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since third grade
Monday, July 26 2021
location: room 325, Howard Johnson By Wyndham (a motel), Staunton, Virginia
I'd eaten a fair amount of cannabis last night, and it didn't kick in until this morning. It was so strong that I was having trouble walking, and eventually I found I was happiest when in a bathtub full of hot water. I'd originally planned to call Deedee, my brother Don's social worker, first thing this morning. But I was too fucked-up to be doing that. A little later in the morning, though, I mustered the courage to make the call, only to get a mailbox whose limit was exceeded. It didn't seem like my brother had been assigned the best social worker available.
Eventually I got some more food at Kroger and drove out to Creekside again. When I got there, the front door was open, so I walked in. Having been in relatively fresh air for awhile, the stank inside the trailer hit me once again. The regrigerator was out in the yard where it could do no harm, though I tink its stench had insinuated itself into the ventillation system (which was running; evidently someone had figured out that air conditioning was an option). I opened the doors to get some air blowing through.
Don was already preparing himself and my mother (Hoagie) food, so I didn't end up having to do any of that. So instead I focused on mining the house for more documents, being as systematic as I'd been yesterday, though looking in other places. I also tried to find some of my old vintage computer equipment in the honey house attic, but none of the stuff I wanted (old C-128/VIC-20/Color Computer stuff) was there. I know I'd gotten rid of some stuff that I'd thought was completely worthless back in the late 1990s, and (since it's hard to imagine where else it could be) it might've included that stuff. Some stuff that definitely is worthless, like 80286-based AT-compatibles and bulbous VGA monitors, is still there.
Hoagie had said something about perhaps getting more information about Don if we went to her bank with her. The hope was that they would recognize her and thus give us what we needed. So I loaded everyone up in the Bolt. Hoagie and Maple the Dog rode in the dog bed in the back (where there is no seat) while Don rode in the front passenger seat. Don seemed interested in the electric car, though his sense of how much energy they require is always way off. (He seemed to think hooking one up to a piece of exercise equipment might work, though in truth it would take days of hard exercise for a human to generate enough power to drive a Chevy Bolt just one mile.)
We walked into City National Bank, which is in the location of the old credit union where Hoagie had joint accounts with both Don and me. The tellers immediately started freaking out about Maple, since she is so adorable (and a welcome change from the usual bank business). I got down to business right away, laying out an expired driver's license and some letters Hoagie had received, hoping to establish who she was so that we could then find Don's information from his part of the joint account. But evidently Hoagie hadn't really done much banking at City National Bank. The teller, a youngish woman, didn't know who she was, and neither did anyone else immediately available. But then this handsome, sharp-dressed man came up out of nowhere and immediately recognized who I was. It took me a moment to understand who he was, though it was helped by his introduction. He said he was Lyle M., a guy I'd to school with for years at both Riverheads Elementary and Riverheads High School. Lyle might've been the most popular person in my class, though, unlike the other popular kids, he was never mean to anyone and never had a single scandal (though supposedly some decades ago he was sucked in by multi-level marketing thing). He asked if I could use his help here, and I said sure. (Not only did he work there, but he'd been working there for 25 years!) He turned to the teller and gently said that he'd known me and my family "since the third grade" (actually it might've been fourth or second; I was at Riverheads beginning in the last couple months of second grade, though Lyle may not've shown up until fourth). This was all it took to get to Don's paperwork and finally know his social security number. (It has the first five digits as mine and differs only in the final four, suggesting my mother got them at the same time.) It turned out that the balance on the account was only for $30, and that the account was in the process of evaporating away due to fees. Lyle was able to get the most recent fees retroactively waived, meaning the account swelled back up to a little over $100, which we withdrew and gave to Don. Both Don and Hoagie were very grateful and talkative, with Don going so far as saying Lyle and he should get together for pizza some time. Lyle knows my family and is aware of my brother's issues, but he was nothing but kind and indulgent.
From there, Don headed off on foot, leaving me with Hoagie and Maple the Dog. I decided to take Hoagie over to the Walmart on the side of Betsy Bell to further charge up my Bolt and get her a coronavirus vaccine. I'd seen signs up about how their pharmacy was offering them. We walked in with Maple, and nobody told us we couldn't. What we couldn't do, though, was get a coronavirus vaccine. They wanted proof of insurance (which in this case was at least Medicare and perhaps other supplemental plans) for help with their billing, but of course we had no such thing, and even the chance of finding it back in the house was slim.
I took Hoagie back out to Creekside and then began my me-time for the evening. I repeated yesterday's pleasant experience of drinking of white wine at the pool at around 6:00pm, though this time nobody else was there when I arrived. I jumped in, of course, mostly to wash the mildew smell out of the clothes I'd put on just before going to the pool (they'd been drying in the air conditioning).
Later I scooted all around Staunton again on the electric scooter, though this time I went somewhere I'd never been before, up to the top of a very steep hill a few blocks west of the HoJo. One rises through a cute neighborhood of beautiful houses to an actual park, something called Reservoir Hill Park. N. Madison Street was too steep for my scooter's motor, so I was forced to walk it up there (waving at friendly people on their porches and encountering a couple curious cats), but once at the top I could scoot around the modest lawn of the park, which includes a baseball field. There's also a prominent cellphone tower, the reason my new cellphone has been working so great at the HoJo that I haven't cared too much about the non-working WiFi. (This evening, though, the WiFi finally started working.) The brakes on my scooter weren't really up the task of decelerating on the ride downhill from the park, which was scary at times.
This evening I ate leftover Chinese food and witched on the room's television to watch more of a zany Jennifer Anniston road-trip comedy I'd been watching earlier called We're the Millers. It's a great thing to watch in a motel room. In it, our protagonists try to look and act as wholesome as possible in order to smuggle drugs in a camper driven from Mexico.
The view from the walkway outside my third-floor room at the HoJo, looking south towards the center of downtown Staunton. Click to enlarge.
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