Flashing Red Neon
Dec. 21st, 2004 05:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraSo Annie calls me yesterday morning and of course, she has been completely unsuccessful in interesting deep-pocketed members of the Family – read eccentric Auntie Jane in her Ithaca eyrie – in subsidizing my Adventures In Retail. Nor do I particularly blame Jane: on paper, at least, it does not look like a good business proposition; in an eerie recap of My Adventures in Novel Writing, I have bitten off a piece of narrative complexity bigger than I can chew; and however chummy with the familial ghosts who hang with Mnemosyne on the front porch outside the House of Usher, Jane's got this world's priorities straight: her son, the doctor and his three daughters whose chronological spacing is so eerily similar to the synapses of the original Vogel clan that you have to imagine that the Universe is giving the prototype another chance to get it right.
(That's three times I've used the word "eerie" (or its homonym) in less than two hundred words plus my sentence structure is very convoluted. Hey! It's my journal and I can write what I want to.)
Nonetheless, I feel set up. If Annie could do nothing for me, she should have left me the fuck alone. I didn't volunteer to bend her ear last week. In fact, I got off the phone as soon as I could and dammit, she called me back and pried.
"Oh, Patty," she tells me yesterday, "we spent the entire weekend on the phone rehashing the whole tortured history of the Vogel clan, remembering every horrible detail, what a miserable little waif you were –"
And I'm thinking, great. Not only is there no fabulous cash giveaway but now my cover's been blown. The big red neon LOSER sign blinks once more on my forehead.
It is hard to justify feeling furious with someone when all they've been doing is trying to be helpful. Nevertheless, I succeeded. In my ancient copy of the Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – one of the few actual relics I managed to rescue from the House of Usher – there is a biographical note on Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle that includes an anecdote that perplexed me as a child: Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle and a colleague are walking in a garden. The colleague is a cripple. At some point during the walk, the cripple's legs give way and he collapses to the ground. And instead of extending a helping hand, Sir Arthur continues to walk on! The point being that Sir Arthur decided the colleague's pride was more important than an amble through the flowers.
Sir Arthur! Dawg!
Anyway, I try to explain this to Annie who is growing more and more flustered. "I guess it's true what Oscar Wilde said: no good deed goes unpunished!" she hurls at me before we end the call. Neither of us go so far as to actually hang up on the other, but on my end, I was tempted.
So my final bequest from my mother is an epitet: I am now "Poor Patty."
Well, every heroine needs a defining Scarlett O'Hara moment. I suppose this one's mine. As God is my witness, I will never be Poor Patty again.
In other news, business abruptly soared yesterday which I'm tempted to attribute to Mercury finally lurching out of retrograde but which common sense tells me is due to Christmas vacationers. My pals, the Nevada monster garage guy and his wife, dropped a hundred and fifty. Another guy bought out a shelf for stocking stuffers. A third couple drove all the way down from Vacaville. "We only came to Monterey because we wanted to visit your store!" they told me. They only bought a couple of bottles but I was flattered anyway.
I expect business will continue to be good until Xmas and then we bottom out into the absolute Slough of Despair that is retail in January. Somehow I'll have to get us through it. Cash flow, cash flow, cash flow. If I make 20 K in July next year, then I'll simply have to stash half of it away in anticipation of December. The Fabulous Grasshopper-to-Ant Makeover!
Also got an email from my X-Husband, Max's father, that made me very sad. He's been diagnosed with mitral valve prolapse. Going in for a transesophegeal echocardiogram today. An icky procedure. And as I read the email, I flashed on the day he delivered me the divorce papers: "Well, it wasn't because we didn't love each other…" And I felt in the present tense what I didn't feel then: a stricken heart.
(That's three times I've used the word "eerie" (or its homonym) in less than two hundred words plus my sentence structure is very convoluted. Hey! It's my journal and I can write what I want to.)
Nonetheless, I feel set up. If Annie could do nothing for me, she should have left me the fuck alone. I didn't volunteer to bend her ear last week. In fact, I got off the phone as soon as I could and dammit, she called me back and pried.
"Oh, Patty," she tells me yesterday, "we spent the entire weekend on the phone rehashing the whole tortured history of the Vogel clan, remembering every horrible detail, what a miserable little waif you were –"
And I'm thinking, great. Not only is there no fabulous cash giveaway but now my cover's been blown. The big red neon LOSER sign blinks once more on my forehead.
It is hard to justify feeling furious with someone when all they've been doing is trying to be helpful. Nevertheless, I succeeded. In my ancient copy of the Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – one of the few actual relics I managed to rescue from the House of Usher – there is a biographical note on Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle that includes an anecdote that perplexed me as a child: Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle and a colleague are walking in a garden. The colleague is a cripple. At some point during the walk, the cripple's legs give way and he collapses to the ground. And instead of extending a helping hand, Sir Arthur continues to walk on! The point being that Sir Arthur decided the colleague's pride was more important than an amble through the flowers.
Sir Arthur! Dawg!
Anyway, I try to explain this to Annie who is growing more and more flustered. "I guess it's true what Oscar Wilde said: no good deed goes unpunished!" she hurls at me before we end the call. Neither of us go so far as to actually hang up on the other, but on my end, I was tempted.
So my final bequest from my mother is an epitet: I am now "Poor Patty."
Well, every heroine needs a defining Scarlett O'Hara moment. I suppose this one's mine. As God is my witness, I will never be Poor Patty again.
In other news, business abruptly soared yesterday which I'm tempted to attribute to Mercury finally lurching out of retrograde but which common sense tells me is due to Christmas vacationers. My pals, the Nevada monster garage guy and his wife, dropped a hundred and fifty. Another guy bought out a shelf for stocking stuffers. A third couple drove all the way down from Vacaville. "We only came to Monterey because we wanted to visit your store!" they told me. They only bought a couple of bottles but I was flattered anyway.
I expect business will continue to be good until Xmas and then we bottom out into the absolute Slough of Despair that is retail in January. Somehow I'll have to get us through it. Cash flow, cash flow, cash flow. If I make 20 K in July next year, then I'll simply have to stash half of it away in anticipation of December. The Fabulous Grasshopper-to-Ant Makeover!
Also got an email from my X-Husband, Max's father, that made me very sad. He's been diagnosed with mitral valve prolapse. Going in for a transesophegeal echocardiogram today. An icky procedure. And as I read the email, I flashed on the day he delivered me the divorce papers: "Well, it wasn't because we didn't love each other…" And I felt in the present tense what I didn't feel then: a stricken heart.
