Moods

I'm in a pissy, miserable, cranky and awful mood this morning and it makes me want to smoke, or throw myself off a bridge or something. This mood was brought to you by a) stupid knee, still injured and making my life difficult; b) puppy, who has apparently decided that if I'm not walking him, well, he's not housetrained anymore, so that for the second morning in a row I began the day by stepping into a large puddle of piss on the kitchen floor and c) my son, who missed the bus and then presented me with the worst report card I have ever personally seen. If I had given a report card like that to my father in 9th grade I probably wouldn't be here typing this for you now, because it would be difficult to type missing my arms, if, that is, I was alive, which would be doubtful. I said this to my son who said that he was sorry I'd had such a rotten childhood and I said that that wasn't what was bothering me at all, that instead I was upset since I didn't have a man handy to beat the crap out of him. At moments like this I become unexpectedly Republican and feel that all my problems could be solved by the application of a little old fashioned military discipline, god damn it, whereby I would throw away everything, leaving only perhaps a shield and a gun or two and some bare boards to sleep on, and everyone would be beaten regularly and fed corned beef hash. Unfortunately I am soft and weak and not a member of the superior anything and so I always cave in and there's no discipline of any kind, really, around our house, except inasmuch as the dogs have us trained to feed them.

The other option that occurred to me this morning is more feasible, though: leaving. Packing up the dog, a few clothes, some CDs, my camera and my tent and moving on, preferably to some kind of slow country western lament about drunks and jukeboxes and the rain. Divorcing my kids and the puppy and starting a new life somewhere else, somewhere bleak, somewhere with a lonely aluminum diner and one flickering streetlamp. Somewhere I could wear red lipstick without looking like a crazy bag lady. Somewhere where I wouldn't know what the hell a report card is and they don't have puppies. I can just imagine my kids, left behind, almost like the Rapture came - they'd be delighted. They'd let the puppy shred the couch into tiny bits all over the floor and they'd all lie in them and have a generally great time until the canned food ran out and the water got turned off (they like long showers.) It's not good when I am the only civilizing influence in a household because we might as well face it: I am not particularly civilized at all.

Alas, though, I 'm not quite able to tear myself away, even if some of it is just an unholy fascination at this point, like, how bad can it possibly get? Pretty damn bad, I'm afraid, pretty damn bad. The house just gets nastier and my knee keeps on hurting and the report cards. . . jesus, the report card. I try to reassure myself on that point since even if he is doing terribly academically, at least he has a lot of friends (mumbling friends with long hair, who smoke cigarettes and have bottle rockets behind their backs) and is socially quite adept (do they honestly think I don't know a high school FREAK when I see one? What the hell do they think I did in high school? ) and, well, hell, he's just like the president. Except, of course, for the money and the family connections and the frat boy attitude and, thank god, the apparent callousness, although M does seem to think he's both immortal and always right. He is 15, it is true. Possibly M will make it to the White House yet - we can only hope that it's not with high level explosives strapped to his body.