Well they call it Rainy Wednesday
ButThursday’s just as bad…

You know where I am.

Proud that I got my big bear bottom out the door today. It wasn’t easy. I argued with myself, on and off, all afternoon to get here.

At least it’s an argument now. For many a year, there was no argument, just m3 doing whatever my depression told me to do.

In fact, for a lot of that time, I had no idea that there wad a thing call depression and 8 might have it.

But now I have developed a still crude but nevertheless effective inner parent. It is a somewhat exasperated and weary parent, but honestly, I was quite a handful as a kid and any caretaker tasked with getting stubborn and argumentative me to do things I didn’t want to do would would have ended up exasperated amd weary anyhow.

Instead I had… nothing.

So this inner parent of mine is, in a sense, giving myself the parenting I never got and didn’t know I was missing.

Every family seems normal to its members. It never really occurred to me as a child or teenager thst I was being mistreated. I knew something was wrong and that I was not like other kids, but it took being away from home for a very long time before I could figure out that I had been neglected and ignored by my parents.

Every family has its own culture, and mine taught me to disappear. To ask for nothing, need nothing, want nothing, be nothing.

So that is what I am left with : nothing.

And I am back home, moistened but unbowed.

Today, when I was leaving, I went to all the trouble to get my headphones out and get them working with my tablet (theirs is not a particularly harmonious relationship) and left with my head held high.

Only to realize it was raining and so the headphones were useless to me. So I thought about it for a few seconds, then asked Ali, the concierge on duty today, to hold on to my headphones till I got back.

I didn’t want to go back up to the apartment to drop them off. Partly this was laziness, but mostly it was that I did not want to give myself one more opportunity to chicken out and stay home and end up locked in the cycle of video games and ennui again.

So I headed out into the dark and rainy day (ick) and headed to our bus stop and sat down, ready to face the day.

Only to realize I had forgotten to get my cheque out of the mailbox, an omission that makes cashing damnably tricky. So I had to come back to our building, get it, and slip back out again.

No wonder my inner parent gets exasperated!

So there I was, waiting for the 401. Suddenly, I realized : it doesn’t have to be the 401. All three of the buses that stop at our stop go direct to the Skytrain after, and then on to Number Three Road and Westminster. So I could take whatever bus came next no matter which one it was.

I love it when my cleverness pays off like that.

And I lucked out at Money Mart. There were absolutely no customers there when I arrived. It was suppertime, and I guess everyone was eating. So I had zero wait for my financial transactions.

And this on Check Day!

After that, it was a leisurely walk to White Spot, where I had a Hot Turkey Sandwich (the power of my dream compels me!) with fries, and for dessert, a Hot Brownie Sundae.

Yeah, I know, I should not have such things. But in my defense, I had not eaten since 9 : 30 am, and I ate at 7:30 pm, so I had gone ten hours without food. And I had a decent meal beforehand, so I was not eating something sugary on an empty stomach, which would have been a REALLY BAD IDEA.

And the one thing I was worried about when I ordered it, the chocolate sauce, turned out not to be a problem because there was none. In fact, what I ended up receiving was a plate with the brownie pieces, a dollop of vanilla ice cream, and a squirt of whipped cream with a cherry on top, all separate in their own zones.

Kind of a deconstructionist sundae, or an exploded diagram of one. White Spot : stretching the boundaries of the concept of “sundae” in a way that confounds your bourgeois expectations of antlike dessert conformity.

In their defense, it was super busy. I showed up right in the middle of the suppertime rush. So my waitress had a reason to maybe do a bit of a slap-dash job on my sundae. And I have never been big on presentation anyhow.

Plus, she noticed my runny nose and brought me extra napkins without me even asking, and that counts for a lot in my books. So much so, in fact, that I left her a tip of over 30 percent of the tab.

That kind of unforced conscientiousness ought to be rewarded!

After that, I walked home. At the crosswalk at 3 Road and Cook, some fool kept pressing the button over and over again, apparently transfixed by their ability to press a button and hear an electronic chirp.

That got to be pretty annoying. I wanted the computer voice that tells blind people what street they are crossing and where to tell this person “Stop fucking around and cross the street!”.

Then again, that sounds like something I would have done as a kid. So if it was a kid, I guess I can partially forgive it. I was fascinated by buttons that do things back then too.

Somewhere in there is a point to be made about how I still press buttons all day (some virtual, some on my keyboard) but I am too tired to dig it out.

Instead, I’mma go nap now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.