my mom was so touched by this I guess that she has saved the thing ever since.
I know she was touched because a total stranger told me this story, the story I have just told you about me and the gargoyle statue, just today. Because my mom loved to tell it.
So now this statue is back in my possession, and I find myself needing to once again, thirty-two years later, mail this thing across the country.
And now it’s become this whole thing in my brain. I need this thing to get back across the country again without shattering again. I need to prove I have learned something in these last thirty-two years. That I am a more responsible adult than I was then.
Stay tuned.
KSUA this evening had a show that apparently all they ever do is evaluate covers of “Wild Horses.” They are going alphabetically by band doing the cover. They are in the Ms. I wish I could listen to their entire show. I bet it would be an amazing podcast. They were so, so high.
And earlier in the day, they had a Christian Hip Hop show. That was a trip. But this song was pretty solid.
Tomorrow at this time I will be taking off for Anchorage, so I do not know if I will be writing again this week. We will see. We will see. I know you’re all dying for my take on most recent Google Antitrust decision, but that’s gonna have to wait till Monday sorrryyyyyy.
Byeeee.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.