My Mood Matches the Weather

Flood Warning

According to weather.com, Jersey is in for another 2 - 6 inches of rain.

It wasn't until this past Thursday that Main Street in Bound Brook was open. Poor Bound Brook! Or as Xman used to call it, Un-Bound Brook. Bound Brook, Elizabeth, and Wayne always get the worst of it. People died in Bound Brook during Hurricane Floyd. Buildings that were one story underwater caught fire and burned down to the water line.

My favorite place on earth at the time, the Palmyra Tea Room, was flooded out and the owners never had the money to start again.

The Army Corps of Engineers did three parts of a four part project, so Bound Brook still floods and it's going to flood again.

I hope that all it means for me is that I'll have to find a different route to work, because right now my trip takes me along two rivers that always flood. I hope there isn't a recurrence of Lake Becs, but I have a feeling there will be.

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Google'll Getchya If Ya Don't Watch Out

I googled someone's nom de net today and found several unpleasant surprises. There's nothing quite like getting gut-punched on a peaceful Sunday afternoon. I don't have the energy or inclination to cry, but I do feel like someone took my guts out, unwound them, then stuffed them back in.

Even though I've suspected this for awhile, it still hurts.

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Eat This, You'll Feel Better

The other day, I thought, all I have at home is poor people's food. Frozen meaty bits that I should cook up. Yesterday, I got yet more poor people's food. Today, I'm cooking it up. I planned a menu for this week, hoping to avoid the expense of the cafeteria. And the torrential rain coming during the next couple of days.

I had broccoli-cheddar soup for lunch. I'm baking brownies right now and I'm getting ready to go put a corned beef brisket in the pot. After that, I'm chopping up the poor people's fruit into a nice, handy, easy to pack up fruit salad.

And I do feel a little better after the soup.

Ah, the brownies are done.

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Canceled Due to Inclement Weather

No long ride this week. No short rides until the rain goes away on Wednesday. And now, of course, I kind of miss it.

I need to find consolation in something today, even if it's whatever I can dig up on Netflix or Hulu. I had been watching "Rescue Me", but that will not serve to rescue me from the gut punch I got today.

My Face as Emoticon

I worked at St. Fatty's Fair the other night. Six and a half hours next to five gallons of boiling hot oil in an industrial size deep fryer.

There were a couple of other people at the pizza stand with me. (Yes, the pizza dough was fried, then sprinkled with sugar or laden with sauce and Parmesan.) There was Dave, a retired UPS guy who seemed more interested in schmoozing than actually doing real work. And there was Dee, a nurse practitioner at a local medical group.

I was assigned / volunteered to take the money, then finish off said pizza with choice of topping. This I did for about two and a half hours. When a customer ordered, over the din, in my best "Yes, chef!" voice, I would shout "I need one with sauce, please!"

I made a point of smiling. Maybe it looked phony, I don't know. But I was pleased with myself. It had to be 100 degrees in the tent, in the 90 degree day, with 80% humidity, and I didn't melt, nor did I melt down.

And I was having fun. I know it's weird, but I was. I liked the carnival atmosphere, I loved seeing the families out for an evening. I was truly enjoying myself.

Three hours into it, after Dee had her dinner break, I went on mine. I had pierogies and realized with some sadness that I will never have pierogies as good as Annushka's. It's been a year since the big break and neither side has contacted the other. That's pretty final to me.

When I came back, there was a lull for about ten minutes, so I sat down and Dave sat opposite me.

He grinned. "I can see you as a school teacher."

I was horrified. "Me? A teacher? I don't even like most children."

"Naw, naw. I mean - " he made a gesture, a flick of the wrist. "I mean cracking that whip. Keeping 'em in line, you know."

I was still horrified. It was delivered without a lot of subtlety, but the translation I got was that I was being wildly overbearing in the worst possible Gordon Ramsay way.

With that arrow hitting the mark, Dave walked away. I sat, stunned, and Dee began taking orders and handling the money. I moved over to put sauce on the pizzas and generously sprinkle them with Parmesan.

"What's the matter," Dee asked. "You want to come back and count the money? You look so sad and disappointed."

Disappointed? Over not counting money? I didn't think so, although I have to admit, I liked the feeling (obviously bogus) of flow that had been with me earlier.

When closing time came, I left. I'm not working the Fair again and I'm just as glad.

Last night, I had a dream that I, full grown, was standing behind my mother where she worked. She looked like she did in the early 1970s. She was typing away - she could type 120 words per minute with her little hands. Her back was toward me.

"Mom," I said. "Mom? Why didn't you teach me how to be normal?"

She didn't look back but I could tell she heard me.

"At least let me learn how to blend in? To do what people expect of me? Why didn't you teach me that?"

Again, she would not turn around although in my dream, I know she heard me. What would have been the beginning of a brawl in real life was given the cold shoulder in my dreams. Maybe it's better that way.

She couldn't be bothered.

And while waking, I know that once you hit, say, 21, the statute of limitations on what our parents do to us should run out, I think it's too late to correct this damage. I've tried a number of times and it comes off as fake or phony. My face outs me, as Graphics Gary told me, too. The face that never lies. The face that shows scorn, sarcasm, disbelief, irony and for far too many years, no love.

Everyone's Gone to the Moon

We're closing in on that season. The month when only Becs remains in the world of central Jersey. Where does everyone go? And why can't they just stay there? Or why didn't they take me, too?

When I was a kid, my family never took vacations. (The tradition continues, largely uninterrupted.) All up and down the block, my pals were gone for a week or in some cases, two weeks. My best friend was like some kind of wealthy heiress/princess, because her family stayed in the Holiday Inn. They would go places where they had no relatives. This boggled my mind. (I was 19 before I stayed in a Holiday Inn and I thought it was wonderful. Actually, right now, I would still think it was wonderful.)

Take Me to the Rivah

Where did everyone go? When I lived in Virginia, everybody went to the Rivah. To this day, I'm still not sure which river they went to.

Everyone's family had "a cabin on the rivah" and my pals invited their other pals to go along with them.

I stayed home and rode my bike in the post-Apocalyptic world of August.

It's the End of the World as We Know It

Worst of all were the summers I was in college. I had an apartment in Richmond, near the school I went to. If May started the Silent Season, August was the very height of it. Humidity shimmered up from the concrete and melting asphalt.

The Richmond ladies stayed in their little apartments, leaning against doilies, fanning themselves so their organdy dresses ruffled in the damp breeze and if you saw any of them on the sidewalk, they looked like someone had mistaken them for ironing.

I rode my bike up and down the street of the Fan District. Everyone was gone. Everyone but me and the Richmond ladies whose nephews didn't invite them to the Rivah.

The worst days felt like I saw them through a thick, sickly yellow cellophane, dead and flat, and it felt like they would never end.

But eventually, people would start trickling back. They would tell wond'rous stories of their adventures and I felt so clueless.

Why didn't I go on adventures myself? What was I missing?

Plus ca change...

We're back in the season where everyone's going away. Everyone but #*%*$* Fred and me.

I haven't saved up for a vacation, but I can feel myself starting to gnaw at my own vitals. I'm going to have to go somewhere, somehow, soon.

All too soon, everyone will come rushing back from vacation, clogging up the roads again, energized, bright-eyed as a coked-out 19 year old, not understanding why I bear more than a passing resemblance to Bertha Mason Rochester.

Because I was here while you all went to the moon. I kept the earth in its place, me and the Richmond ladies and the weight of it has driven us all a little mad. Welcome back.