Losing my eyesight has been my greatest fear since I was a kid. I’ve had a few scares since.

Now it’s official. I have the early stages of dry macular degeneration, the same thing that made my grandmother so blind. There is no treatment, no cure. There are some things that can be done to slow it down, as long as it stays dry, and I will do those things, mostly consisting of quitting smoking and taking massive amounts of certain vitamins and antioxidants. And hope that it doesn’t turn into the wet macular degeneration, which is far faster and far more destructive.

I go back for a checkup with the opthamologist in October, to see how quickly it’s progressing.

And for now, I’m trying very, very hard not to freak out that my biggest phobia has been realized.

Flying to Michigan to see Mr. Wow for a week on the 30th. *bounces excitedly*

And I’ve wanted to write about some things. But I just can’t find the words. When I try, it gets lost in this incredible upswelling of happiness, and I’m reduced to staring blankly at the screen and thinking, “Wow. Just… WOW!”

And I’ll be going off to see Mr. Wow in early July. I can’t wait! I can’t even be sad about missing BayCon this weekend, because there is a WOW in my near future.

Next year, I hope to be able to bring my WOW to BayCon. He’s geeky too, just like me, and he’d probably enjoy it. Besides, the only friend of mine who’s met Yar is drewkitty, and I know that there are others who want to.

About the only coherent thing I can say is that I keep expecting to come down off the honeymoon stage high. I’ve known Yar more than a year. I’m usually finding – and ignoring. or even actively shoving aside – warning signs that this is Not A Good Thing long before this. I’ve been very good at that form of self-delusion in all the bad relationships. It was even easier to do in the cases where the guy was actually a good person, but that there were obvious, large, glaring incompatibilities. I knew that they were there on some level, I just kept paddling deeper into that river I have so loved to spend a lot of time in, De Nile.

But not this time. There have been no little nudges from somewhere inside my head that I’ve then had to lock in a mental closet. No little voices giving warnings that I’ve had to ignore. None of that. Nor have I put him up on a pedestal like I generally have in the past with whomever I’ve been involved in. I haven’t felt the need to do so to drown out the doubts.

My subconscious has decided that this is all too good to be true, and has started presenting me with bad dreams. Not ones where Yar suddenly starts acting like the abusers of my past. Even my subconscious seems to find that entirely too unbelievable. Instead, the bad dreams have simply been that Yar changes his mind about how he feels for me and everything between us comes to an abrupt end.

Even I have to admit that I was more than due for something good. I’d never have imagined that it could be someone THIS good, though.

Just… WOW!

I had nothing in particular planned today, other than spending time talking with Yar. Since I’m sick, Juan has taken over the shopping and cooking, and Shaddy is taking care of some of the other errands, like getting the cars serviced and such.

And boy, did being sick give me a case of the gloom-and-dooms. Yeah, the problems I was rambling about before are bad, and it’s not an easy life. But as I’m recovering from the bronchitis, things aren’t looking anymore like OMG TRAPPED FOREVER HELP HELP.

My aunt Cheryl offered to come stay here for a while. A few days, a couple weeks, whatever we want. She’ll look after my grandmother and keep the household running, and my mom and I can get out of here for a while. I need that. Mom needs it even more. I at least got away for a while in January. She’s been trapped here in the house… and mostly in her room… other than doctor appointments, physical therapy sessions, and podiatrist appointments since early August.

It’s sounding like we’ll take Cheryl up on her offer, and we’ll head north, up to the area of Eureka and Arcata. We’ve been talking about moving to that area when my grandmother dies and we leave Delano. Everything we’ve seen and read makes us both think that it’d be a good area, and that we could afford to get someplace to live up there. But reading and pictures don’t beat actually looking around in person, so that’s what we’re going to do. I’m not sure when we’re going to go yet. Probably not for a week or week and a half at least, to make sure I’m over the bronchitis.

But in keeping with her theory that we both need time away from this house, my mom gave me a surprise this afternoon. Shaddy had been planning on taking his daughter to the Cinco de Mayo carnival today, but a heavy storm came in and he didn’t want to drag Jasmine around the carnival in the heavy downpour. So instead, my mom bought tickets for the two of them and me to go see David Copperfield on his one night performing in Bakersfield.

The 6pm show was sold out, so the tickets were for the 9pm show. It meant that I’d be gone for the entire time that I usually spend talking with Yar. Our biggest form of contact is the chat window on the game we both play, and that we met on, for two or three hours at night. I could only email him and let him know I wouldn’t be around. It comes on top of a couple shortened nights in a row thanks to school and/or family obligation on his side or mine. I hated to bail out completely on short notice, and I missed our nightly talk. But it’s not like I was going to turn down my mom’s gift of a $50 ticket, either. What I really wished was that I could have taken Yar with me to see the show.

I love magic shows. Love them lots. I’d seen Copperfield once before, 23 years ago when he did a show at DeAnza college. He hasn’t lost any of his skill. He still puts on a great show. I think the real evidence of magic, however, is that I’m definitely 23 years older, and he still looks pretty much the same. He probably sold his soul for the same semi-eternal youth package that Dick Clark bought. I have to admit that I missed out on a lot of the patter. Whenever he started talking, I’d start missing Yar and wishing that he was there next to me instead of Shaddy and Jasmine. But then he’d perform an illusion, and I’d be hooked all over again.

I will say he’s gotten a lot more casual with his shows than he used to be. Oh, there’s still lots of lights flashing and smoke drifting and wind machines blowing. But the silly, sparkly outfits are gone. So’s the bad hair (ahhhh, mullets back in the day people actually thought they looked good) and even he admitted that it was bad hair. He must be… what, early 50s? 52, according to Wikipedia. So it’s not surprising that he doesn’t do the death-defying escapes anymore. But he did do some close-up magic with cards, dancing tissues, etc. And he hasn’t lost a bit of his dexterity or showmanship.

Jasmine, who’s 7, was so wowed that after the show she kept asking where he lives. Turns out that she wants to figure it out so she can go live with him and have him teach her magic. And on the way home, though the rain had stopped, there was still heavy cloud cover. She was unhappy because she couldn’t find a star to wish on. She wanted to wish for magic, just like Copperfield’s.

It’s time for my annual bout of bronchitis. It hit yesterday, so I have about two weeks of this to get through. I’m either so drugged up on cough medications that make me extremely drowsy and often knock me out, or I’m coughing so much that I’m gonna start straining muscles. That means that keeping up with stuff around the house has gotten much more difficult. It didn’t used to matter as much. If I was knocked out most of the time from cough medications or hacking up a lung, my mom could always take care of what I couldn’t get to. But not this time.

She has hit a plateau in recovering from the stroke, able to get around the house but not able to get out and do errands. She can walk around a bit, but standing in one place is difficult and often painful for her, so no taking over the cooking. I managed to talk one of the guys who lives here into doing the grocery shopping today and cooking dinner tonight and the next couple.

Mom doesn’t do any exercises to strengthen the muscles that were weakened by the stroke, so it’s unlikely she will improve further. She is also back to the amount she was drinking before the stroke. She doesn’t seem to realize how much it affects her and how much of the balance and muscle control she’d regained she loses from the drinking. I can watch her becoming more and more wobbly and less and less capable as the day goes on. She has fallen a few times recently, and I’m sure it’s because she’s back to the heavy drinking. Her skin has gotten thin with age, and she’s on blood thinner medication, so she gets these gashes on her arms and legs that bleed profusely and it’s difficult to get the bleeding to stop. But saying something to her about it won’t make a difference. It hasn’t before, it’s not going to now. She fell again tonight, about 3 hours ago, and last I checked on her, her left arm had still not entirely stopped bleeding. She’s starting to look like I’ve been beating her with all of this. Every time I saw her so drunk she could barely walk before the stroke, it made me cry myself to sleep that night. It’s a thousand times worse now with the stroke. And I feel like a fucking weak coward, because if I was really doing what I should, I’d refuse to buy her the booze. I’m the one who has to do all the grocery shopping, after all. But with everything else, all the other stresses, I just can’t face the day after day of fighting over it if I refuse. I should be stronger than this, but I just can’t fucking get myself to do it.

Meanwhile, my grandmother’s mind is slipping further. She can’t hear nearly anything unless I’m yelling it, and then she gets pissed off at me for yelling. She’s pissed off at me because I have refused to throw out my artwork, which is apparently useless and taking up space (and it’s not like it’s space she needs, or even would use if it was empty.) She’s recently been making it pretty clear that even though I live here, I should do my damndest to make sure that I leave no sign anywhere that I do. The fact that I live out of a box and a suitcase is an issue, even though they’re out of the way, because they’re visible signs that I live here. Never mind that the reason I have to live out of a box and a suitcase again is because two months after I had my own room once more, she and my mother informed me I had to give it up so someone else could have it.

My grandmother has also decided that for some unknown reason, I have completely rewired the dryer so it doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. It doesn’t turn on the way she’s convinced she’s always turned it on. The thing has always had a start button in order to get it running, but she’s sure that the way she used to turn it on until recently was by turning the timing dial to the time she wanted and then pulling it out. That’s how the washer has always worked, not the dryer. But every time she does laundry, she comes to get me to show her how to turn on the dryer, and then yells and screams at me for a while about changing how it works on her just to drive her crazy. She also is convinced that I’m “doing something” to the TV to make it hard for her to watch it. Never mind the fact that I only watch one hour of TV per week. Every time she can’t get the TV working because she poked the wrong button when she turned it off the night before, it’s my fault and I get yelled at for it while I’m fixing it for her.

She’s pissed off at me because I “choose” not to sleep at night. She’s pissed off because I “sleep all the time.” If I don’t get any sleep or get very little (as usually happens) then she tells me that I should be perfectly fine because all I ever do is sleep. She won’t eat anything but sweets all day – heavily sugared cereal, cookies, and ice cream – and then tries to refuse to eat dinner because she’s “too fat” (her clothing is extremely baggy and hangs off of her) and so that’s a fight every single night to get her to eat anything healthy at all.

She’s losing control of bodily functions. There’s a stain on the chair she always sits in, and it’s obviously a urine stain. But she claims that it’s the cats making the chair filthy, and knocks them off the chair if they ever dare to get in it. The day before yesterday, a new wrinkle in this is that she shit herself rather explosively in the morning, after she’d been up some hours, just before she was going to take her shower. She’s currently still able to clean herself up after something like that, but who knows for how much longer with the way things are going. And one of my own issues is that I can’t deal with fecal matter without heaving up everything in my stomach. This is the case even if I can’t smell it. Just seeing it will cause me to start gagging.

And with the cats, she frets if they’re are out at night, but even if we tell her that all of them are in, she goes and stands there at night holding the door open in case any cats want in – letting all the cats out in the process. So I wind up spending hours trying to wrangle the cats and get them into the house for the night, after already having gone through it once to get them in.

She doesn’t care that having my psychotic cousin over here drives my mom’s blood pressure up and puts her in danger of another stroke. Nor does my grandmother care that when he’s here, I can’t sleep (sometimes for days on end if he’s here for multiple days in a row) because I have to be on guard so he won’t attack her or my mother. She tries to force us to let him stay here on the couch anyway.

Anything… and I do mean anything… that she doesn’t like at the moment is pretty much automatically my fault. I am so sick of getting yelled at, insulted, and threatened for things that I didn’t even do. And if I say I didn’t do them, she gets even more pissed off at me for lying to her. Even the cats messing up the chair thing isn’t always the cats. Sometimes she accuses me of peeing on her chair.

I have nowhere to work on artwork except at the dining room table since I had to give up my room. And if I’m there, she likes to wait until I’m concentrating and then come up behind me and stab me in the back with her fingernails. She thinks it’s hilarious to make me wreck some piece I spent days, weeks, and one case months on. Then she gets pissed off at me when I’m not amused by her little “joke” and starts screaming at *me* to leave *her* alone. I’ve managed to hide the destruction in a couple pieces, but often the piece will be ruined beyond my ability to fix.

I am low man on the totem, and even though my mom makes a point periodically of telling me she appreciates all I do, everything else is not making me feel much appreciated. I feel trapped. I feel like I’m drowning. I spend a large portion of the day refusing to let myself cry because I want to desperately but I just don’t have time for the tears. I’m going through a lot of self-pity right now, though I don’t let it prevent me from doing what needs to get done. The one thing I have to look forward to every day, the one good thing in my life right now, is the three or four hours I spend talking with Yar online, and the trip out to see him in July, hopefully. I’m skipping BayCon this year, because of the expenses of the trip in January when Yar came out to California for a few days, and the projected expenses of the trip in July. There are a lot of people I will miss seeing, because BayCon is the only time I get to see most of my friends.

I can’t even go hang out with a friend down here just to get away for an hour or two. Because I have no friends down here. Nearly six years I’ve lived here, and there have been people I’ve gotten on well enough with at the college. I’ve suggested we hang out, and they take my number, don’t give me theirs, and I never hear from them again. Since I had to drop out of college when my mom had her stroke last August, and discovered it was too soon when I tried to go back this semester, I haven’t even had that hour or three a couple times a week to get away from all this.

This is not how I pictured my late thirties and early forties. I sometimes find myself resenting being in this position, and hating myself for that. I know I have some advantages living here, like not paying rent or having to worry about bills. That was an acceptable trade-off when I was helping to take care of my grandmother and was also getting some money toward college so that when I get out of here, I can maybe manage to have something resembling a life. But since I had to drop out of college, my workload has more than doubled for less “pay”. I know that this isn’t how either of them pictured their lives at the ages they are now either. I know it’s not easy on them either, and that what they’re going through is worse than what I’m dealing with in so very many ways. My mom hates her helplessness and wants to get her independence back, I know that too. But since she wouldn’t do any of the physical therapy exercises to continue her improvement after the sessions ended, doesn’t do any other exercises to improve things either, and drinks the way she does, it’s unlikely she will and she will need me to be with her for the rest of her life. And all I want is to get my degree, get the job I’ve been wanting with it, and build a life with Yar. It’s looking like, at best, that will be eventually get my degree and the job that I want, and live a life with both Yar and my mom, if Yar is willing to have her as a rather permanent attachment.

I really don’t even want to think about what it’d be like if he doesn’t want to deal with having to live with someone else’s alcoholic invalid of a mother. Yar’s the best thing in my life, the best thing ever in my life. But with that comes the fear of losing him. And all of this is so much to ask him or anyone to accept.

I know that some of this is also that when I get really sick, I get gloomy and things look bigger and harder than they are. But even without the gloominess from being sick, it’s a fucking huge and heavy load.

Doing the best I can with this situation is not good enough. Hell, it’s not even barely acceptable, it seems. Since I’m apparently a problem for everyone here, maybe I should just move the fuck out.

I was quietly doing a little research. My mom was quietly playing a game. I have no idea what my grandmother was up to, but it was quiet too. Which made the sudden yelling just outside much more obvious.

Whoever it was, it was female and seemed to have one preferred word, which popped up about every three: fuck, and its variations. So I went to find out what exactly was going on.

I’d been waiting for a chance to shower. Even though it was nearly noon, I was still wandering around in pink pajamas. My grandmother decided to start doing laundry just when I was heading toward the shower, so I was waiting for there to be hot water again. I didn’t expect to have to go confront insanity while clad in pink pajamas.

But there insanity was, in the form of a slightly chubby Hispanic woman in black leather jacket and black jeans, her hair piled haphazardly on top of her head, and black wraparound shades hiding at least some of the crazed look she had on her face.

She was screaming at Shaddy, who was standing in the open door to his room (formerly my room, for all of two months). I had no idea what she was on about. The clearest things out of her mouth were the constant variations on “fuck”.

Shaddy started yelling back, about the time that I got out there, telling her to go away. Very mildly, all things considered. She ignored him and just kept right on going.

I stared at this for a moment, and wondered if this was his ex-wife. I’d heard him say she was crazy, and I’d never seen the woman. But then I decided that it’d gone on long enough, and I put on my best intimidating manner and stepped in. I figured that she would only listen to someone who sounded like her, so I told her to get her “fucking ass off my fucking property, and do it right the fuck now, you stupid fucking cunt.”

Oh yeah. I used the c-word that I hate. I figured it’d get her attention. I was right. She turned to me and opened her mouth, but I cut her off before she could get a word out. I repeated, with variations, what I’d already told her. And then told her that if she didn’t, I’d be happy to call the cops and have her arrested for trespassing and disturbing the peace.

So, where she’d ignored Shaddy, she turned and started walking away. She kept right on yelling and swearing the whole time, and now I realized that she was demanding that we go and get her a 20 of dope. What? What the hell was wrong with this crazy bitch?

She got partway down the driveway toward the front of the house, and then stopped and started screaming at Shaddy again, who’d followed a little way behind to make sure she kept going. Thing was that his being there did no good. She wasn’t worried about anything he had to say or do. So I stepped down off the back porch and followed. I told her again to get the fuck off of my fucking property. She turned and started to walk further toward the front of the house, continuing to rant, swear, threaten, and demand that we get her dope. When she got near the sidewalk, but still on our property, she stopped and turned again and started screaming directly at us. Again. Same litany.

I told her to get her fat fucking ass off of our property in the next two seconds, or I’d be on the phone with the cops. She turned to me and told me to go ahead and call the cops, because it wouldn’t matter. “I’m an agent! I’m a fucking agent! The cops ain’t gonna do shit to me! I’m a fucking agent!”

Which is when Shaddy and I started laughing our asses off at her. She did not like that. I’m sure she thought that informing us she was an agent would somehow convince us or scare us. When all it caused was the two of us practically rolling on the floor at the stupidity of that statement, she started screaming again about how we owed her a 20 of dope, and we’d better go get it.

When I could talk again, I told her to get off the property and not to come back, or I’d make sure she was in jail. She started saying that she’d be back. She could come back anytime she wanted because she was a fucking agent! But now she was going to go to Mark’s house. With that she finally left. But she kept on yelling and swearing the whole way.

Mark is our neighbor and lives on the next street over. His backyard adjoins ours. We could trace every step she took to get over to the next street, because she just kept right on yelling. I’m not sure she ever even paused to breathe.

When she got to Mark’s place (who actually is, unlike us, a former drug dealer and may have drifted back into that, from what we’ve been seeing), instead of demanding dope, she began accusing him of stealing her car.

You’d think a dealer would know better than to steal the car of a fucking agent. Heh.

Shaddy told me what had happened. This woman (he wasn’t sure what her name was, but thought it might be Cha Cha) had just showed up here and started off yelling at Juan (another homeless one that my mom took in, who stays out in the bedroom I used to have that got flooded with raw sewage). So Juan went over to Shaddy’s room and ducked inside, but the woman wouldn’t stop. She pounded on the door until Shaddy opened it, and then started up on him. She claimed that he’d sold her Drain-O, and she’d spent three days in the hospital because of it, and he owed her a 20 of dope. That’s what all the stuff that was too incoherent for me had been.

The dumbest thing is that Shaddy is the least vice-ridden one of us all. He smokes an occasional cigarette, but that’s it. He’s otherwise a complete straight arrow. He won’t even drink or eat something that has alcohol in it, as he’s Muslim. No drugs, using or selling. Nada. But supposedly he (and/or Juan, she seemed to get the two of them confused, even when they were both standing right in front of her) sold her Drain-O when she tried to buy dope from him, and now he owed her a 20 of dope.

All we could do once she was finally gone, and we could hear her screaming at Mark, was shake our heads and laugh.

But I guess we’d better be careful.

After all, she’s a fucking agent.

It started off just a quiet, normal day. Nothing extraordinary. Despite its mundane start, this day will always be one I remember. Today was the day that I discovered my ass has mysterious powers. Well, power, anyway.

What is this power, you ask?

Oh, you don’t?

Well, I’m going to tell you anyway.

On this perfectly ordinary day, my mother was taking a perfectly ordinary shower. I heard the water shut off and a pause, and then she called my name. I got up and ran there, afraid she’d fallen since she’s still unsteady on her feet after the stroke.

It turned out she was perfectly okay. She just wanted to show me something. The thing that made me understand that my ass had acquired some strange new power. Not a useful power, mind you. Just strange.

Somehow, my ass has acquired the ability to dye things blue.

Ever since my mom’s stroke and her slow recovery, she has used the front bathroom because the toilet is higher off the ground and it’s easier for her to get back up. That’s also the bathroom everyone in the house uses exclusively, aside from showering. I am the only person who uses the bathroom in the back of the house, and that has been the case since August. So no one else could have left a blue ass-shaped dye-job on the toilet seat. It could only be me.

The thing was white yesterday, and all the years I’ve lived here it’s been white. But today, it has a little white, and then this sort of heart-shaped area of dark blue. Now, it’s not just common transfer. My ass is not blue. I used a pair of mirrors and checked. My ass is still ass-colored.

We tried to use cleaner, and the dye faded very slightly, but refused to let go. Bleach didn’t dent it either. It looks like the size and shape of my ass is permanently imprinted on the toilet seat. In blue.

Leave it to me to acquire mysterious powers of the ass. And only to stain white porcelain dark blue.

My mother is not convinced that I have acquired a strange new super ass power. Her theory is that the alien in a cat suit is performing some sort of experiment that makes my ass and the toilet seat cause some sort of chemical reaction. And I suppose that’s possible. Strange things happen around the alien in a cat suit.

But I say it’s my new superpower. The ass that saved the world from boring white toilet seats since, well, this afternoon.

I have little to no problem ranting and rambling at great length when irritated, angry, sad, or amused. Somehow, it’s hard to write about happy. I mostly just want to hug those moments to myself. Even more so if it’s happily in love.

So, since that’s the case, sparse updates are likely to be even more so. But at least in this case, no news is definitely good news.

Besides, I doubt that anyone other than me is really interested in reading long ramblings about how Yar is amazing, special, funny, talented, and on and on. Because I could very easily go on and on. And on.

Hard to believe that April is approaching already. That’s when Yar and I first started talking, April of last year. At first just in email, and then nightly in chat beginning in early May. The time between then and now has mostly flown by. There were certainly some hard times in there, the worst being my mom’s stroke in August. Having Yar to talk to made even the worst parts more bearable. I don’t know if I – and consequently, the family – would have gotten through it as well if he hadn’t been there.

Thank you, dearest Yar, for being there for me, and for being such a source of happiness. :)

Never did I want to be here again,

And I don’t remember why I came.