A glass honey jar
and other not better things
Here in the Town I Didn’t Choose, it’s desert dry most of the year. Clear and sunny and just when I feel smug that this maybe isn’t the worst place because “nice weather”, July shows up like an uninvited dinner guest. A hot wet blanket with bugs I haven’t seen all year. A tropical trio of mosquito, cockroach, and the housefly that won’t leave your face. Not epic like Veracruz or Florida, and I only have 3 mosquito bites instead of 435, so not really complaining. But complaining.
Summer sucks, we only liked it when we were young because we didn’t have to go to dumb school. And it maybe is fine for a Canadian because you just stopped shoveling snow and living underground a month ago. Summer has a great publicist. Like Kardashian level. There’s nothing to like but somehow it keeps getting people excited when it shows up.
I still get up at dark and now that means 430am and I do all the things by 8am Or the heat, as the Weather Channel app says, is OPPRESSIVE. Running dogs, picking up poop, mixing compost, raking the sandbox yard, watering plants with the water I collect off the AC condensation line, filling holes for the dogs to redig, running another set of dogs, feeding everyone, washing bowls, washing patios, filling water buckets here and on the corners for street dogs (something I get yelled at for by the Dog Hater Ladies in town…if I don’t provide water in the desert they’ll just keep moving on, they say, I just roll my eyes and fill the water buckets.) I’m not here to make friends with these bitches. Also if I was here to make friends the first thing on my Buddy Bucket List would be 1. Does not think dehydrating dogs to death is okay.
I don’t respond anymore. It’s too hot to respond. I just act like I don’t speak el Spanish so goodly and do my thing. I think my emotional outbursts and frustrated Winter yelling tears at the SUPER MEGA BIEN NASTY ladies has given me a reputation of being unhinged and loca por los perros and I’m fine with that. Not sure how I’d respond in English if some fat lady with a fish face walked over a bucket of dried dog turds from her house 3 doors down that sits vacant in a town with a thousand street dogs— But como se dice Goa Fuckiendo Yourselfo. (My rescue dogs are inside my property, I’m not sure what kind of mental moron would think the poo is mine) I have fantasies of picking up all the street litter and broken bottles and pouring it over her fence. Oh, these aren’t yours? But they were in the road…fish face.
I’m growing, but I never said I wasn’t petty.
I’ve made sure that I’m seen as cranky, unpredictable and prone to letting all of my aggressive dogs run wild in the street. None of which is true but what IF? What if I was just a spacey broad who left the gate open all the time? They don’t know I’m an obsessive lock checking freako. The end result is that I’m left alone, no one bothers me (mostly) to go to some dumb church, baby shower or Jehovah’s Witness whatever they seem to want from coast to coast worldwide, and people have stopped dropping off puppies and showing up at 10pm looking for a kitten vaccine. I call that a win.
Sometimes you don’t have the smorgasbord of treats, you just have to be “happy” that you don’t have what you don’t want. No eyeballs and raw monkey brain on the buffet? What luck! My experience here goes much better if I lower the bar. It’s about an inch from the ground right now. If I hit the tienda on a day when the bread is fresh or the milk has 2 days left before expiration, I’m riding high. If I round the corner and see that someone has raked trash and litter into a pile? Curb appeal!
I transferred some honey I bought in a plastic bottle into a glass jar I saved (because plastic bad) and it slipped off my 3 inch countertop and shattered on the tile into 10000 shards of sticky sweetness. I looked around for someone to blame. Alone, I cleaned it up and that meant scooping it up with a spatula into a plastic bag and rebagging. I don’t buy paper towels here because they are just big rolls of toilet paper. I cut my finger a couple times. I didn’t take it out to the street trash bin with no bottom soon enough and one of the dogs got into it and spread it back over the floor and ate much of the glass and there was now a bloody sticky mess. I cleaned it up a second time. Another finger cut. Still no one to blame. I did however resign that glass is not better. There’s a thousand ways to die these days and frankly avoiding plastic in a town where we barely get anything at all seems less a priority than bleeding out in the kitchen from a glass cut. (silver lining)
I waited to figure out who ate the glass because surely they would be in distress. That was Tuesday and now it’s Friday and no one died or even had a bloody stool. Miracles abound. A gratitude journal for me always seems twee and forced, so I’ve changed it to the What Didn’t Go Horribly Wrong This Week. It’s more on brand.
No one brought me dog poo that wasn’t mine
I had only one migraine and it lasted only 9 hours instead of 18 and I didn’t barf
I remembered to transfer money into my debit card account while I still had $32.87 in that account
I cut Brady’s toenails and she didn’t bite me
That’s all for now, but 4 is pretty good. Don’t push me. I’m going to try the Chicken Rotisserie guy again this weekend and hope that I’m not too early or too late to score a bird. It’s been 6 weeks since I’ve timed it right. I don’t want to jinx it.