Feeling useless when in pain.

Ben is busy setting up my iphone again. He has a crazy EQ on it to change the songs to be very vocal-centric for me so I can hear them properly. Something broke after the last update and I can't hear it to set it up properly. The joys of being deaf, let me tell you. Deaf enough to need all this help but hearing enough to function so that others don't understand how frustrated I get.

And when I get frustrated the whole world caves in because if ever there were an issue of main character syndrome it would be here on the point, and it would be me. 

In other news, we took the dog for a swim, and we went for breakfast, and it was so late I have a headache from the distinct lack of eight-in-the-morning-sharp coffee, and we got some bacon on the side to feed to the dog because I have decided that his moments of clarity are getting further and further apart and so every day I try to make sure he spends his happiest moments. He sleeps next to me in bed, he gets fifty treats a day if he wants. 

But I still have a headache. 

The boys want to go see Avatar so I told them to go. I don't want to see it. I want to nap and listen to music and paint and draw and make things but I am also so tired. I don't think the sleep apnea thing is going to get anywhere, Rather than fucking with the symptoms I want to fix the root cause and see a specialist. My doctor is strangely not on board so I'll have to put him on board somehow but I will deal with that in a week or two. Once the headache goes away.

The eleventh day of Christmas.

We are...drinking Sazeracs and having an all-day horror fest that consists of putting every new horror movie we haven't seen on Netflix yet onto a piece of paper and drawing them one at a time. I wish for a sweet black licorice death at this point, let me tell you as most of them are worse than bad and I can't name what I love about  my slasher movies so much except that if people are outside running away from maniacs in the dark I am there in spirit. Maybe it's because I couldn't run from my own monster? Maybe it's because the monster is inside. I don't know, I just know that I am almost drunk, and there's a storm coming. The wind is warm and fierce suddenly, the rain is moving in and the seas feel wrong. The moonlight is off. The neighbourhood is pitch-quiet and Ben is already fast asleep in the theatre, taking up three places on the huge sectional instead of the usual two. Boys come and go. Dinner arrived, and lunch did too at one point. I ate some jelly beans in between. At one point, Caleb came down for a visit, hand snaking around my throat to tip my head back for a brief kiss before the glare of the redhead filled my peripheral vision and I told Caleb to either sit and watch or go out and I'll see him later. He's promised me a storm walk tomorrow which is beach combing when the tide begins to furl in against the shore, a dangerous time but also the time with the highest rewards.

I hope the power stays on.

8:05/4:25

And just like that Henry has graduated from university. Wow. When I started writing here he was a thirty-pound toddler straining my back and my brain with being so incredibly like and unlike Ruthie and he worried me more but less and he remains a twin to her but his own person just the same. 

I am so proud of him and I can't believe that's it. No more school for him. No more lunch bags, no more tuition, no more working on projects and waiting forever for marks. No more any of it. 

It was a wonderful end to a very long day. I worked today and after a two week break all of the plants were half-alive and everything was so grimy. It's an office with crazy windows and a partial atrium ceiling so they have so many tropical plants and yeah...the heat was cranked and the plants were suffering so I turned it way down and gave everything a long drink and then cleaned for a few hours. Then I rushed home because the dog is getting old and having separation anxiety issues and I didn't want him to get too upset and now I'm going to surprise the boys with hot turkey sandwiches and stuffing because there weren't any leftovers after our big Christmas dinner and so I picked up extra and I'm roasting more turkey breast and making gravy and I know they will be excited. Definitely a whole new sort of countdown to longer days, as suddenly the thought of an endless dark January isn't so bad right at this moment.

Twenty Twenty Three.

Have you ever been alone at night
Thought you heard footsteps behind
And turned around and no one's there?
And as you quicken up your pace
You find it hard to look again
Because you're sure there's someone there

 

Never question a princess on whether or not she can competently (and accurately) perform Iron Maiden's Fear of the Dark for an audience. She can and she will because performing is in her blood. Singing is not, especially this genre but I skewed comedic and it held and I had a rousing round of polite and surprised applause. Which is great, because secretly I've been off trying to figure out the lyrics for Halazia (the new Ateez music video) and this had me reaching into the darkest corners of my brain, my fingers trailing lightly over the ghosts the light refused to reveal. 

Iron Maiden remains the singlemost LOUDEST concert I have ever been to. I took earplugs. I was wide-eyed and ringing for days afterward in spite of them, however, but it was fun and I'd do it again. 

I have the tiniest bottle of Piccolo to split with Lochlan on the beach at midnight. The rain is holding off, humanity is ruined, everything's fucked and we'll be standing in the wreckage hoping for a better future, or perhaps amnesia from the past, or something or other. I wrote my resolutions with imposter syndrome and I'll eat them smeared on crow three days from now, having broken every word into matchsticks, as I always do. 

Happy New year.

 

I don't talk shit about you on the internet.

We're having a great time singing along at the top of our lungs with Kelly Clarkson's incredible cover of Happier Than Ever. Oh my God, it's a masterpiece.

Welcome back.

Me, I mean me. 

I have had a great week eating my body weight in chocolates, gin, cheesecake and tourtiere. Turkey, carrots and butterflake rolls. Every time someone walks into this house they bring me a coffee and so I roll through the day into the night and then into the next, wide-eyed, sugar-crushed, Santa-spent and reeling in the glow of our prettiest Christmas decorations, still on the tree.

The weather was bad. So bad. It snowed and snowed and then it rained so hard I thought we would be swept into the sea. I waved to Santa at the mall and he did not see me. Lochlan wanted to make appointments for us to visit with him and I declined. I was tired. I didn't work too hard. I listened to Ali & Theo. I listened to Shostakovich and I put on Ricky Montgomery on for the dog and the dog finally stopped freaking out and fell asleep. 

We changed light bulbs and faucets today. Some were too dim, some too bright. Some faucets were hard to turn, others seized completely. A multi-hundred dollar trip to the hardware store and the assurance of the staff that we wouldn't get a plumber this week left me pointing out that I can do this myself but in the end Lochlan only let me change one of them myself while he and Ben did the others and PJ did two in the next house over, for a case of beer, I think. He came home slightly drunk, anyway. He waited too late to go but we only have one basin wrench so there was no choice in the matter. 

Spinning back toward reason.

If we're counting the days, we've made it to winter solstice. That means the days will soon be getting longer again, and didn't I get a hint of that this morning, as it seemed bright enough to open the window treatments on the main floor around seven this morning, and I don't think that has happened for a while. 

The boys went out to do a coffee run and we've spent the remainder of the day guessing singers from the Youtube Christmas station Google found for us and has been playing ever since. 

Bing Crosby? 

I think so. 

It's Gene Autry.

Wow. I was so off. What the fuck. 

If you knew Gene Autry by sound I would be surprised. He's a bit before your time. 

I didn't know Pentatonix either, if we're being truly honest. I did know Wham, Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon, played in a row and I half-expected Live Aid to round out the segment but then Mariah Carey came on and I realized there's no human plotting these playlists. I would do half-hour themes, mix old and new a little better than they are now and skip the annoying 'classics' that are repetitive and stale. I would mix in songs from other countries and more rare pieces and some classical, maybe some instrumental. I don't know, maybe that's just as flawed as what I'm listening to now, I suppose and we can't all agree on what's good and bad and that's why you can listen for going on ten days now without hearing the same song twice. 

I need to go light the candles and prepare the rituals. They are just rebirths in the starlight, fresh hymns for new seasons, taking deep breaths and exacting gratitude for everything we fought for, and everything we've kept.

My epic tale (for today).

At the edge of the world
Fight the mighty horde
That bashes and breaks you
And brings you to mourn

This morning I am listening to Ayla Nereo alternating with The Arcadian Wild and yet my brain is screaming the lines from Toss a Coin to your Witcher at every pause and it's maddening and it's par for the course, sadly. 

And I don't have any attention issues at all, because there is no attention left to be paid. My debt has been cleared and I've moved on to once again pretending to be functional while I wait for Santa, while I bake endless loaves of Stollen bread, while I wrap the few remaining presents and make white-knuckle drives to the store for provisions, for supplies, for escape. 

We're ready and over the next month we're also hosting some guests but all of that depends on the weather, as it's absolute chaos right now. The mountain highways are the first to check out of reality as people in mclarens with racing slicks try to go to North (or South, or East) and take out everyone else. The boys call it road-bowling as the unprepared drivers hurl themselves into perfectly capable everyone else. I sneak out here and there during less-crowded times, shift into four-high and get where I'm going. Back in the day of my sports cars I would throw eighteen-inch snow tires on and use the skills I learned doing donuts in snowy parking lots as a teenager, as instructed by the boys, since I was the last to get my license and was the most celebrated upon doing so. 

They don't worry about me driving and my Jeep is big enough to push everyone else off the road but they worry about me being trapped in traffic endlessly because roads here are designed to be impassible bottlenecks at the BEST of times and that's dumb too.

Used to be sweet, now I'm just bitter.

Six loaves of bread proofing on the stove this morning, three big crockpots on the go. Beef stew tonight. My recipe, which I won't share and they can't seem to duplicate. It's always almost but not quite. Lo-Fi winter jazz playing through the house thanks to Google being yelled at until he/she got it right. I had it on Shostakovich and it was choosing the most morose pieces I was losing my mind. Then I switched to Ali& Theo and again, the most drag-me-down choices and finally I just said what I thought was the name of my favourite Youtube random snowy cafe jazz music and it was a direct hit. 

Perfect. 

The dog is sleeping on the living room floor, one eye open so he can watch me from there. Cat is playing nearby. She's a little maniac and then she conks out for three hours straight. It's hilarious. 

Duncan is also conked out. He did a coffee run, mine was wrong and had cream in it so I drank as much as I could and had to pour out the remainder, almost half a cup. I can't do it. It tastes bad. I'm actually finding that since contracting covid (in September), things since have a weirdly metallic taste and it's difficult to know if it's the thing or me. 

He felt bad, but not bad enough to stay awake and cut onions so there I was, alone in the kitchen with my intrusive, non-consensual thoughts and my ghosts and my tiny grey and white furry friends.

On bribing PJ to stay up for the 9:45pm Amazon delivery.

I made it. I didn't think I would but then I got sucked into Lookism on Netflix and it's really good and I had a big glass of orange juice to sip so I went to bed just as Amazon sent an email saying that they would try again tomorrow. That my packages aren't coming. That they ran out of time or something. 

And we're doing it all again tonight. 

My orange juice is two ice cubes, a quarter of a glass of actual juice and then water to the top. The undiluted version is so freaking overly sweet and I grew up in a household where my mother mixed orange juice from concentrate and always added a can of water 'extra' to make it go that much further so to me that's what orange juice tastes like only I'm too lazy to mix the cans. I also am criminally short on freezer space and live with several men who think it's a damn shame how I regiment myself. 

Lochlan just wishes I was that sparing with my alcohol. I can drink the whole of a fermented lake. If they added sugar I would be less likely, you know?

All of this wages an ironic war with my love of candy but I clench my teeth at night and they hurt and sugar somehow makes it all worse right now so we are looking at retraining muscles, different pillows, a shit-ton of relaxing techniques and biofeedback and it's maybe ten percent better already. 

Have I finished wrapping? No. Do I care? Of course not. Do I have any motivation? None to be seen for hundreds of miles in any direction, thank you. Just grey clouds, swirling wind and that unravelling striped scarf I keep meaning to fix after it got snagged on the picket fence one late afternoon in November. 

I am not productive in any creative, meaningful way but I'm not procrastinating either. This morning I did the floors and the beds. The whole house minus the downstairs suite but the theatre too. I swept outside and walked the dog and played with the new kitten, a white Bengal that I weighed days on as she was somewhat feral and unfriendly. Only weeks later and she sleeps in Lochlan's lap as long as he's sitting down. Her name is Aurora. She loves the dog. He thinks she's very interesting.

(I was considering getting a Russian Topaz and then Aurora came along and was touted as unfriendly and not a good choice for adoption and so of course we love a challenge and we gambled and won. How often does that happen?)

My fingertips split from the chemicals and from the dry indoor winter air. I still have my job, though I won't be working many more dates this year. I'd like the next ten days to go by quickly so the days will grow even longer after that. I'd like to have more fun and fret less. Yes, I still fret but I don't care about it so does it even count? And I want to find more of this feuerzangenbowle incense because it smells like Christmas, smells like winter in the woods, a bonfire at the far end of the little bridge just over the brook, a place that felt like it was the middle of nowhere but the highway was only a hundred yards away if you kept walking. My tiny little mind and oversized imagination didn't know that and I was raised by the boys to believe if you walked into the woods they would never end and you would just keep walking until you were lost. Now I see that they said that to keep me from going in alone, but what a gamble. I was such a stubborn little girl that I would have done it just to see if they were right or wrong but Lochlan rarely took his eyes off me and never let go of my hand when we were in the woods, as it were. 

I am going to go wrap some presents and listen to some Christmas music, I think. Then I won't feel so bad about the lack of drive or about who has to stay up late and wait for overworked and underpaid couriers.