Memphis: The Exhaustion

Every once in a while, Gary and I find ourselves in a situation that just does not work for us, and we have to find a way to make it work. I give you: Landscaping. Building Shelves. Moving Heavy Objects Such As Full-Grown Pear Trees from the Front Yard to the Back. It always starts out well:

Me: “In [X] weeks I need your big strong arms to help me do [X].”
Gary: “Just tell me when and I’ll do it.”

What Gary means is “Just tell me when and I will at the last moment pick apart your well-drawn-out plan until it is a tattered flag symbolizing the fallacy of your supremacy over me.” This is why you will sometimes find me in our front yard yelling: “Bongo! Do as Missy SAYS!” Sometimes, Gary and Ellen cannot work together because they have incompatible problem-solving behaviors, so Bongo and Missy have to step in. Bongo is a good boy. All he ever says is, “Bongo scared of Missy.”

Well, it seems I need another pair of personas. At the Beale Street Music festival we were forced to realize our exhaustion behaviors are incompatible as well.

This was me, exhausted, trying to find a place to sit at the Wolfmother concert:
Whump (sound of me flopping down in exhaustion on a random spot of wet grass)
Gary: “NO! You can’t sit there! It’s wet! People are too close to you! It’s dark! People will step on you!”
Me: “Shhhh! Be still.” And because I am tired, I close my eyes and sit in the lotus position. I go to my happy place. Where it is quiet and isolated and there happens to have a loud band roaring off in the distance.

This was Gary, exhausted, trying to find a place to sit at the Wolfmother concert:
“Let’s go here – past those kids – no – too close to the bathroom – there’s a spot up there – too dark – there – no, that’s a trash can – its getting darker – keep UP, come ON – by the fence – ” He kept spiraling into the crowd looking for the ideal clean, dry, well-lit patch of pastoral grass with a huge personal space boundary. Eventually he had cornered himself by the fence.

Me: “Please. Stop. Stop moving. Stop talking.”
Gary: “We have to get out of here!”And he kept moving, and talking, and that was the first fifteen minutes of the Wolfmother concert.

This conflict comes up when we are both beat. I, like a normal human, move slower and am quieter when tired. Gary moves faster and talks more. He calls it being “overly tired,” a zone in which his body is sapping his brain of all its remaining energy and he has no judgment.

The obvious answer is if we are both exhausted Gary should just pick me up and carry me about, and thank you for thinking of that. YOU are so clever. But he would still keep talking. I hate to be picky, but that’s as bad as the moving.

So I need another pair of personas we can adopt to get us past the rough patches when we are worn out. I’m thinking Meth Addict for him and Unconscious Overdose Victim for me.