Flies in the Kitchen in Normal entries

I’ve both been thinking about and ignoring the random and brief upshot of my ex’s comet like passing of crazy across my screen. The song up above is a fair representation of all the ways I feel about it. Nobody does fatal nostalgia quite like John Prine and Sunny could sing the hell out of this song.

She had this friend who she taught the harmony too; I think of the two of them singing this song. The friend was morbidly obese serious trailer trash and bubbling over with raw talent. She also just celebrated her thirtieth. Yeah, a child. When I first met sunny most of her friends were quite a bit younger.

Bad things happened to all of them. Predictable, for the most part, bad things you could see coming down the pike from miles away. Sunny wasn’t really built to live past thirty, not in her mind. I’m guessing the past two years have been hard on her and if she hadn’t destroyed every bit of my life in Oregon and put down my young dog I’d be real sympathetic. Truth is with or without sympathy we all dig our own holes or make our own mounds.

The truth is you have to live with who you are, it’s the natural justice built into the species. I know, fiction relies on the whole Nice-Guys-Finish-Last or No-good-deed-goes-unpunished or Evil-is-Defeated-by good and all sorts of other similar anecdotal happy horseshit. Real life doesn’t need to set up a conflict and resolution. All law and morality aside, and with the notable exception of genuine sociopaths, we have to live with who we are and what we’ve done or haven’t done.

I could have posted a different song just for the one line; I had a jukebox graduate for a first mate, she couldn’t sail but she sure could sing. It’s a few steps closer to esoteric, at least in the sense I would have used it. Most people in Sunnys life have to make some sort of excuse for her, and the pattern is usually that they do then get burned, fight, drop out of each others life and years down the road have a drink and are best buddies again. In theory that’s kind of sweet. In practice, I’m not going to be one of those.

I’m over simplifying things, part of that is because I really have been ignoring it mostly. I’m not thinking too deep. The other part is betrayal. I could get over her betraying me, what I can’t do is betray everyone else who is close to me and I will not get over her having betrayed the trust of fat, happy little goofy dog. I have to live with who I am.

The people who are close to me now are very much the opposite of her or anyone in her world. So am I, I always was, it was part of the attraction, and I would feel mean if I just plain old abandoned her as she was losing her shit. I didn’t though. I went above and beyond to make sure that she and the dogs were provided for and she snagged defeat from the jaws of victory.

I think she was expecting me to be glad to hear from her. If I was I would have also been appalled; she isn’t tracking well and even a few paragraphs of IM text just bleed crazy, narcissistic crazy, delusional, self absorbed, untamed and unfettered crazy. I’m not even sure if she knows we are divorced. It wouldn’t matter anyhow, she’d tell the story the way she wanted to, facts never much stood in her way.

I feel a bit guilty typing this out, I’m going beyond the point where it feels comfortable but not even scratching the surface, and, really, I don’t think about it much. In more recent memory I remember mourning the loss of my dog.

I don’t know about now, but at one time she sure could sing.