|
|
|
my brother Don at the Chinese buffet
Friday, March 21 2025
location: the couch in the Shaque, Stingy Hollow Road, rural Augusta County, VA
At the Shaque, I've had a pattern of going to sleep at a normal hour and then waking up at something like 5:30am, not being able to go to sleep, and then resorting to more wine and watching YouTube videos for awhile and then going back to sleep. The video I watched this morning was a hilarious takedown of the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. I also drank two glasses of wine, which I was sure would give me a hangover at that hour. But mercifully it did not.
It was cooler this morning when I set out this morning for the floodplain to poop on the southeast bank of Folly Mills Creek. The temperature makes a difference when you poop the way I like to, since it involves finishing up with whatever water is handy. And creek water in the Shenandoah Valley in late March is cold. You might wonder why I don't just poop in one of the two working toilets in the Creekside trailer, and at this point not pooping there has just become one of my things, similar to how I never pay for a haircut and don't eat meat. (Back before my parents bought Creekside, I'd developed a habit of never using the bathroom in my childhood home, starting some time before I moved to Charlottesville in 1996. Instead I'd turn my need to poop into an excuse to climb up Pileated Peak with a shovel.)
The big thing I needed to do today was to take Don into Staunton and have him sign those two documents mentioned yesterday in front of a notary public. I'd had a website produce the "power of attorney" document based on a questionnaire, but to produce the "disclaimer of interest" in my mother's life insurance policy, I'd just asked ChatGPT to do it, and it had done a great job (well, at least it looked good to me).
A little after 11:00am, I drove with Don to the Staples in Statler Plaza to print out the documents I'd created. (I could've possibly printed it in the Shaque had I not thrown out all the old inkjet cartridges, which I'd assumed were very expired or otherwise worthless, though I hadn't actually thrown out the horrible Hewlett Packard printer.) I'd never attempted to print out a completely digital document at a Staples before, so I had to ask one printing desk staffer what to do. (It involves emailing your documents to a specific email address and then scanning a barcode.) Meanwhile Don just stood there, impatiently waiting for me to do what I needed to do. I kept fearing he would launch into a converstion with the young woman staffing the printing area, something that I would find stressful and embarrassing. For some reason, though, he reained mostly silent
I'd hoped Staples also does notarizing, but they do not. So our next destination was the UPS Store, which was nearby, just across Greenville Avenue. That was when we ran into a roadblock. Don has an ID, but it's a voter ID and not apparently sufficient for establishing his identity to a notary public. When the notary told us this, Don let out a "That's so incompetent!" in frustration. But that didn't solve anything, so we left the UPS Store without the thing we'd driven into town to get. Since I would have to be going back to Hurley tomorrow so I could start my new job, getting Don a proper ID and those documents notarized would have to wait for another day.
Yesterday Joy had given Don $50 so he could take me and himself to a restaurant meal today. Again, this was in keeping with her peculiar new desire to spend money from some mysterious source on decidedly frivolous things. Don wanted to go to Burger King to get Impossible Whoppers, but that kind of food is just kind of gross and I can only eat it very occasionally, and I'd had it only a few days ago. So instead we ended up at the Great Wall Chinese restaurant, which is in the Statler Plaza with the Staples. Don goes there "whenever I have money" to take advantage of their buffet. He ordered the buffet while I went to see if the buffet had anything for me. It didn't look like it did, so I ordered a Szechuan bean curd with vegetables from the menu. While I waited for it to arrive, I played Spelling Bee and looked to see what Don was getting from the buffet. The main thing he got was eggrolls, which he must've eaten at least ten of. In addition to those, he also ate a fair amount of broccoli studded with little nuggets of what looked like crab meat. As I looked around the restaurant, I couldn't help but notice that the other diners were obese or otherwise unhealthy looking. Places with cheap all-you-can-eat buffets seem to attract that demographic.
When my Szechuan bean curd arrived, I found it a bit sweet and not nearly spicy enough for my tastes. But the portion was generous, so I could only eat about half of it before needing a cover for the plastic container it had been served in so I could take it home with me.
After that, Don basically wanted me to serve as his personal chauffeur. I bristled at this, since waiting around for Don to do whatever it is he does in retail environments is no fun at all. But when he narrowed down his destinations to just two, I hesitantly agreed to serve as his driver. The first destination was the Walmart, where Don wanted to blow his money on two different Lego sets. (He likes Lego kits that are to be assembled into vehicles with detailed moving parts.) While he was doing that, I parked at the bottom of the Walmart parking area and walked down the various pedestrian-hostile (that is, steeply-graded) berms to the nearby Dunkin Donuts on Richmond Road and got myself an oatmilk cappuccino (which both Gretchen and I agree is the best franchise cappuccino one can get). Then I sat in the Forester waiting for Don. And waiting. And waiting. Eventually I became impatient and drove closer to the front of Walmart. And then I went into Walmart, looking around at the various checkout lines, self and otherwise. (Because of Don's dismal level of competence, I do not think he ever uses self-checkout.) He was nowhere to be seen. So then I walked back to the Lego section of the toy aisles. He wasn't there either. What the fuck? He didn't seem to be in Walmart. Had he gone somewhere and somehow missed me? So I started driving out towards Richmond Road, thinking maybe I saw a pedestrian resembling Don down there. But it was just one of those homeless men holding (or preparing to hold) a cardboard sign pleading for help at the Walmart entrance.
Traffic forced me to a business on the other side of Richmond Road, where I placed a call to Don's cellphone. When I got him, he announce that he'd "had to take a shit" and that was the cause of the delay. But that had only burned ten minutes at most. Clearly he'd been afflicted by a long period of indecision when weighing what Lego kit to buy. Don never hangs up his phone, so I could then hear him going through checkout over my Forester's bluetooth connection. As he did that, I sang loudly with a high falsetto into the Forester's microphone, "Don Mueller/Don Mueller/Of latter day saints!/Don Mueller/Don Mueller/Of latter day saints!" knowing that he'd left his phone in speakerphone mode and everyone around him could hear me.
After I finally got Don back into my vehicle, I took him to the next destination, which he'd only identified as "the book store." The only bookstore in Staunton he's ever had me drive him to was Know Knew Books, a used bookstore on Richmond Road closer into town. But when I pulled into their parking lot, he asked, "Why are we going here?" Evidently the bookstore he wanted to go to was some other bookstore, though he'd never bothered to tell me what it was and had somehow assumed that because he knew, I also knew. It was infuriating, but it was also, as I pointed out, telling. "Do you really think that just because you think something, everyone else is thinking that too? The only bookstore I knew about was the one I'd just taken you to. There was no way I would know to take you to some other bookstore without you telling me!" Don apologized in his usual defensive way, but not in a way that suggested he wouldn't do the same thing again. The other bookstore turned out to be on Beverley Street in Downtown Staunton, and this time Don managed to get in, buy the book he'd specially ordered (it was about Mesozoic plant life), and get out again in only a couple minutes during the time I was circling the block looking for parking.
Back out at Creekside, I had some downtime with YouTube videos before walking barefoot down to the marsh with my nice Nikon camera to look to see if there were any birds I could photograph. I'd been seeing lots of flamboyant birds in the past few days: cardinals establishing territorial lines near the Shaque, a mockingbird showcasing his repertoir near Don's trailer, a couple pileated woodpeckers flying their sinusoidal trajectory into the white pines I'd planted 40 years ago on Horizon Field, and a fluorescent-blue bluebird I'd seen this morning. But none of the birds down in the marsh wanted to be photographed. Several red-wing blackbirds were cussing at me and that was about it.
This evening as I drank box wine and waited for an unusually large 200 mg dose of diphenhydramine to kick in, I read a psychological assessment of my brother Don that was included in a packet of documents given to me yesterday by Joy Tarder. It was surprisingly entertaining to read a multi-page description of a person I know so well. [REDACTED]
The pedestrian-hostile berm-with-terraces landscaping system between the Walmart parking lot and the Dunking Donuts. Clearly no pedestrians were ever expected to walk from one to the other. Click to enlarge.
My childhood home from the southwest. Click to enlarge.
My childhood home from the west. Click to enlarge.
Folly Mills Marsh & Fen. Click to enlarge.
Folly MillsCreek as it passes Folly Mills Marsh & Fen along the boundary between our old parcel and that of the Vesseys. Click to enlarge.
A large sycamore on the edge of the floodplain field, viewed from the east. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250321 feedback
previous | next |
