Cranky

I called my dad to tell him we were ten minutes away.

"I was just about to go to lunch. I assume you will be having lunch here?"

I said no, we were having a late lunch with my mom. It was she who invited me down so she could see me around my birthday. Visiting him too was sort of an add-on. He got cranky about his lunch schedule getting messed up.

"No one thought about the effect of all this on me."

"We meant to leave earlier but it didn't happen."

"Uh huh. Well, I have some food around here, I'll make ... something."

He didn't ramp it up enough to actually make me feel guilty, but I appreciated the attempt.

When we got there he was eating a simple tuna salad he had whipped up, and we visited for about an hour. Then we went to my mom's -- my parents only live about twenty minutes apart -- and had lunch and she had made me a cake and got me a shirt. A cool shirt, a Hawaiian shirt with Mustangs on it (the car). Visited a couple hours and left in time for my son to get to his waitering job. I came home to decompress, and will go to the shop for maybe an hour to take down a bunch of my shit that's in the way. Tomorrow night we load the first trailer of stuff for Burning Man.

So, an entire Sunday, and I get maybe an hour to work on the important stuff.

Yesterday, my ex took me to brunch, and though I thought it would be a 9 ~ 11 thing, she picked me up at ten thirty and took me all the way downtown. I got to the shop around two.

It was my birthday and what I really wanted to do was take my last free weekend and work work work on stuff that matters to me but you know how these god damn birthdays are, someone wants to see you and you really can't say no and there it is. Or I couldn't. I don't like feeling churlish, as if my little hobbies are more important than the people who love me. They aren't, and so I went. But I'm cranky about it.

I wanted to take my last full free weekend and get most of the work done on the electric chair thing I built --

I just got inspired to combine a riding lawnmower, a wooden chair, and a Tesla coil into a new art car. Anyway.

-- and I did start off okay, staying up until four o'clock Saturday morning bending and welding steel tubes for the sunshade. But as Saturday unfolded and I was tired and looking at my remaining time, I got real cranky. Real cranky.

No lie, some of it was my ex. We had a nice time -- apart from the moment I inadvertently gave her an opening to club me with how she knows she'll never love anyone ever again, screw that -- and later in the day various conflicting feelings had me suffering afternoon squalls and storms. I don't regret recent decisions. I do regret that we both weren't better equipped to deal with the past ten years or so. I miss certain aspects, feel pain at certain losses ... You know the drill. On top of that, yet again I was recognizing that my vision for having a good time and helping others have a good time at Burning Man really does not include much use of my creative little engineering project. I was stressing out over the little time remaining to do so much designing and building. Indeed, I was really feeling lost and low, and my Burn friends were not the ones I wanted to drag into an unscheduled commiseration party. I need a closer friend than that.

So I called one and had some tequila shots and went to the movies.

Thus, the weekend to get a whole lot done turned into very little done and a decision, again made almost permanently but not quite, to shitcan the Lectric Lurveseat this year and concentrate on what I really want to do up there.

Which is dress creatively, drink a lot, chill out, drop all pretense of civilization, and make good friends. Somehow, tooling around in a neat little gizmo that mostly just shows people how clever I am does not make the short list of what's really important.

But failing to complete the project does make me cranky.