When I went outside to the car this morning, I managed to push the panic button with my ass. There were roofers working on the neighbor’s house, and they all stood up and stared at me while I scrambled to try to turn it off. I clicked all the buttons on the key fob. I turned the car on. I moved it a couple of feet. I debated driving down the highway like a person in a parade, with my headlights flashing and my car honking.

I went inside to ask Steve to help me disconnect the battery and then it stopped.

I crept back out to the car, but it didn’t matter. The roofers still stared.

I gave them a very QEII sort of wave, adjusted my nonexistent tiara, and drove away.

We have an ad in the paper this week for a new receptionist/clerical worker, with computer experience a must. I’m no computer genius, by any stretch, but it amazes me how many people my age or younger don’t seem to have any experience with the damned things at all.

We’re pretty dependent on computers at work. Not completely, but pretty.

I had to drive Steve to the doctor because he was falling down dizzy. We got a prescription for some anti-dizziness medication, but the pharmacy couldn’t fill it. Why? Their computers were down.

Damned machines. Damned machines!

I’m fond of them, though. They whir. I have a great love of things that whir. I especially love the word whir. Whirring. I need to read a poem about whirring. I have a poem in which things churr, but I don’t believe I have one in which they whir, and damn it would be really obsessive if I go now and run a search to find out, wouldn’t it?

We are not worthy. She’s been nominated for a Pulitzer for Radish King. Hot damn.

So, Hugh McMillan, plagiarist, has landed a poem in an anthology. Enquiring minds want to know who really wrote it.

Wow, I’m struggling. I know where I want the story to go, but I’m having a heck of a time getting my plot to go thattaway.

I’m also lazy and shellshocked, so that doesn’t help.

In thinking about yesterday’s post, I realize again that I shouldn’t be surprised or disheartened by my isolation.

I don’t come from artists. My family isn’t about art. My family is about money.

I am the poor one, the one who has to worry about money. Oh, the rest of them worry about money, but always in a “How can I get even more of it?” way, not a “How can I pay this doctor bill?” way.

They are the people wondering if the house should be sold for just under 2 million or just over. I am the one wondering if the roofer will do half of the roof now, and half later.

And I would be one of them if I could.

Fans of Ellen Raskin’s great mystery can find her working notes here. It’s neato.

You have to spend money to make money. Who hasn’t heard that? But you have to spend words, spend poetry, to make them, too.

Most of the time, I can withdraw into my little poetic shell and it doesn’t matter that the world around me, this very small little slice of world, is so barren of words. The truth is, I simply don’t have people to talk to. I don’t have the opportunity to go to readings, to hear poems, to talk poetry, unless it’s online. Unless it’s something that I have to work so damned hard at that it’s hard to convince myself it’s worth it.

The internet isn’t about back and forth. It’s about hit and miss. And lately, my god, it’s all been miss.

The upshot of the whining is that I’m lonely. I’m tired of having to try so hard to have conversations about things that matter to me. Perhaps I’d be happier if I stopped wanting those conversations at all.

To be honest, Medicare has been okay, but we got notice a couple of weeks ago that Steve’s Part D drug coverage was going to change so much that it would become obsolete. So, we get to start from scratch.

Whoever designed the “doughnut hole” in the coverage should be horsewhipped.