Fool Me Once. . . .

It's time for the schlemiel report.  None of this is tragic.  Merely irritating.  Then funny.  I was to shoot last night with a model who stood me up on Saturday.  I had arranged the day around a four o'clock shoot, but at 1:30 she texted to cancel.  She had contacted me, not vice-versa.  She is a print model who wanted some of the images I make to be her.  Great.  I wrote her an email about my great disappointment in her professionalism, etc.  She wrote back and begged for me to shoot with her.  Offered to pay me.  I told her that I did not do this for money (Jesus Marimba), but booked with her for seven o'clock last night.  I did not want to shoot at seven after staying up shooting the night before, but. . . . So I arranged my day around it.  At 6:30 she sent an email saying she couldn't come.  She has my phone number.  Fool me once. . . .  The way G.W. II said it.

I was glad to be able to go to the gym though.  I still look like a diseased person from my bout with Godfather Death and want to move a few steps up the ladder from hideous.  It was late when I got out of the gym.  I went to Whole Foods to get something I would not have to cook.  And so coming home I knew that I'd be eating late and having contemplated the Blue Plate Special the past few days, I was distraught.  Fucking model.

Coming to the door with groceries, boxes of Polaroid that needed to be sorted, shoulder bags with work material, etc, I fumbled with my keys to open the door.  I missed the lock and they fell from my hand.  The keys to the new car are big and have a computer attached to them for unlocking the car door, so there was only one unlikely possible place for them to fall where they could get through the cracks in the deck.  Of course.  I could not get them to go through this particular place if I tried all day.  Now it was dark.  I reached into the space as far as I could but was not able to even brush the bottom with my fingertips.  I tried and tried while one thousand mosquitoes feasted on my bare legs and arms.  Disease-filled with malaria and encephalitis, etc.  My skin was on fire.  It was time for a new strategy.

I walked to the door off the bedroom.  There is an wrought iron door there that lets me slip my arm in enough to reach a hanging key which would allow me to get in.  But in a moment of safety paranoia, I had moved the key.  I kept at it like a madman though, as if I believed I would become the stretchy superhero in the Fantastic Four.  More mosquitoes.  I wanted to weep.

"I guess I'll have to drive over to my mother's house to get her key," I thought.  Oh.

It was time to rouse old mom.  Now she lives a good life and had been at a Hard Rock several hours away all day gambling away my inheritance, so she was tired having eaten at four-thirty, and was in her gown watching television and thinking about how much fun it was to be spending every penny before she dies.

"What?  I guess you want me to come over?"

"That's what I was thinking."

The dark made darker by swarming clouds of vampires.

By ten I was on the couch eating my rubber organic deli chicken.  I think it was organic.

I blame it all on the model, though.  Fool me once. . . .