At some point during my periodic search for obscure, horrifying old Mormon films, I discovered a real doozy. This was about two years ago and I’ve been willing myself to summon the endurance to recap it ever since. How Near To The Angels comes at us from 1956, and it comes at us hard.
We begin our story with two schoolmarms dressing a young lady in a white wedding dress.
For the past several years, Sky and I have basically been the only house on the street to put up Christmas lights. We're frustrated about this because if you go a block in pretty much any direction it's like you've entered the North Pole.
Our street slopes down into a hill at about the midpoint, which is exactly where our house is. As a result, the east side of our property is about six feet higher than the west side. Because we sit at this spot, our house is very noticeable. So when we erect our lights, they really stand out and represent our neighborhood.
"Why doesn't anyone else get into the spirit?" we lament every November as we line our walkway with ground-level lights and fasten together a rainbow tree that Skylar begs me to leave in the box because "it's hideous."
Skylar has been begging me to get a new phone since before the war. I don't know how long it's been since I've upgraded, but apparently "too long," or so he told me recently when he held my current one up and pointed out that it was cracked all over. "You even shattered the back? I didn't know you could do that!"
So he finally got on the internet the other day and ordered me one. Some fancy shmancy new iPhone that is exactly like my previous iPhone, as far as I can tell, except now I have to put in my passwords, none of which I even remotely remember, on all 600 apps I use.
The phone was supposed to arrive in mid-December, which was fine with me, but Skylar was not satisfied because "I want to play with it!" So he did some research and found out that if he ordered it through Verizon instead of Apple, it would show up more quickly, somehow.
He cancelled the original order and bought the damn phone again through Verizon and told me I'd be getting an email from the company saying it was ready for pickup at the store near our house.
Two days went by and my husband, who is apparently not patient, called Verizon to ask them if they had one in stock that I could just come and get, even though they hadn't yet emailed me.
My phone starts buzzing. It's Skylar. It's 4:00 PM. The fact that he's calling me at this time probably means he finished his rotation early today.
I answer.
"She didn't really explain what that meant and AHHH I just realized I forgot to pick it up what time are you going to be there and do you know yet what we're doing for dinner?"
He starts every phone call like we're in the middle of a conversation already and he expects me to understand what the hell he's talking about.
"I have no idea what anything you just said means. I'm not inside your brain," I remind him.
The disconnected thought vomit gets worse toward the end of the week as he seems to be in his most exhausted state by then.
"Nevermind," he says. "Your turn. Tell me about your day?"
He requests this as though he's already given me a coherent account of what he's up to.
When I moved into my house in Year Of Our Lord XIIBV, one of the first things I noticed was that all the walls were beige, which I didn't love.
"I'll paint them later," I optimistically promised myself. And then I moved all of the crap I've ever owned into the place.
Look. Let me give you some old man wisdom from this old man. Listen carefully. What I'm about to tell you is one of the most important things you'll ever hear in your life: if you buy a home and it is not the color you want it to be on the inside, do not move your sh&t into it. Leave your sh$t out of it. Paint the d@mn place first.
I bleeped out all of my swears for my mother.
The point is, painting an empty home? A pain. But a manageable pain. Painting a home full of your life's worth of hoarding? An unmanageable pain.
Do not do that to yourself.
I give this advice knowing full well that I could have never followed it myself when I was young and dumb and so excited to sleep under my own roof and start saying things like "are we heating the neighborhood?!" whenever someone left the door open. I couldn't have forced myself to wait several days to get the painting done before moving in.
Ok nobody panic but I changed some stuff. I know. I know. We're not supposed to change things. Change is not a thing we handle. There's a reason we're all still here hanging out on blogger in 2020.
TWO THOUSAND TWENTY YOU GUYS.
But we're all still living in 2006 over here. The only thing that could make this site more 2006 is if I inserted one of those widgets that automatically blasts a Jack Johnson song every time you visit Stranger. Don't worry. I'm not going to do that. Because lazy.
I changed things because our super talented artist at The Beehive, Josh Fowlke, messaged me and was like "you do realize you have like 19 different and conflicting brandings you're using across all of your various projects, right?"
Then he sent me some new images and fonts and I had to go in and do stuff with internet code and dark magic and I think I may have accidentally launched bombs at Thailand at one point but eventually everything ended up looking how it looks now. Which is good. I think. Probably.
I'm so very tired right now. Skylar woke up at negative 3:00 AM screaming. Then he flew out of bed and started running through the house in a full panic. Duncan and I were going to follow him to see what was going on but we didn't because lazy and tired. Eventually he came back into the bedroom, climbed into bed, and whispered "the house is secure."
Whether the outing would actually happen was always in limbo—or at least, that’s what we were told. It hinged on our scholastic behavior, which had most recently been called into question during The Samantha Brown Vomit Incident only one week earlier.
I'm sitting at my kitchen table. The fire is going. Duncan is perched in front of the front door staring out at a snow storm. Skylar is in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher and quietly singing something to himself. Taylor Swift? I don't know. It's probably Taylor Swift.
We walked around the neighborhood this morning to get coffee and breakfast. As we walked, we talked about our favorite Nevada memes from this week. Like this one:
Skylar's latest rotation is in dermatology, which I've been looking forward to because of a baseless but immovable assumption that it would give him access to an entire ocean of free botox that he will urgently funnel into every crevice of my body.
So far that hasn't panned out, but I've at least been able to corner him every evening for a full consultation about every suspicious growth I've ever discovered but haven't gotten checked out because I've always assumed I'd be married to a very gay dermatologist one day and could deal with whatever at that time.
"What about this one?" I say, pointing to some crusty bump at my hairline. "I don't know man. Go see a doctor or something," he responds.
"I thought that's what I was paying the GDP of a mid-sized country for you to be!" I yell at him as he slumps away and disappears behind his laptop to study until midnight.
The third year of medical school is not great, in case you're wondering. I felt very emotionally prepared for the first two years. Sure, he studied all the time, but he was also home nearly all the time. Skylar and I have been steamy lovers (not sorry) for over half a decade and his first year of medical school was far and away the period in our relationship when we spent the most time together, apart from the first couple months of These Unprecedented Times of Uncertainty when he was stuck at home with me.
While the rest of you mouth breathing rat faces were only pretending to fight for lgbtq rights, Cousin Itt was literally passing landmark legislation and being so sexy it was illegal in the process. pic.twitter.com/mfyiLDxCmg
— Eli McCann (@EliMcCann) October 31, 2020
Shortly after Cousin Itt penned The Gay Agenda, Cousin Itt was asked when would lgbtq people have enough rights and Cousin Itt said “not until Liza Minnelli is all 9 justices on the Supreme Court.” pic.twitter.com/cmAqAm6mwz
— Eli McCann (@EliMcCann) October 31, 2020
