Tides

 I hadn’t posted this photo before my phone was stolen last week, and I was sad I’d lost it (the photo, and the phone)—I don’t use the so-called cloud for storage—but then realized I’d emailed it to someone so had that copy, and here it is. It’s from my recent day trip with Marz to Lake Superior. Not really tidal, the rock pools were full of rain.

It calms me to look at it. I’ve been out of sorts from dealing with tech—more like avoiding dealing with it, in dread—but in a weird piece of luck, yesterday someone donated a like-new iPhone 7 to the thrift store. (“Weird” because most donated phones are locked or defunct, and almost never iPhones either.) Big Boss unhesitatingly said I should have it for free to replace mine stolen by a temp worker. Not that an outdated 7 would  sell for much, but I’m glad to have again a phone that I know my way around.

iPhone is on model 15 now; Apple doesn’t allow the 7 to update anymore (I’d forgotten that hindrance to using a phone forever), but it’s still better, especially its camera, than the cheapish Android from BJ that I was using. 

So that’s a relief and felt like a weird bit of justice… 

Auntie Vi, is that you again? I’m going to assign all unexpected gifts of material things to Auntie Vi from now on.  

And I’m going to give that Android to a coworker with one eye who can barely read the shattered screen of his own phone. (My workplace can be like something out of Dickens.)

I’ve been feeling out of sorts with it being Asst Man’s last week at work, too—his very last day, today. Even though we’d had continual problems and I’m glad he’s going, I’m also sad that I’m losing someone with whom I experienced one of the most astonishing days of my life—the day three years ago during the 2020 Covid shutdown when, after George Floyd’s murder led to uprising and looting, AM had called me up in the morning and said, “Big Boss just asked me to paint the boarded up windows at the store—do you want to help?”

We’d each rounded up house paint from our basements (I was rooming with HouseMate who was happy to donate hers), he’d picked me up in his car, and together we’d painted the plywood boards. We then walked together, the two of us,  through acrid smoke down Lake Street, along with groups of people, many of them carrying brooms and bags to clean up broken glass, to the overpass where a line of armed National Guards blocked further access.  

I’d posted about those last days of May 2020 here.

This morning I went into work to drop something off with Big Boss, and to say good bye to AM. I told him I’d been thinking about that day and how glad I am he’d called me that morning. 

He said yes, it’d meant a lot to him too, and too bad we have such “different personalities”. 

I felt again that slight surreality, a sense of dis-location that I often felt with AM, as if there were an invisible but powerful third person all the time between me and AM, like a road worker holding signs of misdirection. That invisible presence being alcohol.

At any rate, once again there was no connection, only a sense of something not fitting by a frustrating fraction—like a Tupperware lid that should snap onto a container but simply does not. 

So I feel a little crazy, a little fragile, a little sad, and angry, and mostly relieved to be free of this. I suspect it’s like the low-level infected tooth I finally had pulled after several years—I will feel slightly but significantly better in my whole self afterwards.