Teel McClanahan

Okay, Iain just posted that he’s already over 15k words. That puts him on track for 30k for the month or better. Now, a couple of days ago I was on track for 30k for the month, but the last couple of days have no long posts created. I can’t really check it right now… well … maybe I can. Hang on

…

It looks like 13,884 words before this post. And I doubt this post will add more than a couple hundred words. Which puts me at only 14k, only a thousand or so words behind Iain at the moment. About a day’s worth of posts.

Which is reasonable, considering there was that one day I didn’t post. 135.1, why have you forsaken me?

Anyway, I’d better get on track. This whole “secret word cound” ruse only works so long as I actually come out ahead of Iain. And he’s threatening actually ramping up his posting speed and reaching that mystical 50k words this month. I don’t know if he’ll do it, but it’s a possibility I’ve got to watch out for. Of course, spending the last two nights transcribing poetry and short stories probably didn’t help. Heck, I was up until almost six this morning transcribing the last Man With The Coat story and then making a brief post. Like I said then, though, just a few more stories and I’ll have finished the “Vintage” collection.

Anyway, I’m hungry. I’m going to go get the mail and some breakfast and then … I don’t know what. Maybe work or some such. Lots to do.

No more. No more old, bad poetry anymore, anyway. I’ve got all the “Vintage” poetry transcribed and online now. I’ve just finished transcribing and uploading the last of the Man With The Coat stories, though I don’t think I’ll post it until tomorrow. I’ve got to BitPass register it and the entire Man With the Coat collection and … I think I’m going to give away “May I take Your Order, Please?” to entice readers.

Forty-five poems. Took me two nights to get it all done. Well, all of tonight, plus all the productive time I found myself with last night. I’m so tired. I hope someone reads … at least some of them.

Anyway. Got up “late” today, around 2. Hauled the brush to the brush pit with dad and unloaded it. Worked on some parts for a ‘practice’ small table before moving on to the full-size coffee table. It seemed to work pretty well, I thought. The next one ought to be quite a bit more complicated, but basically just an expansion on the same general ideas. I put the first layer of … well, I got started on the ‘fun’ lamp I’m working on, anyway. I should go put another layer on it. Whaddya say?

You think I should wait until morning?

You think I should get up in the morning? The morning?!?

Bah.

It’s morning now, and I haven’t gone to sleep yet. What makes you think I’ll be getting up any time soon? Getting up soon is for my father, maybe my grandfather, depending on how he’s feeling. For me, nights.

I’ve got half a dozen more short stories to transcribe, and I’ll be through with the “Vintage” collection. Well, sort of. I want to do some re-writing on some of it, polishing on other bits, some new writing as well, and then put together an anthology and publish it via CafePress. Before the end of Focus On: Writing, definitely. How soon within that depends on what other projects steal my time and money. For instance, I’m thinking of heading down to the valley on Wednesday, staying the night and coming home Thursday with my brother.

I didn’t finish cleaning tonight, didn’t finish vacuuming. Perhaps I’ll … Perhaps I’ll get up in the morning, clean, do another layer, perhaps eat and do some sanding, get the mail, take a nap, and then address the day. Address things like glueing the parts for the top of that small table together. Or maybe I should do that before my nap. We’ll see how things go. Four or five hours sleep now, three to five hours later, plenty of daylight hours for the work that needs to be done around here in the day, plenty of wakefulness to do the things I seem to do better at night.

I think I’m almost warmed up enough that I could write something original soon-ish. It’s almost clean enough, too.

Something about a clean, quiet room really enhances my ability to get started writing. A tidy writing surface, a just-vacuumed floor, no visible clutter, it just feels good. And then without thoughts of “things to do” popping up from my visual range, my mind seems more free. Not having a pending “To Do” list helps, too.

But … but if I don’t have a pending “To Do” list in the morning, one I’m already aware of, I have a heck of a time getting out of bed at any specific time. When I worked and the “To Do” list consisted of “Get Dressed, Eat, Go to Work, Come Home, Eat, Get Naked” it was no trouble to get up (relatively), because one of those was time-sensitive and flagged as “Very, very important” to do. Nowadays… It’s a little harder.

Shit. I just remembered I have to get the entire contents of the store boxed up and out of the store and … somewhere … before Friday. And since I’m supposed to be in Phoenix on Thursday to get Heath, I really need to get it done before the end of Wednesday. And when I wake up, it’ll be Monday. I’m adding a whole new page of “To Do” list to my new spiral-bound pocket notebook. Empty the store: move the wood up out of the wheelbarrows and out of the way, find boxes to pack up the stuff in the store into and fill them and stack them on pallettes to be moved upstairs, disassemble the shelves that the stuff sat on, find a place for them, clean up the store. Oh, and find some way to clean dad’s crap off the table that’s supposed to be my work area in the warehouse, because I’ll have to start working there as soon as we can’t work in the store anymore. (Next week, anyone?)

Okay, this is taking too long. I need some sleep. I have things that need to get done. I meant to take a shower last night. Then again tonight. Perhaps tomorrow or the next day. We’ll see.

Right now, sleep. I’ll try posting again later.

I should just go to bed, but I’m not where I’d like to be on my word count and I’m not really tired. Five, six hours ago if you’d asked me, I would have told you I didn’t think I could stay awake more than perhaps half an hour. In fact, had not my father been a constant distraction, I would very likely have fallen asleep on the way home from Phoenix tonight, despite my intestinal difficulties. But here I am, four AM, posting a post that, if it becomes a typical length, will take me on to five AM, and I sure hope I get there tired. I really ought to be exercizing or something, but it’s somewhere between 30 and 40 degrees right outside my bedroom door, which is not a temperature that I personally find conducive to exercize (or much else). A shower wouldn’t be bad, either, though I expect I’ll take one tomorrow morning if I don’t find myself too awake to sleep after this post and take one then.

Anyway, today was a day. Okay, yesterday was a day, but … maybe I’m just in another timezone. Got up around 8, got dressed and together, tested my copy of The Storyteller DVD – it works – and put the original in the Netflix envelope to return via USPS. Went down and had waffles and awful, awful fumes for breakfast (the spray-lubricant we’re using right now is downright noxious), and very quickly left for Phoenix.

Dad took a … different route around, down the 87 to the 202, through the airport for some reason to 24th, north to Thomas, East to 44th to a little Sears store that didn’t have anything we were looking for, across to the 17 and up to a hardware store that the internet said carried products from Standard Abrasives, but which … well, they can order them, but … we should have called first. Then on to the Map store, where they didn’t have the map my dad was looking for and my dad didn’t let me look at maps to find the maps I was looking for because he thought I should be helping him look for a map that only he knows what to look for on, to know it is the right map, then went up to Stuart Anderson’s to meet Angela for lunch. She was early, we were on time, April was quite late. Around the time we ordered lunch (before April arrived), we determined that my father’s inability to communicate effectively and my sister’s inability to assert her own opinions had led us to a restaurant that neither wanted to eat at, but both thought they were at because it was what the other wanted. I thought we were there because my grandfather had wanted to eat at Stuart Anderson’s on Tuesday, and … well, I think I was right. Anyway, we all ordered the Filet Mignon and we all agreed that it was about the quality of a Top Sirloin at best and that we were glad we hadn’t ordered the sirloin. April showed up during our salad course. Overall we spent two and a half hours at the restaurant before we split up and went our separate ways.

Heath went with April, to get his hair cut. Dad went on his own, to shop for tools. I went with Angela, to shop Zia’s. Angela has a credit there from selling all her Sex and the City DVDs, and wanted to see if she could find something she wanted, and … I’m practically addicted to music and movies. She didn’t find anything, but I bought a new copy of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever To Tell for the price of a used CD, a used copy of Elliot Smith’s Kill Rock Stars, and a used copy of Trainspotting on DVD for the same price as the other two. I very nearly purchased a used 28 Days Later DVD, when at the last minute I found it was Full Screen instead of Widescreen. I have no idea who prefers Full Screen and why. Anyway, I put it back. I’m burning through my tax refund. I shouldn’t be.

Angela and I stopped by the house to get the shirt and cups and then went to Harkins to see a movie. She gets one free on her birthday. We wanted to see Secret Window, but it’s a ‘special engagment’ and can’t be seen for free… so I bought her ticket and drink. Happy birthday! I … I somehow didn’t know that the movie was based on a story by Stephen King until, during the opening credits, it was revealed to me. And instantly I knew the story was going to be boring and slow-paced and unbelievable and predictable and have a disappointing ending. And it was everything I thought it would be, and more. There’s a twist near the end that … well, if you don’t see it coming you’re probably watching The Passion of the Christ in the next theatre over. Sigh. We should’ve gone for Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen or Agent Cody Banks 2.

Anyway, that was okay. It was a movie, and that has a generally calming and mood-enhancing effect on me. And the screen was like, quadruple the size of the movie-theater screens in Payson. And then we went back to the house where very shortly father showed up and gave me the big Roundup sprayer. I mixed up (in two trips) about three gallons of Roundup and sprayed the ‘lawns’. The east side-yard seemed pretty bad, but that was just because that’s where I started. The back yard seemed worse, but that was because ragweed was growing thicker across the entire back yard than I’ve ever seen grass there. It was … an unusual sight. I thouched up the front yard, and then right before I ran out of Roundup, father reminded me of the West side-yard. Which, when I got there, trumped the other yards. It had ragweed and other weeds taller than me throughout. It was like a forest. Most of the weeds were taller than the palm tree there. If I hadn’t sprayed them, the weeds would have killed the palm tree by blocking its sun.

A little loading, and father and I left the house. Somehow in all dad’s travels he hadn’t come across a post office, so the Netflix envelope had not yet been mailed, and it was then after 6:30PM. So we dropped it in the box at the local post office, and it says it’ll get picked up tomorrow morning. We’ll see how fast they get it from right there in Phoenix and show it as received… probably Tuesday at the earliest, which is silly.

Dad and I went to … let me remember here … Lowe’s, where we looked at some abrasives, dad bought some hardware for his hutch, and we got … something … I don’t recall. Something to adapt a motor to a big flex shaft? Then we forgot to look at something, so when we got up the road to the Home Depot, we stopped there too, and picked it up there. Oh, and a new sander for me that (we hope) is really well suited to the work I’m doing, and a couple 10-packs of abrasives for it. I do a surprizing amount of abrasives-shopping these days. Eventually we’ll get the right tools all together and I’ll spend more time sanding and less time shopping for new ways to sand. I hope. There are basically only two basic types of sanding power tools left to consider before I have them all. Really, there is an end in sight.

(Ooh, that reminds me, I’m thinking of doing a dining table after the coffee table, in a similar style; manzanita legs and a barn wood top, covered with a special epoxy to make it a flat surface without taking away from the roughness of the barn wood. Actually, I’m thinking that I’ll make both table tops at the same time this week, to get ahead… though I do have to find some fucking way to box up and pack away everything that’s left in the store and get it and the shelves and display cases out of the store before next Friday so someone else can set up shop. Sigh. My father makes such interesting decisions and plans sometimes. We’ll see how the tables construction goes.)

Anyway, then on to Sam’s Club where we did the grocery shopping for up here. Nothing exciting there, except that by the time we got to the checkouts I was becoming faint from not having eaten in six or seven hours and made my dad buy us something from their little … restaurant thing in the Sam’s Club. Nourishment made a big difference for staying awake and cognizant for the ride home. We made one more stop, at Officemax, actually. Which was nice. Dad needed to buy tax software, and I needed to get a new little pocket notbook, either spiral bound or stitched. I prefer stitched. I have one I’m using … I’ve been using it off and on, carrying it in my pocket for over a decade … and it’s stitched and has only lost pages that I’ve very carefully cut or torn out of both sides of the stitching. The one I got a couple months back that has a glue-spine is falling to pieces. And I don’t know how Spirals will stand up, but I expect them to get malformed and perhaps damage my pants. Anyway, Officemax didn’t have any stitched-bound notebooks in pocket sizes. Spiral-bound (at the top) were one for 99cents or twelve for 5.99, so I got the 12-pack. It’ll help encourage me to write more. I’ve been trying to loosen up and write everything down that it occurs to me to write down. This involves a lot of lists, to do lists, lists of books I want to read, things to pick up the next time I’m “in town”, and I hope it leads to more. The stitched one I’m still carrying around, that’s for … ideas. Story ideas, painting ideas, movie ideas, whatever, but that sort of creative ideas. It’s been accumulating ideas for a long time, and getting pretty good.

So … that’s about it for the day, except that we got back here after 10:30, and after I got settled in and checked my email and site and comics and stuff I didn’t have time for in the morning it was nearly midnight. I was sortof tired, but also sortof not. But then it occurred to me that … a software CD I’ve been waiting for might have arrived in my PO Box today, and that if it had, I could be playing it all night long. So I put my shoes back on, put on a couple of warm layers, grabbed my keys and flashlight and went downstairs and out and to the post office to check my mail. I’ve never really wandered around Pine at around midnight, Friday night or not.

It’s dead quiet. There was one car on the highway the entire time I was out, and beyond that I did not see or hear any sign of another waking person. The post office box was empty. I emailed the company to be sure the CD got sent out. It’s been over ten days. I’ll be patient if it has, but there’s a possibility it didn’t, or went to the wrong address. Anyway.

Ooh, and the replacement Power Rod for my Bowflex came in today, so I get to install that tomorrow, and should be able to post photos of the broken rod tomorrow. We’ll see how that goes, what that looks like.

And then… I don’t know how I spent the last five hours, exactly. I know that audioblog entry took me a while… for a variety of reasons… including hardware, software, and mental and emotional preparations, plus a couple of errors along the way. But there it is. And here this is. And I got all the relevent/current notes xfered from the falling-apart glued notebook into one of the new spiral-bound notebooks. And … watched some TV? I don’t know. Time flies.

And now, as I expected, it’s around five as I’m getting to the end of what I have to say. So. On to bed. The blanket’s been on a while, so that’ll be warm. Tomorrow there’s more branch-gathering to do, the bowflex to repair, and I should probably get started selecting barn wood for my table tops, if time permits. And maybe some sanding. I don’t want to be too ambitious, I do need some sleep, too. I’ll get whatever done I can get done, and only two or three things more.

Good night.

Click for the .mp3 file, ~2.8Mb, 5:56, inaccurately transcribed below for wordcount and people without sound. It might be good to read along while you listen.

**********

My grandmother.

I don’t want to say too much, but I can’t go on saying nothing. She’s not well. She’s not been well her entire life, from what I hear. A few years ago she had a stroke which took away most of her ability to make new memories, half her vision, and most of her mobility. A little over forty years ago she suffered a heart attack and a series of surgeries that doctors say she shouldn’t have survived. When she was an infant she was found to have a congenital heart defect, and was not expected to live. Not a year, not ten years, not twenty years, certainly not seventy years and more.

But there she is.

She has a chronic cough, has had it … I don’t know how long. She had it before I moved up here at the start of last year, and before that, I guess. A couple of months ago it became more serious, her breathing was completely cut off and she had to be taken to the hospital. They diagnosed her with pneumonia and put her on antibiotics and after a time, sent her back home. They put her on a nebulizer to put medicine directly into her lungs… When that didn’t solve it, they brought in a condenser so she could be on oxygen most of the time… A few weeks ago, a new doctor diagnosed her with asthma, and prescribed asthma medicine, and for a few days it seemed to be helping… but then she started to go downhill again… not long ago they brought a ‘more powerful’ nebulizer attachment for the condenser, and switched up the drugs again, trying to clear up her breathing.

Nothing seems to work.

And then, about a week ago, I walked into the house … I don’t remember what I was doing, taking a break from tree trimming or hauling wood or sanding or … whatever, and grandma was coughing again, but now she was coughing up … I don’t know what, but she was coughing it up and spitting it down into a small trash can next to her chair. And all of a sudden a memory came washing over me, and a feeling…

See, the last time I ever saw my mother’s father, that’s exactly what he was doing. I don’t remember much else, but I remember the coughing and the spitting and the sound of it that was not like when I’m breaking up some congestion from a cold and spitting it up, but something somehow worse. The entire time we were there, my mother’s father was coughing and spitting and coughing and spitting, through conversations about … I don’t remember any of that, but what burned into my memory is that spitting into a trash can, that sound, a little different from just being sick, and then he was dead. I don’t know if it was days or weeks later, but that was the last time I saw him before he went.

And when I heard grandma coughing, spitting, repeating, it was that sound, that image, all over again. My grandparent, effectively living out their final days unmoving from a reclining chair, sitting up only to cough up more, spit up more, inches from death. I’ve been living here with my grandparents for over a year now, living with cancer and stroke and pain and suffering and slow, quiet death, and it never got to me. And all of a sudden, in that moment, I had to get out of the house. I couldn’t take it. It was too much.

I don’t know if I’m getting this across properly or not, if I’m converying what I felt when I saw her, heard her, knew in my heart that she was dying. Not just sick, not just disabled and confused and upset because she knows that she can’t remember, can’t get around, she’s dying. All at once, from one day to the next, she had changed.

And I wasn’t the only one who knew there was a change, because that night she decided she was fed up with it, it was too much, she couldn’t take it any more, and she didn’t want any more treatments, doesn’t want any more medicine, she’s been ready to go…

Ready to go…

And the next day, she slept straight through, and I heard about it quietly from my father, and because of what I’d seen, what I felt, I understood. And the next day, she slept most of the day again. And on the third day, she roused some, and had some appetite. And she’s still wheezing, and she’s still coughing, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but she’s off all her medicines and it could be any time…

Or it could be another decade. She wasn’t supposed to survive infancy, childhood, past 25, 35, 60, and here she is, 72 years old and for all I know she’ll see 82 or 92. And I haven’t seen, haven’t heard that coughing, that spitting again since that day, but … I’ve been avoiding going into that room as much as I can, too. And she could pass away in her sleep tonight, or tomorrow, or next week, and it wouldn’t surprize a one of us, and we’d all know she was in a better place. And she could surprize us all and hang on another year and another.

But I couldn’t go on saying nothing, keeping quiet. This is important to me. My grandmother, my grandfather, my family is important to me. And it’s really been bad lately. For her, for grandfather too, and … and every morning I wake up and I go downstairs and when I come around the corner, there’s a possibility nagging at my mind that the car isn’t there, that there’s been an emergency or a death or … something in the night, and until I round that corner and see that car there’s this terrible pinch on my chest that says that yesterday might be the last day you ever saw her.

Are you okay with yesterday? I am. I’ve learned to make every day a yesterday I don’t have to be sorry about.

I’ve had to.