It’s been awhile since I have been here.  So much has happened since my last post. 

I’m finally living in my grandparents’ old house.  It feels like home, and I haven’t been home in a long time. 

I thought the trains would bother me, and maybe they will when I can turn the air conditioner off at night.  I do hear them above the A/C, but more as a backdrop rather than a theme.

Jerry is terminally ill, permanently disabled and all that.  The pulmonary fibrosis is only getting worse.  He lies in that bed with the oxygen box on alternately sleeping, then barking orders, often unintelligibly. 

I don’t know what to do.

The move here was horrible- Jerry wanting to hang on to every worthless piece of crap, and me just wanting to snag the essentials and get him the hell out of there.  I couldn’t keep everything, and with the limited amount of time and help I had it was surprising it went as well as it did.  

I am setting myself up for living alone which is almost a comfort when Jerry has his explosive coughing fits- and irrational fits of rage. He is often positively evil to me, and I don’t know how to respond.

It’s getting creepy being around him.  

And even in the midst of this I have been most pleasantly surprised by the chance appearance of an old friend from the very distant past.

He is not the old friend/ former paramour that I have obsessed about for the better part of 20 years and whom I pretty much have written off. He’s someone who has never been on my radar screen until now, even though I’ve known him casually for the past 35 years or so. 

Here’s to old middle school admirers who I never knew I had.  When other guys were chasing my oldest sister he was watching me from a distance.  Fun to find out after all these years.  And even now it is oddly satisfying to hear a man say that,”fucking your sister would be like fucking a fence.”  I had to be catty and add my thought that he would have had to tie a board across his ass to keep from falling in the abyss.  Comedy is indeed the flipside of tragedy.

I am both pragmatic and cynical enough not to get my hopes up. I have said it forever that when Jerry dies I won’t seek a replacement, but I won’t turn down an upgrade.