Trigger locked.

What was once a comfort now seems a curse. Jacob would have hated this life for sure (and he did, hence the knees-bent and arms outstretched swan dive, or so I imagine whenever I close my eyes) and I'm not sure we like it any more than that. Days are spent in gratitude and deep conversational therapy. Ideas are deployed, tested and then evaluated for change or success. Every day ends in a post-mortem of discussing events or rough moments. I eat too much. I don't sleep enough. They let me drink, if I so choose. I want to finish a book, get lost in a movie, or begin a painting but I can't. It's far too cold to get messy with throwing on the wheel, as my clean-up routine involves the house by the garage and the gravel side parking in the driveway as I refuse to be the guy who fucks up the sink in my studio with clay.

So I am aimlessly wander, a tortured soul on earth mimicking the footsteps of my angel in heaven. 

I asked nicely to be taken off these pills. It's been *almost* a year. The answer came back with a resounding denial. I researched stopping them myself and found out you can taper by opening them up and counting out the little balls. I opened one and found discs. Six of them. I took three and had a bad day. I won't do that again. Maybe they will decrease the dose when we hit one year. I've missed a lot of joy in that one year and a lot of writing and creativity too but I've also not had an anxiety shadow looming over me. I've had a bunch of panic attacks. I've had breakthrough fear but mostly I've just withstood and withdrawn, a capable tiny woman in a silent world who hasn't been a handful in a long time and now grows the risk of becoming an afterthought, a warm breeze through an open window, a less sparkling version of She who I once was, flaws and all. Is it better? No. It's like I am the best cup of coffee you've ever had and suddenly someone appears at your table and begins to pour an entire pitcher of milk into it, until it overflows the rim of the cup and begins to bloom across the tablecloth and drip onto the floor. Is it still coffee? Vaguely. Can you still drink it? I guess so. 

Is it good? 

No. 

I tell this to Lochlan and he laughs and kisses my forehead. 

Is it necessary? Yes, Peanut, it is. You're still here. I promise. 

But we know about Lochlan's promises and his bold reassurances that he has no way to guarantee, let alone fulfill. We know he has the want to console the crying child but can he? I shake my head. 

A facsimile. 

I can barely tell.

A perfect clone. 

Hardly, Bridge. The words come with a knife edge, suddenly as his patience is cut clean through and he changes the subject. Let's go see Ruth today. 

Please. 

And get some sleep tonight.

I shrug. I can guarantee one, just not the other. Sleep is for people at peace. Death is for people at war. 

I know what you're thinki-

No, you don't. 

We're not at war. It's peacetime.

If you say so.

It's been a really busy week. Busy organizing and cleaning the house, early spring cleaning, as it were. Burns Night. University transcripts in the mail. Dog rebounding. Cat warming up. Long bitch sessions in the hot tub and in the living room. Hot chocolate to the point where I should just open my own cafe for I am constantly making it lately. Furniture rearranging and planning for a little bit of paint and polish to the house when it warms up. It's supposed to drop down very cold tonight so this morning Lochlan and Ben and I took our weekend walk on the beach while we could. It's too slippery to walk on the rocks when it's below freezing and though I do love to be throw off the cliff and swimming back around to the beach, January is rarely the month in which I do it with any regularity. I can't say the same for every other month, but lately I want to be comfortable. I feel old and tired in my bones. 

Lochlan said that will get better as I get used to it just being the usual crew on hand. 

I wonder if he's right. This is the lull between seasons, between holidays and between storms. I've started pulling tax papers together. I've started wearing Valentino lipstick. I've begun to think less about what's for dinner and more about how I can relax. I haven't slept much but eventually I will. I continue to pledge to post properly even though my head is in the clouds or in the dirt on any given day and since we had our Burns Night supper the days are indeed seeming a little longer at last. 

That's good.

Oh look, nothing again.

I made a mountain of my famous mashed potatoes to go with dinner (chicken and zucchini) and there was none left for tomorrow's lunch. I should have known, but I wondered if anyone was hungry as they were all snacking around three this afternoon and I figured a light dinner would be enough. 

Now it's all finished and the whole kitchen has been scrubbed and all of the pots and pans and dishes too and the time machine is loaded and ready and I'm going to head down to Dalton and Duncan's to watch Singles Inferno and drink tea (DO NOT BUY THE TETLEY LIVE THEY ARE BAD). If I can stay awake, that is. 

In other news, we've finished Bling Empire: New York. It was terrible. The music was terrible. Their voices were terrible, the fashion was mostly bad and the whole thing screamed set-up and everyone was made to be a villain. 

Ha, sounds like my house.

Live, laugh, Be Cremated.

I received a (very) belated Christmas gift this afternoon from a not-close acquaintance. It was a reclaimed barn board hand-painted sign with a pretty ribbon for hanging. Very farmhouse. Very pretty. Very much a catalyst for the longest dinner debate we have ever had, I think. 

The signs says, and I quote, Don't let your dreams be dreams. 

And I know what the sentiment is supposed to be, but I just can't get past the fact that it seems like it means that your dreams are worthless so don't even bother. The boys, in trying to find kindness, point out that it means not to leave them as 'just' dreams, but to make them your reality. 

Then it is worded wrongly. Clumsily.

I had to hang it in the garage. Kind of wish it read YoU cAn ChAnGe YoUr OwN oiL, GiRlFrIeNd! or something less cutting, but here we are. 

Merry Christmas. 

Is it over yet?

Pussy riot.

Which one would you like? 

All of them.

He sighs a long sigh and checks his watch and then gets up to go to the front desk to let them know. 

I'm kidding. I don't think I can choose in a day. We'll come back. 

Another sigh, another time check. We stopped for a quick cup of coffee and visited a kitten shelter and now I can't leave. All the cats love me except for the ones that don't. My black outfit is now laced with cat hair and I'm wondering if I should add this twelve year old ginger diabetic to the mix. Or maybe the tuxedo. All of them. Perhaps this ancient chocolate point Siamese wants to yowl in a home of his own. 

I could but I won't. I'm already the crazy lady. We don't need to add cat to that description. Plus we have a new cat since just before winter and she's a dream.  But Caleb humours me in whatever I want when we are out and about and today we had a bunch of rare Saturday appointments at the lawyers office to shore up 2023 as the year we don't change anything at all, and so it was a bunch of new signatures to carry forward and the more things change, the more they stay exactly the same. 

I did, however, find a Van Cleef and Arpels charm as we walked. It's very pretty. I bet someone was pissed but what can I do? It's a needle in a haystack kind of problem but if you've lost one and you can describe it hit me up. Not my taste. I like finding dollar bills in pockets or on elevator floors. I never look up, just in, he said and I agreed in order to point out the luck of looking lets you find things and I will forever be the magpie sitting on my tiny trove of treasure. 

Just one maybe? Choose one you like. 

Is he talking about charms, cats or...men? I could never pick just one, and I no longer know what we're talking about as he holds out my coat for me to slip into and we're off for home.

The guests have gone and they took my smooth brain with them.

What do you want to do today?

Pick up some extra gas cans, ammo, cash and solar panels. Maybe guns. 

Wait, what?

I've gone down a rabbit hole reading about the WEF. It's ninety-nine percent entertainment and one percent doomscroll. It's wrapped up in an ugly package and it just makes sense. I feel guilty for using private planes. I feel dumb for having taken the vaccine. I feel helpless in the face of a world without power or internet and dammit, we just adopted an orphaned broken electric mower and fixed it to use and I conquered it handily (you have to do a series of movements to start it) and so I don't want to give that up. But I also think some stacks of cold hard green and a stockpile of weapons (I saw The Road) are a good way to go for now. If the cyberattacks come or the electromagnetic pulses or whatever they have planned hit, we need to be ready. 

I love conspiracy theories. Love them love them. Especially since some of them are glaringly true.

A brief update on why there are no updates.

A revolving door of Christmas and post-holiday visitors keeps me from being able to write. A rock in my jeep wheel means we have a project for the weekend. A new study points out the huge quantities of lead and cadmium in dark chocolate (of all things) and I am ready for a vacation or at least a bottle of wine and a spate of horror movies in a row, all to myself. That's my reward for all this and *checks watch* next Wednesday will be the day, barring any further FAA issues, that is. 

I'm making Caleb watch k-pop videos (okay, just one, actually: Halazia). I'm making Lochlan study rudimentary hurdy gurdy playing, as we are considering having one made for Henry, and I'm listening to The Arcadian Wild all the damn time now, because it's like Nick Drake but with bluegrass. Ruthie is knee-deep in taxes, having had a banner year and then some working her butt off and it reminds me that tax time is coming (haha please kill me) and I need to maybe double my pills. My skin is finally clear after months of antibiotics and so a breather from the eczema is so nice, but my fingers are all split on the tips and it doesn't help that I heavy-clean the office each Monday for my employer and he says I should chill but dirt is bad for business and I just coat my fingertips in lanolin overnight. 

The new cat settles in on the bed each night too. It's amazing. 

The good news is our guests love to eat out, and so cooking is on the light side. They also aren't my guests and so short of small talk and asking them if they need anything I am off the hook. I love that. 

In other news, all of the Christmas gifts I ordered from overseas are still in the mail system. Hahahaha.

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.