0003 Dalera 09: Patience

Today started with a dream:

It's late, and Jessie and I and two other people are driving in the darkness. We're lost, and we're tired, and we need to find a place to stop for the night. We come across a manorhouse, and the servant that answers the door looks at us suspiciously and tells us that, "the families are under oath not to turn away the needy, but tonight was a bad night for us to arrive." He assigns us each a room by giving us each a card and telling us to sleep in our specified quarters, nowhere else, and then in the morning we should be gone with first light if we can.

The two people with us that I didn't recognize received the same room, a "master bedroom for guests" with a king-sized bed meant for two people. In one corner of the room is a rope, and the servant says that it holds the chandelier in another room above someone's bed. They crawl into bed and are unconscious almost instantly, tossing and turning. He mentions off-handedly what a tragedy it would be if one of the guests pulled the rope loose in their sleep. As we're leaving, we hear a crash, and then a few drops of blood spatter the sheet covering our "associates."

Jessie receives a room with a single day bed and we reluctantly part, knowing we'd be incapable of sharing that space to sleep. My room is upstairs somewhere. I'm told that it's in the Topiary, near the Cambrai Hall, or at least that's what I think I hear. I tell the servant I think I can find it, and he looks at me skeptically but leaves me to wander the halls of this ancient house, filled with living plants and shadows. Twice I go up a staircase and think I've come back to the same landing as before.

All of the rooms and halls are labelled in small brass plaques, but what I thought was archaic English may not be. The word I heard as "Cambrai" is spelled with something that's either an abnormally stylized "final i" or else it's some other letter entirely, a short vertical stroke with a long intro serif, more like a one or a stylized seven than a letter. Now I'm starting to doubt what I heard, and where I am. I still haven't slept; I can't find my room. I find the Topiary, but not the bedroom I've been told is within, and I'm loath to fall asleep anywhere else, now more than ever.

In time, sunlight starts to filter into the house, and I start to hear voices as people rise. Twice I see people in Edwardian garb talking in the halls, and only luck keeps me from being seen. I'm not supposed to be here. Someone spots me and approaches, an older woman with red hair. She smiles when she sees me and addresses me as quot;Adama," saying it's good to see me again after so long. I stammer my way through a conversation, apologizing for being distracted and claiming I haven't slept a wink. She says she understands, expressing excitement at a "full gathering" after so long. She says she'll see me at breakfast in the main hall.

I say, "Thanks, auntie," on a hunch, and she makes a face, obviously annoyed. She tells me that she's tired of that joke and reminds me that I'm her cousin, not her niece. I blush and apologize, saying it was meant in jest and that if it stung, I was sorry. She's mollified at this and leaves me to my search. I find the bedroom, but now I'm too curious to sleep, and didn't we have to be gone at first light? I hurry downstairs, looking for Jessie's room or the others, but the house has changed. Her room is gone, and in its place is a long, open space lined with statues.

I start to panic, but before I can do anything an older man grabs my shoulder, spins me around, and begins to regale me with how wonderful it is to see the family's "shining star." He goes on at length about how he knew from the first moment he saw me that I would go on to do great things, that he knew it from my sculpt. I blink, and he motions behind me to an empty space in the corridor where he is obviously seeing something I can't. He describes it in detail, and others present nod admiringly. He then tells me that outside, everyone is "muddy" and "cloudy", but that he can spot a member of the clan in an instant because they're "clear" with a "shining heart" inside. My panic is at odds with my confusion. If he can spot outsiders, why haven't I been sent away yet?

Everyone leaves, and I ask someone in parting if there's breakfast. He looks at me patronizingly and says it's in the Great Hall, but that I should watch myself, as Brogan—I think—has it in for me. I follow the crowd, and on the way I hear someone say, disparagingly, "once a Mercedes, always a Mercedes." No-one's looking at me as this is being said; I think it's in reference to Brogan. I still have no idea what's happening, but now I'm more hungry than tired.

Sunlight floods the Great Hall and six longtables are set with fine china and genuine silver. Servants bring in food and start serving, and we all take our seats. Someone pelts me with a roll, and I turn to see a man—a grown boy, really, not much older than I— with a sneering smirk and sideburns, in a white button-down shirt, brown suspenders that match his pants and shoes, and gold cufflinks. I heft the roll as if to throw it back, but before I can a crash fills the hallway. One of the servants, in adjusting a heavy mirror hanging on the wall, has brought it down on top of himself. Part of the glass has shattered and spilled on the ground, the rest crushing him under its weight.

In a flash, Brogan is rushing to the back of the hall, reciting lyric inspirational poetry, and suddenly I understand everything. The clan is filled with hereditary mages, and I am apparently one of my generation's most powerful; I'm expected to rise one day to lead. The Mercedes family has long been marginalized because their power is weak, but they're planning a coup because unlike most of the families, they actually train in their talents, learning to make the most of what they have. Brogan Mercedes is my rival for leadership of the clan, not very powerful, but very showy and very skilled at what he can do.

Brogan puts the audience in thrall as he infuses strength into the family servant, lifting one trembling fist in a gesture of triumph. The servant groans and strains, and then lifts the heavy glass and silver mirror off of himself, rising and single-handedly returning it to the wall. Brogan turns to me, smirks again, waves his hand at the shattered glass, and spits a final couplet that fuses the shards of shattered glass into a heart-shaped mirror. The Mercedes family erupts in applause for their golden child while the remainder of the gathered clap half-heartedly.

A few elders look to me, disapprovingly. An older woman—likely an aunt, perhaps the mother of the woman with red hair—clucks her tongue at me and chides me for letting Brogan show off and prove he's got the gift. If I'd just lifted the mirror, I could've gotten the applause and put Brogan in his place. I smile back and say that I've forced Brogan to give away his method, that in his haste to demonstrate what he could do, he's revealed his focus, and that now if I need to face him, I know how to put a stop to his powers. This earns me some raised eyebrows and some quiet chuckles as the clan's next leader proves her worth once more.

That's when my body said I'd had enough sleep, and I had work besides. I could try to analyze this one, and there are just enough hooks to point me in the right direction, but I'm loath to spoil what was in all other regards this really awesome hidden-reality vision of modern people in fin de siècle clothing and magic and internecine feuding.

---

In other news, Jessie and I have once again surfed the Luck Plane.

Those who've been following the continuing saga know that I filed bankruptcy, and that I surrendered the house. As part of my bankruptcy plan, I had to keep paying the utilities on the property until the bank got around to the
foreclosure. That, as it turned out, would be a long and arduous process. They told me that, because I was still in bankruptcy, they were legally obliged to leave me alone and not contact me or do anything with or to the house or mortgage. I didn't have to pay, of course, and they weren't going to ask me to do so, but they also had a backlog of cases to resolve and weren't in any hurry to deal with me because of the bankruptcy flag. Thus, I thought I'd be in a state of limbo for a while, paying for utilities on two places.

One of the bills on my list of obligations was, of course, the combined water/sewer/trash bill. The trash portion of the bill was a non-negotiable seventy-seven dollars and twenty-five cents, and I even called to try to get that relieved but met a brick wall. The water/sewer portion, however, was a negligible amount, perhaps fifty dollars each every three months to cover the water that evaporated out of the heating system or flowed through the pipes to keep them from freezing in winter. I wrote off the bill every quarter as an annoyance, but not really anything I could fix for several months at a minimum.

Last Saturday, I received a bill from the Borough of Pottstown for one month's water/sewer/trash, not three. The bill amount was USD5977.20. That's over an order of magnitude greater than the last bill, for one-third of the time. The bill also tells me how much water that is, and according to the meter, I used 968,660 gallons of water. In a month.

On Thilya, I called the utility department and asked them to check the meter. The clerk said that she'd be glad to help out, since this was "highly abnormal," and that they'd call be back in a few days to tell me what the real reading on the meter was.

Bralya morning, she woke me up with a call at 08h00, telling me that she was sorry to call so early, but that she had authorized the utility department to turn off the water at the street, because "the agent that went out to read the meter said he could hear water running inside the house, and the meter was even higher than before." I told her she did the right thing, and that I'd have to call my lawyer to find out next steps. She asked me when I'd be able to come out and have a plumber find out what was wrong, and I took the five minutes to explain the whole story to her. At the end, she replied with a quiet "oh" and then thanked me for letting her know before ending the call.

My lawyer didn't have great news for me at first; the bill was obviously mine to handle, because I was obligated to pay the utilities. However, when I told him of the "running water" bit, he said I needed to contact
Countrywide as soon as possible to let them know there might be damage to the property and that they might take care of things, but he didn't leave me with a lot of hope on the matter. I called Countrywide on Thursday afternoon, but I spent half an hour in IVR-hell and then gave up.

Kimya morning, I managed to get through to an operator and got the name of the specialist assigned to my case. I then proceeded to get him on the phone with me, live, and give him a fast synopsis of the problem, ending the explanation with "you need to do something because Countrywide's investment here is at potential risk of damages." His response was, essentially, to tell me that anything I had been told prior about his company not being able to do anything because of my bankruptcy was crap. He said that, as my surrender of the property was in an approved plan, that was as good as relief from stay in the eyes of the law and that he was going to file the paperwork to move me out of bankruptcy status. He told me to call back in a week, and that I should be able to get through to general customer service instead of the bankruptcy department. They would then be able to tell me where to send the bill and everything else.

So, by Slacking off, I've been able to pass the buck on some kind of major plumbing disaster at my old property, sidestep a six-thousand-dollar bill, jump the queue on the foreclosure track, drop some karma on the mortgage company that would still be getting paid if only they'd negotiated a short sale in the first place, and leave a mess for somebody else to clean.

I feel like I ought to feel bad about my failure to be the responsible adult in this situation, but I'm too busy bathing in schadenfreude to care.

I'm into making lampshades out of the skin of "just his way"people.

Oh, my. What to post, what to post. More to the point, where to begin. Once again, I've let things build up to the megapost stage, but that's mostly because I dislike making a number of small posts throughout the day. For whatever reason, I prefer the entries that I make into this diary to be fairly substantial, so I tend not to say when single events crop up that would make decent entries, simply because I feel like there's not enough to them. This leads me to put off posting for far longer than I should.

I guess the issue at hand most immediately is the dream I had last night. It's the first time in a long while that LoveBear played a central role, not me. That sentence still sounds quite ludicrous, but I'm sure anyone who knows me can understand what I mean by it, I hope. At any rate, the setting seemed antiquated, lots of wooden fixtures and what I would think these days of old-fashioned housing on narrow streets, lots of kids playing ball and such. The one thing that stuck out about the setting, though, was the fact that the Jewish community was very Mafia-esque. They really did run things behind the scenes, and everyone knew it but it was politically incorrect to
call them on it because they still publically played the "victims of the world's hatred" routine.

Bennie and I and someone we were visiting had been invited to go to someone's house for a meal, and it would've been a bad move to turn it down, but I tried anyway. The old man asking us if we wanted to eat with him asked me why I was being rude, and I asked in return if he'd be willing to join me for bacon cheeseburgers that I'd just made. He looked justifiably insulted and said that while he was under a prohibition to partake in my food, I was under no such restriction to eat his and so he had the right to expect me to take him up on his offer, while I had no such guarantee in response.

Then we were inside his house, and his kids are playing in the kitchen with a dog, and his wife—or maybe his daughter; he was pretty old—was at the sink, washing dishes. Between the sink with all the dirty dishes in it,
and the window over it where wind off of the street blew into the room to kepe it cool, sat a huge pile of raw hamburger. For whatever reason, the people in this brand of Judaism bought meat fresh at the store every morning, and they cooked it that evening, but it was against their religion to refrigerate it in the meantime, so it was just sitting there. I'd heard rumors about this, but I'd never seen anything to substantiate it until then.

I turned to the old man and pointed to the meat and told him that wasn't healthy. He sneered at me that it was tradition and if I was turning my nose up at it then I was probably incapable of understanding anything else about
his faith. I turned to the kids and asked them if they wanted to eat meat that had been sitting in dirty dishwater. They said no. I asked them if they wanted to eat meat that had been curing in the sun. They said no. I asked them why they ate the meat that was sitting on the countertop exposed without a cover. They shook their heads and shrugged.

The old man started to tell me that the countertop was scrubbed clean every night and I was making up stories to try to belittle his faith, when suddenly the dog jumped up on the counter and made a run for the pile of hamburger.
The woman at the counter swiped at it with a wooden spoon and it jumped back down to the floor, but I rounded on the old man and pointed at the dog and said, "You might as well have thrown that meat on the floor right then. You have to assume every meal you've ever eaten has been licked, bitten or pissed on by that dog."

At this, Bennie gave me this look that said, quite plainly, that however much he may have agreed with my sentiments, I had just gone way out of line in stating them publicly. Our friend—I never did figure out who it was—starts freaking out that I'm going to get all three of them killed. The kids start crying because they've been eating tainted meat. The mom's yelling at the kids to be quiet because they're having hysterics over nothing. The old man is yelling at me about how I'm one of those dirty stinking goyim. I'm yelling at the old man about his stupid religious rules don't mean a damn thing to be because I'm a Gentile. Someone puts a hand on my shoulder to spin me around, and—

Then I woke up. I have no idea what any of it means. I'm not even sure I want to explore it. It's too much of a treasure left unexplained.

---

I keep wanting to talk about the whole home-buying process, and yet I keep avoiding it. It's almost as if I feel like I'm going to jinx the whole thing by discussing it anywhere. It's weird. Though, I also don't like posting stories in the middle, and this one is clearly not done yet, though that seems a totally stupid reason not to post. I mean, no story is every truly finished, or even begun for that matter, and so at best one gets coherent snippets that stand on their own as meaningful. Clive Barker used this trick once to get out of writing the ending to a novel he didn't know how to finish—Weaveworld—and while it's a brilliant book, the lack-of-ending is truly obnoxious, so I don't like doing it. 

At any rate, the mortgage paperwork is now to the bank, and the home inspection happened last week. The inspector found a number of things wrong with the house, but most of them were trivial. The big on that concerns me is asbestos wrapping on the pipes in the basement that's starting to flake, but neither they nor we can afford to have it professionally removed, so it's going to stay there for a while. It should be harmless for the time being.
It's just annoying. The other big issue is the roof. It's not leaking yet, but it's probably going to start in the next year ago according to the inspector's estimates.

The nice thing is that the sellers have agreed to fix everything I considered important but those two things. The boiler flue is rusted, the drainage spouts are clogged, the shutoff valve to the washing machine is broken, and a
number of other minor things need to be fixed. The sellers have agreed to handle all of that, because they've got a house they want to buy and so they're willing to keep us happy with their deal so they can afford the house they want. I'm jazzed by this.

Hopefully Monday we'll get copies of the signed addendum and then the buying can proceed apace. I've gotten very good at initialing pieces of paper that have been placed before me without worrying about what they say. I get the impression that if I were to ask what every piece of paper I've been asked to initial or sign meant, someone along the way would have me killed as a threat to the bureaucracy. I value my life too much to question niggling details such as the ownership of my soul.

This whole housebuying thing really has my head tied up in knots. I'm consciously aware of going through the process, and yet the fact that in two months if all goes well I will be tied to a piece of land hasn't really sunk into my brain as of yet. I doubt it will until I actually hold the deed in my hands. It's very very strange. It's a huge commitment, one I'm not entirely sure is the right one, but that I know is better than any alternative.

Facing the nip'n'tuck was much the same.

In fact, it was almost exactly the same. I knew I needed to do it, but there was so much that could go wrong and so many problems I could end up having to face, and yet none of them were as bad as the idea of not doing it. It's a huge outlay of cash. It's got a lot of hidden costs that you can either accept without question or you can turn down in bulk, but you can't really avoid.

I just hope I'm as happy with this outcome as I have been with the other.

---

This being All Saints' Day, I suppose I should write up the results of last night's festivities, too. Jessie and I went to Bennie's for Halloween, which was nifty. Lots of people showed up, and it was good to see them all. The event was costume-required, for which everyone had something either well-done or at the very least creative.

Kage's costume was truly frightening to behold.

Jessie and I went as a pair of font-faces, Palatino and Garamond. If that sounds strange, it's because it is. Solid black outfit, with an iron-on on the back of the shirt giving a name and brief history, written in the appropriate face. Very post-modern and surreal. Very silly. We probably could've done better, but at the time I thought it sounded like a very cool idea. It didn't come off in execution nearly as well as I'd hoped.

The basis of Sue's costume had me mildly envious, admittedly. That style of suit, over which one could wear regular clothes if one wanted, is exactly the sort Jessie and I would both love to have. Personally, I would want the hood with ears attached, leaving the face open, but that's mostly because I dislike human hair on furries, myself included, so I'd rather have the complete package that way. However, that's a single trifling detail out of an
array of nifty ideas.

The big hitch is that hers was a gift, so I have no way of asking her how much it cost. I'd love to find out, though. I've seen sights that will do that sort of work, but none that do the quality of work I'd like or the price of work I can afford, at least right now. Maybe when we've got our debts paid, though.

The house is definitely a step in the right direction for that, though. No more rent into a black hole.

At any rate, much fun was to be had. Wolf made chili which turned out quite good, if a bit different from my usual style. Though, that's because I make chili-for-Frito-Pie which tends to be very thick, and this was thinner chili-for-eating-alone which was very juicy and flavorful. Sue made what I can only describe as country mashed potatoes which were slightly chunky and really tasty. I made broccoli and cheese, which I thought turned out alright, and Bennie picked up a cold cuts tray and some Atlanta Bread Company bread which was really good.

Everyone also brought lots of Halloween candy. I'm glad I went off the diet for a few days to enjoy it. Well, I say I'm glad I did. I actually can't even drink diet soda any more; it's too sweet. I can handle real sugar, but in very small amounts. I'm apparently better off sticking with bread and complex sugars. Anything more heavy than that and I start to feel nauseous. Being on the low-carb diet really has screwed with my body.

At least I'm losing weight, or I was.

The exercise I've been taking has helped, too, I'm sure. Even if it is just DDR on Workout Mode. It's still better than nothing, and I'm doing it three times a week these days 'cause I feel better about myself when I get some regular exercise. I thought that was just the health-nuts talking, but it turns out to be true. Lots of crazy stuff like that. Who'da thunk it? 

This started out as a Halloween thingi and turned into a ramble, so I'll finish by saying thank-you to Bennie and Gideon and Vulp for having us over, and to everyone that kicked in and made it such a good evening. Now I have to start prepping for Thanksgiving.