DISPATCH 3: GOD ROLLING AND SMOKING MY SORRY ASS
RE: CAR TROUBLES, #INYOURWALLSWEDNESDAY, LIQUID SQUIRRELS, AND ALIEXPRESS PROSTHETIC HANDS
Since we have now passed the midpoint of the year, here is my main lesson from 2024 so far: never say “it can only go up from here” because you’re tempting fate, and plus you’re normally wrong anyhow.
Last week was suchhhh a soup sandwich that I’ll be forgoing my typical format which includes what media I’ve consumed in the week. For better or worse, I had quite enough content in my own life. So much, in fact, that I’ll be splitting this into two parts as my original draft was over 10 pages long. Sorry to the haters and losers who can’t stand my posts.
A few weeks ago, I was thirty minutes into a six hour road trip and my tire light went on for my back left tire. What followed was an absolute comedy of errors in which I tried to fill up my tire with air, realized the air pump was broken and that I’d only succeeded in letting air out, tried to change to my spare, let a random trucker from Pennsylvania change my tire for me, drove at 50 MPH to the next closest gas station, reinflated my back left tire from my self induced flat, and changed my tire back, with only a little help from a different random guy at the other gas station.
So it was funny – comedic, even – when, two weeks later, I drove over a nail with the same tire and gave myself a flat again.
Right after I sent my newsletter last Friday (June 28th), my boyfriend drove me to pick up my car from the mechanic.
“Easy fix, $23,” said the mechanic. “It was a slow leak, not a puncture. The lining was separated from the tire, so we replaced it.”
Okay, I thought, but what about the nail that was definitely in my tire. But then, this would explain why the tire light went on during the road trip, and the mechanic was the experts. Plus, I was already late to work.
So I drove back to my house, rushed about to get my work uniform, and narrowly missed cutting off a cop turning out of my street. Then I DID cut off a cop, but it didn’t matter – I was now late enough that multiple managers were calling me as I pulled into the parking lot at work. This would all be fine except then my tire light went back on because of fucking course it did. As it were, there was still a nail in my tire.
I blustered into work, finding the general manager on the phone trying to call me. By way of explanation, I tried to tell them all about the nail in my tire. At this point, I was well and truly worked up, explaining how I’d had a flat for a week, and the mechanics were supposed to fix it, but they didn’t, and now I was really mad.
In the process of trying to explain my tardiness to two of the managers, I pulled out my phone and swiped to the photo I’d taken of the nail in my tire. This was a tactical error: I should have found the photo BEFORE I took my phone out, as swiping puts you at risk of accidentally showing your managers an unflattering portion of your camera roll. Say, heinous flash selfies of you sitting on the curb in the parking lot eating chicken tacos. At least they did me the courtesy of pretending they didn’t see my parking lot portraits. Now not only was I spitting mad, I also wanted to throw up on the spot.
My frustration continued to consume me for the rest of my shift. One could say I was a little distracted at work. In trying to read off salad ingredients to a customer, I started to stumble over my words, told him the salad had ‘croutumbers’ on it, trailed off, and then made a face exactly like this: :|
I was also telling anyone who’d listen what had happened to me. One of my coworkers asked how I was doing – presumably just as a formality – and I said BAD and then told them all about the nail and the tire and the mechanic who didn’t fix it.
“Yep, I used to work in a garage,” he said, forced into having a real conversation when he probably just wanted to go home. “That sounds about right. They probably looked right at it and decided not to fix it.”
Okay, I understand that I am in some ways naive and guileless. I would never claim to be worldly or knowledgeable or have street smarts or common sense or anything in that realm. But is this like a known stereotype, that all mechanics suck? Because another one of my coworkers echoed this sentiment and I couldn’t tell if these people were uniquely biased against mechanics or if mechanics were a group of people I just shouldn’t trust on the whole.
Anyways, by the time work was over, my car had a really alarming amount of bird shit on it. This, I would later learn, was foreshadowing, but it was not the primary concern. I needed to get home. My tire, which was supposed to be at 33 psi, was at 24 psi; and I, in my allergy to taking the easy way out, decided to change to my spare at midnight after work.
So, Friday night, I found myself in the rain in the parking lot of my job, wrenching my whole body backwards in an attempt to loosen the lug nuts on my increasingly flat tire. The good news was I was on the phone with Mary the whole time, who entertained me with a foul Leonard Cohen tweet (see below for what post exactly).
The less good news was that my male coworkers kept stopping to ask if I needed help. One of the people who inquired was a manager, Joe, who’d been regaling some of my coworkers and I with his plans to party rock at some bar that night.
“Do you… uh… want any help with that?” He said, collared shirt already wet from the rain.
“No, it’s all good. I’ve had to do this a lot recently,” I said.
“Do you know what’s wrong with it?” Joe said. I could tell he was torn between an obligation to help me and a desire to get the hell out of dodge. I surely didn’t want to keep him. I also would rather change the tire by myself in the rain than make small talk after an 8 hour shift.
I explained what happened with the nail and the lining and the mechanic and what all. “It’s a whole situation,” I said.
“A whole situation,” he echoed.
A whole situation, indeed.
I would end up getting the nail thing patched up on Saturday, but that wasn’t the only instance of car troubles for the collective this week. My boyfriend also ended this week with a hole in his car. It all started with just a scratch.
The creatures in my wall have been very active this week. Since we’ve moved to this apartment, there’s been an occasional scurrying in the walls. We’re on the second floor of a triplex that has two units on the bottom and one on top, so obviously we could hear pigeons on the roof. But on Monday, the animals started to pop off.
There was a frightening scrabbling noise in the ceiling which was made all the more concerning as it seemed to be concentrated right on the entrance to the attic. It wasn’t immediately clear exactly what the noise was. It wasn’t the pigeons because there was no cooing. It sounded far too large to be mice. It definitely had claws. I was picturing something like Chris Fleming’s Depiglio, or maybe a Bertha Rochester vibe – like when Kenny Beats found Mac Demarco living in his attic.
After evacuating Monday afternoon because I was afraid of something or someone bursting through my walls, I returned to my apartment in anticipation of having a friend over for dinner. That’s when I took a good look at the attic and noticed that all of the windows were broken.
More importantly, perhaps, pigeons were flying in and out of both sides of the attic.
My boyfriend and I moved into this place a little over a month ago. When we toured it with the landlord, there were clearly some renovations going on; there was sort of crud all over the place.
“Man, it looks like a bird tore through here,” the landlord had said on the tour.
I had thought this was kind of an odd remark to make at the time, but I hadn’t realized he was being literal.
Even with the pigeons, though, I figured there was something else in the attic. This is because the noise sounded like something a lot heavier than a pigeon. It was also scrabbling on the floor, which I kind of thought pigeons didn’t have to do on account of the wings. So I filed a work order under the category ‘MICE/RATS’ because there was no category for ‘I DON’T REALLY KNOW BUT IT’S CRAWLING AROUND MAKING A FUCK TON OF NOISE.’
Between my car troubles, the unidentified living thing in my ceiling, and the general state of things, I pretty much snapped. We told the friend who was supposed to come over for dinner about the scratching sounds, and said she might not want to be in our house when there was a risk of some very energetic animal with claws falling into our hallway at any point. She said it was fine and we could still cook together. But I was like, Girl, the creature. So instead we went out for tacos.
The good news is that I’ve been experiencing symptoms recently, as is common for hypochondriacs. I’ve been searching for a cause, and after discarding malfunctioning gallbladder, rare tumor, and collapsed lung, the most likely suspect I found was ‘anxiety disorder’ (lame, already knew about that one). Luckily, having pigeons in my attic energized a whole new wave of searches, such as “diseases you can get from pigeons in your attic”. And let me tell you, these ones have some crazy names, like Cryptococcosis, and Histoplasmosis, and chlamydia.
This is the topic I should have led off with when my mom called Monday night to ask what I thought about the upcoming election, a line of inquiry which often leads to a follow up question pertaining to what exactly I’m doing with my life. I should have said, hey mom, I know you’re probably concerned about my life path in tandem with the direction of the nation, but did you know that prolonged exposure to pigeon shit can give you a rare form of meningitis?
Instead, I said I couldn’t really think about the election right now because of the animals in my attic, and sent her the evidence of the mysterious scratching sounds and the pigeons. My mom found the whole ‘creature in my walls’ situation extremely funny and said it was probably ‘the honey badger.’ As in, the honey badger of the viral video from a dozen years ago. You know, ‘the honey badger’, have you ever seen that video? It’s hilarious. ‘The honey badger don’t give a shit’, that one. I got her drift, but she insisting on sending the link to the family group chat.
She tried to show my dad the video of the animal noises, but my dad was too busy watching the honey badger video, laughing so hard he was close to tears.
Tuesday morning I awoke at 6 AM to scritching and skittering in my ceiling yet again. I also had a text from my landlord which informed me that we’d hear roofers in the next few days on the east side of the house. That was cool and fine, I suppose. I didn’t know there was an issue with the roof – aside from the obvious with the windows – but it’s good to know the roofers were coming. I would have preferred to hear from an exterminator, but I had to go to work, and my boyfriend would be home during the day to handle the animals.
So I went to work Tuesday morning, showing anyone who would listen the noises of animals in my walls. Here were some theories that we came up with about what it could be: squirrels, raccoons, possums, large rats, very dense pigeon. Of these, the one that seemed most plausible was squirrels, so I adopted that as my working theory of what was in my attic.
Saying this will only betray some ignorance on my behalf, but I kind of figured that hook hands were obsolete because there are more effective prosthetic options out there. As such, I was surprised when a man with a hook hand approached me at work on Tuesday filming me on a digital camera, and told me I should go down to Florida because they have the best key lime pie. Saying shit like this is why Mary thinks my life is like a Bob Dylan song. He had an American flag hat on, too. I guess that’s patriotism.
I was still thinking about this when I got home Tuesday afternoon. This led me to do some research on whether hook hands were, in fact, anomalous among prosthetic wearers. I believe the answer is yes but I am in no way an expert on this issue so you should not quote me on this. In my Googling, I did find some cool prosthetics on AliExpress.
I also found this article on prosthetics which says, and I quote:
As of 2005, nearly 2 million people in the United States were living with limb loss. That's approximately 1 amputee in every 150 people, and that number is projected to double or triple by 2050.
Double or triple by 2050?? What could that possibly mean?? And then this is reiterated later in the paper. Are we anticipating some sort of mass limb loss event? Should we be preparing for the extremity apocalypse?1
I was so struck by this information that I tried to call my boyfriend to tell him immediately, but he was seeing a man about a GameCube. This was kind of a B-plot running through this week: my boyfriend found a GameCube he desired on Facebook Marketplace, endeavored to buy it, low-key got scammed, and haggled to return it (but perhaps this is a different post).
When he got home, I told him breathlessly about the startling number of limbs we expect to lose as a nation in the next 25 years. He listened patiently, but we were interrupted by a call: the exterminator! O, frabjuous day. Soon enough, we had a gruff, squat man with a big ladder standing in our hallway listening to the video of the scrabbling on my phone.
“Yeah, that sounds like squirrels, or maybe raccoons,” the pest guy said. “The problem with squirrels is that I’m going out of town. And squirrels, I mean, I can put poison up there and kill em, but then they stink. They’ll get stuck in the traps and liquefy.”
Liquid squirrels, I thought, sounded rather unpleasant, especially when I was supposed to be celebrating the founding of our aging nation. The exterminator went down to the basement with my boyfriend. I joined them several minutes later.
“Well, there’s definitely also mice,” my boyfriend said in the basement. “But, you know, that’s to be expected.”
I mean, not necessarily, I thought. Between the mice, pigeons, and potential squirrels, we had a veritable menagerie on our hands.
Back upstairs, the exterminator tried banging on the hatch to the attic. He retreated back to his car and returned with a gas mask, and then continued to push on the hatch, which was then raining crud onto the carpet in our hallway2. Finally, he pushed through to the attic, peeking up to take in the damage.
“Fucking birds,” said the legs on the ladder. “These motherfuckers. Goddamn.”
Hearing your grizzled exterminator said “goddamn” in an awestruck voice upon viewing your attic is not precisely ideal. He pulled the rest of his body into the attic and shut the hatch. It wasn’t long before the banging began. My boyfriend and I eyed each other from across the dining room table as we listened to the exterminator thrash about in the attic.
Of the two units below us in our building, one is occupied by our neighbor who I think should have jester’s privilege as he seems to always be in situations, like I am. He’s quite the character: he’s got a Southern accent, bleached blond hair, often wears clashing patterns, and one time I saw him in a shouting match with a man on the street carrying a bag of bottles and cans. As we awaited word from the exterminator, we heard our neighbor shouting outside again, which was not entirely out of the ordinary. Then he came thudding up the stairs.
“Y’all gotta move your cars, he’s throwing broken glass,” he said. “I tried to holler but he didn’t hear me.”
The image in my mind, perhaps inspired by some recent fear mongering from other retired neighbors, was of a hooligan producing shards from some sort of sack and then throwing them at cars for the love of the game. It wasn’t entirely clear which villain our neighbor meant, but when we got down, large shards of broken glass were flying down from the attic. Our exterminator was trying to board up the windows. In doing so, he’d thrown broken glass onto my boyfriend’s car, putting a hole in the hood.
This was very 👍Awesome 👍. In addition to the hole in the hood, there was just a lot of broken glass in general on the car, but we didn’t really have time to get that off as we ourselves did not want to have jagged glass plopped on us.
We moved our cars and went back to our dining room table, trying not to pay attention to the sounds of struggle from upstairs. Maybe 45 minutes after he’d gone up, the exterminator in his gas mask emerged from our attic with a covered bucket.
“There’s three pigeons in there,” he said as he passed us. Then he disappeared around the side of the house.
My boyfriend and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows. Soon, the pest guy was disassembling his ladder and securing the hatch to the attic back in place. Then he approached us, speaking through his gas mask.
“A few flew out on their own, I chased eight out the window, and I caught three in the bucket, plus a nest – so really four,” said the exterminator. “I couldn’t even see if there were squirrels up there because there were so many birds. This is the largest population of birds I’ve ever seen in a single house.”
He’d also boarded up the windows to prevent the pigeons from coming back. He assured us he’d be back the next day (Wednesday) to check on the traps to prevent any less than solid squirrels, if they materialized.
Once the pest control guy left, my boyfriend and I looked at each other and laughed. Less of a ‘haha funny' laugh, and more of a ‘what the hell just happened’ laugh. We were now roughly 20 pigeons lighter and up a lot of broken glass.
And yet! The week still had more in store for us. They should invent a week that gets easier. At least I get to blog about it — part two coming tomorrow.
MORAL OF THE STORY: DON’T TRUST MECHANICS. WATCH YOUR FINGERS AND YOUR TOES. PIGEONS MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.
The real answer is that vascular disease and diabetes are the lead causes of amputation (as opposed to accidental injury), and the amount of people with those conditions is increasing. Go figure!
He vacuumed it up later with a shop vac, to be fair.