Day the 4th: The Other Psychic, Eats Uber Alles, Crinoline

Weighed in with the other psychic, K., who seemed not in the slightest bit concerned and to ask her again when this Vegas thing approaches, whether I live or croak. OK. Everyone’s a fucking psychic but me. I can intuit things about people occasionally, but I’m too sure something awful is going to happen at all times, so ‘the gift’ would be wasted on me. I’m sure you’ll be expecting me to talk about my aura, crystals, and levitating soon.

We began Ubering again and we had one altercation per usual. “I can’t believe you won’t even say thanks,” I said angrily, when she bitched at me for not being able to find her in the grocery store and because I took 3 minutes to buy candy bars for us. “I don’t see anyone summoning you in the app.”

“Maybe if we went closer to A RESTAURANT we would.”

So we proceeded to go across the road, literally just across the road. Not kidding. If she wasn’t having trouble climbing stairs to apartments, I might have told her I was ready to call it a night.

“I’ll bet you a nickel that’s a tr@nny ,” K. said after we put in our Eats order in the intercom at Taco Bell. (Believe it or not, K is an ally, but she likes being edgy).

“Be extra nice to her. She’s at least nice,” I reminded her, thinking of the last bitch we encountered at this restaurant another night. But I wasn’t worried at least in that point, because I’ve seen her be kind to another transgender woman before. I remember that one was afraid to go to Walmart lest she be harassed or worse.

I heard a woman won a bunch of times on Jeopardy, but my internalized mysogny wonders if she benefited from having been socialized as her biological sex, but also being a woman in her soul. Anyway, she won, yay for taking one for the ladies.

One of my old hobbies was reading obscure 18th and 19th century books. Archive.org kept me sane in the last days of living with the guys, when they made me stay in my room. I read a lot of manners books and ‘conduct of life’ stories. I became fascinated by Victorian memento mori photography too, it was almost soothing to me seeing all the dead people in regalia because if I wasn’t reading or sleeping I was wanting a way out, any way out.

Today, I took up The Dangers of Crinoline, a short pamphlet found on Google books. Looking at how lovely women looked with their giant skirts in things like Godey’s Ladies Book , one doesn’t realize how many folks burned to death because their skirt caught fire, etc.

I love the emotive, verbose style of the Victorians. I sometimes like mimicking it poorly when writing over-the-top things. Fun fact: I collected antiquarian books from my mid teens into my twenties. I had so many, my earliest was from 1749. I loved the scent of the paper, which smells different than 1800s paper, and modern paper smells different from that, but all smell wonderful. Add that to my heaven’s smells. Of course, I sold them all for dirt cheap when my mother and I fell on hard times, but I bought most quite cheap from an old man who owned an old book store and I played hooky from college there a lot. Why give an idiot such as myself an education? You may wonder, but apart from already being rotund I’m more well rounded, the good it does me. My first kiss was in that store, hidden among the shelves. He was a 43 year-old fellow and a little slow. I only did it for the experience. I was 21. I felt nothing, too shy, and I had zero romantic interest in him. A Vietnamese family swooped him up to get a cousin of theirs into the states and send money home. She was a little off as well somehow. They had a little girl who most likely was smarter than both of them combined. I doubt their forms of off were very heritable and I’m certain he doted on that child. Sorry, I took 40mg of Adderall and that’s what you get.