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lazy, selfish, and blockheaded
Monday, April 6 2009
setting: 5 miles south of Staunton, Augusta County, Virginia
There are two models of lifestyle in my genome. One is that of the self-denying, ant-materialistic, anti-social, and singularly-focused obsessively-driven ascetic. That comes from my father, and it can be pathological at times. The other is highly materialistic, social, hedonistic, selfish, and lazy. That comes from my mother Hoagie. Today I took my mother and her representation in my genome on a shopping spree.
The ostensible purpose of this shopping spree was to get some speakers for my brother's "new" computer. But I also wanted to go to a welding shop and help my mother pick out some equipment. She'd had a promising start in welding when she'd taken a class about a year ago but hadn't pursued it. Meanwhile I've been doing enough functional welding to have the experience to make equipment recommendations. I thought it best that my mother get a high-power stick welder to start with.
We went to the Tractor Supply Company on Route 11 south of Staunton. It looked to be a big good ole boy hangout, judging from the fact that most of the people going into and out of sliding glass doors were wearing cowboy hats. I kid you not. My Subaru definitely looked out of place in the parking lot what with its pithy pro-Vegetarian/anti-factory-farm propaganda.
Just inside the doors, I knew this wouldn't be Gretchen's favorite store, what with the constant cheeping of baby chicks in the back. It turned out that their welding selection wasn't all that great, with a large section of shelf unstocked. At some point my mother struck up a chirpy conversation with a total stranger who turned out to be a truck driver and, as always, I found her wanton extrovertism making me deeply uncomfortable.
I did manage to find a replacement chain for my Stihl chainsaw. It was behind glass so it couldn't be stolen, something I worked into a pun on the pronunciation of the brand. When the employee came to unlock the glass, Hoagie recycled the joke but fumbled it. I found myself in the checkout line behind a young woman buying a box of chirping ducklings.
We ended up buying an old school fire engine red Lincoln 240 volt stick welder at Lowes. Somewhat surprisingly, Lowes also had USB extension cables and they were significantly cheaper than they had been at Staples.
The shopping spree continued at a new supermarket off US 250 half way to the east edge of town, where Hoagie likes to buy her shrimp. Though last night's meal had been nearly vegan, tonight's would be unusually rich in animal products: shrimp and venison. While we were shopping, I grabbed a few bags of corn chips. Though I've helped advance my mother's food product awareness beyond its basis in the 1970s, there are few vexing holes in that knowledge, and chief among these is what constitutes a quality corn chip.
Somewhere in there I managed to get a pair of speakers and a set of wireless headphones for my brother Don, paid for out of the account my mother maintains for him. This amount in this account has to be kept below a certain figure or Don will no longer get SSI checks, so my mother thought it would be prudent to burn a little off buying electronic equipment. Your tax dollars at work.
Back at my parents' place, I dropped off the massive welding unit at the front door of the old body shop. This is the same body shop that caused so much neighborly conflict back when I was a kid and our redneck neighbor ran of business of repairing cars in it. Now my parents own the garage and its gradually falling into disrepair, although my mother thinks she'll be using it as a welding shop. I checked out the wiring and found it hadn't been equipped with 240 volts (some body shop that must have been!), so Hoagie is going to have to get the electrician to come out and add a big fat circuit. I told her to have him make it 50 amps at the least.
After hooking up the speakers and headphones to Don's computer, I put a lot of time into trying to get the DVD deck to read the CD that had come with the $100 book he'd bought called Pheidole in the New World. For some reason the deck could read audio CDs but not DVDs and not disks containing data. Eventually I gave up on the damn thing and copied the contents of the Pheidole disk onto the hard drive on the computer in the Shaque. That computer is hooked up to a DLink wireless router, and I was able to wirelessly connect to that router with Don's new computer from across the street, perhaps 100 feet away. Doing this, I copied the contents of the disk again, this time to Don's computer, where I set it up as a folder with a desktop icon. We'd thought maybe the CD contained some sort of wild and crazy audio-visual tour of the world of ants, but the contents were much less entertaining than that. It was a simple a database of the genus Pheidole produced in FilemakerPro. You could look up ants by species name or cast or whatever. But there was no sound and no video. It was targeted exclusively at hard core ant nerds. And, to top it off, Don didn't like how we'd gone about making this information accessible on his computer. My use of the term "copy" had set off a red flag in his addled brain and now he was going all Business Software Alliance Gestapo on me, talking about how it was "illegal" to copy, and that I was violating copyright, and other zero-tolerance extremist pro-copyright views. (Where had this come from?) It did no good to point out that he'd actually bought the CD and copying it was the only way for him to access the software. He didn't want to hear about "fair use" or any of the many tools our society gives us when interacting with media. He was stuck in a tight mental loop and there was nothing I could do to convince him that what we were doing was legal. Even more depressing than this attitude was the realization that he had no interest in the computer at all other than for its ability to access that one CD. Giving the computer to him had been a mistake.
Meanwhile my father was suffering another anxiety attack, this one lasting for hours and accompanied by worrisome feelings in his arms and a ringing in his ears. I went to check up on him and he was just sitting there in his chair complaining about his health. At some point I jokingly reminded him of something he'd said maybe twenty years ago, "I don't like being around old people; all they talk about is their aches and pains." "Did I really say that?" my father asked. "Yeah, you did," I replied.
Hearing that I was in town and that there would be venison for dinner, my old buddy Josh Furr had come over. I was still talking with my father when he arrived, and he walked with us across the street from the old house to the doublewide. For the first time in my experience, my father needed help negotiating the stairs. Evidently his legs were sending conflicting messages about the terrain and couldn't trusted to carry him without fail. I've also been noticing that his Parkinsonian problems have become much worse in the past year. Now he can't hold anything in his hand without it shaking violently at a rate of 3 Hz and an amplitude of a half inch. He's had to give up on writing, though he can still drink coffee without spilling it.
As with all things my mother cooks, tonight's meal was bland in the extreme. It also struck me as oddly conventional, with its animal-product simplicity. She'd baked some bread, but it tasted like fluffed cardboard because it was completely salt-free.
At some point in the meal my father started complaining that he wanted to go back to the old house, so I went with him. I sat there amid the dust-covered piles of clutter (none of which has been cleaned since the new wooden floors went in five years ago) and looked at my pathetic old man, who could do little more than cough and complain. I asked if perhaps all the dust and dander in the house might be negatively impacting his health. At first he poo-pooed the idea. But he seemed to be giving it more consideration as I talked about it. He'd been saying that he can no longer sleep in the bedroom, that when he lies down he has a "psychological" reaction that makes him fear he's smothering. But he can lie down perfectly fine on the couch in the Shaque. I know for a fact that that bedroom hasn't been cleaned since the 1980s and that the aggregate dust layer in there could be as thick as inch. I'm sure that smothering feeling keeping him out of there is more than just psychological. I suggested that he try sleeping over in the doublewide for a few nights just to see if his health started improving. He said, essentially, he'd take it under advisement. But he's so weak, perhaps this was just his way of avoiding an argument.
Later, back in the doublewide, I broached the subject to Hoagie of possibly doing something about the dust in that house. I said that it's gotten to the point that it could be affecting Dad's health and that, for him, just for him, she should put in a little effort to clean the place up. I said I'd be willing to help if she'd just give the word. Josh, who was still there, also offered to help, though he did so with all due respect to my mother. But I could see my argument was going nowhere. Perhaps just because Josh was there, Hoagie indulged me for a little longer than usual before snapping, "For chrissake, Gus, I don't want to talk about. Just drop it!" Though she's healthy and her husband is sick and unhappy, my mother is too fucking lazy, selfish, and blockheaded to do the little it takes (in this case, just giving the verbal go ahead) to possibly make her husband's life just a bit more pleasant. I found myself growing increasingly frustrated, enraged, and sad, but there was absolutely nothing I could do. So I just cried. I did so silently, poking the tears out of my eyes and trying to keep it together. My mother seemed completely evil at that moment. I wanted her to be the one who was dying a slow and miserable death.
My brother and I visited the swamp today. I'm still marveling at the beavers, which weren't a part of my childhood.
And with the beavers come Canada Geese, also unknown in my childhood. This one was probably a male; a female was sitting on a nest several hundred feet away on the bank of Folly Mills Creek.
Me and Josh tonight in the doublewide.
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