The rain is a jerk
The rain won’t stop. It falls in drops that look quarter-sized to me as I squint through our fogged windows. The rain lets up, it pauses to catch its breath, but doesn’t stop. Without speaking, the clouds convey through deep-set wrinkled brows that the rain will be back soon to fuck with us. When the rain takes these breaks its sweat soaks the air. The humidity condenses on every glass surface.
Yesterday I found the humidity had turned a fresh pack of sugar cones into soft sponges. My older kid rumbled like the thunder as she agreed to endure the indignity of ice cream served in a bowl. My younger kid nibbled the squishy cardboard consistency of a cone with eyebrows raised and a smile but when I asked her to give me that cone so I could put ice cream inside it she cried. I gave it back, filled, and she smiled again for a moment before shouting that I had to pour chocolate sauce inside as well.
When it thunders my kids freak out. One of their grandmas had a computer get fried by lightning. She unplugged her computer but not her modem or router or robot or whatever it’s called, which was plugged into her computer, and the storm zapped her house. The electricity fried the device and the computer it was attached to. My brother Rick was partially struck by lightning recently; he was closing windows against the rain and lightning struck his house nearby and he felt the shock go up his arm, leaving it all tingly. This was the same day he found out his wife is pregnant again, with twins. The doctor told him not to go into a deep sleep for 24 hours. It will be good practice for having twin babies. My kids are freaked out about the threat to the computer; they don’t care about my brother. The computer is where they watch movies and play games, so when there’s thunder they scream and cry that we have to turn off the computer and the power strip and unplug it. So storms sound like BOOOM! WAAAHH OH NO QUICK HURRY THE COMPUTER! WAAAAHHH UNPLUG IT WAAAHH! I’m more freaked out about the threat of twins; I’d rather my computer or my body be struck by lightning. I deal with this danger by being prophylactically hairy and gassy and unfunny and clammy. So far no twins, so I’m gonna stick with this plan.
With all the water falling out of the sky the air feels heavy, thick like french bread sopped in pea soup. I like that as a meal but breathing it leads to choking. I break a sweat pushing aside the weight of that wet, warm, stupid air, let alone when I, say, lift one of my kids quickly and set her on my shoulder. I hold the backs of her knees and dangle her downward behind my shoulder blades. “Where did you go?” “I’m right here!” “Where?” “Behind you!” I turn, “I don’t see you!” “No, behind you!” Repeat. The laughs this gets are cheap I suppose but sincere, and worth perspiration that oozes out all over my body.
Also worth the sweat: headstands. I learned to do them just this week. A friend showed me how a few weeks ago but it hadn’t worked, not least because I’d been too intimidated, so it became another thing I can’t do and can’t bring myself to try sincerely to do. Once my arms and head are in place, I jump my feet off the ground, pitching my weight and legs and pelvis what first feels like forward toward my face then suddenly feels like backward toward the back of my head as my feet lift off the ground. From forward to backward; it’s an appropriate motion for much of my life course. I’d been practicing just a little, infrequently and insincerely, kicking up off the ground for a sec then returning the balls of my feet to the floor, and then one time I just held it at the top of the arc. Later I extended my legs fully (the initial upside-down position has my legs bent, my knees near my stomach or chest) and did a real headstand and once again felt so surprised I almost fell over. The move begins with putting my elbows on the floor. Then I lower my head to the floor and place my head in my hands. Those gestures suit me, and I love the idea that in beginning the headstand I first give in to my impulse toward resignation. It feels like a good exercise, a lot of work and I come out of it sweating.
Sweat is useless. Mine is, anyway. It sits on my skin like warm soapy water midway through washing a sinkful of dishes - slightly slimey, dirty-feeling. The sweat soaks into my clothes. They cling like what I imagine quicksand feels like. I don’t cool off, I just add too sticky and too smelly to the list along with too hot, too old, too dull. Too hot because the windows are closed because it’s raining, and often raining sideways, blowing into our house in bursts, wetting furniture and kids’ paintings they left on the floor, so the house steadily heats up over the course of the day.
Before I put my head on the floor to begin the headstand I check for bugs. See, the rain has flooded our backyard. A newborn river runs down the hill of our street along the ditch where I wish a sidewalk was. (Rivers, like many other wild animals, move independently from the moment of their birth. [If you’re keeping up, you will note that this was an attempt at dry humor, but one that fails because too soggy. Sorta like those ice cream cones I through away.]) All this damp is flooding out the homes of ants, spiders, and earwigs, who have come into our house in large numbers.
The new spiders lurk in the small storage room off our back porch, the room I use to keep boxes of books I will regret not reading, or regret not remembering, or regret not re-reading, or regret reading, and to keep some additional sweatmaking exercise equipment. (My favorite is a home-made sandbag that I shoulder then pace around the room. It makes me think of Sysiphus. We must imagine Sysiphus happy, says Albert Camus, I think, in a book I think [but am not sure] I read and which I can’t remember well enough to know if I should be proud or embarrassed to have read it, or not read it. In any case, it is nice to imagine someone happy. French existentialists are, apparently, cheery.)
Yesterday I killed four spiders in that room, one that hung down at face height when I opened the door, and three that crawled along the floor at face height if my face was near the floor, which it is at the bottom of a pushup. You can’t let spiders near your face. They crawl inside your tear ducts and lay eggs and then their babies hatch and they eat parts of your brain so you make poor career choices and you start to feel bad about yourself and your hair falls out and trust me it’s a fate I would only wish on someone I truly hated. I killed those spiders with David Graeber’s book Debt. Some friends of mine praise it highly; others hate it deeply and, I am sure, wish he’d get a case of spiderfacebrainmunch. (That’s the scientific name.) I got a free copy, I can’t remember how. I can say it’s a weighty volume whose heft serves well for spider squashing. I may also someday read it.
The ants patrol the kitchen, mostly, but they also range into the bathroom where we feed our cats. They especially like the dish of cat food, which is gross because it is full of cat food, and also ants. My wife has tried becoming resigned to the ants and ignoring them. Resignation is a strength of mine but ignoring irritation is not. If you ignore irritation don’t you end up empty inside? Like, if I wasn’t irritated, what would I feel? The ants swarm all over the garbage can under the sink, and they send scouts and caravans - supply lines, I am sure, for their eventual plan to amass near the bed where I sleep and carpet me with their terrible little bodies.
Did I mention that an ant bit me the other day? Not at my house, but outside a burrito place. We were in a hurry to take our kids somewhere and I hadn’t had breakfast so I ran in, got a burrito to go - it was really good, by the way, as I knew it would be because the place was full of mexican people, which is the way to judge a burrito place - then ate it knealing on the sidewalk at the side of the road while my kids climbed in the car. It was on my arm, in the crook of my elbow and I brushed it away - the ant, I mean, not the burrito, or the car - and it bit me. It left a big red welt that is still there after three whole days. I had begun my war on the ants before the bitten-while-burritoing incident, but I felt a bit bad at first. After that being bit me, though, I feel completely justified in killing every ant in the universe. What kind of terrible monster bites someone in the middle of eating a burrito? The only answer: a terrible, monstrous one.
I discovered via a very scientifically knowledgeable friend (you may have met this friend, Google?) that orange oil kills ants by breaking down the tissues they need to breathe. I filled a spray bottle with vinegar and several drops of this oil. It has a nice citrus smell as I spray every ant I can find. I kill them in large numbers. I sometimes feel a bit bad as their bodies build up but mostly I feel like a god, and besides they started it. Unfortunately, like all gods, I’m kind of shitty and ineffectual. The bugs keep coming back even more numerous.
The earwigs have stuck to one of the bedrooms but they’ve been there in force, an armada of at least half a dozen. I think they came in via a laundry basket. My wife had hung some laundry on the line in our yard during a false flag burst of sun that the rain used to trick us, to fuck with us. She brought the laundry back in, set the basket in that bedroom, and minutes later: earwigs.
The combination of them having ‘ear’ in their name plus their pinchers plus the fact that the pinchers are on their asses plus a half-remembered scene from one of the old Star Trek movies where a villain (I think his name was KHAAAAAAAAANNNNNN but I’m not entirely sure) pours a big fucking monster bug in someone’s ear, and the bug proceeded to chomp down with its monster-big-bug-teeth on the person in their ear drum or their asshole or the little strip of flesh under their tongue, I don’t remember but it was gross because it involved a bug… all of that means earwigs freak me out. Like, being bit is gross, being bitten on or worse inside the ear is grosser, and somehow being bitten by big old teeth on someone’s ass is even grosser still. Anus dentata, I guess. Unfortunately I can’t solve the earwig problem until the rain stops and the sun comes up and all the water dries up so I can successfully burn down our house.