Scheduled Downtime All Fucked Up

the grass had been growing for two weeks under sun and rain, sun and rain… ideal conditions for everything except the two sprained ankles attached to the person technically responsible for its maintenance, and i had been watching it happen from the windows while moving through the house with the little careful steps of somebody carrying a full glass of water except the glass was me and also i was spilling shit everywhere because the house had reached that stage where every horizontal surface had something on it that should not be there and every trip upstairs required a cost-benefit analysis and increasingly the benefit was losing.

the lawn could have waited. lawns wait because that is what lawns do. everyone i talked to about it said so. but they were missing crucial information, so i clued them in to what i am dealing with here: last time i went to Maine for a week without mowing first, the auto parts delivery guy called in a wellness check because my meticulously manicured landscaping has now entered the circle of people authorized to report me missing. i literally cannot make this shit up. and there is something so insulting about surviving everything i have survived only to have my continued existence questioned, by a man holding brake pads no less, because the grass got too long that i went outside and started cutting.

one stiff, painful, spiteful step at a time mind you.

it took me twice as long to mow half of it and half became the plan eventually although i do not remember formally forming or changing a plan, but plans have a way of becoming descriptions after the fact, and every few feet there was another hole from the woodchucks or the chipmunks or the voles or whatever has been tunneling beneath the yard with a level of sustained interest in the property i frankly cannot match. i have seen the woodchuck. enormous. smug. built like a throw pillow with aspirations of becoming an NFL linebacker. and, you know, at the rate i catch him on camera making midnight snack runs to gnaw at the seed cylinder i keep on the ground for the squirrels, i actually would not be surprised to turn on TNF one night and see him blocking and tackling for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

there are also smaller holes and holes inside holes and soft places where the ground gives a little underfoot, which is an unfortunate thing to discover when both ankles are already injured because suddenly the ground beneath me is not a yard so much as it is a field of possible future urgent care trips, and i was steering the mower around all of it in these increasingly stupid loops while my ankles kept objecting and i kept continuing because stopping at that particular patch would look ridiculous and then stopping at the next particular patch would also look ridiculous and eventually this is how people die on mountains, i assume, although nobody has ever had to identify my body halfway up Everest surrounded by overgrown dandelions and an American Lawn Mower. not yet, at least. i got enough of it. enough that someone driving up to the house would think “yes, a person probably did that recently.” proof of life by closely clipped crabgrass. excellent. go me.

i still have to pack. Maine will be ten degrees colder and the warmer clothes are packed away somewhere because in early spring i had declared ‘summer!’ with sufficient confidence to place sweaters beyond immediate reach, which is a kind of optimism i do not remember ever possessing, and i have neither the requisite time nor ankle integrity to drag boxes of appropriate apparel upstairs and unpack an entire season just to repack a fraction of it into the car. this is the problem with organizing things. disorder at least keeps everything available, theoretically at any rate… with enough search power. organization, on the other hand, is how you outsmart yourself by losing objects categorically. i know where all the summer clothes are because they are absolutely everywhere. the warmer clothes are somewhere sensible. useless.

the house is a wreck because i have not been able to move much all week and i keep seeing things that need to be done and then calculating the amount of ankle involved. dishes are low ankle. laundry is moderate ankle because stairs. anything that has fallen on the floor has entered an entirely different jurisdiction. i dropped my last clean spoon yesterday and looked at it for a long time before deciding that was where it lived now and i could eat yogurt with a fork.

ten hours of clutch/brake/gas pedaling tomorrow.

that is the part i keep circling back to because there is no elegant way to operate car for ten hours with a sprained ankle, let alone two. hell, there may not even be an inelegant way; you just put the ankles there and then ten hours happen to them. i might use cruise control for the first time which bothers me more than it should and therefore probably exactly the correct amount. i have never used it. ever. i like controlling the speed like i like controlling everything else: directly & myself. i know what cruise control does, though that does not stop people from explaining it to me anyway sometimes, as though i have spent twenty-five years avoiding the button assuming it activates the passenger ejector seat or something. i know, yes. press button, car keeps going even when my gas pedal foot is not telling it to.

still.

there is something unpleasant about taking my shoe off the accelerator while the car continues accelerating in accordance with a decision i made several seconds ago. old authority. delegated authority. stale authority, even. i dunno. maybe i just like the physical feedback confirming that the thing is doing what i am currently telling it to do and the instant i stop telling it, it stops. come to think of it, relationships would probably be easier if people had accelerators. and OBD.

well, anyway…

the weather is finally beautiful here.

actually beautiful. the first time since last fall where i have walked outside and the air itself has not engulfed me like fascist oppression. the windows can be open. there is that particular September light that makes everything look welcomingly inhabitable, even the half-mowed lawn, even the yard full of mammal traps, and naturally this is when i am driving north where it is colder because i took the week off work already and that makes the trip feel less like something i decided to do and more like a process that has advanced beyond the cancellation window. i could cancel it… obviously. nothing would happen. actual fascists would not be banging on my door with a pair of waiting cuffs and an arrest warrant. people might wonder what the hell i was doing, which would be fair because what would i be doing, sitting here in the landfill like another lump of discarded detritus and the aching ankles and the half-lawn, taking PTO to admire the wreckage.

so i am going.

i keep waiting to feel something specific about that and apparently we are still not doing that anymore. what is ‘that’ you ask? feeling any type of way about a single damn thing.

i am not looking forward to the trip exactly although there are parts i will probably enjoy once i am inside them, which seems to be how everything works now, no anticipatory appetite, no dread either, just an itinerary supplying flywheel momentum moving toward me while i perform the little tasks required to make myself available for impact. pack the clothes. mow enough grass to remain legally alive. put things in car. drive north. arrive. eventually return. just passively ghost-riding my way through life, baby. and just like the elliptical this metaphor is murdering, i stay fixed in one place no matter how many strides i make.

my emotional state is flatter than my chest lately, which is almost impressive because have you seen my chest?

maybe i will sit in my favorite park with the burnouts and the bums and the weekend farmer’s markets and the new disc golf course i am too crippled to use, just read all of next week and the ankles will finally heal because nothing will be required of them except getting me from the curb to a blanket. which is the sort of assignment i would like to receive professionally someday: move thirty yards. sit down. read until otherwise instructed. there are worse careers than park employee who is not employed by the park.

but then i have to drive ten hours back home and maybe that screws the whole thing up again.

this is where i should probably be concerned. i am aware of concern. i am intimately familiar with it, in fact. we are on a first name basis now, have met each other’s parents. we are such close friends that i can happily ignore all its advice and say back with a shrug, “fuck it, we ball”