On Tuesday, my nervous system told my body,
Babe you cannot do this anymore.My hands started shaking while I was doing taxes in the Middletown office.
Shaking? That's actually an understatement: My hands thought they were conducting an invisible philharmonic orchestra.
Mister and Missus McGoo were sitting in my cubicle. My hands shook so hard, I couldn't input their driver's license numbers.
Oozing apologeticness, I ushered the McGoo's to another tax preparer, expressed remorse to Leslie, and took off.
Not sure which of the many, many straws was the one that broke the camel's back.
Was it panic over impending nuclear cataclysm?
Open the fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!Was it watching a fox break Grey Chicken's neck in the golden hour, the afternoon before?
Or knowing I wasn't going
home in any true sense of the word "home," but only to some place where I'd parked my stuff and cats (I hoped) temporarily.
###
This episode happened following about 36 hours off, which I tried to turn into quality time by going to the New Paltz Community Garden and breakfasting with real-life Flavia.
I planted peas and put some strawberries and marigolds into one of the upraised beds the previous plot tenant had conveniently left behind:
Following morning, I motored up to Ellenville for breakfast with real-life Flavia, who
may have found a good home for Brian's beloved piano:
It's sad that nobody seems to
want Brian's beloved piano. It's an awfully good piano, though real-life Mimi's tenancy with its wood fires, clouds of marijuana smoke, dust, and Japanese beetle infestation has been hard on it. Still. It managed to plong in tune when the head of SUNY New Paltz's music department came up to play some notes.
And real-life Mimi surprised us both—pleasantly!—by actually finding a campsite where she can live in the camper Brian helped her buy, come May. That was a relief!
"So, I'm going to spend May cleaning out the house, and then I'll put the property on the market," Flavia said. "Tim seems to think I can get a
lot of money for it?"
"How much?"
Flavia hesitated for a moment. But in the nine months since Brian's death, we have become intimate friends who can talk about money. "Million or so."
"And the first thing the new owners will do is pull down Brian's house," I said.
"Probably," said Flavia.
I had a Shlock shift in Montgomery after hanging out with Flavia. I didn't want to be there, but when I got back to the
casa after work, I didn't want to be
there either since Icky was in residence, and my antipathy toward Icky just grows and grows and grows. Icky marches around the house talking to people on the phone or alternately haranguing and cajoling the Spawn in a loud voice, pretty much ignoring me. It's like he thinks I'm invisible, and when I'm around him, I pretty much
feel invisible. Fortunately, he's only up 10 days out of the month.
Anyway, I was keeping
Sonia and Sunny company in the Patrizia-torium on the glorious couch Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed gifted me with when I left Dutchess County, when I heard loud squawking from the back lawn.
Looked out—
A fox had the grey chicken in its mouth.
Ran downstairs and out onto the porch.
Icky had heard the squawking, too, and had raced out onto the lawn. The fox dropped the chicken and
leaped—its fur golden in the golden light of the late afternoon sun—before running into the small copse of trees that mark the property's boundaries. But either it had broken the chicken's neck, or Icky had broken it, carrying her back to the porch.
The grey chicken was the shyest of the chicken GurlZ. I liked her. I appreciated her hesitancy. So, this was very sad.
But fox is gonna fox. And I have told Icky at least 50 times:
There are too many predators around here to let the chickens free-range! You have to build them a run!He ignored me, of course. Like I say, I am completely invisible to him.
But that essentially means that Black Chicken and her sole surviving companion, an almost identical black chicken, are Dead Chickens Walking. It's a bad situation. And
frustrating. Because I can't do a damn thing about it.
I didn't sleep well.
Is that why my hands started shaking so badly in the Schlock office?
I don't know.
###
Before Schlock, I did taxes for a handful of friends every year through TaxBwana. One of those friends is my good pal Tom, whom I first met on LJ back in the Jurassic. Anyway, Tom contacted me that evening:
Could I...?Yes, but Schlock won't let me do freebies, I said.
So, I'd have to charge you.He described his tax documents. They were pretty basic. But Schlock would have charged him a minimum of $250, which seemed like highway robbery to me. So, I snooped around online for a bit and found a site that lets you do and file your federal taxes for free-eee-eeee! and only charges you $20 for filing your state taxes.
"So, you'll set up the account," I said to him over the phone, "and then I'll use that account to input your tax stuff."
"Good show," he said. "But how
are you? You sound down."
I described what had happened at the Schlock office that morning. How my hands started shaking, how I couldn't control them, how Mister and Missus McGoo had gawked at me in horror with their big, googly, cartoon eyes.
"Honestly, I couldn't blame them," I said. "I wouldn't have wanted me to do my taxes either at that point. But it would have been less embarrassing if I had taken a big dump and begun fingerpainting on the walls."
"God, that sounds awful," Tom said.
"It was," I said. "But working there has been awful from the start. What you won't do, you'll do for money."
"Has it been bad?" he asked.
"Really bad. And housing insecurity plays into that in a major way. You and I should be housemates! We'd have a good time and save a ton of money."
I said this in a random, joking way. But the minute the words came out of my mouth, I thought:
Hmmmm... That's not a bad idea.Tom has a house. Since his daughter moved out, he lives there alone.
Tom and I are very much in synch psychologically. We both subscribe to the Larry McMurtry ideal of friendship. We are not romantically attracted to one another. We are both more-or-less in the same financial situation.
The more we talked about it, the more appealing the arrangement sounded.
But there is one major caveat: Tom lives in Holland, Michigan. Where I have never been. Holland, Michigan, ranks high on Architectural Digest and Forbes lists of the prettiest small towns in the U.S. It's a college town. It has an arthouse cinema! But it is also Trumpy, plus it has brutal winters.
At any rate, I am probably gonna fly out for a visit sometime in the next couple of months.
If I like what I see, the plan becomes a possibility.
I'm also going to book a consultation with a neurologist. I've been assuming the hand tremors are stress-related. But who knows? Maybe I have Parkinson's disease.
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