It has been a long day.
Well, it started out pleasantly enough in dreamland, where Gene and Melynda and I lived in a beautiful house with parquet floors and a collection of old Soviet medals. It was just happy and normal, living and going to Metro, and the three of us curled comfortably on the couch watching a movie. Gods above, how I wish I could have stayed in that dream.
That ended when the neighbors rang the door at 9am. They were returning our dog, who had managed to escape through a hole in the fence. The dog is upset, but that goes with both earlier and later events. I had to keep her in the house all day, because she was either going under or over every fence I put in her path.
I spent most of my driving time today thinking about whether to write about this publicly or not, and ended up with the "it doesn't really matter answer." Anyone who knows the history of my paticular family saga will no doubt understand why I'm having panic attacks at the moment.
My sister's dumber-than-a-cow boyfriend has a suspended license. My mother has warned him repeatedly not to drive my sister's car. Well, yesterday he went off on some errand with her car. Closing time rolled around, and he still wasn't back to pick her up from work. Later in the evening, the he called. From jail. He'd been picked up on a DUI, and there is some other oustanding charge relating to his last scrape with the authorities. So, my sister had to get some friend of hers to drive her to South Austin last night to pay the $105 to bail her car out of the lot. Dimwit boyfriend is still in jail, because my sister is still too young to sign a bond, and my mom refuses.
It's ugly, and classic, and there is nothing good to be done. Earlier this week, after learning that Dimwit got fired from easy job #3, my mother told my sister that either he went, or they both did. So, my sister, being amazingly lacking in common sense, has declared that she "is in love and no one understands," blah, blah, etc, etc. She's even threatened to sell her car to bail Dimwit out! (Thank the heavens my mother hid the title.) I don't know how the hell she thinks she's going to live, supporting Dimwit. Neither of them has finished high school. He has demonstrated his chronic inability to hold a job of any kind. (My mother has told my sister several times that she will pay for her to finish her diploma through the correspondence course she's been taking, regardless of anything else.) She has the chance to stay at the house, save some money, etc. But she won't give up on this guy that she doesn't even have a good relationship with. She obviously doesn't trust him, they fight constantly. They had a violent scene involving a knife in the front yard, it seems. It's like bad television, one of those after school specials.
So the house is filled with the screaming and the threats and the madness I left behind three years ago. I'm sick to my stomach and shaking from it, I'm having panic attacks, and I'm worried about everyone. I've wound up right back in the role I didn't want to be three years ago, trying to take care of everyone and talk some sense into them. It didn't work then, and it probably won't work now.
Is it cowardly to want to run far away from this? It is weakness to be so upset by it? I don't know. All I know is that this is so damn wretched.
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