My head is swimming. Classic Sherb bite. Headiness, rabbit holes and worm holes.
It’s late into what has been May 18, 2026. Most of the night’s baseball has ended. [23:36]. I was asleep but I woke up and I’m awake again, as the time of day becomes less and less relevant. Is that what data does, the phone, the internet, AI lurking about, always ready, always listening? And weather rumbling, threatening, the old “new” intelligence? Rain is an increasingly conscious entity, I assure. I can’t prove it but I know it to be true.
The water under the floor, wet poltergeist, a different manifestation of the same storm. The clouds make it look like the rain has cleared out but not entirely. The rain didn’t leave—it’s under your basement, taunting you.
I’m up to three buckets this go-round. It’s a 3.5-gallon bucket but I don’t fill the bucket all the way because I have to be able to pick it up, open the door, carry it out without closing water on the floor, or on myself. So three buckets is something like nine gallons. It was two and a half or as much as three inches of rain today over the course of about ten hours, off and on with some heavy patches mixed throughout.
I turn the Locked on Cubs podcast on as I sump the water out of the floor. But I have to turn it off to write. I can’t focus on what they’re saying while putting pen to paper. They’re cracking me up tonight after a Cubs loss to the Milwaukee Brewers.
I actually kind of like the whole water in the basement mess as a challenge to overcome, to deal with. But I don’t like the idea of having water sit there while we’re gone. Live with it or get a sump pump installed, those are my two choices. We are leaving for Tucson in two days (less than, not even 36 hours from now). And there is more rain on the way. I psyche myself up to do battle with the weather but I’m sorry I can’t (still) be at Farm to see the water come in there, to make sure the leak buckets are in the right spot. Farm is an old farmhouse in the middle of Missouri. The problem there is a roof leak; the roof is failing or failed, leaking in something like ten places and coming into the house in various places.
I was out there yesterday cutting the grass. Then I booked it out of there to stay ahead of the rain that was headed this direction. I can sump here but I can’t do anything for Farm. Then we will leave and that means I will go weeks without visiting my dad in the nursing home over in Belleville, IL. I saw him on Friday. I usually see him approximately every five days. Now I will have to go nearly three weeks without seeing him.
Every time we go to Tucson it amounts to a letting go, a relenting, a goodbye. He’s been living/dying in Dammert, i.e. the skilled care wing of the Benedictine Living Community at The Shrine in Belleville for more than two years now. I hate leaving him; leaving him behind. When I think about leaving this house to go on a trip, I tell myself it’s not forever, it’s just two weeks, no big deal. When I leave my dad I know it might be the last time I ever see him, on This Earth anyway. Bob Lanaghan, a fellow Dammert resident who has been one of my dad’s lunch mates, is running on fumes. For the first year plus, Bob offered some comic relief on my visits. Beyond going blind, he is now hardly eating. It’s only a matter of time.
Ah, hell. That’s just what this life is. Life goes on, it will go on, with or without you. It will not wait around and it does not care what your plans are!
The GMO Sherb is showing out well. This might have been my last joint of it. I can’t recall whether I have previously written much about it/on it. I am awake here late at night, or very early in the morning, and I’m feeling very introspective. It’s hard to believe I was at Farm yesterday, I left before six in the morning. It’s all a blur. I thought I beat the rain but there is no beating the rain. It’s like my dad said a couple weeks ago when one of the OG CNAs was trying to get a rise out of him, making faces at him. When she walked away he said, “She fooled me, I fooled her!” That’s the last lucid thing I’ve heard him say. She fooled me, I fooled her. He smiled and he had a glint in his eye.
Damn. This is the Sherb bite for sure. It’s like a wild, wary, unpredictable animal. If you can work with it, get it to cooperate, if you can learn how to ride it, it can be a workhorse, a real mule, a carrying agent, a vector, a viaduct, a way. Let’s get back to that water in the duct. 12:05, 5.19.26.
I’m still awake, back awake, awake again, re-awakened. This is how I wake and bake. Now also under the influence of alcohol aka vodka. It’s been one of those nights. One of those crazy, crazy nights. Somehow
My mind wanders, my eyes sting, this box fan drying them out, allergies, May, fighting off any more sleep. I will crash when I crash. I’m on the fourth bucket. These are my best hours. Unbeset, undeterred, undertaker spread the word. I emailed that guy, that writer Connor Greer, but he never emailed me back. I made a big mistake and lost all my friends. Three Mile Island is back in production. If only we’d gone to the river together, made the sharing glass. Instead I got drunk, lost all my friends again. If only they were peonies. They were monarchs. But I wanted them to stay. They were recluse, they were widows, they were a previously unrecognized kind of salamander, peanut shells, ticks in the high grass.
Did you hear that? The weight of a falling branch. Leaves are so the whole tree doesn’t have to fall. My dad on the phone, my mom on the phone. A TWA flight to nowhere delayed forever. One blanket two, Sir Crocs a Lot, that little room he carried around with him. Basement, devil, door.
GMO x Sherb Crasher #7, by Fig Farms
Weeds of Grass 