"God bless you." I hung up the phone. Perhaps it is good to be needed by a man in a wheelchair and a tall woman in a large straw hat. It is definitely painful to stand on the edge of their patio outside their mansion and contemplate the wispy, brown trees and scorched abtiniya, the dusty sand where lawn should be, the generally burnt patch of land with the very beautiful house in the middle of it. Sad, it is. So I have been successfully guilted into this, and it sort of happened without my knowledge, the hypodermic needle slipped into the clothing.
Dammit, I need a truck and a rake and a shovel and glue and PVC, and fittings. Especially a truck. With a truck, I can do things. Without a truck, I am useless. Worse than useless in fact since I am reliant then on the mobility of the client to do their job, which is wrong, just wrong.
But I don't have time to think about trucks and shovels and money because I'm going on vacation, I'm trying to finish 3, 4 or 5 tv shows and rebuild a motorcycle and do my job and my boss's job both at once so my dear landscaping does not wilt beyond repair. I am an insane man living an insane life, so I ought to be happy. I'm pretty sure that if I ever get randomly shot walking out of my apartment my last thought won't be about how I ended up here but about how I forgot to empty my digital camera yesterday again.
Also, on an unrelated note, I have to resign myself to the fact that I'm a racist. I do not, and never will, understand extroverted cultures, like the one I'm in the middle of. They irritate me. They have no abstract sense of responsibility or morality, substituting for this a sort of tribal familial code. I don't understand family. I don't understand a mentality based on the sufficiency of the family unit as opposed to the sufficiency of the individual. I was raised to kill my own snakes and take personal responsibility for the ones that got away. I was not raised to help kill our snake and then look about in vague confusion after it escapes our hands. If I don't have enough to eat, then that's a problem that I do something about, not a problem the government does something about.
I can deal with extroverted individuals, on a case by case basis. They're individuals. They're people. But I can't deal with extroversion in the abstract. Too friggin' much drama. I get angry just thinking about it.
So this place hates me, and I hate it. I guess that makes us about even.
Of course, I can't stand individualistic people either, but at least they leave me the hell alone.
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