Bats

I liked the bat. It was a soul, a ghost, and it was welcome. I shouldn’t leave the door partly open. The cat wants to go in and out as she pleases, out to the balcony, up on her catwalk. I don’t have a screen door there. Screen doors are so bourgeoise. When I went to Rome, and I saw that my hotel room window just opened, so that I could reach out and touch the pigeons were they not so far away, I was like, this is living.

The afternoon was with my mom and sister. My mom was having outpatient surgery. They had to cut a thing out. It wasn’t cancer. Still, we sat by her with an IV in, and chatted to the anesthesia people and the nurses and the surgeon.

When she was done, a nurse said, come back, but then said, only one of you, and I was like, huh ,what complications causes only one person to be allowed back, but mostly I distracted myself for another hour, and we got her home, though shoeless. Shoes were too much for her, anestheseologically.

I went by my dad’s because my car is making a noise. I am in my forties, but technically my dad owns my car. I don’t know. I told him the noise. Popped the hood. We took off a top and saw it didn’t have much fluid in it. Transmission fluid! Great!

He drove me to two different car parts shops. One was closed. One told us they did not even stock Honda fluids. Never!

We went back to his house. He poured some generic transmission fluid in. Then I put the lid back on, and I saw that we had been looking at the power steering fluid.

This is the kind of shit I would do, for sure, mixing things up and then trying to figure out how to cover myself to spare my ego because I can’t do anything right, I can’t handle this world, I just can’t, can’t, capitalism, fuck.

I would have expected my dad to curse and slam something down when I told him we had made a mistake, but instead he just explained how to fix the problem the next day.

The way we’ve worked things, I am somewhat incompetent, and my dad is fully competent. So this was kind of a shift. But I was good with it.

Maybe him ageing was putting us on more level ground.

What you have to know is that my dad was abused as a kid, so his competence is kind of his thing, and we all benefit from it if he doesn’t get too scared when he makes a mistake.

I drove home.

Slowly.

On city streets.

I was watching Arnold Schwartzeneggar’s documentary when the bat flew in.

When I have seen a mouse in my house, or a big bug, I panic.

The bat didn’t panic me at all. I just thought, wow.

And immediately I understood why people are scared of bats, how they are related to the supernatural. It wasn’t a giant moth. It was a flying mammal. The flapping noises are the same as a big moth, but the speed is so much faster. I couldn’t follow it. I liked knowing it was in there. It was the ghost of no one or maybe everyone.

I opened all the windows that didn’t have screens (Rome-style), and shut the doors to the bedroom half of the apartment. I slept hard, after a day of medical professionals and my mom getting cut on.

When I woke up, it was gone.

At least I can’t find it.