Pain Is Relative

This drink is going to get much more expensive.  I'll have to make adjustments.  Perhaps I will just quit drinking since I don't much care for bourbon.  There will be no tariffs on bourbon.  "Buy domestic," the Trumpers say.  Politics is the new religion, I've been told.  Consider that ten percent hit to your stocks a small tithe to pay your new god.  For the rest of you who have no money for the stock market but do have a 401k, you just have to remember that when you put most of your money in, if you are over a certain age, the market was much lower.  You've been making free money for years.  It is nothing you did.  Everyone was making it.  So. . . you are not losing "your money" but just some of what you got over the last decade or so by doing nothing.  Still, you will feel it more, I know, than the Billionaire Boys Club. Pain is relative.  I mean, they will still feel better than you do.  They will still be drinking the things most of us will have to forego.  

It's ok.  I am a hillbilly.  I know how to live poor.  Electrical tape and baling wire.  I'm a hippie, too.  I have been, from time to time, a vegetarian.  Beans and rice and tofu.  And drum circles are always free.  Thunderbird and marijuana.  But watch out for the chemicals, man.  You never know what is in them.  

The yellow stuff on the table is killing me.  That is about two hours worth.  It falls like rain.  Has been for the last month or so.  I have been sneezing and blowing my nose since it began.  I don't know if it has gotten worse over the years or if it is just an aging thing.  

Well. . . they are not mutually exclusive.  

I still felt off yesterday.  I felt better for a minute.  The roofing man came to do a walk around.  I showed him what other work needed to be done, most of it rotten wood.  Other things, too.  Tearing down and hauling off a fence that fallen apart, etc.  He said he could do it all and would give me a price on Monday.  And guess what.  I felt a sense of relief.  I've dreaded it all, the rot, the expense. . . but things can be fixed, and once it's done, you forget about the money.  I'll feel better, I think, when it is done.  

But by the afternoon, I was dragging.  I took my mother to her therapy appointment, but I would rather have been on my couch.  The therapist wasn't even as friendly as she usually is.  I need to check my horoscope.  I'm star-crossed, I'm guessing.  When I drove my mother back to her house, I simply dropped her off.  I didn't even get out of the car.  

"I feel like shit," I told her.  "I'm just going to go home."

And that is what I did.  And I made that Campari at the top of the page.  And I began to feel a little better.  I think it was simply being home and not being out, but the little bit of alcohol surely played a part.  Then I made a Greek salad and turned on the tv.  I was couch bound on a Friday night.  

I had an email about my Hulu account.  I didn't know I had a Hulu account.  I thought I had cancelled that.  Something, however, was screwy, for when I put the channel on, it wanted me to log in on my computer.  I had to scan a QR code on the tv screen first, then it asked for my password.  Things got hairy for a bit, but I finally figured it out and Hulu opened up on my television screen.  And holy shit--"A Complete Unknown" was on my list.  

So I watched it.  

People I know kept telling me how good the movie was and how much I'd enjoy it.  The cinematography was good, I'll say, but the movie was made for people who really didn't know much about Dylan, I think.  The movie was just a condensed theatrical version of all the documentaries already made about him.  It was o.k., but it was like watching a play of something you have lived through.  

Afterwards, though, I did get my guitar and croon me some Dylan into the late night air.  

And maybe that is why I still feel like shit today.  But I slept without aid and I can take a nap later on.  I am going to need to rally, though.  My cousin is leaving and I have to figure things out.  Yea. . . been putting that off.  The anxiety is too great, I think.  

If I were like Zimmerman, though, I wouldn't be in this pickle.  No, man. . . I'd be like a rolling stone.  

Oh, shit no.  Really?

The times, they are a changing.