Hey everybody! Look how big I am compared to this airplane!

I cursed whatever “keen detective instincts” led me to this bargain palmist, even if I had made a new resolution to follow where my excitement led, at least when I could. I begged Brian to come with me. “It’s good practice,” I coaxed. “in case this non-working shit goes on for a while. Filling your days and all that stuff.”

“Christ…I’m not going to be laid up that long.”

Nobody could really know that, but abled people, especially American men, never wanted to hear it. I left the words on the tip of my tongue where they belonged and tried wheedling again. “I might make an idiot of myself—you wouldn’t want to miss that.”

He didn’t, and off we went. The place was hidden away in a strip mall and a bell dinged over the door like it was a spooky convenience store. The tarot reader was young and dyed-blonde, surprisingly efficient for someone in the spirit realm. For a moment, I’d trade my future for the crisp twenty I handed over, but I was here now. Best to have the experience.
The medium turned over one card. “The Empress is a strong sign of fertility.” She looked over from me to Brian, and I blushed as if I were in junior high and she had my handwritten diary.
“Oh, we’re not…he’s married. To someone else.”
Maybe the medium rolled her eyes a little. “The images aren’t often literal. Also could mean creativity and that kind of thing.”

Maybe.(I'm not really clear on some of the rules since my dad retired and I get the retirement amount of Social Security, but it also stinks that SSI is so punitive, since the people on it got disabled younger and/or don't have much work history...that's mean, not protective, in my opinion of course.) After trying to drag through a bill that raises asset limits for years, I thought about it one day: Like, fuck the asset limits. (showing off that big policy brain and keen ear for messaging that have made me obscure) Give everyone the retirement amount once they show that they are disabled...it's not princely, but it could meet a modest nut. Which is supposed to be the point of all of that, not some game where you see how much they let you lie.(and, you have to because the amounts are too small for an honest life with any pleasures in it.)
Instead, they create accounts so that teens and twentysomethings can Save Up For College, because tell me again how school fixes everything.(I don't actually know that I know anyone who does this, but I'm too old and haven't mentored in ages. Maybe it rocks. Still seems a bit convoluted.)
Which brings me back to my title and how there is a certain irony in how many fundraisers my activist, yet SSDi- having ass gets invited to. I mean, I don't exactly need them to "give me money"--I had gifts from the holidays and I like contributing, but it does feel like the consideration flows in the wrong direction sometimes.

I'm not sure why, looking at that old discussion thread, "Places" seemed hard to write. Maybe I'm just looking back and making a big deal of a tough morning--it happens. That doesn't explain why, as I was looking back, it was as if a still, small voice in my head, thinking in full sentences as I almost never do:

"You can't do places because you've never had one."(Which is a thought I was trying to keep from everyone, back then,including myself, but especially my spiffy new(ish) virtual friends. The thing about an oasis is trying to make it just about the fun parts, not the fact that there are doorways in your own house that you don't fit through--I don't really need them, but that's not always the point.

Freud, who definitely had his own problems, would say it's about "love and work", but unless you grade on a very generous curve...well, I've had a lot of scraps, okay, made my share of collages, but I can't say, on either front, that I've ever had anything to sink into(whether or not that's a real thing or not, anyway, like Snot from The Wire, I've never really gotten to play along) Never had a spot where things are okay because I'm there. Not since I was lap-sitting size, anyway, and there are limits to how far back I want my time-warp to go, even as I sort of wish my friend Steph were still waiting for this overly-long attempt, and I wish I could be like my old self and see a future with my half-mordant, half-cheerful stamp on it.(That old self wants me to further break word count to assure us all "Hey, it could happen!" and I'm writing that because I probably owe her, but I'm pretty sure I don't believe that anymore.) Maybe just typing it is good for me, though.