Pray For the Soul of the Lowly 'Ho, and Other Monday Randomness

After months of mostly-impeccable behavior, the Tahoe has gone to hell on a handcart. (We needed the handcart because the wheels would have fallen off had we tried to drive it to hell.) I have only received the very basic diagnosis, via an early-morning cell call from a very sleepy LJ, but the very basic diagnosis included the phrases "twenty-eight hundred dollars" and "not covered by the warranty", so I know everything I need to know for now. Which is: stuff is broken that we can't afford to fix. We're apparently going to fix the most-pressing issue first--an entirely new suspension, which we began to suspect we needed when each of us, independently of the other, noticed that there would be moments in any given journey where it felt as though the chassis and the wheels each had different opinions on where we might be going next. It turns out that they have $850 worth of different opinions, which...My second divorce cost less than that. Maybe that's something this truck should consider. The chassis gets the steering column and the radio, the wheels get the funky seat-warmer feature and visitation with the fuel-injectors on the weekends.

I'm sorry...was I babbling? That could have something to do with the total lack of sleep I experienced last night. For those of you in Places Other Than Chicago, I shall hereby present the Condensed Version of the Chicago Metro Area Weather Report:

It's REALLY FUCKING HOT, yo.

Or rather, it was R.F.H all day yesterday, which allowed an almost oven-like quantity of heat to build up in our house. It got so bad that I took my laptop and my water bottle out to the front porch so I could work on the book--though I'll also admit, it's helpful, while writing, to be surrounded by exactly the sort of scene I'm writing about. I'm getting to know the drug dealers by name--to say nothing of where they hide the pack.

But even though I could sit outside, write outside, even eat dinner outside, the one thing I couldn't do outside was sleep. So at about 10:30 I went into the house, took my shower, and went to bed.

What a waste of time. Even with the windows wide open, even with the fan on high, even wearing a tank top and boxers and throwing all the blankets to the ground first thing, it was like trying to sleep in an industrial laundry. It was STEAMY, is what I'm telling you. And it's all the fault of the cats.

See, were it not for Whitey and Foof, we could leave the bedroom door open at night and get a decent crossbreeze working. But Whitey, especially, takes sleeping humanity as a personal affront, and devises various ways of righting this wrong, mostly by stomping on their faces. And I was not in the mood to open my bleary eyes and gaze upon enormous cat-ass, which is his other perennial favorite. So--door, closed. Heat, stifling. Gladys, tossing and turning and getting ZERO sleep.

This, as you might imagine, has made for a fairly random day. I am tired and scatterbrained in the extreme, and to top it off I have blisters on the soles of my feet because as I took the first few steps in the new sandals I planned to wear this morning, I heard this strange sound every time my right foot came down. So I took a few more steps, listened to sandal-farts, and decided to scrap the whole production and put on my old shoes--forgetting that they take a few weeks of getting used to before I can walk all day in them.

Now I have to go home and withdraw my last $70--left over from a clothes-shopping spree of epic proportions, urged on by my mother of all people!--to contribute to the fund to repair that damn truck. But at least I'm going home--back to my industrial laundry, my cat-ass, and my new friends on the block.

But I really, REALLY need to get some sleep tonight.