The Motels

We are now at the Townhouse motel in KF. We left our land on Tuesday and got this room for 4 nights. Tom just went to bed and so I thought now was a good time to update.

The day before we left, I got a letter from Bob. He did get Angel Eyes. I told him that it’ll be a while, but someday, if I can ever have access to my printer again, I’ll send the short stories he hasn’t read. He told me more about his life there which I had asked him about. He isn’t in PC like I had thought. Most of the people that he’s housed with are also old or have medical problems. There are two dayrooms and even a pool table in one of them, but not surprisingly, the blacks have taken that over, and if you’re not in with them, you don’t play pool. Quoting his words, he’s had to cell with 9 black bastards and a white bastard and is currently in with a gay deaf guy he’s been with for 5 years. I was amazed at just how few roommates he’s had and the moves he’s made over the years. I think I had more cellies in 6 months at the jail than he’s had in over 10 years of his imprisonment. That was part of the curse, though. If I had been a people-person who liked variety, then I wouldn’t have moved so much nor had so many cellies.

The truck is struggling along, but barely, and it’s looking more and more like we’ll be forced to abandon the land and live in the city, just what God wants us to do and what I was always meant to do since I went out on my own, but you know what? I’m staying here! I don’t care how much I hate it. This time I’m staying in the city like I swore I would if I got trapped in it one more time. I’m sick of getting stuck in places I don’t want to be, so I’m just going to stay put. I’m not going to struggle for rural life if it wasn’t meant to be, and I’m so, so tired of losing! Cruel, heartless fate keeps making more and more decisions for me and taking from me. Another thing it’s taken is my plants. By the time we get back to the land, they’ll be dead for sure. It’s like it wants to take literally everything we own from us, the last of our few precious belongings. I realized this like never before that we’re meant to be losers and to struggle till the day we die, but I will not let it get the rest of my stuff like my dolls. Instead, I’m going to be the one to give them up, not wait around till circumstances force me to give them up. This is the third time in less than 5 years that I’ve been forced to do without my stereo, computer, dolls, etc. It’s making me not want to own or have anything ever again. I just want to get rid of everything but my clothes and computers, though even that may be taken away from me at some point, and forget about buying anything in the future. I’ve wanted the dolls on my list for so damn long that I’m sick of wanting them! I’d rather just get incense occasionally that you don’t keep. I’m just too damn sick of losing, so if I don’t have, I can’t lose. It’s easy moving from rental to rental every time the neighbor’s antics get to be too much as opposed to moving to raw land. Also, when the roof leaks, it won’t be our responsibility. When the truck breaks completely, we won’t have to worry about the fact that we’ve got no backup because in the city he could just walk or ride a bike to work if he had to. When the sickos got me tossed in jail, I swore I’d never leave the city if I got stuck in it again, and I mean it! This may be a puny city compared to Phoenix, but if I’m going to be fated to move every few months to a few years, then I want it to be where civilization is so we don’t have to worry about propane, trash, water, electricity, shit tanks, gas, broken vehicles, etc. Sure I’ll miss the peace and quiet, but was it worth having it just to lose it? And we’re getting faster and faster each time we lose something. Look how fast we lost this land. We may not have officially lost it, but we will. I’m sure we’ll need to ditch it to save the extra $135 a month. Spending $30 on storage is pretty insignificant, but when you’re as poor as we are, $135 is a lot. As it is, we’re going to lose what we’ve paid on the land so far, over $200 for the shed, plus the $1500 that the RV cost. The string of losses never seems to end!

I have been so, so depressed. So pissed, so frustrated, so sad. I’m so sick of struggling just to lose, to be reduced to living like a little bum. One thing we did decide for sure is that we will not go back to living in the RV and I will not live in a fucking shed! I’m not a dog and I’m not going to live like one and feel like a dog in a doghouse!

Why, though? Why????? Why are we so fated to struggle and to lose what few things we manage to achieve? Ok, so Maricopa was a dumb move. We were desperate and greedy, trying to achieve too much too soon, but we can’t even have the simplest of things in life! I can’t even have an average house in an average neighborhood where I can hear myself think! If I can’t have the basics in life, what can I have? Like I said, everything that’s happened over the last 5 years makes me not want to have anything. I don’t want to own anything, I don’t want to buy any more dolls, I just want food, books, music and clothes, preferably all the while I have a roof over my head. I don’t care if it’s smaller and older than the Phoenix house as long as we’re not terrorized by our neighbors and forced to know their every move. I don’t care if it doesn’t have a private backyard, a pool, etc. I just don’t want to live in RVs or motels!

Funny thing, because the day before we left the land, we discovered that those people in back strung off their property in preparation for a fence, no doubt planning to build a house because we moved there, but now I see that it doesn’t matter what they do because we won’t be living there. Tom had made the comment about hoping they’d put up their fence before he did so that that’d be one less side he’d have to fence. “You couldn’t get that lucky,” I told him, and now I see more than ever that he’s not meant to put up a fence anywhere any more than I’m meant to generate money.

Like I said, at this point, big and fancy don’t matter anymore. Security matters. Peace of mind and peace and quiet. Just a place where we can put what few things we have left without the constant barking, basketball games, car stereos, and the commotion we had in Phoenix. Tom said that that couldn’t be a problem in this climate, but when you’re cursed when it comes to neighbors, does climate really matter? Besides, it’s not cold year-round here. They do have summers here, even if they’re mild compared to Arizona. Cursed or not, even I’d have to agree that most sane people wouldn’t throw their dogs outside in the dead of winter, nor would they want to be outdoors themselves to carry on like animals. I’d happily settle for just one bedroom.

The foul-odor curse has followed us here. The RV smelled of rotted food for a while, then there was an odd chemical smell I detected as well. Probably propane. Well, trapped in the city we won’t have to worry about propane, but will whatever place we rent end up stinking, too? It makes me wonder.

I’ve spoken to a lady at this pizza place by this motel, who’s a native of KF. She too, hates apartments and thinks they’re all noisy because people simply don’t care, and she too, wouldn’t want to move to a warm climate where there’s more outdoor noise. If we ever went back to a warm climate, that wouldn’t mean we’d want to go to one that got to be 115˚ in the summertime, but to one more like San Diego, and only to a retirement community, though I know we’ll never be able to afford to buy a house in a retirement community. No matter how much we try to save, emergencies come up to steal the money away. Then again, I meant it when I said I didn’t want to own anymore, so scratch that. As a renter, at least if we got evicted or run out of there by spiteful bosses, crazy blacks or evil Mexicans that know we’re living in a time when they can shit on whites, cry racism and be believed, we wouldn’t be giving up anything that was ours. Instead, we’d be losing something that always belonged to someone else.

Anyway, this lady advised us to rent a house. She said there are lots of them and that the rent is comparable to an apartment. I know God will see to it that if we did get a house to rent the neighbor’s dogs would be outside at least during the summer and that they blasted their car stereo, etc., but at least it’d be so easy to up and move as opposed to having to prep and sell a house! Something wants us to keep moving around anyway, so why not? The original plan was to save up for a cabin or a small, used manufactured home while we rented in the city, but nah, I don’t think so. I’m just tired of losing and I know something would only come up to screw us out of our plans. We may have set ourselves up to lose the Maricopa house by biting off more than we could chew, but it doesn’t change the facts. The point is that we still lost and we’re STILL losing. Every time we think we just might finally be picking ourselves up, something happens to kick us back down again. I’m also sick of being teased with dolls and little treats like that I can only want, but never seem to have, and being kicked off the net by circumstances. We won’t be able to get online till we’re in someplace, so once again I’m losing out on Webshots. I could always go to a library and to their site, but I couldn’t download any of the daily pictures. I try to tell myself I’ve already got a zillion pictures, but that’s not the point. The whole point is that once again, I’m forced to give up, to lose, to be controlled, and it’s just so fucking frustrating! I feel so damn defeated. We’re 38 and 47 and we’re homeless in a foreign state. That’s infuriating. He works his ass off at the bank and now this place. I work my ass off on my stories, and this is what we get for it? Thanks, God, thanks a lot!

I have so many conflicting emotions. A part of me wants to take whatever I can get whenever I can get it and for however long people/God will let me have it, while another part of me wants to die, and another part wants to give up what I have and never get anything new that isn’t a necessity. I mean, it’d be so simple not to have anything other than computers and books, but do I really want to live that way? Do I have much of a choice? Tom says it was our choice to come into the city and to rent, but is it really? Sure we love taking showers in a real bathroom, having more space and life’s modern conveniences you can find in motels, but would the choice really be ours in the end? He takes home a little over a grand a month. Assuming they don’t fire him or lay him off, which is a serious concern for me after the way we’ve been so damn cursed with one crisis after another, this is how I figure it. About $400 would go to rent, leaving $600 for food, gas, internet service, phone time and storage. That wouldn’t leave us much left over for the land payment, let alone any savings, and that would be even if the truck never broke again, which of course, is an impossibility.

KF sure has a lot of pigs cruising around for a small town, and it bothers me. It really does. Perhaps that is major paranoia on my part, but it sure feels like I’m being taunted. I can’t even walk the two minutes it takes to get to the pizza place or the convenience store without seeing one, let alone driving throughout the whole town! Why are they all over the place like this?

Anyway, while I don’t want friends, I appreciate the woman’s advice, whatever her name is. I don’t know if she owns Stagecoach Pizza or what, but I’ve seen her twice by myself and once with Tom, who was glad to have kept down the pepperoni pizza he got from them. I’ve gotten mushroom pizza twice in a row, but tomorrow I think I’ll try their hot wings and hope they’re not too hot.

Okay, now I’ll describe the motel. For someone who’s had the great misfortune to have to motel it so many damn times, it’s one of the best we’ve been in. It’s cheap and it’s privately owned. It’s very apartment-like. In fact, I think they were apartments that they converted into motel rooms. It’s like being in an apartment with just a bedroom and a bathroom, and no living room or kitchen. Some of the downstairs rooms have kitchenettes, but we’ve just got a room and a bath, and it’s cool because the bath is across a little hallway, away from the room. The shower’s the greatest. Awesome pressure. The tub’s a little steep for lying back in, but I did so anyway. The water gets so hot I can make my instant coffee or tea with it. Although the bathroom has a fan and a heat lamp, I like how it’s also got a window I can crack to let the moisture out. What is it with me and flushing things down the toilet, though? I accidentally dropped part of the toilet paper holder down the toilet when flushing it, but I got a new one by saying there never was one to begin with. With just 16 units and two housekeepers, it wasn’t hard to keep them away. I put a please-do-not-disturb note I wrote out on the door just in case, and it’s worked so far. The room has a loud fan in its AC unit that I like better than the sound machine, but unfortunately, the bed’s too hard, there is some door-slamming, as well as stereos going by a few times each hour. Because Tom’s snoring was really bad (I guess thicker air causes him to snore more), he was sweet enough to sleep on the floor. Besides, after feeling his movements in Gert, as we call the old shit of an RV, I don’t need to feel them here, too.

We let Blondie run around loose in here for a few hours in the evenings, which he enjoys doing. I know that unlike most rats he doesn’t miss having a roommate, but he does love people and he savors his time with us. He alternates between climbing on us and exploring. I know he’s peed, but if he’s done any duties, it’s been done in places I can’t see, like under the dresser.

The only other things I don’t like about this place are that the outside lights are too bright, making the room too light at night, and there’s no desk, so I have to use the laptop in bed. I’m supposedly not going to have to write journals by hand anymore because we’re supposedly going to go from living in motels where we can use the laptop, to a place where we can set up our regular computers, but I won’t believe it till I see it. I know all too good and well how much fate likes to throw kinks in our plans. At least I’m still glad we don’t have a kid to deal with in the midst of all this bullshit, uncertainty, frustration, anger and sorrow, and I’m still glad I never made it as a singer!

Anyway, the worst thing about this place is the fucking door-slamming. Why do people think that in order to shut a door they need to slam it? Do they WANT to annoy others? And of course there are the car stereos that go by. It’s not as bad as in Phoenix, though, because they can’t pull up close to the building, and there’s no corner or stoplight for them to slow down at. They just more or less whiz by. Well, we’ll be out of here on Saturday. The woman’s all booked up, so unless someone cancels we’re going to go to a strip motel with rooms that are all side by side. Here we’re on the second floor. I’ll be damned if I’ll tolerate people over my head on top of all else I’ve had to tolerate if I can help it!

Although it’s very hard, I’m trying my damnedest to look at the positive things we’ve got going for us, even if it isn’t much. The most important thing, as Tom said, is that we’re together. Whatever happens, be it God forcing us to literally give up everything we own, and I mean everything, we’re in this together. There’s certainly no reason not to believe He could/would make us lose it all, too! If we’ve lost all we’ve lost so far, sure He could make us lose more, and why not? It’d only be Tom and Jodi’s stuff, so who cares?

I’ve had periodic crying spells on and off over the last few days. God, I haven’t been this depressed since jail, but I knew I’d have a new long-term problem once the sickos were finally out of our lives. I swear, we solve one problem and just go right into a new one! If I knew we were going to be in a fairly decent house in a fairly decent neighborhood by the 1st, I may feel a little relieved as any bit helps. How different this new long-term problem is from the years of problems we went through on account of the sickos. The sickos may’ve been much worse to have to deal with than being homeless, but at least we knew what was going on where they were concerned. The only surprise was the probation cut.

I still don’t miss Arizona, but God do I miss that house! We had our problems there, but at least we had a home. I know things like a mannequin and $300 for a monthly allowance are just a dream, but that’s ok because I’d be happy just to settle for a house, even if it’s old and small, with neighbors that keep their shit to themselves. The quiet neighbor part of it is just a dream too, but if we can get in a place where the door-slamming doesn’t startle and jolt me out of my skin, that’ll be a start. Anything that stands independently.