City Bird

I’m afraid of a lot of things, but I’ve only got one real phobia. It makes all kind of sense to be scared of falling off a roof or drowning or getting hit by a car, and these things do indeed scare me. Still, I’m able to get on with it.

Not when I’m on a high place with something moving around underneath me, though. I call this “pierophobia” because I first felt it when I’d walk out on a pier over the ocean, look down through the slats and hear the water breaking against the piles. I’d get so scared I couldn’t move. My parents and brothers would try to talk me out of my fear, saying things like, “Come on, those holes are only an inch wide! How do you think you’re going to fall through them?” But that’s the thing about phobias — they don’t much respond to logic.

When I was a kid, there was one place we went regularly on vacation where you had to climb down a rock and wood stairway down a cliff to the beach. We went there every year for a while. Going up the steps wasn’t too bad, but I was scared to death of going down them. As I got older, my fear actually got worse. One time as I was inching down, one step at a time, keeping one hand on the cliff for some sort of security, and I came to a place where snakes were slithering down the cliff face right next to me. After that I always walked a quarter mile down the highway to the beach’s main parking lot, so I wouldn’t have to go near that spooky staircase.

Nowadays the phobia gets me when I’m crossing a bike/pedestrian overpass. I hear the cars under me, see and feel their movement, and sometimes it makes me so scared I freeze.

That’s what happened this morning, on the way to the dentist. I got up the ramp okay, but as soon as I came onto the bridge over the highway I had to get off my bike and walk. It doesn’t matter that there’s no way anyone could fall off. The chainlink goes up far over my head; you’d have to go at it with a sturdy pair of wire cutters for about half an hour before you could possibly make a gap big enough to fall through.

Still, it scares the bejesus out of me. I don’t know why.

All my life I’ve heard complaints and jokes about plumbers making too much money. I say, if people are willing to pay it, there’s a reason. Nobody wants to mess around under a sink. Even Dan, who was handy-and-a-half, hated to fix plumbing. I remember him grunting and swearing and having all kinds of problems when he replaced the kitchen faucet.

I thought I’d just need to change a washer, but when I got the sink handle apart, I could see the whole thing was a mess — all rotted away and crumbly. So I bought a nearly identical faucet and watched some YouTube videos.

It took me three days to get that old kitchen faucet all the way out. There were these plastic nuts on under the handles, holding them tight on the sink, and I had to lie on my back in the cabinet to unscrew them. Unscrew them, ha! They wouldn’t budge. The YouTube videos said to use a little lubricant if they were tight. I squirted WD-40 all over them and they still wouldn’t move even a little. I made a little progress by banging on one of them with a hammer, but even after an hour of that, it wasn’t any looser. Getting them all the way off at that rate would take days.

I called the local do-it-yourself plumbing house. “You can heat up a screwdriver and melt through the plastic, then pull it right off.”

“Heat up a screwdriver?”

“Yep, a hot screwdriver. It’s not real pleasant, but it works.”

“Hot screwdriver?”

We went through a few more rounds of me stupidly repeating “hot screwdriver” before giving up and thanking the man. How do you heat up a screwdriver? Wouldn’t it make a big melty plastic mess? Maybe get stuck worse than ever? I didn’t know. All I figured out was that if you say “hot screwdriver” too long, it starts to sound like a porn film.

So I turned up a burner of the electric stove full blast and set the metal ends of three screwdrivers on it. Back under the sink. Little chunks of lime flaking off the bottom of the sink basin, falling all over my face, into my eyes. Flashlight in one hand, weapon in the other, shoving that screwdriver into the plastic nut. Something — maybe plastic, maybe water — made a hissing sound when the melting was going particularly well. Made me feel like a dragon slayer.

I had to burn four gaps, two per plastic nut, then use the biggest screwdriver to chisel the things off. They didn’t come away easy. Even when just a quarter of a nut was left, it held onto the bottom of the sink. The smallest screwdriver, heated, pulled up a corner of it, then the biggest screwdriver jammed into it repeatedly until it flew off. I’d work at this for maybe ten minutes, then get out of there to wash all the flakes of lime off my face and get a drink of water. One fleck of lime got wedged into my eye and wouldn’t come out. But finally the last bit of the last nut came off.

After turning off the water valves and unscrewing the little hose thingies that go up to the faucet, I pulled the whole thing out of there, like a Medusa head trailing a couple really long snakes. The next day I took it down to the do-it-yourself guy to buy new hose thingies. Pulled that sucker out of my backpack, plopped it on the counter. Everyone who saw it looked pittyingly at the thing. The water spout held together with duck tape, the hose thingies two-parters that were way too long and covered with all sorts of colorful crud.

“Looks like somebody sat on it,” one guy said.

“Why are the hoses so long?” Do-it-yourself plumbing guy asked.

“The hot and cold water valves are on the wrong sides, so these have to be long enough to cross over.”

“Ah.” He just kind of shook his head, and said he couldn’t stock hoses that long because they’re against code, and sent me over to the hardware store.

Anyway, I finally got the faucet replaced, four days after I started trying to take it out.

We’ve had the loveliest summer until now, with highs most days in the upper seventies. Yesterday was the first time it was hot enough that the squirrels refused to scurry. I definitely saw squirrels walking down the street.

Of course the squirrels are as spoiled as we humans are; everyone’s griping about the heat, when all it’s doing is getting into the upper eighties. I feel sorry for Rowan, though. She’s one of our substitute psychics, and she has a a genetic disease called TRAPS which gives her severe flu-like symptoms in hot weather. So severe she ends up in the hospital. She can’t hold a regular job, and about half the time when she’s working at the store she either calls in sick or has to go home early. That must be awful.

Well, I finally did it: threw out a mostly full package of sanitary napkins. I haven’t needed them for about five years, it was just hard to throw away something perfectly good. They’re individually wrapped, and I only used a couple, but it seemed kind of weird to give them to somebody, and you can’t very well donate an opened package to a food pantry. Maybe I could use them to clean up spills, but if I haven’t done it in five years I don’t think I’m ever going to. I thought of leaving them in a public ladies’ room, but couldn’t think of a good candidate where they wouldn’t just get thrown away by the cleaning staff. So I finally just chucked them in the trash.

There’s a thread at Codex called “When do I give up on writing?”, but it’s lame. It turns out to be all about not quitting. About dealing with adversity, and perseverance, and putting on your Big Girl Pants and giving it one more try.

One post says to stop writing if you have something else you’re more passionate about doing. Lord knows I do. I want to watch television and drink. It won’t be easy. I have to get a TV. It’s complicated. I think you can’t anymore just buy one and plug it in; there’s some little box thing you have to use if you don’t have cable. Probably I should just get cable anyway. Then you have to decide what to watch, but that’s easy because I remember about the drinking part from when I was younger. Jack Daniels and Bacardi were both pretty good. Tequila too, unless maybe Bacardi is tequila? I don’t think so. Oh yeah, and Korbel. Korbel was good. Anyway, start pumping those down and you can just turn on the TV and be good with whatever. There’s also this show called Breaking Bad which is a relatively new thing, only I think not so new that it isn’t already over. I could watch that. But I’m sure there are all kinds of shows that are still on that would be better than writing. I could buy a TV Guide, if they still make those. And if none of that works out, pretty soon it’ll be football season.

If you google “quit writing,” there’s really nothing. Good reasons to “quit” writing they talk about are things like giving the story time to settle, or taking time for friends and family. Bullshit. That’s not quitting at all!

Even Writing.com has that motto, “Keep writing!” Expressed, preferably, with lots of (((hugs))) or whatever. Just another imperative to control you, like “Show, don’t tell!” or “Cheer up!” or “Stop picking your nose!” You nod your head guiltily until no one’s looking.

No one needs to keep writing. There’s bazillions of good reasons to stop.

– Everybody writes. People who don’t ever read are all like, “Hey, guess what, I’m writing a book!”

– Writing is very, very, very, very, very hard work, and at the end of it you’re lucky to see a cent.

– Nobody really gives a shit what you have to say.

– Underpaid/unpaid slush readers really don’t need another manuscript of yours to wade through.

– Form rejections shit all over your self esteem.

– Those other writing people deserve a chance. Writing less does them a favor.

– Writing is old-school. Pretty soon we’ll all have holographic glasses.

– Books and stories have no value. Anyone who, for some reason, still likes to read can get all the reading material they want for free. Here in Madison, for example, we have Little Free Libraries. Not Little Free Gas Stations, or Little Free Jewelry Shops, or Little Free Pizza Parlors. Only books are so worthless.

– What kind of hobby serves no purpose but to inform you how badly you suck?

– The world is full of thousands of better and less selfish things.

I can’t do this anymore. I can’t stand it anymore. Any word I write is just another banshee shrieking through my brain.

Today I served a woman with a cigarette lighter poking out of her cleavage. Another regular stashes a roll of hundreds. Lots and LOTS of women buy crystals destined for the twin towers. (“Would you like a bag?” “Nope, don’t need one!” [Plop!])

Kind of makes me wonder if anyone just uses their bra for boobs.

There are three men banging away at my roof right now. They’ve been at it for two days, and it doesn’t really look like they’re going to be done today either. This is obviously going to cost more than they quoted me. It could be a lot more. One of them, the leader, has a really scary mouth. His gums and lips are red and puffed up, so swollen they merge into each other. He says there’s a lot more wrong with my roof than what they’re fixing. He makes a red smile when he says that, even though it looks painful.

It’s very noisy – lots of banging, sawing, and strange noises I can’t identify. At one point I heard a crash, and it was a glass light fixture in the dining room falling on the floor. I don’t know why it didn’t break. I’m just glad I wasn’t sitting at the table when it happened.

At least they didn’t laugh at me about the roof repair that guy did last summer. I deserve to be laughed at for hiring that loser. That was so stupid I should lose my job, get kicked out of both Codex and Wyrm, and have my children taken away from me. If they weren’t both adults, anyway. But someone should come and take away my cats. Maybe impound my bicycle.

I kept working on store stuff for an extra hour I won’t get paid for, because I can’t concentrate on anything I really want to do with people up there. I know it’s stupid, but I just want them to go away. I don’t like strangers on my roof.

I was lying in bed and heard a THUNK against the door. This is a door you can open by pushing on it, without using the doorknob. Lately Mike has taken to bumping it open so he can get into my closet and sleep in a basket in there, usually knocking a bunch of stuff down in the process. I don’t encourage him to do this, but a lot of times I’m reading or writing and too preoccupied to deal with him.

Anyway, I was trying to sleep when Mike thunked his way in. I got up, tossed him out the door, closed it, and fastened the little deadbolt latch at the top. I could hear him thunking against it some more, even running down the hallway to thunk it harder, but I went back to sleep anyway.

When I woke up, he was back in the room again, having somehow made a hole in the door. When I unlatched and opened it, I saw he’d somehow brought a chair into the hallway outside. He must have climbed up onto the chair and clawed his way in. I covered up the hole with newspaper, sheet plastic and duck tape. I tried to get back to sleep, but of course it was no good. As I lay in bed, I could hear Mike rip through the paper and plop back down onto the floor of my room.

I’ve been dreaming more than I used to–once every couple weeks or so. Usually I only remember snatches and impressions, but this time it was freakishly realistic. When I woke up for real, I was surprised to find my door wasn’t even latched. I couldn’t stop looking for the hole, the chair, the cat-shredded newspaper.