It always ends the same way.

I know. Ten days without checking in again and the internet moves along at such a frenetic clip my cycle of news for you barely exists for a moment before dropping you into the next tidbit that you seek out online.

What's happening? My grapes aren't quite ready, the red ones anyway. I eat the green ones by the handful, barely avoiding certain death by the giant bald-faced hornets that seem hellbent on making another summer memory for me. Lochlan says I am hilarious and he lives for this. I go into every summer marvelling at the long light, the warmth, the sting of salt on sweat, the gardening possibilities, and then I run screaming from it just as quickly, resenting the oppressive heat, traffic, tourists and the sheer work of gardening involved. The bugs. The endless mowing. The endless cleaning of the pool. The endless ruination of all of my bathing suits so quickly as the chlorine rips them apart and I tend to sleep in the pool. PJ called me a human sous-vide once and I cracked back an insult about fetishes of sealing people in plastic and eating them later and all he did was laugh until he started to wheeze. 

(PJ doesn't like the heat either.)

By the end of summer I am spilling blueberries out of a mug in a race to get them all, the bottoms of my feet are black from the dust, from the sand and the pavement and the dirt and my skin is faint golden, buried under a million freckles that appear seemingly out of nowhere. I am wild-eyed and now offended by the early end to the evenings and the tourists leaving the town high and dry far too early and the Back to School adverts and the Christmas displays in stores. 

He said it's like the five stages of grief but I go into it mourning summer and then finally find acceptance and even enthusiasm. 

Even as he yells at me to go back outside and scrub my toes before I leave little sooty footprints all over the white carpet, something I categorically denied until he pointed out my feet are size six and the next closest is him at eleven so it's pretty obvious it was me. 

I just shake my head and keep eating blackberries. No wasps in these ones. Only spiders. Yum.

I have four suggestions that might make the world a better place. (Vancouver and LA I'm looking at you!)

1. Lower your goddamn expectations. Expect to wait. Expect life to sometimes not be perfect. Expect other people to have problems too. Expect some things to go wrong sometimes. Be patient and prepared and you'll have an easier time. Do it for your own mental health, which, like physical health, should be looked after.

2. Let's eliminate Air BnB's! If you stay in a hotel they have better standards. And if they have cameras you can get a nice payout. Air BnB was supposed to be for when you were away you would rent out your own home and make a few bucks. Now it's stealing from the available housing supply as people buy up stock for short term rentals. Fuck off with that. Shut it all down. Forever. 

3. Cap rent amounts (and maybe sales too) by square footage. The joke of a video about a 200 sq foot room in an SRO here going for $2000 a month wasn't funny, it was devastating. There should be a maximum rental price you can charge if a unit falls under a certain size, or have a graduated scale in increments. Why the hell not? Nothing else is working and prices are through the roof.

4. Let's get Sam Asghari and Meghan Markle together!! Come on, it will be fun.  They can write books on their experiences and fade away together. Even better, someone introduce Britney to Harry and she can have her life and eat it too. What bullshit. I am somewhat heartened though. Up until a couple of days ago I was beginning to think she was dead.

  (Also whoever said to fill a small water bottle with water and freeze it and roll your feet on it is a fucking genius. It's my new favourite thing. I can't get cool. I am cranky.)

Safe Haven and halfway points.

Devilled eggs and sweat. Bad documentaries and worse romance movies. Nicholas Sparks who never fails to sweep my feet out from under me, even though I am so jaded at this point my skin has a green cast and is cool to the touch. 

I love Julianne Hough. I freaking love her. Even if Footloose didn't need to be remade, though her background means she shouldn't have fallen off the bike at all. Safe Haven was a weird one, though I got chills when Josh Duhamel told her she was safe, and gave her all of that white-knight bullshit romance-novel reassurance women fall for so damn easily, without prejudice. Every single fucking time. 

And it's hopeful, optimistic reassurance at best. Because in the end Julianne (Katie/Erin, whatever she wanted to go by) saved herself. As one should. Or something. Not sure if that works for or against Mr. Sparks but it was a twist I didn't see coming. 

Kind of like Cobie as a ghost. No idea. Completely shocked by that one.

Smash Um forget Um cookies.

 It's cool today. Jeans and no shirts for some, simple linen sundresses for others. I'll let you figure out who's wearing what. The pool and the air seem to be the same temperature, the skies are a pale blue that remind me of Jacob's eyes. The clouds persist, but just a little. There's a blanket folded on the back of the swinging bench on the porch and one on my favourite egg-chaise by the pool, just for me, just in case I get cold and want to wrap myself up like a burrito. 

I've been strolling the neighborhood picking blackberries and picking up litter, petting everyone's cats, dogs and children, talking to Ruth on the phone half the time and my dad the other half. My dad has gotten old suddenly. Gone is the stubborn, unfeeling mean giant of a man and in his place is someone shorter, frailer and more understanding, somehow, as if the wind has been taken completely out of his sails. He's almost fun to talk to now, and I almost want to go back on my vow to feel nothing when it comes to my folks, as they never felt anything about me, other than some sort of smug satisfaction that they could just lie about my life instead of being horrified by it. 

But as I said, I have made the choice not to care.

At all. 

Cole's anniversary came and went. The clouds came and went. The rain came in briefly and then went. I watched like seven dozen movies and documentaries and true crime dramas on Netflix and I don't think I liked any of them. I loved the mom in Run Rabbit Run but not the story. I'm watching American Psycho now just to remind myself that Patrick Bateman is a construct of a construct and Caleb took some stupid cues back in the day, though I feel like men like Caleb are more then inspiration for the writers instead of the result, especially since this movie is only twenty years old. 

I haven't 'done' anything. A little gardening. I stalked a very big beetle yesterday. I cleaned out one of the Jeeps since it was downright filthy and I scrubbed the inside of the pantry (shelves too). I hung more lanterns. I cleaned some baseboards and windowsills and I painted an old set of bookends that my grandfather made and I have carted around ever since and they're holding the cookbooks. I found a copy of Kim's Cookbook for Young People, a treasured first cookbook that Bailey and I studied and copied and cooked before I was one of the boys. I bought it and am waiting for it to arrive. I'm going to send it on to her for her birthday. 

 I haven't made much progress in my own reading. I want to do a lot of sewing and painting and reading and resting but the dog is dying and he needs me. I can't leave a room without him anymore and it's breaking my heart. Fifteen years of having an ever-present shadow and when I don't have a shadow anymore I don't know what I will do. This dog is my constant and my comfort, even sleeping up close to my head when the boys moved here and I was left behind and I watched 30 days of night and got weirdly scared.

I needed him and now he needs me so if he needs me to sleep up by his face I will do it. It's the least I can do for him. His spine is sharp and his eyes are cloudy. He has no idea what his name is anymore and he rarely eats. But it's okay. He can live out his days on love.

I didn't mean for this to be sad. I meant to sit down and tell you how reluctant I have become to be reasonable. I'm back to living in my own head and maybe it's the pills, maybe it's the dog, but it just feels like someone dropped a concrete block between me and life and only Lochlan and the children can get around it. 

That's not a bad thing. Just a thing that I see. But my eyes are cloudy too. Cloudy and rainy, more often than not.

Dumb bitch.

Cole (Trey to me and the boys) died seventeen years ago today. 

Huh.

It seems like it was a movie. It seems like another lifetime. Maybe it was just a lifetime movie that I caught at the end on a fuzzy cable channel back in the day when we had channels on the television instead of apps. On the upside, I don't miss anything I want to see now because I can start it when I please.

Seventeen years, and this weekend Henry turns twenty-two. And he's finished university and already working away in his chosen field and his bosses are very proud of him. 

Cole would have been proud of him too. 

Everyone is. 

Would he be proud of me? I don't know. Maybe. Probably not. He always had this disdain for me, as I deferred to Lochlan forever (and will forever) and Cole felt as though I was marked. That he would always be second place. 

So tonight I raise my glass and pour it out in the grass for another year gone by and say things out loud I never would have dared to say with him present. 

Third. You were third place. Ha.

I still say it quietly. He's probably around here somewhere.

The food trucks in my hood tonight are ice cream and shawarmas. Perfect.

It's a beautiful Friday afternoon and I am soaked to the bone with chlorine, save for George, who is wrapped in a fiberglass sleeve. Wet hair plastered to my skull and my bathing suit is almost dry at least thanks to the eight minutes of Vitamin D allowance I was given in order to thrive without burning. 

In between swims I am emailing around, getting things done, tossing around terms like subrogation and probability. My primroses are about to bloom again. My potatoes are growing up everywhere. The cucumbers and pumpkins are flowering and a squirrel stole all of my radishes before they could fully start. The grapes are green pearls in the shade, protected from the heat and Dalton and Duncan are brown already, in high contrast to Lochlan, who is mildly pink, like me, but has hair the color of recently polished copper. 

It's my favourite time of year.

I'll get a fat cheque from the subrogation nonsense. I am trying not to be hasty. I'll get it all organized. I'm thinking of getting Lasik or PRK or at the very least contacts, and I'm thinking that there are enough festivals with food trucks and live music that I could go all summer without having a single sad thought or at least less of them and every year I say that all I'm going to do is lie on my back under the stars and eat Twizzlers and sing at the top of my lungs. Every year I do it maybe four nights tops. This year I am going for a record. 

The songs are whatever is playing on eighties radio. I don't know anything else, lyrically, I mean. 

PJ made me a large ice with water and grapefruit juice. Dinner is FFY (Fend for yourself) since every Friday night Henry goes out with friends and plays pool and drinks diet pepsi because the pub doesn't have diet coke and so we get takeout lunch on Fridays. Today was A&W but I only had a chicken BLT and I am stuffed. I might have a coconut pineapple popsicle later. I might sit outside on the porch and look at my flowers or out back on the patio and look at my sea. 

Maybe I'll do both. 

This weekend we need to do some yard work if it's not too hot and birthday-shop for Henry. Nothing like leaving it til the last minute. We also need to sleep.

A record.

 Unless I am seriously indisposed, AKA injuried/committed/kidnapped, even in my semi-lucid state I have never gone this long between writings. No, I'm not gone. I'm just busy. I go up to Cows for ice cream. Messie Bessie is this year's favourite. The cones aren't stale yet. Hilarious because it's a busy place. It has some weird affiliation with Anne of Green Gables now, not sure if they are just capitalizing on the island's most popular export or what but I found it strange. 

I finished the second season of Yellowjackets and I made two whole cardigans while doing so. Nice ones. For me and for Ruth. Hers is fall-hued, mine is the colours of the sea. As always. 

I let Daniel cut my hair so short everyone has been saluting when I walk past. PJ keeps asking who the little boy is that he keeps seeing. It wasn't even funny the first time. 

I convinced the boys that we no longer needed the half-broken meteorological station anymore, that we can simply look outside and know what's up, like they did in the old days. 

That did it and I bagged up the pieces from the outdoor sensors, ripped the digital readout panel off the wall and breathed a sigh of relief. That thing was an albatross that we stared at too much, gauging the heat by numbers instead of by feel. Using half-functional technology to decide for us if we were hot or if it was hot enough to turn on the fan or the A/C or whatever. 

One of my fondest bucket-list items in life is to become a serial minimalist but convenience holds me back. Also I am a magpie and collect shiny things so it's tough anyway but now I think very hard before I add to my collections or buy on a whim. 

Not like that isn't hard with the economy the piece of shit that it is.

I finished a defacto bucket list because I had never made one. I had a lot of plans floating around my head mentally but nothing concrete. It's good to have one. Though what happens when you complete all the things on the list? Do you make a new list? Kill yourself? Remember the little things? Become a grumpy oldtimer? Someone tell me please, before the list becomes a catalyst. 

I need to buy some shorts. Mine are all worn out. I need to drink less. I want to sit outside in the evening all summer and watch the flames and read my book and watch the waves and eat cheese and grapes and not talk and not worry about heat or Coleiversaries or the fact that Henry turns twenty-two this month or the damage being fixed on the Jeep this week (not my fault, covered by insurance) and I need to sleep better, more often and just do nothing. I need a lot of things. Been saying this for decades.

I'll try and come back sooner. Probably tomorrow. Spent a lot of time away but I'm home now. Also I learned I refuse to drink liquids that come in containers I can't see through. Who knew?

 Gah. The internet seems broken. The boys say it's only me but they're also not really online as much as me in a way and way more than me in another and so I don't know if they're playing straight with me, I just know that everything chugs and buffers and the webpages look weird and there's junk at the top and bottom but I can mostly find what I need and it only took me five tries to log in so either I forget how to blog or someone is messing with my Perfectly Ordered Routine. 

Probably the Devil but would that actually do him any good?

Cormac McCarthy died and I shed a tear for one of my favourite giants of literature. I got my speaking in Italics from him, when I write. I got Southern gothic from him, in my dreams and I still quote needing whiskey for The Road if we ever end up on it. A gun, bullets and whiskey. Other than food that seems to be all they needed. 

When I hit the road (AKA Highway 99) I have my tote with a lighter, a knife, pepper spray, a phone charger, and chapstick. Then in the back of the Jeep is a tire kit, fire extinguisher, food/water/blanket, jack, first aid kit, etc etc etc. 

Huh. Anyway, I am sad. Everyone dies.

Bruised fruit and great TV.

I'm a bubble in a bubble. Absent for days drifting on the wind above a dark blue sea. I'm slowly descending though as they realized that pain medication on the reg was going to fuck up the walking-coma thing I have going on and something had to give. Something was not the pain meds, that's for sure and now I can almost form a coherent sentence. Sometimes even out loud, if I must. 

Let me tell you some things. 

With one arm I helped do all the repairs on the gazebo because I can climb like a monkey. As long as it's only one level up no one worries. When we get to two or three they all panic but really would it be a bad thing if I snapped my neck and went away forever? 

That depends on who you ask. But who is going to shimmy up the side and be able to stand a roof panel that won't support a whole man? Me, that's who. 

I watched the whole first season of Yellowjackets. I'm starting season two. Ben is a great pillow. He loves to nap, I love to watch movies and shows and so we make a great team. If I move he goes off. Like an IED and so Lochlan is content to also nap or do what he needs to without worrying. Sometimes that's nice. I can say that from here, in the clouds because the chemical lobotomy has been the greatest thing ever, even trumping sliced bread.

I listened to the new Foo Fighters album and let me tell you. But Here We Are is a great song, Rescued is a great song but Beyond Me is a spectacular song made better by the whole-hearted eighties power ballad it seems to want to be. This is a Bridget/headphones 24/7 kind of song. This is so good it's criminal. I am hot or cold on the Foo albums. I have my favourite songs. Some whole albums leave me cold, but I keep coming back. I've seen them twice. Will I go again? Of course. They came back with grace from a tragedy that is unthinkable. Unrecoverable from. Like me.

Did I come back with grace? Of course not. Hahahaha.

I am still knitting sweaters over here but boy it's hard to do now. Luckily I was always a slow knitter so I am barely bothered. I do this while I watch things. While Ben sleeps. 

I've been coughing all week. Pretty sure my allergies have gone through the roof. There's a patch of ground in the garden that plants grow in just fine but it makes my skin burn. Explain that. I can wait. I mostly direct, now and PJ and Dalton do their best. August comes to play Rubik's Cube with my brain and Caleb continues to torture me with his..everything, who am I kidding and Ruth and Henry are so independent and capable I sleep like a damn baby when I do sleep at all. Sometimes I roam the halls like a ghost in Hello Kitty pajamas, gliding through the dark, checking cats and doors and windows and looking out at the cold dark sea. Sometimes I sit and watch the fire die and sometimes I go crawl with Duncan and it's like waking up on the festival grounds again. I have to think really hard to remember where I am. 

My beloved dragonfruits have reached sixteen dollars each and I'm switching to apples for the summer, I guess or until the price goes down. Hell I could put a little drop of apple juice on a cucumber slice if I need a craving satisfied but life has gotten weirdly comical and not in a funny way, in a sad way that is so horrifying you just laugh and laugh until you sob. People have no patience and no manners. I had to learn to tell people off nicely which isn't my strong suit. I have a whole new outlook because now they won't let me leave the house because every time someone pisses me off in public I start talking about the purge and waving my cast around. 

Even today at the drivethru, someone tried to go around me and he caught my eye and my eyebrows went up, cueing his car to reverse back to where he was and I was still amazed. Like, did you think I was in this lane because I want to go inside? No, I don't want to go inside. I just want an ice cream handed through a window and I can wave my card at a little black box and no one needs to make a fuss here. 

It was butterscotch ripple for one scoop and rum raisin for the other. So good. 

The cone was stale though. They're always stale. Like nacho chips, hard taco shells and the air between my ears. Makes my last outing alone bittersweet, that's for sure.

At least tonight I have a date with a boiling hot bubble bath and a kush bath bomb. I can't wait.

Really fucking clumsy for a goddamned former acrobat.

The ten day absence isn't because I am avoiding you. 

George has a crack in his belligerent self because Bridget took a drunken backflip off the diving board and might have landed on...the diving board because SUE ME, I'm used to doing backflips in place and forgot about things like physics, momentum, gravity and...pain. 

Never ask a tightrope walker for a trick because she'll do one and fuck up her summer with another complete lower arm cast, this one which is also temporary for two weeks until the next one gets put on and I got a pale green cover for it because it's pretty and WOW. I figured I could just roll with it and I said I was fine but then Lochlan touched it only slightly and the noise I made ratted me out. 

Narcotics don't mix with anything but George has a way of hurting me like no other man ever could.  

I did all this with my left hand, including formatting!