Just when you thought your source of familial annoyance was dead...

I am depressed tonight.  There are lots of reasons for it, but I think the main on is having my sleep schedule screwed with.  There are many others too, but that one is always the one that lets the others break out to the surface.

My grandfather is the new nightmare in my life.  He's bored all day and he has taken my living here to mean that I do nothing and have nothing to do and want to spend every free moment with him.  He's great to have lunch with and talk to for a bit.  I don't even mind doing favors for the guy.  I was going to say that I ask of people about what I'm willing to give to them, and that's true when I don't like you, but I have a really hard time asking anything of anyone at all ever.  So the amount I ask of someone is really no indicator of how much I'm willing to do for them.  For this grandfather, it was a little bit.  He used up all of that today.

Yesterday, he asked if I'd go to the auction with him in Las Cruces.  He offered to buy me something if I found something I liked, because I didn't want to go and have no money at the moment.  Today he called at 7:45 and said he'd be right over, so I got ready.  He showed up at 9.  Now I'm not the king of being right on time, but there's a bit of a difference if I make someone get up and get ready and also waste the productive part of their day.  He has some habits.  Apparently they involve asking for EVERYTHING in my mom's house.  He has no use for any of it, but he just wants to grab what he can.  I need to have a garage sale and ditch a lot of this stuff...and make money and pay the mortgage for a month with that.

When it comes to things I need to be doing while I'm here, they are: I need to write, I need to work on a game, I MUST write my dissertation and a talk on what I did in Germany, I need to repair this house to get it ready to sell, and I have got to organize the things in it to go too.  Well I can't use those last two as an excuse to get away from him, because he wants to help with the house, and wants to hoard everything in it.  I've seen his handiwork too, everything he touches looks gnawed-upon.  He fixed my mom's bathroom sink.  The metal is all chewed-up, the pipe has a very slow leak, and the original problem wasn't really solved.  I should post some pictures of that, and of how he fixed the door.

He means well in a suffocating and overbearing way, though.  He also has no respect for privacy.  I should arrange it to look like I'm having a satanic orgy some morning.  He started just coming through the side door without giving any notice until I started locking it.  I then also locked the gates to the yard, only to discover that one of the last things my mother did was give him a key to those.  He gives the impression that he thinks this place and everything associated with it or with me is his to do with as he pleases.  He has a way of asking that is just pushy and quickly evolves in his head as some kind of agreement in which I get totally screwed.  He wants to tell someone that they can just take over the payments of this house, for example.

So, I rode with him to the auction today.  For my time, I got the following: A lecture about how Obama is fucking up the country with no specifics.  A lecture about how Bush was great for chucking the UN out of this area.  Some crazy nutball shit about end times and "one world government".  And then a whole bunch of lectures about Jesus.  If I have to ride with him again, maybe I'll just stop keeping to myself what I really think about these issues.  I try now to tell myself that when someone likes me, they think I believe like they do, so this really is flattery, so I try to not be high school Jeremy, who slapped people in the face with their own belief systems when it even seemed like they were thinking about encroaching on mine.  That was a fun ride.

Then we got there, and they're auctioning farm equipment.  Nothing he wants is even going to be on the auction block until Sunday.  He also knew this in advance, because he went the other day.  Let me tell you, the farm equipment is probably good, but most of the rest of the shit is SHIT.  This kind of thing is definitely for people who are not savvy enough to use a computer to check out ebay and craigslist...which is why it is all farmers there.  They are really old farmers, mexican farmers, and Mennonites.  Those seem to be the last three groups in the area who haven't heard of the internet.

My grandfather kept saying, "Well, if you see anything you want, let me know." So I would say, "Well, I don't have any money," which is short for, "Yeah, I kind of stopped my life to come here and take care of my mom, so I have no income and the insurance company is dragging its feet on paying out on her policy, but that doesn't mean that I want you to assist me in any way." But then he made a kind offer:  "You can pick out anything you want for not more than 100 or 150 dollars...and then you can just pay me back by digging ditches or something for me for $8/hr."  That is, apparently the rate "his Mexican" charges.  You know when you have something hit you so profoundly out of left field that you can't even fathom how to respond until the moment has passed?  That was one of those times for me.  It's mostly that I just didn't want to hurt the old guy's feelings, though, at this rate, that's not going to save him for long.  I should've told him that I'd work it off at my physics tutoring rate: $50/hr, and that he already owed me about $200 for the time I had spent there up to that point.

So we spent the ENTIRE day there looking at nothing.  He got bored with me at one point because I, myself, was so bored that when we got over to the vehicles, I inspected a few really quirky ones thoroughly.  They were: two ancient ambulances, one short bus (that I kind of really really wanted), and a van with a hydraulic arm with a bucket on the end.

I was wiped out, so I was looking forward to sleeping on the 45 minute drive back to Deming, but that's when the final bombshell was dropped.  It was really a minor one, but considering it was one more straw, I wasn't happy.  I got to drive home, because he wanted to sleep.  Having to stay awake when I'm sleepy is the single worst feeling to me that there is.  My body just goes dead when I'm sleepy; it doesn't really even consult me.  So it's a Herculean feat for me to try to make it stay up, especially when I'm driving.

He didn't even sleep on the ride home.

And then I got home finally and took a million hour nap.  Now I'm up at 1, alone, and am trying to think of a way to not go to an auction ever again.  He thinks we're going again tomorrow and the next day.

Lockdown

The little brother is gone.  We spent the day driving around on dirt roads way out in the desert looking for fossils or arrowheads or anything remotely cool.  We found a trough filled with something horrible (so we threw a bunch of rocks into it to make it splash) and an abandoned mine shaft.  You could drop a rock in it and hear it rattle to the bottom before hitting something metal and splashing into water.  Ah the beauty of having an open mine shaft right on your property.

He went back home to go to work tomorrow.  He wanted to take this week off too.  That would make four weeks of unpaid leave for NO REASON.  He really was driving me nuts here, because he was just around enough to fuck up anything I wanted to do, but not so much as to do anything with me, despite that he often lamented that.  It was disingenuous.  He wanted me to feel like he was really wanting to be with me, but he wasn't.  It was okay, because I didn't want him to be here either.  I don't do well living with anyone I'm not banging--at least if they can't leave me massively alone--so I was not fond of him here.  Plus, his whole function was to not have a key so that I would have to leave the door unlocked.  There's a reason why that's annoying, which I'll get to in a minute.

My grandfather has been at it for 1 day and is driving me mad.  He's retired and manic, so if you say, "Hey, this needs to be done," he thinks you mean that he has to help you, and that it has to be done immediately.  He also thinks that you have nothing else to do.  So I basically have to pretend like I'm not here or not awake or something, because he won't take, "Let's do that next month" for an answer.

But now I'm locked down.  I'm going to wake up in the morning, work out, write, and do my other side project.  Only then will I receive visitors.

I still don't have a certified certificate of death for my mom, which means that I still have no money.

Funeral Post Mortem

So, the funeral was yesterday. If anyone in this town has the flu, I probably have it now. But I got lots of hugging and handshaking practice in, so I probably went up a level in that. It was pretty decent so far as funerals go. There were a couple of speakers, one was really great, and the other was hilarious. And then we played the video I shot of my mom and hadn't shown to anyone.  It started with, "I'm BaaAAAaack!" That cracked everyone up. And there had been enough random cell phone bullshit during the funeral that when my phone went off in the video, it seemed like it was in the room somewhere.  Then there was a dinner afterward, and that was good too. Today I've got to go get a billion flowers for no reason. I told my brother he should take them to his girl. I wonder how well that would go over.

Afterward, I had a beer with my old ex-stepfather. He wasn't ever really present in my life despite that I lived with him for 7 years. It was one of those things where if he saw me, he assigned me a chore to get rid of me, so I just made sure I was never in his line-of-sight. But we got to reminisce about places we lived and events that happened, even if it wasn't about things we did together. So that was nice...ish.

Then later I went to my aunt's place to watch the new episode of Community. It was pretty bland. I don't remember the exact joke I made, but it was something like, "Wow. This was the low point of my day, and I was at my mother's funeral earlier!"

So, things will start going back to however they're going to be I guess. My little brother is doing everything he possibly can to not go back to work. He's now thinking he will take off until Wednesday. He just doesn't want to work. I can sympathize for sure, but the little shit has a great job. When I had a job that paid me 2/3 of what he's making, I was ecstatic. I hated being in an office and having to go daily, but I never missed a day. I don't think he does much more than I did in that job either, and it was pretty little.

So, I will probably post more entries from time-to-time, since there's going to be plenty of other stuff related to my mother's death and dealing with her stuff, but I do imagine that the posts will thin out somewhat. They have already begun to.

The Next Day

So, my brother and I went to the funeral home today.  That was really easy to do.  Apparently, they handle pretty much everything, though they are dramatically not prepared to be dealing with anyone who has half a brain.  I guess I'm writing the obituary, and making the flyer.
My brother and I stopped by the brewery in town afterward and got a couple of beers.  Then we got another one for free.  Then it turned out that we only paid for our food and not our drinks.  I'm not sure how that happened, really.  Maybe someone overheard us talking.

I passed out when we got home.  A few Belgian-style beers and a night with not much sleep did me in. I guess my brother did a good job running around and doing paperwork stuff today.  I'll do my part now and write, scan photos, and assemble something to pick up at the funeral.

Last night my brother invited his stoner buddies over.  I really hated that.  I kind of just want to be alone for a while, that didn't include him then, but after having to listen to stoner talk about how to pick up women for an hour just two hours after my mother died, it kind of does now.  In case you were wondering it goes something like this, "You gotta fuckin' tell her 'Hey, girl.' No wait, you gotta find something, flowers or some shit.  Then you gotta tell her 'Hey girl, you're beautiful.  You're even more beautiful than these flowers.'"  There was some other jazz about a butterfly and whatnot, but it made no sense.

Ugh, I have a headache.