Six Years Later . . .

It has come to my attention that I've spent all our discretionary income and more on staying in Airbnbs in Massachusetts where I can easily buy cannabis products. I have enough of a stash of vape cartridges, chocolate bars and assorted gummies to face a zombie apocalypse, which is a good thing since we're heading into the zombie apocalypse for sure. 

By Zombie Apocalypse, I mean the deterioration of society as we know it here at the End of Empire. Although my mother, the arbiter of all things sensible, would disagree, I fully believe that a couple of thousand dollars in a money market account would only enrich bankers. It wouldn't protect me much in a zombie appocolypse. Financial ideas and maxims from the Eisenhower era no longer apply - Okay, Boomer?

Velvet and Cupcake have accompanied me and Pinko the Bear on many of these long weekends devoted to cannabis tourism. The last time we went up there, they wound up getting married. The Airbnb was just south of Massachusetts in northwest Connecticut, and it turns out that getting a marriage license is much easier in Connecticut.  In New York, where everything is still virtual, folks are waiting weeks for an appointment to show their IDs to a clerk on the computer. In Connecticut, you can show up at the County Clerk's office in the morning and get married the next day. So Pinko the Bear and I went up a couple of days early, ostensibly to reconnoiter but really to relax at somebody else's gorgeous country house. 

Even if I could afford a country house, I have never had any interest in taking on the responsibility of a country house. We have trouble enough changing the lightbulbs here at Menopausal Stoners HQ. The Bear and I have both put on a few pounds during these past six years, and we've both had health issues. I'm home recuperating now because my dang shoulder replacement broke. The repair surgery was successful, and I feel pretty sturdy now - but it's some bullshit that the screws in my total reverse shoulder replacement busted after only two years. The theory is that my bone graft never healed properly, causing micro-wiggles in the screws, which eventually snapped like so many paperclips. 

Naturally, I have asked The Man in San Antone about product failure because you never know if you can finance your retirement through litigation. I doubt it, but you can't finance your retirement through cannabis tourism either, unless you're running the dispensary.  In any case, nobody wants a creaky old lady with a bum shoulder up on a ladder changing light bulbs, and Pinko the Bear doesn't give a fuck if it's a little dark in the bathroom when he takes a shower.  So here we are.  Besides, he wound up having a triple bypass a few years ago which interfered the family jamboree we had planned for Thanksgiving.  Cupcake and her parents were all set to come to my parents' house in Houston. We had tickets to go see somebody famous sing at Goode Company Armadillo Palace and everything.

It was a sad day when Pinko the Bear had his heart attack. He tried to blame it on me and even told his heart surgeon that I'd given him a heart attack. The surgeon told Pinko the Bear that if that were true, I'd given him the best heart attack in New York since he had WALKED into the ER as opposed to going out in a box. The short version of that whole episode is that one morning at about 5:00am I was going to the bathroom and caught a whiff of cigarette smoke in the house. A conversation ensued wherein I finally expressed to Pinko the Bear in terms he could not dismiss or deny exactly how much I hated him smoking at all, much less in the house.  

He was so pissed he went off to sleep in Velvet's old room (which is now Pinko's Twitch Studio).  About 15 minutes later he stumbled into the kitchen looking for Alka Seltzer, rubbing his chest.  I told him to quit having a panic attack, gave him a Valium,  sent him to bed, and went to work. When I got home that afternoon, I shamed his mopey self into making an appointment with the doctor. The next morning, Pinko saw the doctor and handed over his tobacco pouch. The doctor did some tests and sent Pinko straight to the ER at NYP/Weill Cornell. About three weeks later, he was finally released. Here he is taking a lap on the intensive care unit after the bypass. He was a bit ornery with the nurses, but overall he was a good patient:

Here's a blurry photo of him about 6 months later fixing to get a stent in the first of three collapsed, occluded bypass veins - or whatever occluded:

Who knew bypasses collapsed? Doctors might leave that part out sometimes when they're explaining procedures. The notion was that he was soooo blocked in the "widow maker" in particular that bypassing was the better option. 

Either way, it was a rough year especially since I had to be nice when I remained pissed off about him and the smoking.  I eventually found a family therapist in Washington Heights who happened to be a communist, and we got all that settled. It's unlikely that The Bear would have been able to listen to anyone who didn't examine the role of capitalism and material conditions in our emotional lives. There was much discussion of how our relationship was Dialectic, and I was glad to have someone help me challenge Pinko's inherent patriarchal attitudes. The therapist wound up giving us some years of double sessions for the price of a regular session since he and Pinko talked politics half the time.  It worked for everyone.

Pinko is still self indulgent, and we do enable each other's bad habits, but we've settled into a comfortable life here in historic Harlem, USA that involves running up to Massachusetts periodically for cannabis products. Honestly, I thought that between the liquor lobby and Mass Tourism, there would never, ever be recreational marijuana in New York, but politicians do throw workers a bone occasionally and one thing is sure: Andrew Cuomo is a polished Democrat who knows when to throw workers a bone even when it's not End Stage Capitalism.  It will be a while before we'll be getting Gummies in our own neighborhood, and in the meantime, NYPD can suck it when someone's smoking a blunt on the corner. NYPD can suck it all day every day, if you ask me. #FTP

Anyway - the point is that Velvet and Cupcake got married at an Airbnb in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago.  Velvet got the license, hired a preacher, moved this fire pit, and we had a wedding in the back yard.

We moved the Adirondack chairs and used the wicker furniture from the front porch so it looked a little more formal.  Cupcake's parents came up Saturday morning, and her brother came for the ceremony then went back to grad school. Buzz Kill was there with his long term girlfriend and their emotional support Havanese.

Now there's a betting pool at work over how soon I'll become a grandma.  It may be the End of Empire, with all the shit that entails, but life goes on and on and on.