Agnus Weekus Horriblus: Oh! What a wretch I art!

The heading for this entry, though dire, is hopeful insofar as it presumes that the horriblusness is limited to a week rather than a fortnight, or a month, or a season, or—G*d forbid—a year. I have been victim of a sequence of events that have threatened to rob me of all equanimity, forbearance, and once or twice even my lady, Mlle. Madeleine. Our dear reader provided the cause for this mayhem: Mercury is in retrograde. I remember when I was working in a very small business in 2005 and it seemed as though Mercury was always going in and out of retrograde and I remember distinctly thinking “Mercury is in retrograde for Nancy Reagan and my boss, perhaps, but for nobody else.” I feel ready to revise my opinion, however, and have come to one conclusion: Fuck You Mercury.

I suppose my story begins, like all good things, with a wedding. Madeleine's sister Marthe was getting married in the wilds of Pennsylvania, not too far from where the groom had spent some of his childhood, in a town called Danville. The wedding itself was lovely—the rehearsal dinner was entertaining with good, simple food and an open bar with good liquor, the wedding took place on the lawn of an old barn nicely refurbished to serve as a dancing pavillion, and buses were provided to and from so nobody drunkenly plowed themselves into trees. The town itself was dreadful—as some towns used to be factory towns Danville is a hospital town—in addition to being poor it was also filled with the maimed, afflicted, and morbidly obese. Like Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Madeleine and I are set apart from the general stream of mankind by our exceptional literary abilities and small towns tend to get us down by freaking us out. Danville: no exception. So by Sunday she and I were ready to pack it up and drive back to New York with her brother Pip and his daughter. Here is where our troubles really begin (I am not counting the hour and a half it took us on foot in Danville Saturday morning to try and find the Perkins to get some breakfast.)

Although I am a very good packer, and despite Madeleine's and my determined search of the hotel room before we left we somehow left behind a pair of shoes of mine. This pair of shoes was the only one I own which could be properly deemed “fashionable.” They were also the only thing of consequence I had to remember the summer of 2007 which I spent in Berlin (well, them and the laptop purchased in New York to replace the one that had been stolen along with my external harddrive and six months worth of photographic and video work from the studio I was sharing in Kreutzberg... ) I had just gotten them resoled, and inside of them were the custom-made, foot orthotics which I need to wear in order to prevent major muscle pain and general skeletal deterioration. Of course I don't realize they are missing until Monday evening and when I call the hotel they are not in the lost and found and it is suggested to me that I call back during the day when housekeeping is present so that we can all “be sure.” I do so the next day and the woman I speak to is an inexplicable bitch to me. I'm sure this isn't the first time that a guest has left something in a room there that is very important to them; maybe that was the problem? Maybe I was being blamed for the retrogradation of her life? Unclear. What was clear was her profound contempt for both me and my shoes.

Monday was a pretty awful day in general, and for whatever reason I just couldn't get anything done. I spent most of the day reading; it was very cloudy and dark outside. When M came home from work she was angry with me because we didn't really have anything to eat and I hadn't gone to the grocery store. She was miffed about that: what a lazy Agnes!

Tuesday was the first day of going to the welfare office to apply for public assistance. I believe I mentioned the extreme depressingness of that experience, and how I was required to return with additional documentation. I finally made it back home and did much laundry; cleaned up the house a bit. And left to meet M in the city to see a play together for which M had graciously purchased tickets. I arrived a bit early and determined to go to my bank and withdraw some money so that I could buy extra produce and cheese at our CSA the following day which I hoped would make M feel forgivey. Upon arriving at the bank I discover that my ATM card is missing. When we were in Danville looking for the Perkins we'd come across a branch of my bank, not at all a common occurrence, and I decided to deposit the check from my previous landlord in New Haven which I had been carrying around with me for a few days. I fill out my deposit slip and wait in line for the teller while excessive amounts of Cohen brothers local color plays out. Eventually I get to the counter only to learn that they cannot accept my deposit because they have no record of my account. This isn't good. I remembered that when I first got the account two years ago upon my move to New Haven I'd been informed that there were New England and Mid Atlantic groups of customers within the bank, but that those two groups hadn't quite been merged yet into a unified corporate structure. Knowing that I was going to be moving back to the Mid-Atlantic designated New York region upon graduation I asked approximately how long it would take for this unification to occur. “A year at the longest!” was the joyful reply and with the assurance that I would, anyway, be able to use my ATM card at any branch I opened the account. Evidently two years' worth of water was not enough to have completed that particular bridge and the Danville teller directed me outside the bank to the ATM to make my deposit. Naturally, when I got there, there was neither envelope nor pen. So here I am in Midtown three days later with no ATM card after business hours. There will clearly be no cash for Agnes. Arg!

After the play we decided not to eat out (I lied and said that I wasn't hungry so I wouldn't have to spend money at a restaurant and M decided she didn't want to go out to eat if I wouldn't be eating with her) and upon returning home there was again a notable absence of grocery shopping having been done. M was working full time plus a half day on Saturday this week—too much for M but there was overtime to be got—and she was upset at the apparent unconcern with which Agnes had approached the food situation. But because Agnes is extremely mercurial these days M was hesitant to make an issue of it. Nevertheless we exchange some words and Agnes ends up having a bit of a breakdown the upshot of which is that because she is home all the time the burden of grocery shopping falls on her shoulders—not something that she minds at all in theory. The problem is that Agnes doesn't have any money, so going grocery shopping has become an increasingly unpleasant experience for her. M reassured her that grocery money would be forthcoming at week's end and peace was restored. Sort of.

Wednesday is the day to go back to the Welfare office. I am there for three hours and count myself lucky to have made such good time. Though that was probably due to the torrential downpours which left me completely soaked from the knees down for the duration of my visit to those windowless and aggressively air conditioned warrens. I also discover that I am still missing some paperwork. I find out, however, that I will be able to fax it to them and despite the fact that I don't know if I have the paperwork they need and have absolutely no idea in hell how I am going to find a fax machine I feel relieved. Wednesday is also the day for provisioning. I develop a plan of attack: first, go to the ghetto grocery store near our house (near means 10 blocks away,) for dry goods, canned goods, and similar rations. Next I bike to Greenpoint several miles away to go to my bank. Then I go to the butcher shop to get chicken. Finally I go to our CSA to pick up our weekly allotment of vegetables and buy extra plus cheese with the cash that I will get from the bank. I can tell you that ghetto groceries, and butcher, both go of sans hitches. I just cover my eyes and hand over my credit card. Bank: not so much. I arrive and blithely fill out a withdrawal slip and go right up to the teller—no line! I'm not sure why I didn't expect this but, as you have probably guessed, for the same reason why I can't deposit a check with a Mid-Atlantic branch I can also not make a withdrawal. But the teller assures that I have nothing to worry about “You need only go to the ATM and you can make a withdrawal there” (she was Indian).

“Ah,” I replied “But I have no ATM card—I have lost it in Danville, PA. I need to have access to my bank account in New York. This is a big problem for me.”

“Oh,” she said back to me, “I am sure that if you talk to our customer service representative Zach he can help you transfer your account to a Mid-Atlantic account so that you can have access to your funds.”

So I go over to customer service representative Zach and ask him for assistance in accessing my funds. We determine that the best thing to do is to open a new account in the Mid-Atlantic division, transfer my funds, and then close my New England account. I will not be able to keep my account number, yes I will have to order new checks, yes I will have to pay, but only if my balance drops below $500 and only $5/month. OK, not bad, same as my old account. “Great,” says Zach, “Now all I need is $25 to open up the account.” If you were hoping to have the opportunity of imagining Agnes, still ever so slightly sweaty from her bike ride, sitting on cheap office furniture gaping at a customer service representative, now is your chance. I explain to Zach as patiently as I can that the reason why I was there was because I had no cash, indeed, had no access to cash, cash which his bank was essentially holding hostage from me. He then asked me if I had a checkbook. I said that I did, indeed, have a checkbook and that it was at home. He suggested I go and get it. I told him that it was still raining. He said it didn't look like it was still raining and that anyway if it was it wasn't raining very hard. I told him that I lived three miles away. He told me they were open until 5pm. I then told him, a trifle shortly, that I was not going to my house and that he needed to open this account for me right now because his bank had more than $25 of my dollars and I needed to have access to those funds right now. He called the corporate headquarters and they agreed that I could open an account, as long as I transferred the funds right away. I reminded him that I needed cash, and as a result I not only had no problem transferring the funds right away but had, in fact, been fully intending to do so from the beginning. Finally, after full-naming, addressing, and social securing I am the proud owner of a new account. I tell Zach to go ahead and transfer all of my funds from the New England account. He tells me that I need to do it myself, over the phone. I have no idea how much time has passed at this point, but in for a penny in for a pound. I call the number and after the usual automatic menus managed to transfer the funds with the help of a very cheerful woman with a Southern accent. I am happy and mention that I am relieved to be able to have access to my funds now. She agrees with me whole-heartedly, and is excited to let me know that because I have transferred my funds before 3:30 in the afternoon, those funds will, in all likelihood, be available to me the very next business day! At this point I try and suggest that perhaps the bank can forward me some little of my own money so that I can, after all, have the cash that I came into the bank for in the first place, but “oooh, yeah, oh sorry but as this transfer—usually it would be available right away of course—but as this transfer is an interregional transfer it has to be done manually but the good news is that it is almost totally positively going to be available tomorrow morning which is Great!” Zach assures me that I can come all the way back to Greenpoint the next day to get cash at 9am, when they open. Well fuck you very much, Zach. So I leave the bank, no cash which means no extra produce and cheese at the CSA which means no forgiveness.

For Thursday, at least, I am determined to be awesome, have an open mind, and not allow myself to feel overwhelmed. Thursday, at least, will be sweet. I did some horrible drudgery things in the morning that I'd been putting off for months and then in the evening I went on a 34 mile bike ride. M was having dinner with a friend and came home late thus preventing me from making her miserable. “What a succesful day,” I thought, “if I can keep from interacting with any other people and then do something which completely exhausts me physically I might be able to do this thing!”

Friday I spend much of the day writing a letter to an unemployed friend of mine whose wife cheated on him with people from their neighborhood bar to let him know that he didn't have it so bad. Then I decided to make a nice dinner for M because she has been working so hard all week. I very sweetly call her and ask her if she has any special requests. “Only yellow and green tomatoes and blueberries from the farmer's market,” she says. “Wonderful!” says I, “your wish is my command.” It is a lovely day and I ride my trusty bike into the city to do some errands (including going to the fucking bank,) go grocery shopping and go to the farmer's market. Bank is no problem. I even go to the library and check out some things, feeling virtuous. I suspect that I should know by now never, ever to feel virtuous ever because it always, always fucks me. But there I was. Time to go to the farmer's market. And I wander around for at least a half an hour going from stall to stall looking from the glorious produce on offer to my grubby little fistful of painfully acquired bills to the prices of said produce and I simply can't induce myself to buy anything. Finally, as a wave of panic begins to build, I snatch up some yellow tomatoes, a small bunch of bok choy and one of scallions and a few plums and ran out of there. Madeleine and I had made tentative plans to meet for coffee but I couldn't get in touch with her. Her cell was turned off and she wasn't picking up her office phone. This is very unusual and I knew that she must have been called away for a meeting or something but I kept calling. By the time I left the farmer's market my jovial mood had completely dissolved and I left a truly belligerent message on her voicemail. A message that any reasonable person would know would not encourage Madeleine to pick up her phone in future ever again. I did make it home again Friday evening, and the long-suffering M smoothed down my feathers and night drew closed the curtains of the day.

Saturday felt dangerous from the beginning, and as M was working again I was determined to stay at home and organize my filing cabinets. I did this without injury for many hours. M came home and it seemed safe to leave the house, so we went to Greenpoint to look at a shop that was having a sale. It was nice and even the shopowners' excessive adorableness failed to prove off-putting and we went to a nice bar and M had a beer and I, intent on being the (fat) little match girl had a club soda which proved to be only $1 less expensive, but it was still nice. We went home and had a nice dinner and bad things seemed to have dispersed. Hurrah. “Let's go for a night-time bike ride,” I suggest. M agrees and off we go. Lovely! What a nice Saturday!

It is only on Sunday that I realize that during the nice ride we took on Saturday the glass of my iphone was cracked. Who cares! It's still usable! Or would be, if the crack weren't positioned in such a way as to completely prevent the phone from being 'unlocked'. Well Goddamn. Should I wake up Ronald Reagan and be all “welfare queen buys new iphone!?” Of course, that would imply that I were actually getting public assistance which, as of now I am not. And as that phone is not only my only contact with telephonic communications but also for all practical purposes my only email source (no internet at home saves money!) I really need it. So it's another bike ride into the city (saves $5.50!) to Tekserve and $129.50 and hopefully I will have a functional phone in a day or two. The good news is that I got neither run over by a bus or murdered on my way back from the store. Though I don't suppose I should actually say that out loud in case Mercury hears me. I wonder if it can read?