Regressive tendencies.

Sigh.

A whole post about owls and woods and metal and you're all..."a single nother peep"???!?

Bridget, I thought you were a published author. It's 'another single peep'.

God. I could feel the condescension all but dripping off the emails but I had a laugh, wrung myself out, by now floating up to my ears in it, and pulled the plug on the room, washing it all down the drain. I rarely check my emails these days but I was waiting for something and so I read them, against my own best judgment, as I get tired of being told I'm a whore, that I'm going to hell, that I'm greedy and using people and dumb and soon to get 'what's coming to me', etc. etc.

Then the grammar police showed up. Thank heavens, because the others cut so deep but I tend to stay out of reach as it is. And my assistant blocks the worst and reports the very worst to the internet police or whomever needs to know. The Russians? Whatever.

(My assistant is Daniel.)

But yeah. It's a single nother peep. Because for me that's how it's ordered in my brain and I don't care if it's awkward, it's the way my mind does it and going back to edit my words later is sometimes something I can't get to. Sometimes it doesn't get fixed at all and I should try harder but sometimes...

Sometimes I just have to spill the words on the page and leave them there to pile up underneath the dead leaves and the moss and the pumpkin spice lattes and whatever's coming next. I've decided it's going to be good because I need it to be, regression and all.

She's a space cadet. Leave it. Important missions and all that. Lochlan isn't being unkind. In fact, he's the kindest of all, absolving me of my grammar tics and strangeness in one massive sweep. He is forgiving and gracious about it. He called me a space cadet once when I had my thoughts in the sky instead of in the present as required and instead of bursting into tears like he feared I would, instantly wishing he could take back the words he put down in anger, I took it as the single highest compliment he had ever given me. It's better than sweet, heavier than pretty, and more phenomenal than perfect to me.

What? He says, shocked. It's a name called. It's an insult, Bridgie. 

No, it's a goal, Locket. If I start out as a cadet, eventually I'll be the Space General! And then everyone will HAVE to listen to me.

Owls + new Starset.

Gravity
I pull on you
Close enough to rendezvous
You come to me and then you slip right through
I'm in the solitude
Why's it always touch and go?
Now we'll never even know what it's like
Left me in the afterglow
'Til I'm falling through space and time

Okay well, yeah. Toss the rest of the week off with one solid kick and haul in a new day. The owls sung me to sleep last night and when Lochlan came up I was all SHHHHHHHHHH CAN YOU HEAR THEM? And they didn't make a single nother peep for the rest of the night. Maybe that means I've manifested them only for myself, as Ben pointed out this morning. As if I could do that. Like, what?

Speaking of Manifest.

Jesus CHRIST.

I was scared Starset wouldn't sound like themselves. I didn't like MNQN, truth be told. I was really annoyed that there was another project taking up the time that should be used to push out the third Starset album and now that it's almost here I'm thrilled. I listened to Manifest about a thousand times this morning. It has all the elements that stroke my brain just perfectly. Heaviness, melodic emotion, and outer space.

Probably owls too, because owls are cool. 

When I say this afterthought Lochlan's coffee all but spits out in a huge spontaneous laugh.

God this song is SO GOOD.

Eagles, bats, IKEA pour-overs.

Drinking coffee in the gazebo, listening to The Contortionist's new EP Our Bones, reading my own words as I do a little subcontracted fiction writing for a guy who sometimes needs my touch but you'll never hear him thank me out loud. Sometimes gigs are crushing but still lucrative and I never had a soul to sell for so long it seemed easy to give away chunks of the carnival in my mind for a song or a fat cheque or a pat on the head, doesn't matter which.

I am usually the most impressed with the things I come up with anyway, overall.

Lochlan watches me from the patio steps, right by the door in the shade. My very own carnival in human form.  I take another dutiful bite of the apple-jelly toast he brought out for me, washing it down with a gulp of ice-cold gritty coffee from a cup I've been keeping close for several hours now. It's absolutely terrible and yet I'm proving a point. He doesn't need to hover.

I write a few more paragraphs and now I'm faking drinking coffee as it's empty, grinds travelling up the inside of the cup like a waterfall of dirt that eventually dried up in the sun. No one is going to hike back to see this marvel of nature, that's for sure. No one's going to invest kilometres of energy to stand in awe of the raw power of grinds sweeping over a ceramic vessel with a perfect blue-red lipstick print at the top. It's not Instagrammable. It's not wondrous. It's as pedestrian as one can get and you'll never see it but it still exists and that's somehow the important part today.

It's quiet and easy and not beautiful. The opposite of everything we reach for, everything we want, as always.

Oh, here he comes. Old eagle-eyes (blind as a bat these days) knows I'm faking and so I suppose my time here is up.

Upside: I didn't get eaten by a bear.

Yesterday's adventure wound up consisting of a long waterfall-laden hike yesterday. I ran ten kilometres to pull this off, as everyone walks a brisk pace when we hike to keep an even distance from other groups of hikers, even faster when we need to overtake, and since the average stride of the long legs of anyone in the group span several meters easy (might not be hyperbole), I therefore must run. When I begged them to slow down in the humidity they did but only enough so that I had to walk so fucking fast I ran out of breath eventually and got teased endlessly for being out of shape. Ben offered a piggyback. Lochlan offered to take me back to the truck to wait for the others. I swore at both and continued my medium jog as walking fast wasn't keeping up and the flat out running is really hard in the close air of the woods. I also needed enough stopping power to avoid horse poop and huge banana slugs making their way home, something I don't actually have the reflexes for when I run.

My reward was a giant beer and a monte cristo with a mountain of fries and two dill pickles. WORTH.

It also gave Lochlan a chance to regroup and rally back around instead of starting off offended at my allegiances of the morning, wanderlust speaking for me without permission or information, obviously as it is selfish and singular and I am generally not. He isn't mad, and has vowed to make the next week exactly perfect and beyond, as we can manage it via these uphill battles. We're attempting a full-fledged effort to throw history into the sea. Or the woods. I may miss the spectacle since I can't keep up.

Sight/seer.

Watching Caleb sleep. I'm jammed in the corner between the wall and the window, knees up, weighing down the duvet so that if he turns, he's going to wake up, as he won't be able to take the duvet with him. He's my wanderlust cure, my adventurer oddly enough, always suggesting exactly what I need to fix the weird propensity to want to run when things get good. I think it's a holdover from the days when Lochlan would sneak us out of a gig or a town with a saying about always leaving on a high note, when things are good, before people start looking for you. Lochlan is a homebody at heart though. He always wanted to just stop moving, for chrissakes.

My brain has her bags packed, all the shades are drawn and the lights are on automatic timers so that no one will know that I'm gone.

You're like a little bear. The only thing missing is a honey pot. He laughs sleepily. I jump at the sound of his voice. I thought he was out like a light.

Did I wake you? 

Yes. You didn't think I would feel a hundred-pound weight on my blanket? I've been paralyzed like this for over an hour. He grabs me, pulling me in against him, throwing the duvet over top of both of us. His skin is so warm. He kisses the tip of my nose and then pushes his face up toward the light to fall back asleep.

I close my eyes but I don't sleep.

Where do you want to go? 

Day trips. 

Where though?

Exploring. 

Ah. Close enough to be safe but far enough to get away. This is the story of your life, Bridget.

Waiting for the wind to change.

Sam felt the urge this morning to wake us all up at the crack of the dawn and march us down to the beach for a private service by the water. He vacations just about as well as I do, which is to say he hardly does. I will proudly report that I sat outside for a whopping ninety minutes with a glass of wine and Kitchen Confidential, churning through almost a quarter of the book proper and I didn't hear a peep from the house or the sky or the neighborhood. I think they put an embargo on contacting me for that time period and it was nothing short of surprising and completely unexpected.

I did forget to water the lawn too, which was going to be part of my evening but the book was too good to put down and so it waited. I'll do it today.

I was having a good sleep but I am finding that it doesn't actually matter if I go to bed at ten or at one in the morning I will wake up exactly seven hours later ready to roll. Usually that's five but since last night was so late due to an attempt to cram two movies into the later part (Rezort and IO, respectively, on Netflix. IO was far better but Rezort had the best chase scene since Vanishing Point, not even kidding. I screamed out loud.) I went to bed at one-thirty and was up promptly at eight-thirty, or maybe that was Sam's soft knock urging us to follow him.

He had coffee in thermoses at least. Bless him. I sucked almost a whole one back and then decided I was ready to listen but he was almost done. It was cold, about seventeen degrees and I'm up to my ankles in the icy Pacific, short-shorts and a huge sweater and bedhead because that's fashion for me as of late. Underneath it the ever-present pink bikini.

I look around as the caffeine lights the fire in my veins and I think this is my life now and it's awesome.

Moonicorns.

My dark favorites of music and metal in particular are thick and heavy like cream pouring over glass, like the night settling in over the trees, layers of inky opaque purple punctuated by random tiny flashes of light, fireflies or stars to decorate the black. Just the way I like it. I tried to commandeer Ben's big headphones for the morning but he needed them and so I made due with my airpods (finally in again after three months less one week using corded phones due to the ring through my ear.) and it wasn't so bad, honestly.

Besides, Mark is here so I'm not listening to music right now. Right now I hear the hypnotic drone of his machine, the power supply humming away on the floor underneath his doc boot, the needle a higher pitched vibration as he deposits color into Lochlan's skin.

I'm always horribly jealous when someone else has work done and I can't be the one. There's something so cathartic and relaxing about focusing on the pain of the needles for a few hours. I have to watch very carefully. If I am distracted my brain forgets to stay still and I will be overwhelmed with the urge to rip myself away from that pain. If I watch I'm fine.

I'm not having any more work done. Think I'm full up. Mark has changed a few small things, touched up things and finished me off and the only parts remaining that are not tattooed are not places I would like to be tattooed so I'm done but I miss the process. And so I have my books and wine and I'm chilling out this weekend at home while they get things done. I will garden and cook and bake and maybe nap but probably not and I will Netflix and chill and Schuyler promised to take me for ice cream at a place they go since we can't get to Cows up the hill in Whistler this week and it's better if you buy it by the cone instead of by the tub.

(Whistler is overrun with mountain bikers this week for Crankworx. Not my all-time favorite season on the ninety-nine but better than ski season, oddly enough. And Cows is the best ice cream in the known and unknown universe, as ever.)

Nutshell.

I've got new Slipknot music, new tattoos to plan and rain and red wine in my upcoming weekend, a nice change from everything else as we head into the dog days of summer, ignoring the Burning Man elephant in the room. The countdown is on! The invitations are open! And for some stupid reason I have FOMO about it. Fear of missing out. Even despite the relative glamping luxury I was thrust into and still managed to catch a fucking lung infection and a whole heaping pile of misery.

I feel like I'm a part of it now and I'm supposed to show up, but honestly sticking close to home, seeing through the huge harvest of our garden, those new tattoos (not for me but for LOCHLAN who is covering some very old things that he got on a whim and should have dealt with long ago), 3/4 of a cheap red (Vintage Ink whiskey barrel aged, if you're looking. Medium dry, very mellow. Kind of good, actually and I'm not much of a red girl unless it's merlot or shiraz) and my sketch book and headphones.

I don't know why. The other part of me wants to go go go and DO THINGS SEE THINGS GO TO PLACES HAVE FUN but truly I am a homebody and I don't know how to deal with the wanderlust parts that scream so loudly. I make myself more miserable than those around me at least, so there's that. Trying to force contentment when there's no contentment to be found. It's all around us, as always and as always it's just out of reach.

Next year I'll plant epinephrine, just in case.

It could have been a lot worse. 

I hate that phrase. It makes it seem as if what happened wasn't bad enough, or catastrophic enough. It's almost a gleeful sort of schadenfreude of a comment, honestly and I smacked it out of my range of hearing with the back of my hand as soon as it came out of Caleb's mouth.

 Right. I'm fine. Really, I am.

I have no stings. I walked right into a wasp nest, tucked into the middle of the huge oregano plant that I let grow crazy and bolt like fury in order to appease the bees, ironically enough. While the bees were happily buzzing around the giant four-feet wide by three feet tall shrub I had stepped to the middle of it to pull an errant weed, and at the last second I saw the nest, before stepping directly into it. Angry wasps swarmed out in a tornado of disruption and instead of screaming I closed my eyes and my mouth and hoped for the best.

I heard shouts and didn't move. I could feel them landing on my legs, my hair, brushing my eyelashes, wondering how to fight back against this giant of a human that had just levelled the house they spent all summer constructing.

Lochlan ran right into the oregano and grabbed me and I flew out of it and into his arms. He was promptly stung four times in the space between my chest and my back through his t-shirt. PJ used a blowtorch to destroy the remains of the nest and was stung twice on the arms for his efforts. Caleb stood with a curated concerned look on his face and Duncan had his phone in hand in case someone did indeed turn out to be anaphylactic (We're not. Hell, we've done this before. A few times now.) but everyone is relatively alright.

As Caleb said, I guess. It could have been worse.

Once back inside, using baking soda to treat Lochlan's stings, he undressed me slowly, untying my spare linen dress. Two wasps fall out and hit the floor, squished. A bee falls out, crushed the same way. Lochlan starts to laugh, a relief in his voice that surprises me for it's intensity.

It would never be from something like this, I tell him. He stares at me and it makes me so uncomfortable I turn the light off with my mind. He looks toward the dresser and notes the light and asks if I can not do this sort of thing so much.

The day seemed a little dull, I tell him and he laughs some more, not in amusement but in disbelief.

The thirteen year wait (exhale, expel).

Unveil now
Lift away
I see you running
Deceiver chased away
A long time coming

Almost cried in anticipation this morning as I slipped on my headphones and cued up my purchased copy of Tool's Fear Inoculum, a single I thought would download for free when I preordered the album but it didn't and I couldn't wait.

I freaking love it. It has just enough of everything I love about them with a strange new maturity overriding it all. Just mellow enough to be so easy to slip into but still with enough of that vague sexual energy and strangeness to pull off what makes Tool Tool, I guess.

If you're not into it that's okay too. A week from now the first Starset single drops for their third album and I'm sure I'll squee all over the damned floor then too. So the legend has it if you don't like what I'm talking about, listening to, watching, just wait a minute. Or two.

It's absolutely the new music summer of our lives. I have something like five preorders incoming and more to pour over, as I am introduced to things. I love every second of it. Thirteen years ago I was a harried mom caught between Cole and Jacob, trying to raise kids who still needed endless supervision and repair a house that was in pieces around me, all the while enduring the long prairie winters that were bitterly cold and wondering if it would get better. If this was it. If everything would stay this way.

It did get better. This wasn't it. And nothing will ever be the same again, except the music. Familiar voices, modern material. I'll take it, thank you, guys.