Some dirt for you.

(We're at 7:00/7:31 right now for sunrise and sunset if you've kept score along with me. And if you're not keeping score let me remind you you should always always be keeping score. Otherwise how else are you going to know who wins?)

I have been a busy Bee today getting caught up on things that feel by the wayside. I ordered all of the landscaping aggregate? Product? Mud? from the most expensive place in town because they come down the driveway at lightning speed in a little red forklift and every year I tell myself I should buy one of those or maybe a tiny mini bulldozer or at least a personal skid steer and then I get mired down and tired of gardening and change my mind. But then I see the buds come out in the spring like popcorn on the cherry trees and the tiniest of ancient buds on the trees in the orchard and all of the lilacs beginning to bust out and I forget how tired I was and do it all over again. 

I ordered shoes because I ruined a pair this winter in the mud, speaking of mud, though it was away-mud, not my mud and I was pissed but then I remembered I got the shoes for 65% off because I'm a size six and my local shoe store hasn't figured out how to hide the smaller women's sizes from the discount rack in with the full-price youth sizes and I catch them out every year but the three pairs I bought were destroyed cosmetically long before the structure broke down so I guess I'm the fool and won't buy those again. 

The Brooks Ghost line, if you're wondering. Because I do four hundred thousand steps a day and so reserve the nice shoes for sitting and being driven places or dressing up. Not for every day. I've said it once or a million times. Who the fuck dresses up to go to the grocery store or the mall?  Not I. Never me. 

Anyway, enough about Bridget and her decades of muddy sneakers. Jesus. I'll be nine forever and repeating history until the day I die. 

Which may be soon because it's been six or eight months now of whatever is going on where it hurts to take a deep breath but now it's in my back after working it's way slowly around the entirety of my rib cage but it's probably anxiety because I did a lot of scary things and dark-rainy-highway driving this winter and I remained out of my comfort-zone looking in while the warm emanated from the window to which I had pressed my nose but we got everything done that needed to be done and now we're back on the right side of that glass and I feel confident that even though I am the named adult in the room at any given time I have had incredible, touching and supportive offers for others to take on that role if ever I should say the word or ring the bell or drop the ball or whatever would signify that I just can't anymore and that helps a lot. That gives me courage and strength and the fortitude to just keep on trucking. 

So yeah, I'm feeling somewhat confident right this second and for some reason that time is always when I want to write these days and so it's half as exciting as it should be because I have nothing to be dramatic about except for the fact that it's spaghetti night and so all hands will be on deck because I cook  using my biggest stock pots and there is always extra faces around the big table and very little in the way of leftovers for lunches the next day. It's my signature dish. 

Gardening starts Monday so I need to bulk these boys up, after all.  

And sometimes waiting two and a half minutes for a Foo Fighters bridge is just too long, Dave.

Foo Fighters isn't Radiohead now, are they? And sorry but songs like Street Spirit go from the outset. There's nowhere to hide when you press play on that one, no excusing it as a soft transition or a pause in the anticipation, no apologies and no darkness in which to fade into while you wait out the waves of emotion breaking over you, pulling you under into a blissfully-warm sea.

I had that discussion with Ben once if not a hundred times and he used it (me) to make his music better and then he all but stopped making it, just on the precipice of something even more beautiful, and I blame the devil for that too. 

No one is Radiohead though and the older I get the more I put on three or four albums instead of eighty in a week and I hold my cards closer than ever before for my lack of poker face.

Who's talking in circles? Not me, called out the little deaf girl treading water in a sea made of her own tears and all of that unspent emotion. 

Maybe it's the rain or the wars or the fucking price of gasoline right now. We should all go full Mad Max/Tank Girl on all of this shit but instead I will keep treading my dog paddle, looking out toward the horizon past the tankers (worth more than ever) and the fog and the clouds and wish for sunny cool days and remember that I reminded you, babes, that music is political. But you keep forgetting.

***

Batman, just last week:

 You don't have any friends, Bridget, you just have lovers. 

(He's tuned into Radiohead too.)

House of Cards?

Good girl. But what if you tuned that out and tuned into reality?

Why on earth would I want to do that?

For healing, maybe transition. Progress. Improvement. 

I'm perfect though.

He bursts out laughing and his cheeks pink in embarrassment. My apologies but that was well-timed.

What was?

Nevermind. You're one of a kind. 

I don't say it if it isn't true. 

So why the doubt?

It's highly specific to the genre. 

The doubt. 

Yes. Are you having trouble following along?

He bites his lip to stifle another laugh and I'm about to stamp my feet in exasperation but I always try and play it cool with Batman so that he thinks I'm cool because he's one of those people that also holds their cards close and you can't be weird until they're weird first. 

 (It's just a rule, Jesus, no one can keep up anymore.)

If he tries to isolate you again you need sound the alarm. 

I roll my eyes. He isn't looking at me but of course he's psychic because why wouldn't he be?

Caleb is the alarm-

Stop it-

YOU STOP IT. 

Bridget, some day I'll be gone and then who's going to save you?

Who said I wanted to be saved?  

Woof.

The Devil turned off my internet for two weeks and just now let me know he had turned it back on. I don't look at it much anymore unless I'm going to write. PJ leaves his laptop around for Youtube and all the TVs have a big Netflix icon so I don't need much else. It's not like I want to be up on current events (because Jesus H. Fucking Christ) and it's not like I need to search for anything that doesn't begin with Hey Siri and end with a decidedly Lochanesque-type voice telling me in a clipped fashion Here's what I found and then reading me none of it.

I found sometimes I have zero anxiety at all, like today. Which is odd, it being Friday the thirteenth (again) and me being the most absolutely superstitious person you're ever going to me. That's my superhero name: Super Stitious. My powers include knocking the umbrella out of your hand as you go raise it over your head indoors and refusing to touch mirrors because I broke one once and things went really sideways really fast. 

For seven full years. I wrote about it. It's pretty much how this blog began. 

(The black cat thing was never a problem. I had a little black cat for fourteen years. Now all the cats are grey. Time marches on and I stay the same.

Knock on wood.)

But anyway, Caleb calls me the monster and then proceeds to be as monster-like as possible until I threatened to drown myself if only to get away from the endless fear. The self-harm (complete exaggerations, mind you) threats will usually prompt Lochlan to step in and figure out how Caleb is tormenting me and put a stop to whatever it is. Usually through threats of, well, harm. And any time Caleb decides to minimize or belittle Lochlan's mere presence in my life or in general Batman will be there to have Lochlan's back. 

And if you're wondering why I don't go straight to having Batman back me up in everything that has to do with Caleb, well, he's busy usually and also nobody wants that. That forces familiarity over formality and we just crawled out from under that, it seems. There's a hierarchy people. You don't start at the top of the power triangle.

On the upside I'm looking at today as an art-day, a home-day, a fun day. It's Friday. It's a full-moon charge-all-your-crystals day. It's a day that isn't full of random misplaced (or maybe completely justified) dread and it's a day when the world is at my fingertips, now scraped-raw, stretched-white, bitten-nailed claws from hanging on to the world so tightly as it tries to turn without me. 

Do I feel as if I'm keeping up? No. 

Does that matter? Also no. 

My own little world will do me just fine, as always. Now if you'll excuse me I have to put my attack dogs back in their cages (I mean accompany Batman to his house because I'm going to get a lecture now, I can feel it).