You Can Go Home Again — Daily Batman: Road trip

By wonderful Adam Hughes, of course!

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

John Steinbeck

Worrrrrrd. On that note, my first stop (really days from now but I’m constructing these all well ahead of time) after having spent the first night of old home week (aka You Can Go Home Again) in Eugene and seeing Christer-in-law and her apparently amazing boyfriend the night before will be to drive up the road to my brief hometown Portland and have breakfast at Elmer’s with my husband and his father as though it is a regular happening of a Saturday morning.

Likewise.

My husband I can handle but I’m 100% sure I will cry at the sight of my father-in-law. He lived across the street from us and was a constant, quiet, perfect presence and companion in my life and since the day I left Portland we have not spoken a word to one another. I suspect he will be as fine with the bare fact of this, which is the part others might find odd, as me because of how deeply we both of us repress; neither would have expected to hear from the other when there are such sad thoughts to be thunk and beers to be drunk while watching baseball or sitting in a lawn chair looking over the backyard.

But I am afraid that what will cause a stir between us is that I will cave under the weight of the sadness of not having quietly done all that together all this time rather than separated by these miles and deep emotions, and I will cry and it will make him sadder. I feel that I have already dealt him such a bad turn by springing on him that I had to leave, that to compound my betrayal of our connection and friendship and love by showing him further proof of my weakness and self-indulgence by crying about my sadness instead of squeezing hands and exchanging a meaningful glance and saving the tears for the gas station on the way out of town would really end me. Please send vibes.

Breaking news: Power outage predicted in Ceres

Gorgeous George just tipped me off that Movie Day may be interrupted by CID switching over to some new folkloric meter system and cutting the power to Paolo and Miss D’s house, which was our chosen viewing venue, for a to-be-determined portion of the day. Cheezits! That’s okay: we’re flexible.

Thus, once that outage happens, we will scoot from the honeymoon house-sitting and do our little bit of blending at the DMV rather than the Raley’s, since to complete my vehicle registration I need to prove to them I smogged my stupid car in accordance with their stupid laws and surrender my genuinely stupid Oregon plates. Only six characters on the plate? Puh-leeze. You guys are ridiculous. I can’t even look at you right now, Oregon. Ridiculous. Seven is the key number, man. Seven windows, seven doors, seven sevens! (Bonus prize in the mail to whoever nails that quote first. Not even kidding.)

Woohoo, back in the 209 for good (and a little evil, not gonna lie): why don’t y’all make your government bureacracy-bullshit selves useful for once, DMV, and hook me up with them there ol’ Golden Stet plets! So this is not a setback at all. Still taking the day to the moon. Ow!

Edit: The Gentleman beat everyone to the punch with a text message yesterday — “something about mary,” the man said. And he is right, sadly. Oh, I’ll send you something in the mail, all right…

Link a dink a doo and some sketches too

Did you know? My “estranged” husband, Husbandly R. Husbandson the First, Esq.*, is an artist. He has a blog now.

He puts up his pen and ink drawings on there. So far my two favorites are from a series he did while moseying about hipster haven, the city of Portland, which also has a strange intersection with the detritus of decaying industrialism, so you have these two disparate populations constantly mingling.

His note on this sketch was, “He was psyching himself up to do something,” and I like how correspondingly large the hands are as the subject contemplates them. Must’ve been something that loomed large in his mind, to need such big hands for doing it.

The other one I like is this one of a man at the Fred Meyer grocery, I can only guess the one right by our house, badgering the retired gentleman who is merely working as a greeter because this country cannot care for the elderly and who never signed on to hear personal political and social diatribes from some stained-shirt-sporting young pudgy stranger who is either a) a knee-jerk liberal which is just as ignorant and open to the dangers of hypocrisy as going in the other direction, b) a recent parolee whose brain is addled by meth, or c) a die-hard, Ayn Rand-reading, every-man-for-himself, you-must-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-even-if-you-are-paraplegic, bidet-sniffing son of a bitch who doesn’t believe in social programs or stop signs (in Portland, it could go either way):

So that’s my husband’s stuff.

*henceforth known as HRH