Flea Market Guy and I had a pretty laid back weekend despite him having to work. Sometimes he gets overwhelmed with the amount of work his business is getting so I try to be a light and just encourage him to be thankful that he’s not punching a clock and working for some idiot who would rather do or sell drugs than run his million dollar business. I mean, that’s 100% what I’m thankful for right now. And he’s pretty optimistic as well, but with sobriety comes coping and if you’ve ever loved or lived with an alcoholic, once alcohol is taken out of the picture, coping looks a lot different. And he’s done it graciously to be honest. We just hit 6 months of sobriety (YAY!) and it’s been easier than I expected. I know that is not usually the case, but things just kind of fell into place and worked. And I’m so thankful for that. But enough with the mushy stuff. Back to the work stuff.
Part of his job requires him to do interior inspections of homes that have been foreclosed on. So that is how we started out our Saturday. We drove out to the country and pulled up at what would have been a super cute split level house on some land with a dilapidated trailer behind it, two doghouses, a chicken coop, and a detached garage/workspace. Usually, the house has been secured before he has to do the interior walk through. Sometimes he is the one to secure it, it just depends. He doesn’t like to work weekends because he doesn’t like to cut in to our “together” time so that’s how I ended up going with him. I didn’t want him to feel bad about working and I like driving around in the country, especially with him. So it turned out to be a win-win situation. So we get to the back door of the house and he unlocks it and we walk into just trash. The stove was missing. It looked like maybe there had been a grease fire or something. The ceiling was black like it had smoke damage. And there was shit everywhere. Not literal shit, well, there was some dog shit in a bedroom, but you could hardly tell where it was because the floor was covered in debris. Dirty clothes, dishes, old food, old food containers. Everything. I don’t know if our feet touched the actual floor at any time during our walk through there was so much trash covering everything. We had to practically slide down the steps of the foyer to get to the basement which was filled with old music posters and album covers. And there was a very old hand made rocking horse down there.
I’m always amazed at the way people live and the way they leave things when they go. And curious about where they went and why they left things. You could tell that at some point, the person/people who lived in the house were productive and tidy. I imagine their kids moved back home after a bout with drugs and literally ran their whole lives into the ground. I could be wrong, but it’s such an epidemic, I usually assume drugs were involved when things are that trashed. I couldn’t find any clues in that house to prove it though because I was in a rush to get out. It was so dirty, I felt like there were dust mites or scabies or asbestos getting into my lungs with every breath.
So we left the house of filth and headed out to another interior inspection that was much more cleaned up than the last. We got to a trailer, also out in the country, but on a developed street. Not in trailer park, just on a street. The outside was in good condition. The inside had been mostly cleaned out, but a few things remained. A bed. A recliner. A pile of music CDs that had been made for whoever lived there. Oh, and sitting on the mantle was the guy who used to live there. In his very nice urn. All alone. At first, I couldn’t believe that someone would leave their cremated father in the house to be thrown away with the trash, but then my mind got to wandering again, of course, and I decided that it could have only been one of two reasons. They couldn’t have forgotten him there, he was very prevalent in the living room. It was the first thing you saw when you walked in. So, either the guy was a terrible person and a terrible dad. Or the kids were all dicks. I wasn’t able to piece any kind of story together because there wasn’t much to go on. But someone did take all of the appliances including the HVAC unit and all of the copper. And possibly, some of the floor. Maybe they were remodeling when he died. I couldn’t tell. Flea Market Guy wouldn’t let me bring the dead guy home with us. I thought it was disrespectful to leave him there. Especially since he is probably going to end up in a landfill very soon. I tried to google who he was. His name and birthdate and death date were written on the bottom of the urn, but I couldn’t find anything online. Not even an obituary, which goes back to my original assumption that either he was a dick or his kids are all dicks. I went with the assumption that he was the problem, because he couldn’t have raised three totally ungrateful and selfish kids, could he? (I saw a family photo). And if he was a horrible human, then there’s no telling what kind of spirit he would be in the after life, so I agreed with FMG that we should not bring home the dead guy.
He did, however, let me bring home some turkey feet. Or maybe vulture feet. I’m not really sure. I brought home some very large bird feet. Way bigger than our parrot’s feet. So I’m not sure what kind of bird it was. I found them hanging on the porch of a different house way, way out in the country that we were putting an auction sign at (another one of his many gigs). They were just strung up like a pair of sneakers on a power line and hung over a board on the porch. I didn’t notice them right away, but when I did, I debated whether I should take them or not. The house was vacant. They were clearly left behind. And since I had to take them down so they weren’t in the photos FMG had to take, I thought it would just be a bad idea to hang them back up. Plus, my 365 Days of Hoodoo book said that if I can get animal parts humanely, then I should take advantage of that. I’m paraphrasing. So I kept the feet and a tail of some sort. Maybe a squirrel? I thought of Jenny Lawson, the writer of one of my favorite books, as I was heading back to the truck with my haul of dead stuff and I thought she would be so proud. If you don’t know who she is, you are missing out on life. Also, she doesn’t know it yet, but she is my future best friend. Sorry, Liz.
We left there and headed back to the city, but not before Flea Market Guy pulled over and let me make friends with a couple of horses (pictured above).
All in all, it was a pretty good weekend.
And just in case you are wondering, the feet and tail are out in the shed. FMG wouldn’t let me bring them inside.
RouletteWeekend 
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