Hey Suzy Q

Like you, your timing is a thing of wonderment and beauty. 😊  Tell me what’s going on in your life! Start with what you do for a living. I’m currently between gigs.  

You find me in a state of existential peril. My daily life feels like an out-of-body experience. I don’t know if I should start at the beginning or ‘frame’ it for clarity’s sake. … okay, I’ll frame it.

 

Strap yourself in, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

 

First, the good news. I have a dog I’m crazy about named Parkhour. I’ll try to remember to attach a pic. Onto the fun stuff.

 

I’m going in for hernia surgery tomorrow. Medicaid is covering it, or most of it. But I don’t have a job. I’ve also been served with papers for eviction court. Court date is set for the day after my surgery. Filing for a postponement costs $135 I’d much rather put toward paying rent.

 

I have a customer service gig job interview at 3 today. My head is completely not in the game and my heart is beating like a jackhammer.

 

Worst of everything, my son wants nothing to do with me. His mother took it in her cabeza last year to take him away from me, because circumstances made it convenient for her. I had forbade her from taking Luke out of town anymore after she took him to Yosemite in high fire season and had to actively flee the Park last summer with fire beating down behind them. She thought it was funny. I had of course begged her not to do what she went on to do, so she sent me photos out the back window of the car, showing all fire and smoke. So I said, “No more!”

 

That’s when she reminded me that in Idaho, at 16 Luke gained a degree of agency over which parent he chose to live with. Then between the end of summer and the start of Christmas vacation—the next time she ‘needed’ to take him out of state—she bought him a new computer and they agreed not to tell me about it. She put him on a spendy allowance—and they agreed not to tell me about it.

 

And everything they did together—all of it instituted and directed by the adult in the relationship—that improved his circumstances there that was kept a secret between the two of them, had the calculated effect of alienating me, and inculcating the two of them in Conspiracy.

 

They have a word for it now: Grooming. His fucking mother groomed him away from me with conspiracy-building and financial enticements. Despicable. So unbelievably despicable nobody believes it.

 

It’s empirically provable. A subpoena of their texts would reveal all. But no one believes me because she’s the college academic and I’m the Pete Brooks. Now fallen on truly Hard Times. Like, end-of-run hard times. I do not have a single card left to play, Suzy Q.

 

My newspaper gigs finally dried all up in 2022. I went for an aspirational career change and got a job in child care at the start of this year. It was magic! All these little pre-K kids running around, and napping and playing and eating and OMG SuzyQ I was in heaven. I saw Luke in all of them and that filled me with… hope, I guess. Kids represent that, don’t they? The possibility for change, for something better.

 

But then I got laid low by a mystery weakness in my gut and found that I was physically incapable of doing the gig. A long time later now I’ve finally been diagnosed, authorized for treatment, scheduled for surgery… but now I’ve been out of work so long I’m badly delinquent on my rent and currently still scheduled for eviction Court on Thursday, and surgery tomorrow, Wednesday.

 

I gotta cut it short now—thankfully—because of all the shit that needs handling today. After surgery tomorrow I’m gonna be weak as a kitten. Luke is scheduled to come over and babysit me for the first few days after surgery but he’s really pissy about it. Experience suggests he’s getting lots of feedback at his Mom’s house about me and my situation. He’s not even the same kid anymore.

 

It's so despicable as to beggar description, so despicable no one believes that’s what happened and is continuing to happen. Dammit, when he grows up he’s gonna have issues with how he treated/is treating me. I know that sure as God made little green apples, I even tried to communicate it to his mother but she’s gone, man. She doesn’t give Shit One about the long-term damage she’s doing as long as she feels like she’s winning.

 

Ha! I wouldn’t vote for Trump, but I ended up marrying her.

 

I gotta go. Have to mail some comics to somebody who apparently bought them on ebay. But it’s my first sale so I don’t know what the fuck is going on. Only that I have an interview at 3 for a job I don’t really want and am unsure I’ll be able to do and have to start half-way through my surgery recovery schedule and that’s if I even get it.

 

I don’t like my odds. If I end up on the street, pneumonia will take me this winter.

 

So tell me your story and make it a happy one!