scratch that

well, fuck me dead. please disregard my last post.

the house is in foreclosure. not because of anything i did, mind you. my dad has a heloc on this place. he hasn't made a payment on it since last october. so, the bofa said enough is enough. understandable, right?

thing is, we didn't find out from him. we found out because wen'l decided to open a piece of mail marked "resident". i never open that shit. it's how we found out about this foreclosure. my dad probably wouldn't have told us about it until we had a week to be out of here, and i'd have kept paying the goddamned mortgage in the meantime.

the real kicker, however, is this - he's declared bankruptcy. he had to borrow the money from my brother to do it. my mother left him about $400k when she died, three years ago today. add the aforementioned heloc, and he's burned through approximately $450k in those three years, plus fuck knows how much more debt that i have no idea about. she also left him the sole owner of this house, which at the time she died probably would have sold for about $600k. if he'd sold it then, and he knew he was going to move to michigan before she died probably, he'd have walked with about $350k.

i praise the fsm that i didn't get his head for $. my brother got a wee bit of his impulsiveness, but it hasn't cost him anything, really. and i definitely didn't get it. i drive a 13 year old car with 134,000 miles on it. i've babied it its whole life, and *knocking wood* i'll get a few more years out of it. i'd like to pay cash for my next car, or at least have a huge down payment and get the thing paid off in like 2 years.

the bankruptcy could potentially buy us some more time in this house. i need to somehow impress it upon my father that he needs to let things drag out a bit. it could potentially be a year (well, a year from 06.29.09 anyway), with me paying no mortgage. i'd be sitting on a pile from that. moving would be painless and i'd have a nice rainy day fund AND a high def tv. so keep your fingers crossed, k?

speaking of electronics, wen'l cashed in his cisco rewards points on a ps3. :D not even all of them, actually. the next "purchase" will be a nikon digital slr. i cannot wait.

um..

i finally talked to my dad's wife. it's probably a sign of my immaturity to have the word stepmother bounce around my brain so unpleasantly. i actually think i might like her, and it's still weird to hear "my stepmother" in my mind when i think about her.

she called my brother, actually. i just wanted to say hello, and ended up talking to her for like 45 minutes. about my dad mostly. i didn't blog about what he's been going through, but i'll give the cliffs notes here: he ended up in the hospital. one totally dead kidney, and the other about to fail. the dead one's been needing to come out for like 2 years, but he had other shit to do... like sturgis and a "bike" ride to florida and stuff.

and this time, he was like a day from death before he could be convinced to go to the emergency room, at a legit hospital and not the one in his podunk hometown. he needs to lose 40 more lbs, he needs to cooperate with his nephrologist, he needs to get real about his diet. he's doing none of these things, and went so far as to rip out his own fucking foley. doc says he'll be on dialysis in a matter of months unless he shapes up.

i talked to him once when he was in the hospital. he apologized to me for the way he's been behaving towards me since my mom died. for dumping the shit in my lap that he did. i had to let him go (a doc needed to give him a poke somewhere), and it was a good thing. i was too floored to go on.

anyway, he's not getting his shit together. kelly (that would be the sm) called joel to ask him to give dad a call. when she got me on the phone, she asked me to do the same thing. i'm wondering how i'm supposed to accomplish all this without it coming off like i'm telling him what to do. she wants more years out of him than it looks like he's got in him, and i can understand feeling that way about a husband. but the shit she told me about him, and the way he is, is so completely unreal to me. why'd we have to get the years with him we did if to her, he's gonna be all that and a bag of chips?

i got issues. enough to offer subscriptions. i'd like some answers while i still have a parent alive to give them to me. not so i can judge him for those answers, which is the thing i'll never get through to him. the older i get, the simpler the thing that makes things make sense. just knowing why would help immensely.

i'll tell you one thing: when i heard people had been after him for weeks to go to the damn doctor, i wanted to kick him in the balls. my mom did that once, and it almost killed her too - it was a hernia gone extremely bad - he gave her a total ration of shit. but now that she's gone, he gets to be all la-di-da about making my brother and i parentless?

i want to make this call. i'd like to extend his olive branch back to him. what do i say?

when it rains, it pours

indeed.

i have to have my upper wisdom teeth extracted. i had a dental emergency the other morning, and went to dr. papazian. he sed they had to go. referred me to an oral/maxillofacial surgeon over in long beach. my consult and panoramic x-ray is the 12th.

get this - the thing in my parotid gland will probably show up in this x-ray. i will definitely be informing the doc of all my recent medical adventures at my consultation.

i wish i'd had the damn things taken out when i was a kid, before they ever came in. my ma had killer dental insurance back then. they paid like 75% on my orthodontia killer. instead, they started coming in around the time i was 27. my bottom ones have never fully erupted, but the upper ones did.I probably haven't been as diligent about the hygiene as i should have been, but these teeth are right against my tonsils (another relic i'm still equipped w/), and i gag like a bitch most of the time.

the bottom ones should come out eventually too, but thus far they're ok. no cavities or much decay, and they can wait.

i tried to have this all done a couple years ago, when wen'l and i had dental ins. the damn company denied my claim. that pissed my dentist off to no end. "they weren't pathological?" he almost seethed! the place the ins. co. would have wanted to do the damn procedure scared the shit out of me though. perhaps it's a good thing i'll be having it done by this guy.

i heart my dentist. i always have. he didn't charge me for the visit, or for the x-rays he took to give this surgeon. i just hope the dude will work out some sort of payment plan with me.

all the answers tomorrow!

to konagod - there is some beasties.

to the biz - i need song titles for the 2 artists you guessed right.

also, i've apparently lost 3 of my 5 readers.

mass graves for the pump and the price is set

what the hell does obama have to do?

hillary's made me lose all respect for her. she's doing mcsame's job for him for one thing. for another, she's with him on this gas tax holiday bullshit, and saying obama's out of touch with middle america... because he's got a brain in his head and realizes that 3 months of the roads and bridges in this country not being tended to will fuck us in the ass, sideways, in the long run.

why must she pander so? or, alternately, where the hell does she think the money to do that maintanence on our already mcgyver'd infrastructure is going to come from? certainly not the defense budget!

instead, we're talking about his pastor? and someone he sat on a board with? how people really ARE bitter? (see a couple posts down) how about they let the man talk about what he wants to, the shit we sometimes don't want to hear, but need to? continuing to ask him bullshit questions about shit that came to light almost 2 months ago now? how about hillary's little senior moment? where she "misspoke" *rme* about being forced to make a corkscrew landing under heavy sniper fire? or mcsame and his good buddy, the rev. hagge? you know, the one that said god inflicted hurricane katrina on new orleans because they were a bit too *friendly* to homosexuals? you know, just to be fair.

the movie ran through me
the glamour subdued me
the tabloid untied me
i'm empty please fill me
mister anchor assure me
that Baghdad is burning
your voice it is so soothing
that cunning mantra of killing
i need you my witness
to dress this up so bloodless
to numb me and purge me now
of thoughts of blaming you
yes the car is our wheelchair
my witness your coughing
oily silence mocks the legless boys
who travel now in coffins
on the corner
the jury's sleepless
we found your weakness
and it's right outside your door

- "testify", rage against the machine

anyhoo, where was i? oh yeah... i was bitching about the media, the traditional, ie multi-national conglomerate owned, media. why do they think we give half a fuck about that shit? or is it that they know there is a certain percentage of the population out there that they know will buy what they're selling? either way, i feel insulted. i, like an ever-larger percentage of americans, get my news from places i click to. if this swill is what they're going to inflict upon us, then may they perish from their own uselessness.

i'm fast approaching 40 here. i drive a car that's 12 years old and gets shitty mileage on the highway! i will keep paying my damn taxes. the taxes aren't the problem. our weak dollar and our petroleum-dependent administration are the damn problem. our army being in iraq keeping that oil in the ground. the chimperor said today that not enough oil is being produced. no shit, sherlock! you've got a blue-chip MBA and you just now realized that? when will you realize why? january 20, 2009?

btw, that song came out in 1999.

the winters are gonna kill him if i don't first

so i inform my father, henceforth the fucktard, that i know of his plans to move to michigan. he wants to know who i heard it from. what does it matter who i heard it from? you trying to remember what story you told to whom? my brother, dipshit. were ya lying to him too?

look, at this point, i'm glad. i don't ever have to deal with the prick again if this what he's doing. but... and this is a huge but: my grandma (his mother, for fuck's sake) is almost 90. she doesn't remember what day of the week it is anymore, and she's not remembering to take her meds. which means her life is in more jeopardy than we can allow to continue. she cannot live alone any longer. he should be a part of getting her to accept this. she thinks my aunt is malicious (she's not. she's definitely not). she's not accepting my being part of her care. i go over there to check her meds, see if she needs anything from the store, give her some company. all she's been doing lately is nursing 30 year old grudges she has with people. it's hard to just sit there and listen to it. i do, but it's no fucking picnic.

and when i tell her she needs to be better about taking her pills, and that she'd feel better if she would, she shines me on. she, all on her own, stopped taking one of her blood pressure meds. strokes run in her family. is she trying to court one? she has long since been claiming to want to die already.

like i really want to hear that. ME. my mom ain't been gone a year yet. but then i think: maybe things really are that bad. she's almost blind and practically deaf and she's had so much death for so very long. she wants to hang in till she's 90. her life insurance doubles when she's 90, and she says she's too mean to die.

she's not. back in the day she was the best grandma a kid could hope for. she took us kids to disneyland and went on all the rides with us. she'd take us out to her place in the desert and it was always a blast. since my cousin stephen died, it's all been downhill. she was still independent, still took good care of herself. but she got so bitter, and she never recovered.

and her dipshit, fucktard son thinks she's doin ok.

he'll be back in the state eventually. he's got some shit to do for his future welfare that he can only do here, in person. i think the line to kick his ass will be quite long.

fuck his lack of coitus interruptus