Always a little strange...

[gottawonder]

talking to my "trainwreck" sister.

We actually had a pretty good conversation today. She sounded sober and pretty on track with lucidity, which isn't always the case.

What's always odd, is just things like her casually talking about maybe having a heat stroke, where she almost passed out, felt horrible, and couldn't keep any food down for awhile. She always says things like this. Things like "yeah, I had pneumonia most of last winter", or "I cut my leg and passed out in the van, and had been drinking, I realized later that it was bad enough I could have bled to death". She says it with great casualness, like it isn't strange at all that she isn't all that WORRIED about any of this. I guess when you're a hard core alcohol/prescription drug abuser you get used to being sick all the time.

In the last year or so, she's having this thing where her fingers and toes kind of twist up and lock that way for awhile. She's been to the doctor, and they're not sure what's causing it.

She'd kind of quit eating a few years ago, and was absolutely skeletal, losing her teeth and her hair. She did start eating again, and that seems to be helping.

She is a hoarder, and she always has been. When things get bad, she just moves. Sometimes she's forced to have giant bonfires, one time she just left a whole house full of crap behind and the city actually decided to burn it down and use it as a training exercise for their fire fighters. She just buys another place, moves some of it, ends up leaving the rest behind, and it becomes somebody else's problem. Then she fills the new place.

She seems to think that moving will solve her problems. Things will be better at the new place. She will do some of the things she always wants to do; have a commercial greenhouse, a market garden, have animals again (she has been an animal hoarder too, and of course doesn't take good care of them, breeds them thinking she's going to sell them, then she can't sell them, etc.). Her health is so poor that all of this is unrealistic. She also never follows through on anything, but keeps buying/collecting things that she thinks will help her start a business/project.

So she's been talking about moving to be closer to her kids, and maybe she would see them more often, but she forgets that adult kids have lives. They work a lot. They just come home and eat and go to bed. They are busy. They might move again for a job. As it is, her kids don't live that far away. A couple of hours, and she actually does see them a fair bit. She just doesn't have anything going on in her life.

Right now she and her partner live in a prairie ghost town, because that's where they can afford to live, and it has an enormous building that used to be a mechanic shop. It was supposed to be a mechanic shop for her partner, but it is too full of stuff. She is bored there, it's very isolated, and desolate. It is literally a couple of blocks of empty houses, all falling in. Maybe three of those houses have someone living in them. It was like that when she moved there, so I don't know why she's surprised at how boring and isolating it is. She can't afford a house in a thriving community, and her hoarding would be a problem there. She could never live in a condo or an apartment. She pretty much has to live in isolated places.

She keeps thinking that she should be allowed to raise pigs and cattle there, because it isn't really a town anymore.

Talking with her is so surreal. She can sound absolutely lucid, but her perspective is just so messed up.