Because there's time

I haven't spent time here in a long time. Even though I'm unemployed, I have been busy.
Each weekday and Saturday, my alarm goes off around 4: 10 a.m.
Because it's set to NPR instead of some hard rock station, it sometimes takes a few minutes to realize that the pretty music is not just there; it's there to tell me something.
I open my eyes and roll off the bed, cross the cat barricade and stagger to Joey's room to wake her up.
She has to be at work by 5 a.m.

Why do we have separate rooms? For many reasons. The primary one, I suppose, is that she sleeps in the shaps of a boomerang and butts me out of bed.

Other reasons include her snoring. (My snoring is irrelevant because Joey is legally deaf.) And there's three cats and a dog that share her bed. And she stills the covers and blames me for it.
So I bring my own blanket if I want to hang out in her room.

When I worked, she would call me at varying times to wake me up and sing to me, and to give me my orders for the day. She still calls and sings to me and gives me my orders, but she calls around 8 instead of 6:15.

Sometimes I cannot sleep so I turn on the computer and search the job listings. I average three applications a day.
On a really good day, I do six or seven. I think that I have just about applied for everything in a 60-mile radius that I am capable of doing. I have several pages of places I've applied to since September 15th. I have had three interviews.

Then my mother-in-law took me shopping for interview clothes. God bless her! Happy Birthday to me!

So today is the last day that I will go to my Dad's around noon to walk the dog and scoop the kitty litter for a small consideration. Their regular dog-walker will be back from vacation soon. I need to find another means of getting a weekly consideration. It helps. It's hard to find odd jobs these days. Everybody's gone legit, except for people who aren't.

The local drug dealer is a very nice looking young black man in an ostentatious bright green car on lifted wheels.
I finally saw his face from out behind his shaded car windows at the grocery store one evening.
It's tempting to do illegal things. But when I think of how drugs devastate families, like my own, I think again.

My own drug-addict stepbrother was finally kicked out of the house. It's very sad but he was impossible to take.
He did show up a few nights ago for food, but they made the mistake of letting him in the house. He stole. What did they expect? There are two tables outside the house where he could have sat. A bank envelope on the kitchen counter is something he feels entitled to.

Had they kept him outside, they could have hosed him off, too.

The person inside him is a very considerate person with an incredible aptitude for certain things. He is a fishing savant. Really. Unfortunately, there is not much market for that. And drugs have created a crusty exterior of lust for money to smoke off tinfoil up into his nose. That's how they take opiates.

I am the only person he has not stolen from, because I have nothing to steal.

Drug addicts are borne until the burden of them becomes to great. They either destroy their family totally, perhaps even kill their family, through murder or heartbreak, or they FINALLY get dumped.

The only good thing that a family can do is go to Al-Anon and talk it out. The only thing you can really do about other people's behavior is change your response to it.

I do love my drug addict step-brother, but I have treated him differently all along because I have known for years that there was no hope of changing anyone in my family. I talk to him, listen to his lies and act like they are the truth. Oh, drugs addicts become very artful liars. But I do not criticize or even bother to call him on his lies. I just know that unless I see it for myself, it's not true.

What's disgusting is that he has given up bathing. It doesn't matter anymore but it used to matter very much to him.
He loved to get cleaned up and put on nice clothes and cologne. He's handsome and he liked the attention he got.

I didn't know if I would come to the house and find my Dad and step-mother dead. I do know my step-brother's death is imminent, the way things are going. Any change that happens is completely up to him now. He's been sent to rehab three times. The last time he was saved from jail and sent out of state. In a year and a half he has spent more money and cost more money than I make in five years.

He is the living embodiment of what happens when you spare the rod and spoil the child. And he learned how to manipulate my step-mother from birth.

Parents these days indulge rather than discipline. We are raising future generations of assholes who will sit around watching footage of people getting hurt and laughing at it. These people will not consider the common good but only their own needs. Internal genocide is already approved by the Republican party and the right. Anyone who says that health care is a privilege for those who can afford it is espousing it. And they really don't care. Oh, they realize what they are saying and then they say that God wants them to be wealthy.

The deepest layer of Hell waits for these people.

So... I did not mean to detour into the heavy but I have had so much going on. Unfortunately, having a drug addict in the family makes life interesting. They say that you curse people by saying "May you have an interesting life."
It may be so.