Anti-suckage

Oh happy day, I actually had a really good weekend. I know that this in no way has any bearing on how the remainder of my week will play out, nor does it indicate that the Universe is going to take it easy on me or anyone else for a while (the Universe don't roll like that, y'all), but I still would like to recount the ways the past few days have not pissed me off.

• The snow Friday was gorgeous, and gave me an excuse to go strolling through the park at midnight and again the next day, taking pictures of strangers building snowmen. I don't stroll in the park nearly often enough, snow or no snow.

• Saturday, Sarah came into town and listened to me pine and bitch and moan and kvetch about everything I normally pine and bitch and moan and kvetch about. She even endured my pleas to her to help me fix my life, all while politely refraining from pointing out that I was at a Circle K at 3 in the morning wearing fuzzy purple socks and red polka-dot shoes. She also introduced me to my new favorite band, Beirut:



• Sunday I woke up fully clothed and on the couch. At noon. Still somewhat drunk, but thankfully not technically hungover. I realized that I was WAY behind schedule — we were having a birthday dinner for my mom, dad, and youngest nephew later that day. I steadied myself and answered my phone. It was my dad, asking if I was on the road yet. Uh, no, I said with horrible wine breath. Well, dad told me, you best hurry up because we eat at 2. (It takes two hours for me to get there.) Turns out my mom had been assigned to call and tell me when we were eating, but never did. I had just assumed it would be late dinner, because I always forget that in the South, "dinner" means "lunch." Duh. So we trucked it and got the eff out of Memphis and I was only two hours late. No one seemed to mind too much, though. We ate at River Heights Café, which has to be the most overpriced piece of crap restaurant in Hardin County — no offense if you Google the place and find this blog, but yeesh: $10 for this? — but it has a killer view of the river and it's birthday tradition to eat there every spring. We Turnered it up for a while, demanding bowls of cheese and condiments out the wazoo, and then retired to Saltillo for an evening of shooting pellet guns and rifling through the bookcases in the hunt for my sister's high school diploma.

• The weather was absolutely gorgeous Monday, so I roamed around Triple T Farms, taking pictures of rusting heaps of scrap metal and decaying farm equipment. My family's land has to be my favorite place to take photographs, even if it's a little bittersweet to find beauty in decay (is that a song lyric?). The horses are great fun (even if the one named, ironically, Lady always, always, always farts in my general direction; this time she did it twice!) and love the attention. Osama bin Llama, not so much. He kind of sucks, even if he's fun to look at. Also, the random crap you can find on the Turner compound fascinates me to no end. I'm sure I wouldn't be so interested in it if it belonged to some random family. But when I step quietly over coils of barbed wire and oil cans and election signs and boxes of video tapes stored haphazardly in the shed behind my grandmother's house, I feel like I'm getting filled in on part of our story that no one might ever think to tell me. And that inspires me. I came home with 700 pictures to sift through.

• The paint on my car from the door that I was so pissed off about? My dad Magic Erasered it off. Seriously. THE ERASER IS NO-SHIT MAGIC, OMFG.

• On the way back to Memphis, I stopped at a gas station a few miles from my parents' house, and some guys in a truck pulled up beside me. The strapping young man on the passenger side got out and did a doubletake and said, "How YOU doin'?" like that gross dude on that commercial for sour mints or whatever. That made me laugh. And then he said, "You from around here?!" Which made me laugh even more. I normally would have shot that guy the dagger eyes, but I was feeling frumptastic and had no makeup on, so it perked me right the fuck up. I'll cop to it: I am a tool of the patriarchy sometimes. But come on, getting hit on by a teenager?! That's like an ego superpowerup.