My road home was paved with good intentions
But what happens at the cottage really does stay there
It was a perfect week. Nice cool mornings and gorgeous days and long beautiful evenings during which somebody said '“look at the sun now” about a million times and we’d all look and go ohhhhhh. There was a smoke haze a couple of nights due to the fires and the sun looked like a big orange sticker and you could stare straight at it for as long as you liked which was trippy.
The lake was small and teeming with life, not very many cottages, very few people, all kinds of birds and fish and weeds which are ignorable in the daytime, and a very active sky that was mostly sunny until a cloud or two puffed on by and you’d see the silver lining and whatever pictures you wanted to make were totally up for grabs in the billows.
I don’t dream unless I’m up north and I don’t think I’m very good at it
I don’t think I’m fluent, you know, because my brain makes up some real nonsense and I woke up a couple of times every night laughing at the beautiful absurdity.
Like I’m suddenly on the phone talking to someone’s dad who used to work at Sears same time I did and just imagine my sleepy little sunburned brain trying to think of what he would say. It’s like coming up with dialogue, you know, except on the spot so you don’t have time to lay your sentence flat and swirl it around a bit, you just gotta blurt something out and stand by it or float maybe depending on if it’s one of those dreams or not. So I asked my friend’s father what he used to do at Sears.
He was in the fashion department, he said. He was a polka-dot checker. LOL
So you know how they ask you some questions on banking sites and the like such as your mother’s maiden name and your first pet’s name and your dream job which is the one that always fucks me up because it changes all the time. So first I try joke writer then I try fortune cookie writer then I try paint namer (Sun Sticker Orange) or puzzle maker which is true now and just goes to show you. My point is that your mother’s maiden name is forever but your dream jobs can change and actually right now I don’t have a dream job.
My dream job is no job at all
But for the sake of consistency and ease, from now on my dream job will be polka-dot checker.
And speaking of consistency and ease – oh brother – that cottage was so organized it gave me the willies
Like ewww. Just when I was looking for item x holy motherfuck there it fucking was. Made me yelp a couple times like it was some kind of sorcery. This is going to sound stupid because of course the towels are by the sink or of course the spices are all in one cupboard beside the stove and of course the tea is all together and by the kettle and of course this and of course that but make no assumptions here because it’s me we are talking about and my spices, for instance, are sort of sprinkled over a few cupboards and once in a while a drawer and sometimes not even in the fucking kitchen. And don’t even get me started on the tea or the towels (what towels?) because I just put shit back wherever. Nothing belongs anywhere and that’s because I am an undisciplined wild child who hates cleaning up and so I do it too quickly and take every shortcut available and many that aren’t which means things get shoved any old where just to get them out of the way. And then when I need them next time who the fuck knows.
This applies to my keys, glasses, money, bank card, Daisy, whatever I am drinking, and also my toothbrush. All my stuff is homeless.
It’s one motherfuck of a flaw. Good thing it’s got company
So anyway it got me thinking, all that ease and consistency, and on the drive home I thought maybe I would give it a try see if I could swing it, but I forgot to adopt this mindset while unpacking and now I can’t find anything as usual and did I mention I am also an ace procrastinator?
But I am organized on the page at least, thank goodness.
I do lose my laptop once in a while but it’s never very serious except that one time
One more cottage thing that was funny… My two daughters are crazy for the musical Hamilton and my son wants nothing to do with it, partly because they performed it at his high school and he’s sick of it, but his sisters are very enthusiastic and singy about it. Anyway, they were up partying one night – and I may have mentioned their collective penchant for drinking games – and they turned watching Hamilton into a drinking game.
