Personal Ramblings

When I was a kid, Chapstick -- or lipbalm of any kind -- was a luxury item.

I don’t mean that it actually was. But it did take away from cigarette and gas money, so my mom treated it like an impossible item.

Instead, I stole my grandmother’s chapstick, eventually, but only after going a week without it. Can you imagine having chapped lips that long?

The kids at school used to ask if I was wearing lipstick. None of them offered me any lipbalm.

It’s one of many things I remember about my mom.

The trouble is, you put her in the same situation with more money, I still wouldn’t have chapstick.

My mother was abusive in a hundred ways.

That’s a fact that can be verified by a good portion of my small town. Back then, everybody saw, but nobody did anything. My mom could bust my nose open, red and bleeding, in the middle of Rite Aid, and none of these well-intentioned liberal fucks would have done a thing. Not in the early 2000s. No sir. She’s just a single mom doing the best she can. I can’t believe that kid asked for something to drink.

But today the same people will take your kids away for not having enough money, or being in the hospital for a couple of days, and make you spend thousands of dollars getting them home.

The word for my mother isn’t hard to spell: evil.

That’s all it is after all this time. Seeing her turn away four grandchildren who’ve literally done nothing wrong in their lives, and even treating one of them like he has (no, asshole, children don’t do wrong; they make mistakes), is enough to make me feel confident in the fact that the bitch was pure evil.

I say was because the wages of sin is death, and she has nearly exhausted her earnings. It won’t be long before I can be sure she’ll never hurt me or my children again. And no, I won’t shed a tear. Whatever you say, I should have been taken from her and adopted away; probably by John and Adelia Lyford, my grandparents.

So it was Adelia’s chapstick I eventually stole. What do you think she did when it came up missing? She hunted a little harder in her purse, and found another one. She never even noticed. But there I was sitting next her, feeling guilty, because I’m not evil. After she found her other one, I told her I had the first at my house. I told her why, too, when she asked why I’d steal such a silly thing. She believed me without further question, and she hugged me tight.

Because she was good. That’s the word for her. Good and benign. Unlike that daughter of hers, Penny Jo Lyford, whose other Google result might be her obituary.

I forgot that you don’t need to get paid to write. I keep thinking I’m pining away for those beer cans that once ruled my life, or that if I just smoke a bit more weed I’ll finally get high, but none of that is forthcoming. What will get me high is some success in my life, a few things to go my way.

I believe I’ve had four failed job interviews this year. I’ve also  had a job. Not sure I’ll be able to keep it once the kids come home. Hopefully will. It’s a matter of childcare. It’s not a bad job. We count things in the stores, big and little, and give the owners an accurate inventory.

That job was nothing like what I’ve gotten myself used to, and certainly the money is less. But I don’t much care. I’ll take whatever comes my way at this point.

It’s not complicated what happened. My medicine got all mixed up last year and I went to the hospital. I lost one job and then another that way, well the second one I’ve just been scaled back so far that it feels like I don’t even work there. Since then I’ve been on my meds, and the new prescription has been working marvelously.

Then I lost my license. It was a real chore getting that back, months of paperwork and processes. I wasn’t even drunk or high, but you know how police are. Literally the reason I went to the hospital the first time was to get the blood test (and a refill on meds), but they made me stay for days. Anyway I got the blood test, and it showed I was clean of all things like heroin or weed. But what did they say to that? Well, the VA didn’t test for bath salts so we’ll just go ahead and proceed with the case. So I plead off; it was a winter of sitting at home, looking at the van. Sat so long the battery died on it.

I should be writing everyday, anyway, and perhaps I should write a novel really fast. The faster you write a book, the better it comes off, in my experience. I’ve done it both ways. Neither novel was ever sold to a publisher. I did sell a couple of novellas, way back, to a publisher called One-Legged Cow Press. I’d say one thing I still struggle with is descriptiveness; I probably leave too much to the reader’s imagination. Makes it harder to enjoy a fiction, probably.

I forgot that you don’t need to get paid to write. Certainly developments like honest.cash and cent.co make writing or blogging more interesting. Tumblr just takes whatever potential money there could be here and keeps it for itself. I used to have advertisements on my blog here. I’ve had it a long time under phmadore.com, but I let that lapse as I could not afford it. I have a little money now but I don’t see much yield from investing in web things at this point. I’m just going to hold on to what I’ve got.