checkers

I'm procrastinating.  Decisions have been made to do things and I am lying in bed before all those decisions, here in a dark cold basement with sea-foam green cement walls.  Outside it's sunny and beautiful and I could be biking or swimming or whatever.  I'm going to tell myself it's a good sign that I'm procrastinating by writing because I should be writing more.
I'm never sure how much of my life to place on a blog.  Omission surely is the key to a good story, and the slow reveal will likely be less painstaken for anyone who actually stumbles upon my life here, collected into a few pages.  It's been decided that we should move from our cute little house into a friend's spare room.  I need to go through all of my belongings and pare them down.  I am trying to rustle the will to do this.  In the meantime, I am avoiding my brother, who is presently living in the same house.  This complicates the process of cleaning the entire house.  In 29 years, the whole of my life, my brother and I never had a fight until last week.  Then we did, and now I'm sulking.  I can see this is basically what's happening, but this fact will not change my behavior.
I realize I had invested a lot of ethereal qualities into the one relationship in my life that seemed pretty solid, the one family member I didn't consider to be an asshole.  This week's theme is that we're all total assholes and I'm having a little trouble coping.
Predictably, I find myself missing the dead.  I believe that if I could only call my granma she would put my mind at ease.  I can hear her voice.  It's been 13 years since she died?  Has it really?  I barely believe.  My grandma was an asshole but she was awesome.  When I was fourteen we would split a beer and play checkers, since one whole beer was our mutual tolerance.  Toward the end she would forget which color she was playing and king my pieces, get frustrated and fling the entire board up into the air, laughing and cursing.  I think that was my favorite, the laughing and cursing.  I've only known old people to master this particular trait, never anyone under fifty.  I think the sentiments of "this is hilarious" and "fuck it" can only be equally conveyed with decades of practice.
Who was my grandmother as a child?  It's an impossible hypothetical situation to me.  I may as well imagine being an elephant.  What would it be like to have a trunk?  To slurp up water in my nose and clean my own face with it?
Ganesha, this week's prayer is to you.  This week I will wear red and make candy as I put all the things in my life into boxes, removing the obstacles.  Help me to find a path somewhere under all this crap.