Brief Missive from a Bog

this week was just so borked

Oct 04, 2024

you never know when you might need a pair of four-inch gold stilettos

Due to circumstances that were entirely within my control but, I fear, no longer are, this week's post will be but brief.

We have a situation.

For one thing, I'm camped in a bog. The bog is very pretty. There were two turtles sunning themselves on a felled tree a few feet away; just now, in a synchronized leap, they blooped into the water and rippled away.

Late last night I stood in the pitch dark—the bog is remote, there's no nearby town, no ambient light—and filed a story with the flicker of reception I've got, hoping that the boggy splooshing sounds in the thick damp dark were not alligators and trying to feel my way back to Scamp without stepping on a frog.

Back inside, I stood with my hands on my hips and surveyed the debacle.

My father once mused aloud of my brother, "Tim spends a great deal of time on his home planet." It was not a judgement, merely an observable statement of fact; I am certain he has said, perhaps in stronger terms, the same of me.

As some of you have witnessed and others are more broadly aware, for the most part I do not inhabit the world, and live more or less without reference to the whole pesky business of space/time. My willingness to acknowledge the generally agreed-upon laws of physics is not great. If time, or space, or social grace, or small talk or technology or logistics or calendars or mail or things involving the math infringe upon my plans—which consist, more or less, of writing all the time—I do not recognize them, like some countries decline to recognize other countries they don't like. I am aware that there are other, possibly better ways of being; I’m aware I ought to do something about the broken whatever or the messy whatever or go to the grocery store instead of writing and looking at turtles, but frankly that is no concern of mine.

Once I came down from my writing closet and found my then-husband storming noisily around the kitchen. I said Why are you in a snit. He said, Why don't you act like a wife. I said, I do act like a wife. Here I am, standing in the kitchen. He said, It's three in the morning and you've been in your office for two weeks. I said, I’ve been working. He leaned his hands on the island he'd felt very strongly was an important feature of the "kitchenscape" and said, "And what, exactly, do you do?"

That seemed like a longer conversation than I wanted to have, though, so I went back upstairs to write.

And so it has come to pass that I glubbed up from this most recent writing jag to find I was in a bog, not a campsite, there having been quite a storm last week, but I did not have time to move to a different campground because I was writing and who wants to bother with groceries or moving or space/time when they have a thing on their mind? so I ate corn nuts and trail mix till I finished the story and then I filed it from the bog and looked around see what all I had missed.

And lo! I beheld several issues I had elected to ignore, some of them for a goodly while, that had not resolved themselves independent of my efforts, inclusive of but not limited to the colony of some kind of hybrid bug that I'd apparently cultivated in the standing water in my window seals, which bugs had unsealed those seals and moved inside, so I wrote while waving my hand around my face, as well as what I believe to be a near-total takeover of my bedding, my pillows, the cushions, their covers, whatever lies beneath the linoleum, possibly the subfloor, definitely some of the plywood, the aforementioned window seals, probably the interior of several cupboards, certainly the storage compartments, definitely the bathroom which I have stated previously is dead space in the first place, and I don't know how much of the rat fur—the fabric insulation that lines the entire Scamp and cannot be pulled out without serious equipment and quite a lot of time—by none other than the camper nomad's nemesis: black mold.

But before I could consider how I might best begin to address this fresh new bout of dingbat fuckery, my editor texted and we got into production and while we were bouncing edits back and forth, my near-new CampaPotty, purchased to replace the evil giant King Henry toilette, did suddenly break. Yes it did. Without cause. The potty done gone shat the bed, with great aplomb.

Thankfully, but unfortunately, I had set it in the shower, so its overdramatic antics were confined to the loo. But/and/however, said thankful unfortunate location meant there was no way, in fact, to amend the situation, because, in a flash, in an instant, in one horrific moment of time, the CampaPotty purchased to avoid use of the space-killing King Henry's Throne-like toilette, destroyed the Scamp's entire plumbing system during production on a story for a great and legendary newspaper where I have the privilege of working for a couple of men of generous spirit and extraordinary skill who I suspect may have occasion to say Omg what’s she done now at least three times a week. These are the selfsame kind and bafflingly accommodating men who, when I show up for editorial meetings on Zoom and it's all going great and we're talking about ledes and grafs and word counts and sources, must think hopefully, "Ah! This time she will not be weird!" and everyone is chatty and jolly and they try out a little normal conversation just to see how it goes, and say "So what'd you do this weekend?" and I say, "I went to a motorcycle rally and won a shotgun in a raffle" and they give me the look of pained despair.

So of course the CampaPotty broke in the middle of production, right when I was trying so hard to act like a person and just file a fucking story for once without getting eaten by an alligator in a bog.

The turtles have resumed their post. A blue heron just flew slowly past.

I'm sitting outside at a picnic table. I've pulled everything out, salvaged everything I can; the Scamp, however, is a fucking hazmat site, and likely won't be habitable for months. I don't have time to hold still—there's stories to finish, I've got places to go.

Tomorrow, I'll haul her off to a repair shop where more nice baffled accommodating men will give me the look of pained despair when I roll up in my mobile petri dish and tell them what I've done.

Once they’ve tested the mold, I’ll ride off into the sunset and start the next chapter of this here Tramp Scamp Traveling Shitshow: The Great Repair.