I thought I’d take a break to eat my honey oat bagel and write to you, because even ten or fifteen minutes is enough to post an update. I got my badly-needed haircut after driving to the salon, and I will never do that again. The route was through Rock Creek Park in the dark, and I don’t think there have been many more moments I’ve been more afraid. Just hairpin turns and no lighting except Eggsy’s.

I have officially named my car Eggsy, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it days ago. Eggsy is my favorite spy… from Kingsmen: The Secret Service. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s hilarious and I think you will love it. It’s also infinitely quotable, so there’s that.

Martini. Gin, not vodka, obviously. Stirred for 10 seconds while glancing at an unopened bottle of vermouth. Thank you.

It’s 007 meets farce in the best kind of way.

So is my car.

Wouldn’t it be cool if all the Subways in DC were called “Metro?” I just thought of that, because I am having breakfast at Subway this morning, and I highly recommend it. I got a ham, egg, and cheese flatbread with guac and salsa. It was delicous, and I don’t think I’ll be hungry again until Thursday. I don’t have to leave for work for another hour, so I hooked my iPad to my iPhone for Internet access and I’m nursing a Coke Zero and writing to you. By the time this post is finished, I may or may not have nursed several. Oh, wow. Surprised. I’m using the HTML editor in the WordPress app and they’ve finally started turning tags blue so you can see them pick them out easier. It’s the little things, people.

Yesterday was very frustrating at work. I had a lot of problems with my computer and I spent more time troubleshooting them than I wanted, and I had shit to do. Normally, I’m really good at that stuff, but I know nothing about fixing software when developer tools error out. It was a lesson in how to Google. What I learned is that it was a Windows 10 issue with no fix and by then my eyebrows were about to go over my forehead, anyway, so I just wanted to throw my computer against the wall.

I did not.

When I got home, I crawled into bed and watched House of Cards. I’m late to the party- I’m only on Season 1, episode 8 or something like that. So far, I like it, but I’m not as gaga over it as I was Covert Affairs. Kevin Spacey’s southern accent drives me up the wall. I like his regular voice just fine. I do like Zoey Barnes, though, blogger that she is. #gozoey

I’m also intrigued by the character that is obviously a Katherine Graham ripoff. I don’t know all their names yet- I’ll get it eventually.

I’m trying to get caught up on Scandal, too, because I stopped watching it when Dana and I broke up, because it was kind of our thing, and I didn’t want to watch it without her, even though I knew she wasn’t coming back. The last episode I saw is the one where Jake shot James, I think. I heard a spoiler that Jake died, and I cried like it was a real person, because even if you’re a casual reader of this web site, you know I’ve had my own Jake and Fitz for years now.

I’m divorced because they kept switching roles, and of that, I am sure.

I chose Leslie.

Speaking of choosing Leslie, it’s time to go get cleaned up. My hair is so all over the place that I kind of look like Harry Potter. My eyebrows are bushy and have silver in them, which I don’t hate, but they look better all cleaned up. My eyebrows tend to take over my whole face. It’s special.

I also want to get my nails done, but I regret it every time because it slows down my typing, so I think I’ll skip that in favor of keeping them very, very short. I like it when my nails are smooth and professional, but it means more to me that my fingers can fly over the keys.

And speaking of flying over the keys, I’m going to leave early for work and see if I can get some of the work knocked out that I couldn’t accomplish yesterday because of stupid Windows 10. I am starting to feel like an idiot in the computer support department, because I’ve been using linux so long that I’ve forgotten more Windows/DOS than I really needed to…. It’s fine. It really is. But I feel the same way about Windows that I feel about playing my horn. It bothers me that I’m not as good as I used to be. It made me feel good that the IT guy couldn’t figure it out, either.

Stupid Windows 10. At least I’m fed and somewhat awake. Coke Zero fixes everything.

I think I may have been caught on a red light camera Friday night, because Waze was directing me and I didn’t see where I was going for a half second, and that’s all it takes. The ticket won’t be expensive, at least from what I’ve heard from Uber drivers, but it says a lot about my driving that I’ve had a car less than a week and already I’ve made a stupid mistake. Hopefully my insurance won’t go up by too much, but it’s just all the more reason why I didn’t want a car in the first place. I mean, I do, but I don’t. My driving record has been clean for a long time, and I wanted to keep it that way. Of course, not driving for almost a year really, really helped. At least it wasn’t a speeding ticket. I don’t speed at all, and there are thousands of drivers mad at me, I’m sure, because I am content to toodle along in the right lane. My car has a huge blind spot on the left-hand side, so I try not to move much. I’m going to go to Auto Zone after work and get a secondary mirror. I have to make this car last as long as possible, and wrecking it for damn sure won’t help.

I also need to get a few tools to change my sparkplugs, which I forgot I needed… or rather, on the Saturn it was much easier. However, I’ve watched five YouTube videos on the subject, and it’s not THAT much harder. The plugs are just a little harder to get to… if only Volfe was here. It’d be done already, because he carries the tools in the back of his truck. 🙂

I also got all the stuff I needed to detail her, including tire black and a new stick shift knob that lights up blue neon. The car is silver and the interior is blue and black, so it looks divine… literally. Ethereal in the dark. So at least if I did get caught on a red light camera, the picture will look good. It’s all about presentation.

It’s nice to have a little bit of money to spend on fixing up my car, because she doesn’t need much work, but the health of the engine is paramount. The spark plugs need to be changed every 30,000 miles, so buying the tools to do it is a no-brainer. I also want to get some Rubbermaid tubs to keep the back orderly. I have enough cleaning stuff to necessitate the tub, and my room is small enough that keeping my car gear in the cargo area sounds better than trying to find a place for it upstairs. I also have grape soda back there, because I like having cold soda first thing in the morning. However, if it gets too cold, I’m going to be ecstatic that I put it in a bin. Nothin’ says lovin’ like grape soda sprayed all over your car.

I told Lindsay that she’d given me something to take care of, and it felt good because I don’t have babies or pets. It’s nice to have a hobby. 😛

The only thing is that I don’t know Maryland and DC at all. Everything I needed was in Alexandria, so when I lived here before, I didn’t have to go into the city unless I wanted to, and I know NoVA like the back of my hand. Driving in Maryland/DC is unfamiliar and therefore, scary. I am not to be trusted without some sort of GPS, even if I was paying attention to it too hard. Don’t feel sorry for me- I brought this upon myself. I just feel like a schmuck.

Which is why it made me feel like a rock star that I matched with someone on Tinder (looking for friends) that’s a foreign service officer. I told her that I’m a writer and I would kill to hear some of her stories. She’s fluent in like, five languages, which means there’s no limit to the amount of people she can have a conversation with where I’ll have no idea what she’s saying. However, I want to learn Arabic for my novel, so maybe she can teach me what I need to know, or at the very least, translate what I need the characters to say. Plus, some of her stories might make good novel scenarios if she doesn’t mind me lifting them.

In other news, I need a haircut.

Actually, I own a Toyota, but the title was just too funny to pas up. I’m waiting at Jiffy Lube to buy her a drink… and a good one. High mileage oil and everything. I figure that a Toyota will last until Jesus comes, and the guy working on my car agreed with me. You’d basically have to take a tire iron to a Toyota engine to get it to stop working. My sister is not as much of a gearhead as me, so I’m going to get a list of everything that needs to be done at this mileage so I can mete it out by paycheck. I know I’m going from here to O’Reilly’s to get her a new set of sparkplugs, and I topped her off with premium last night to clean the fuel injectors- as much as I could, anyway.

This morning I woke up at 4:00 and shined my boots, then went out and tried to RainX my car, but I got it all prepped and the RainX instructions said you can’t apply it when it’s under 40 degrees… and it was. It looks like we’re going to get some more precip, but it’s not cold enough anymore for snow. It’s just going to be cold rain, so when Scott flies in this afternoon, he’ll have the same weather he left.

I can’t decide whether to take my car or the Metro, because I don’t know how much luggage he has. We shall see what we shall see.

I met Scott at my friend Christy’s house, because he’s in a band with her fiancee. He’s a Republican, and I love him, anyway. 😛 He’s grateful to have someone to meet him at the airport, because DCA can be a scary place if you don’t know your way around. Plus, the Metro is intimidating if you don’t get a good conductor that will actually call out the stops before you get there. The best part is that his hotel is only .2 miles from the Metro, so even with luggage, it’s not a long haul.

My road trip last night was just what I needed to shake off the grief I felt the day before yesterday. I’m grateful to my sister for my car, because I never would have tried to pay for an Uber out there. They would have been the most expensive waffles on record. The food was good, but the service was *terrible.* I overtipped anyway, because I can’t think of anyone more laden than a waitress in a busy Waffle House.

I was surprised and pleased to learn that my mechanic is a trans man- it was obvious, at least to me. He is so hot. I wish I could take a picture. I would never transition, but at the same time, there are those moments where I wish I could take my boobs off so my clothes hang right. I wonder if there’s a way to make them detachable. Duct tape fixes everything. 😛

At the same time, there are other moments when I am such a girly girl. I love makeup and hair and all that shit. Sometimes I also wish that I had long hair, because with short hair, there is no throwing it back into a ponytail or a bun and going. I have to either shower or rinse my head every day. I try not to shower every single day because it really dries out my skin in this weather. But check this out! I found my favorite gel in the entire world, Gorilla Snot, at Giant. I thought only Mexican grocery stores carried it, because the last time I bought it, it was in one of those stores in Houston where *NO ONE* spoke English. There was a lot of “mi espanol es muy, mal… pero cuanto cuesto?” (My Spanish is very, very bad… but how much is this?). I also got better with my numbers because the cashiers couldn’t count back the change in English. Dana and I kept going there…. a lot, really, because it was on our way to Alert Logic and it was the best panaderia in town. I’m too lazy to look it up, but eventually I’ll give you a link. It’s basically Chimney Rock and Westpark.

The mechanic came in a little while ago while I was writing to Susan and he said, “you’re going to type in all your information. I saw you typing 80 words a minute on that Bluetooth.” I laughed and said, “sure.”

And on that note, I have to go. Love you miss you mean it.

Tonight when I got off work, I realized that I missed “home.” The Waffle House is in Dumfries, VA, so I saw my old haunts the entire way here…. even my old office building when I got lost trying to find my way off the toll road (I don’t have a tag yet). So I filled up with Shell just for spite. Actually, that was a joke. My time at ExxonMobil was pretty awesome, actually. I felt like I’d sold my soul to the devil, but at the same time I’ve never had kinder coworkers, ones that keep in touch with me to this day… though neither one of them live here anymore.

When I passed Little River Turnpike, though, that feeling of home was complete. Kathleen and I took that route every morning to get around the traffic on 95, so familiar to me that I could probably drive it blindfolded… though I won’t. I really love NoVA, but Maryland was the safer choice all around. Even Kathleen and I wanted to move there back in the day, because it seemed like they were much more tolerant of the whole gay thing… and they were.

Richmond controls Virginia’s laws, and in St. Bob’s country, you’re not going to see a lot of progress unless absolutely forced to participate. The DC area is tolerant of all, even Republicans, and when you live there, you kind of like to forget Richmond exists… or at least, I did. ExxonMobil has this funds match thingme where if you give money to a non-profit, they’ll match you dollar for dollar. So one of my coworkers gave that money to the Whitman-Walker clinic…. literally AND tongue in cheek because nothing was funnier to us than ExxonMobil donating money to them.

Then there was the day that a drunk Native American shot through the Alyeska pipeline and I was sitting in a meeting where this slideshow was being played in front of me. All the lights were off, the pictures projected practically lifesize on the wall, and the entire room turned when I said, a little too loudly, “UNCLE MATT!” Luckily, they laughed. My uncle Matt is a safety inspector for the Alyeska, and he travels from Fairbanks to Valdez, thus ending up in our picture show.

All these memories are just flooding out, and I feel *fantastic* (say that like Nine). I am back in my element. When I passed Woodbridge, I remembered my fairy godson, Joey, being born and walking out of the hospital crying because that Sunday was Father’s Day and my friend Rob (Joey’s father) was standing right next to me and Kathleen as we were walking out. I spent so much time with Joey, and he wouldn’t remember it, but I sure do. I remember learning the particular dance that would calm him down, and the sweet smell at the top of his head.

The first night I met Dana, she told me that her parents live in Dumfries, and I told her that the only thing I knew about Dumfries was that it was the closest Waffle House to DC. I am sure that there is a Waffle House in Maryland, but I didn’t look. I wanted a trip down memory lane, or memory freeway, as it were.

I am so happy that I moved back, and at the same time, I don’t regret anything. But I feel that something was waiting for me here, and now I have to find out what it is. For now, though, I’m going to eat cheese n’ eggs, raisin toast with apple butter, grits, and hash browns covered smothered and topped.

Amen.

It’s going to be all over the place, because there’s a lot to tell over lunch. Yesterday, my sister and I went to Popeye’s and I had chicken and Fanta, the official meal of the Cajun south. It was delicious, and we chatted both seriously and not. So much laughter, and long hugs because it had been a while since we’d had some face-to-face conversation.

One of the things that really flipped my shit was that when Counselor wrote to me and told me not to contact Dana under any circumstances, I told her that I wanted Dana to cut all ties with my family. This was over Christmas, and I really, really meant it.

Lindsay told me that on Feb. 7th, Dana contacted her to ask if she knew any tax accountants, and she was asking for a friend who’d been here less than a year. It hurt so bad I almost cried. Why she thinks that she can have a relationship with my sister after all we’ve been through is unimaginable to me… on the serious. I was glad that I was on my anxiety medication, because when the cortisol and sin started racing through my body, I was able to combat it.

I don’t have a relationship with Counselor… not that I want one. But it would be the same. Dana hurt me so bad that my therapist recommended group therapy for battered women. I am not innocent in that fight, but the last punch undid me. I had a bruise under my eye for a week, and phantom pain for long afterwards. My wife and best friend in the world left a bruise that everyone could see. I couldn’t leave the house. I took sleeping pills all the time to get away from the pain. It was the most horrible feeling in the entire world, and I lashed out at everyone. I was in so much pain that I couldn’t function, and at first, literally.

The problem was that she outweighed me by quite a bit, so when her fist hit my face, at first I thought my eye socket was broken. She arranged a penitential rite with our priest, and she opened the Book of Common Prayer to show it to me. I hyperventilated so hard that she called my parents, and when they showed up, they saw the bruise under my eye, and it was humiliating… Devastating, really. I didn’t want to show ANYONE that bruise, much less my stepmom and dad. I was just undone.

The fight started when she pushed me so hard I went off like a rat dog with a Napoleon complex, but I couldn’t compete. At that point, I was dealing with a lot of shit that had nothing to do with her, but it was making me so anxious that I’d dropped to 117 pounds and my muscle mass was disappearing. Dana was the opposite. She gained weight and was over 200. Again, I couldn’t compete. I was feather-weight at best.

And the bitch of it is I still love her, pray for her, wish that we could have done more to save our marriage than completely destroy it one day at a time. But praying for her gives me peace in the matter, and I won’t stop. It feels like I won’t ever. But I know that eventually I will meet someone else, hopefully long into the future so that I have time to grieve. There are moments when I still can’t function, I am so upset at what happened. We were in trouble, and the fight was just the last thing that happened. I will never forget it, and yet, she’s still the one I’d hoped I’d be chasing around our nursing home.

So, to say that I flipped my shit yesterday is just about the most honest thing I can say. As Bryn would say, “it’s just true.” I had a great time driving my car home, because she is so perfect for me, and then I crumpled in grief and sadness. I went to bed at 7:00 and slept until 8:00 just because I could. I wanted to get away, so I took 2 Atarax and slept without dreaming. I knew it would do that, because if I had been dreaming, I would have ripped Dana a new one, and I didn’t want to have that dream in the slightest.

She can’t have it both ways. She can’t ask for silence and expect to have full contact with my family. They are so over her.

And one day, I will be, too.

Just not yet.

It’s a good day here at “Stories.” I forgot to put on my calendar when my sister had a meeting in Annapolis, so it’s a surprise that she’s coming to pick me up for lunch at 1300. Her car has arrived and is parked in the parking lot, so I asked her if she could show me where the fuse box is. 🙂 There is no one in the world that I love more than Lindsay. She is my favorite person on God’s green earth, and a surprise visit is enough to make me tear up.

Her car is a Yaris 2-door hatchback, and it’s “bigger on the inside,” as anyone who has ever owned a Yaris will tell you. It’s so much fun to drive. So. Much. Fun. She’s my little egg car, and Dana and I have had a long tradition of naming our cars, so I waffle between Eggbert and Egglentine. I also call her Egglebert Humperdinck. She needs some love, and I’m going to give it to her- Volfe taught me how to change out the sparkplugs, and we’ll see what she needs at Jiffy Lube, too. I don’t change my own oil. It’s just too messy and I don’t have my own driveway. She also needs to be scrubbed down with vinyl protectant and I need some sort of Bluetooth device for my phone. Apparently taking apart the dash to add a new head unit is difficult. It’s already got AUX, so that’s what I used this morning for directions and streaming Spotify. Since I’m on a business plan, I share bandwidth with other people, so I’m trying to clear my phone out of everything it needs so I can put local podcasts and music on it not to go over, or limit other people from using bandwith- it’s all about sharing. 😛 Besides, Google Play will let me download albums or stream them, so I don’t have to spend money on Spotify.

I may go to Best Buy and see if they can do the head unit thing, because I found that in my Saturn, being able to have the mic pick up my voice and other people’s voices coming through my speakers so I could actually hear them was amazing. Some of the head units even have iPhone apps so that the head unit can control Pandora, Spotify, etc… and they’re not expensive. The last one I bought was only $125 and free installation. I bought a Bluetooth speaker phone before I bought the head unit the last time around, and found that it didn’t work worth a damn. If you’ve found one you like, please leave it in the comments, because it would be cheaper and easier than replacing the stereo.

This morning on the way to work I listened to the episode of “You Made it Weird” with Ben Folds, because I thought it was the best inaugural thing to christen it given our ties with him.

I drove to work today because yesterday I got caught in the doors of the Metro and I hurt from head to toe.

But that’s another story for another day……

And on that note, my break is up.