I just wanted to be yours.

Acceptance and affection are my currencies. I don't do any exchange, it's all at par and it's freaking expensive for you. Worse for me still as I can't put a price on the absolute value. It wanes like the sunbeams across the wooden floor, unpredictable new cats lounging in the warmth left behind. 

It's sweet, for sure but difficult too. Like that first time you make a calculated decision to change something because he likes it better and you want to please him. It makes him happy and the thrill you feel down between your shoulder blades when he smiles at you with unchecked delight is the reward for selling yourself out. That's a long race to the bottom and it's a race you should never put yourself in. You're not qualified, you haven't trained, and yet you know in the moment you're going to spend the remainder of your life chasing the high of that thrill like the best drug you never wanted but were given anyway. 

Oh, but his face when he smiles.  

***

The reason the pills went away wasn't because I was a zombie, even though I was. They would have left me locked in that cage forever. It was safer. It was easier. It was convenient and peaceful and stupid, that Bridget being a yes-man when she's been an obstinate nine-year old for her entire existence, all fifty-some odd years of it now. 

They went away for other reasons and I'll never let them do that again. 

Even if it means the smile fades like those sunbeams.

It won't. 

What if we just wait and see, Lochlan?

It won't. I told you and I mean it.

Chipmunks in the willows.

This little corner of the internet turned twenty on Friday. I would have posted but I keep opening my yapping trap and losing my internet privileges. The blog might be an adult now, but I don't think I ever will be, at least not to Caleb, who controls the flow of information out of the Collective most days, or to Lochlan, who can't be bothered to die on that hill, frankly and I don't blame either one of them. It's a blog, not a big deal really. A place where I overshare and foist my tiny frustrated opinions on everyone and you just take it. You read it and then you probably shake your head and get on with your day. 

Yes, imagine me in real life. This is why the boys need naps. 

Eighteen years ago I started writing my tiny, stupid opinions on things and telling you about my tiny stupid life from a tiny, stupid brick apartment building, in a crumbling-paint lead-lined fifth-floor walkup a park away from the main thoroughfare through the city. 

I took that all down. Then it became After Jake. 

Then it really became After Jake because he died and it took me (it's taking me, I mean) the better part of sixteen years to come to terms with the weight of that and how to walk and drag it along with me without becoming out of breath. 

That was three addresses ago that I started it. I just remember people kept hitting our car in the parking lot and that's how I met my neighbours, all decent people who would pitch in and help me with the kids on fire-alarm days, anyway. Then we bought the castle, and Trey (Cole) lost his shit and then he lost me and then he lost his life and I started writing like a joyful little maniac, thinking I had all the time in the world, never once turning around to see the freight train coming at me. Of course I never heard it either. I'm functionally deaf and the biggest faker you will ever meet, pretending all the time.

But there is never enough time. Twenty years goes by in the blink of an eye and I am trying and failing to ease myself back into the every day here but it's tough going because I had the wind knocked out of my sails and I don't fight with Caleb much anymore, I just let him shoulder the guilt as I turn away, tucking my shoulders in, putting my head down and going and finding something (or someone) else to do. 

I never said I was an angel. That was Lochlan's nickname for me. One of thousands. He still looks at me with rose-coloured pupils and for that I am eternally grateful. They all do. The zookeepers with their little monkey. The wolves with their feral forest girl. I never said I gave up any bad habits I just took a break from writing about them because with the inclusion of possibly two years of the worst medication I have ever been on, you would have thought it was a major Red Flag. Like last time. I get stoned and everyone shrieks that I am being taken advantage of so it's better not to say anything at all. 

It isn't them. It never was. It's me. All the time. I take the blame. I am the blame here, every day of my life. Brick by brick, letter by letter, pill by pill. 

Happy birthday, blog.

***

I am 1/4 into Yarn Harlot and it's...well? Upsetting. I have trouble reading about people who are wilfully irresponsible. Ironic, isn't it? I guess I hate reading about people who shove their kids aside and maniacally laugh about psychological issues. I have all sorts of those and I still gave my kids my all. I always will. I'm going to stick with it and then maybe burn it in the bonfire later this week. It's a weird navel-gaze, anyway. Maybe it will get better?

***

I finished Gypsy on Netflix. Thank God I watch these things on one and half speed, sometimes two, so as not to waste my own time. Everyone says the actors sound like chipmunks when I do that, but I'm just gleefully content not to have wasted over ten hours. I LOVE LOVE Naomi Watts. I want her to play me in the movie of my life but this was a terrible thing. She was bad, it was bad. Billy Crudup was amazing. It should have been a two hour movie with a murder. Then it would have been okay. Maybe. Maybe I shouldn't have watched it after Penguin Bloom, which was a full-on masterpiece. Doing the lord's work here, as always. 

***

Jacob would have loved the way Caleb uses the internet as a reward-based system to keep me in line. He would have laughed in that hoarse, incredulous Newfie twang that rang through the halls when something was that Oh-My-Fucking-God. He and Caleb would have probably killed each other by now if Jacob had been stronger. But he wasn't and so there's that. And I'm sorry this has been eighteen years of strife and misery but like I said, at least it's going along at a rapid clip. Just read it all in a chipmunk voice. It's what I hear when I picture you reading it out loud.

Radium paint and Closed for Lunch.

I'm having fun today with the Geiger counter (long story which I WILL TELL if you really want) and measuring everything from the WWI antiques with radium accents (to glow in the dark, like me now, I bet), drunk on exhaustion from staying up past midnight because Coachella. 

Coachella was amazing. But only from 10:45 to midnight and only on the Sahara stage. Then we switched to the mainstage and Lana Del Rey was singing, looking pissed off as ever. Is it shyness? Is she a snob? Lizzie never tells. Her voice is solid like a freight train, so that's that. Of course, it's easy to be steady on your notes if you don't move when you sing. 

That's never happened at an Ateez show. They ate. They danced. They had a blast and so did the audience. So did all of us tuning in from home. Even the boys, who got all excited when Bouncy and Crazy Form were performed. It was awesome. Turning all my metalheads into kpop stans because it's HAPPY. It's FUN. 

Don't get me wrong, metal is fun as fuck but this is a weird eternal-spring/first-love sort of happy feeling and what kind of music does that these days?

So I slept until nine this morning and then we did an inventory of groceries and supplies and made the Big List (this is done weekly to make sure we don't miss anything when we go out. The grocery and hardware stores and shopping in general is way down the highway. Gas is $2.20 a litre and rising and time is money, friend) and then I set to work figuring out if the Geiger counter actually works or if it's a novelty or a false sense of security, or worse, if it works perfectly and we are being irradiated incessantly out of our minds on a daily basis. 

We tried to go antiquing but in British Columbia nothing is actually old because *gestures* reasons and so we came home and for a Saturday everyone has scattered to the wind (like nuclear fallout) and that rarely happens.

Yeah, so we're watching Fallout. How about you?

Sam's lists.

Things I am sick of: "No worries" comments, solar eclipses, gas-powered outdoor landscaping equipment noise, waiting for paint to dry and the infuriating instant-cry that happens when I think about death. 

Things I am grateful for: sunshine and dandelions, pear blossoms (even if they do smell bad), handsewn patchwork, sleepy cats, and Ben's easy hands fixing the coffee grinder which otherwise sounds as loud as one of my nemesis outdoor equipment noises. I believe a bean fell down and got stuck in the sharp parts and it sounds like some kind of electric voodoo blender these days, and so he's having a look. 

This is of  no consequence to me, since I refuse to make fancy coffee and if no one is free these days I'll make instant but a scoop of instant mixed with a scoop of hot chocolate for a de facto mocha which is equal parts awful and delicious. 

So there. 

There's a house near us for sale for four million bucks. It is smaller than most, has two bedrooms and probably will be flattened to make room for a huge mcMansion right to the edges of their property line, which is three cliffs instead of one and not a good plan at ALL. I like the house but I don't want to own it. I am working hard to uncomplicate my life in the extreme and doing really good at it, frankly, including my finances. It was sort of the last hurdle as I do a refresh of sorts. A digital cleanse and organize to follow all of the physical ones that have taken place. 

It's bright enough today to work on the dark green socks I am knitting for Lochlan so off I go to drink some tea and remember that the world is beautiful and all of this is the important parts. The thoughts, dreams, sunny breezes and hot tea. The act of mindful work for a loved one. The gratitude list, playing like a mantra over the squiggly line that makes up my own unalome. The faded patio pillows against the fresh dark green grass and the noises ebbing at last as people hang up their tools, trading them for dinner utensils and quiet pursuits at sunset. 

I'll still burst into tears randomly but maybe I'm grateful for that too.

"Now that the lilacs are in bloom, she has a bowl of lilacs in her room." -T.S. Eliot

We were poking around thrift stores out in the valley on the weekend (Dalton and PJ are always on the hunt for what I lovingly call 'musical electronics' (old amps, guitars, heads, etc.) while Lochlan looks for vintage hand tools and I just look at everything, but I have my sights set on a 'nice' vintage Cowichan sweater for cold nights by the fire when a blanket and five men don't cut it but finding one in reverse colours (dark body, light colorwork) is a unicorn) and I found a copy of a book called Yarn Harlot. 

It seemed vaguely familiar. 

Stephanie's was one of the first blogs I ever read, and probably one of the reasons I started writing about my daily life. Something about a peek into someone else's home/day/routine/mindset is comforting, instructional and entertaining all at once. Sometimes we covet what someone else has. Sometimes we feel better about our own relationships, cleaning routine or feelings after reading about someone else's. It's invasive and voyeuristic and delicious, and I've never been one to demure about any of it, while all the while retaining my privacy to a degree that surpasses any level of reason. 

Anyway, I am one page in and I love it already. It was $4 on a shelf of otherwise terrible knitting pattern books and maybe the reason it called to me was to remind me that I have this outlet and I am not using it to the fullest? Or maybe to remind me of who I used to be? Excited to sit down, tell you everything, delete the worst parts (sometimes the best parts) and then hit publish as if I had completed my magnum opus, every single day. 

Sometimes it's been the only reason I got up in the morning and sometimes I used it to punish myself, the reminder that I haven't done anything to make myself famous or noteworthy, that those who do have a whole team of people lifting them up in the background and I definitely fall squarely into that category, believe it or not. 

I recently picked up my knitting again, probably a year ago now, a way to keep my hands engaged. I'm absolutely compulsive about my hands moving. If they're moving, they may as well be writing, drawing, painting, spinning, knitting, sewing, writing or forming clay. You can't always be touching someone, though that will forever and always be my first choice. 

I am now almost a couple of months out from the very last pill and physically things are starting to calm down. Emotionally I am the Pacific National Exhibition though, all thrills, chills, delight and horror all at once. That will calm down eventually, maybe now even, since the physical issues are ebbing. 

(I am also a couple months out from the heavy-handed and punitive internet embargo that infantilized me right back to the eighties, when the internet wasn't around but the boys' rules were just as miserable.)

So all that is to say thank you for sticking around. Somehow I think it was easier when I had that full-blown psychotic break and went to stay at the hospital with the locks on every door.  It was like speed dating. They pumped you full of drugs, asked a lot of questions, then immediately withdrew the drugs, asked many more questions and then suddenly I was home again. This was a years-long drawn-out ridiculous fugue state where I couldn't be anxious no matter how hard I tired but everything else went to shit. I laughed inappropriately at sad things. I got in fights because I couldn't empathize with the things that were important to others. I gained a lot of weight. I wasn't me anymore. 

I need to be me, or else who am I? 

And spring is a time of renewal and change and reassurance. The lilacs have their tiny buds bursting to come out, the nights are cool but warmer than before and it was light out last even until past seven-thirty, which I exclaimed with great delight in the moment, knitting in hand. I will always have my hands busy. I took my sewing box (it's a Turkish cookie tin) to bed last night and sat up in the middle between Lochlan and Ben with a cat and a flashlight in my lap and pieced together a patchwork cloth that I will then cut into to make a book cover for my paperbacks to live in as I read them (it keeps them nicer in my bag) and to remind me that physical books are as important to care for as my beloved kindle, and I did that until midnight and then I finally turned off my flashlight at midnight and slept until six-thirty. 

So normal. So invasive to tell you this. So looking forward to the lilacs this year.