My grandmother is my baseline, my precedent, for all that is good about the world.

It is as simple as that, really.

My grandmother is in the hospital right now because she didn’t have the energy to tie her shoes, on Tuesday morning.

My grandmother should not be in hospitals, because she should be in her little house. Baking cookies or watching soap operas or taking her snotty little dog out to pee. These things all, but never in hospitals.

I called my grandmother on the phone, tonight and last night, and we talked for awhile. She must have a direct line at her bed. She was excitable but constantly running out of breath. She was trying to get used to taking an extra breath at the end of her sentences. She has her little laugh. There is always enough breath for that.

She has a bad heart valve. And her heart is swollen, but I guess that’s common in older people. On the phone, I told her I always knew that she had a big heart, that it’s not news.

She laughed. She likes corny stuff like that, sometimes.

I talked to my mom on the phone a few times too. She sounded very frazzled and it worried me. She never comes right out and says how she is feeling. But I could tell. It was her two-hundred words to my three, instead of her ninety words to my three. She was talking herself down, almost. She was very nervous about all of this. That we are not indefinite or infallible. Even if it is not urgent, it is an eventual definite, and she maybe hates that thought as much as I do. I can never prepare.

I am never ever prepared for the worst. I refuse to let the worst into my scope or view. My spine would shatter. I would sleep underneath the bed forever. I would renounce consciousness. I am not possible without my precedents.

Things are not so urgent right now, the doctor says, but the reminder that they will be someday is very scary, to the point where I question how I should be feeling or what I should be doing. I am not young and pliable, and I do not bounce back from shocks, anymore or everbefore, and time takes the permanence out of absolutely everything, even the things that I was so sure were permanent.

Just beyond my periphery, so much talk of people passing away. Almost makes you want to never get to know anyone at all.

Gramma says she hopes she will be discharged from the hospital on Friday. She has a faulty heart valve and leveled energy. She causes me to reflect on how pathetic I can be, overcomplicating my scope in life or situations. Happiness is as simple as a comfy chair and some good company. The hot tomato soup and fresh saltine crackers are just bonuses.

Gramma has the purest soul I know. The potential for selfishness, envy or anger simply does not exist inside of her. She is the champion of all good hearts. Some things in their permanence, brightening the forevers.

I’m really not possible without my precedents. Next time I visit, I’m going to make the lunch.

I guess it’s seeming really dumb to write things like this into terribly egocentric and exhibitionistic livejournals, just like most written things do, lately, but I guess that I needed to, or else it’s because it just happened out of bad habits, and I don’t know. I live for the regret, sometimes.

Oh, how I cannot watch news, anymore. Hornets nests, as Jack Black would say. Legions of hornets nests on the grow, beyond these safe harbours.

I always overhear the layman’s opinions, the millwrights taking a break in the other room, while I’m perusing documents and schematics, They are commenting on the newspaper. “Kill..bomb…parking lot…let God sort out…nuke nuke…” and I have to laugh it off to myself, because I do not have, and have never had, the ambitions required for argument. I haven’t the willpower for throwing idealism around anymore, if I ever did before. I will fight no more forever.

I can be obscure and snarky, though. If my opinion is sought, I might say “Wow… nobody’s had balls like that since Hitler, man…”

And being a curious person about all possible scenarios, I wonder about America, coming into full bloom as a more subversive, 21st century version of nazi venom. Genocide to everyone we fear. Unfathomable power + evil = ohmygod. I would surely live out the rest of my days in peace, hornets nests obsolete or in the midst of burning, in far faraway places. There would only be the guilt involved with being part of a segment of civilization that slaughtered every resistance. Surely there would be psychiatrists that could talk me through that problem…

Oh, the path is muddled. I should find a new place to live. A place where it is safe, in all contexts, to be a carefree white man whose psychology has been ravaged by very nearly thirty years of late-20th-century american democracy and capitalism. Usually, the only safe places are the ones where no one else in the world cares to be. Ever have I sought these places. More scarce, are these places. Only pieces of Antarctica, now, I think. And I’m not so hot on eating penguins. Even less on the whole hunting thing. I mean, it would be fun to sneak up on a penguin until you are right behind it, with my fingers open and strained for the pounce, but then, my nature would be more to push the penguin down and see the penguin fall flat and facefirst into the snow, and then I would run away very fast before the angry penguin had realized what had happened and would attempt to enact its revenge on me. Doing something horrendous, like snapping the penguins neck, would never occur to me.

I might starve, in Antarctica. If I don’t die of frostbite first.

Maybe I could befriend a penguin, and I would name it Pablo, because I liked that book about Pablo the Penguin when I was a kid, and Pablo would occassionally bring me a fish, which I would not be so opposed to spitting over a fire, assuming I could find any firewood in Antarctica, which I think I doubt, but anyway it’s o.k. to eat fish ’cause they don’t have any feelings.

Anyway.

So, I abscond. I am always absconding, and in so many ways. Now, in these days where I am not even oblique or interesting, I can abscond with full confidence that I shall not be pursued or ventured for, and my relevance would be a direct function of my will to participate. I am surefire nothing.

Right now, I am trying to decide between sitting down for a good meal at Ruby Tuesdays, or just going through Dunkin Donuts drive-through for a bagel before work. Usually, I end up doing neither.

My dramatic weight fluctuations depend entirely on decisions just like this. Or the lack of them.

At work, I take my orders from Heath. Heath is decrepitly stupid, but he hasn’t the first clue that he is stupid, and in fact he is always extremely confident in himself, and extremely smug, and somewhat condescending to me. Oh, how I hate. Self-confidence is reason enough to hate someone, but condescending down to me, on top of it all? Also, he is so full of shit, it hurts my head just to attempt a conversation with him.

I might pull that penguin trick with Heath, tonight. Tonight or soon, if I don’t get out of here quickly.

The other morning, Heath completely reprimanded my shift’s-worth of decision-making, making clear his lack of belief in my skills. I had been calculating alignments between a 200-ton turbine and a 200-ton generator, and with little more than a calculator and a few micrometers, I had put the units within 3 one-thousandths of an inch of each other.

Not bad. But Heath said he wanted paperwork and more thorough analysis. It was ghastly that he did not have paperwork. Oh my GOD, the lack of paperwork.

There were no apologies, though. I had saved at least 12 hours of time, but nary a nod to my noggin. Fucker.

I hate New Jersey, and I would like to go home.

There is a house I would like to look at, back in Richmond. I would like to buy a house. Even though I keep thinking that as soon as I made a decision to buy a house, I would probably snap and lose all desire for employment for a very long period of time, possibly fifty years, and I would move back in with mom and dad, and after my money ran out, they would have to keep paying for this house that I bought but didn’t use. Goddamn kids, they would say.

I have made the decision to utilize the Dunkin Donuts drive-through. I have also decided that laying waste to Southwestern Asia with nuclear warheads would be a bad idea, despite the working man’s opinion. I will not admonish to others concerning this decision, though. Rather, I will keep it to myself, and hope that it catches on that-a-way. I have also decided that I would like a new house with a bedroom set aside for Pablo the Penguin, who will undoubtedly desire a large pond (at least) in the backyard, stocked with yummy fishes.

Danny Whitten was today’s incidental ghost.

Lately I have been in New Jersey, with a terrible cold, terrible phlegm, terrible headaches, and terrible vertigo.

There have also been terrible flashbacks, terrible sleeping-during-the-day conditions, terrible jobanger (once i start hating you, i never seem to go back), terrible amounts of orange juice, which actually isn’t so terrible because it is immunesystemfriendly.

It is usually cold and wet and miserable, and since it is night, it is dark, and there are crickets, even though I think it’s too cold for crickets.

Someday I will be leaving here.

Come on baby, let’s go downtown.