They Come In Three's...

There has been a sudden epidemic of relapses among the members of my SMART group.

Several people, one right after another, taking their turn to share their story of falling off the wagon.  Some people have put off talking about it for a week or so, because they didn't want to add yet another relapse story into a meeting that was already crowded with them.  Some of these people are new to recovery, and are still struggling with it, and so that's to be expected.  But others have been sober for years.   And those are a lot harder to deal with.  For everyone involved.

Relapses are a part of recovery, as they say.  But though they happen, they're still rare enough that it feels very bizarre for them to be happening in a cluster like this.  It feels improbable, bordering on paranormal.

And I can't help thinking about this, as we get ready to go to Dover for the NASCAR race this weekend.  I normally have a six-pack all to myself during the race, plus a few other fun enhancers and reality lubricants both before and after.  It's always been a party weekend for us.  This will be my first time at a race completely sober.

I'm honestly not worried about my sobriety right now.  I don't feel I am in any danger of getting fucked up in any way this weekend.  Nor am I concerned about my ability to enjoy myself this weekend sober.  This weekend is a blast, period, and there's nothing about it that I need to get fucked up in order to enjoy.  I know I'm going to have a great time.

But with the way things have been going lately, I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel a little bit like tempting fate.

Sizzle Pop Blurble...

Been in class since 8a this morning; just got out.  Too brain-fried to post anything.  It was a cool class, though.  And I learned a lot.

So, worth it.

Must Be...

I should be working right now.

I know this.  I have so much work to do.  And if I don't pick up the pace and start moving it off my desk a lot faster than I have been, then I'm looking at some more late nights and weekends in the office.  And no one wants that.  And I'm going to be in a class all day tomorrow, and then I'm going to be out on Monday (going to the race in Dover, yay!), so that's two days of work lost, on top of everything else.

I know this.  And I know I don't have anything worthwhile to say right now, either.  All I want to do is put in some extra effort on this work so that maybe I don't feel quite so much like I'm drowning under twenty feet of icy, black code.  Icy, black, error-ridden code.

I know this.  But I can't stay away.  I can't ignore this space.  I want to, but I can't.  I can feel it, in the back of my head, all the time:  What are you going to write about today?  When are you going to write today?  It pulls at me, chews on me, and I have to satisfy that hunger, I have to feed that desire.  I can't ignore it, and I can't make it go away.  I have no choice; no say in the matter at all.

Words must be written.

What they say is irrelevant.

Just like me.

It's WHAT o'clock?!...

I have one piece of work I need to finish up before I can leave.  Then I remembered that I still had to post something.  Then I glanced at the clock and realized that I have to leave in half an hour if I'm going to make my SMART meeting tonight!

I don't know if I can even get my work done in thirty minutes, much less that and post something.  And so, as usual, the paycheck beats down the soul.

So it goes.

And goes, and goes, and goes, and...

Buzz...

Busy little bee today.  Way too much to do, nowhere near enough time to do it, and more work coming in every minute.  Worked through my lunch, ate through my work, and I'm so high on coffee I can see into the future.

It does not end well for me.

Still, nothing to do but plow forward into Oblivion.  Upward and Outward!

Fnord.

Discipline?...

My friend commended me on my self-discipline last night.

And I told her, "I don't feel like I have any discipline.  I just have a really deep bag of tricks."

To my mind, "self-discipline" implies some sort of forceful inner strength, which I don't feel I have.  (Though, a lot of what I'm working on with my Self right now is related to trying to learn it.)  And, regardless, even if I do have it, it's not what I generally use to change or better myself.

I'm not strong that way.  I'm slippery.

I don't just force myself to move forward with the things I know I should do instead of the things I want to do.  Instead, I figure out how to perceive the situation so that I end up wanting to do the thing I know I should do.

I don't make myself do things I don't like; I figure out how to perceive them so that I do like them.

I think an ounce of cunning is worth a metric ton of force.

Frednecking At The Fair...

A small taste of my yester-evening.  (And warning - it's loud!)

The Lost Sharing...

I had to skip SMART again this week.  But I wrote to the facilitator, to let him know I'd be out and so he'd know I hadn't fallen off the wagon or whatever; and also to let him know what I would've shared, if I'd been able to make it.

I thought it would be worth sharing here, too:


On Friday, my wife and I went out to our local for dinner and drinks (I had O'Douls).  I mentioned to her that I had recently realized that I could not remember the last time we'd had a fight, or even any sort of minor emotional dust-up, and asked her if she could remember.  She realized she couldn't remember, either.  Things have been really good for us lately; for a good, long while now, in fact.  I hypothesized that this was probably a result of two recent changes in my life.

One of them is a bit involved to try and explain; it involves changes to the way I perceive and interact with her, and to the way I think about Love in general, and so it would require a good bit of backstory that I don't really have time to get into right now in order for you to really be able to understand it.  Suffice it to say that the end result was that I'm no longer as emotionally fragile with her as I used to be, and that these changes began happening quite literally at the same time as I began to get sober.

And the other change that I think has contributed to our recent run of marital harmony and happiness is obviously just that:  my sobriety.  Drinking and taking drugs by definition alter your mood, and your feelings.  They lift them up when you take them, and then they fall down when it runs out.  And even if you're not taking them right at that moment, if you're doing it regularly enough, then the effect persists, and your emotions continue to go up and down, up and down, even when you're sober.  And so one of the results of this extended period of sobriety, is that I'm finding that I'm less emotionally volatile than I used to be; I'm much more even-keeled now that I'm not playing chemical yo-yo with my feelings.

This prompted my wife to tell me again, as we were sitting at the bar, how proud she was of me for being able to stay sober for so long.  And she added how proud she was of me, in particular, for being able to come out drinking with her and still remain sober.  And, I replied back to her that, as always, I found it difficult to accept that praise.  Because I didn't feel like I was doing anything.  It wasn't as if being at the bar made me want a drink, and I was having to spend the entire time resisting this overwhelming urge.  If that were the case, if I was struggling with urges, and then successfully overcoming them, then I would feel as if I had done something worthy of praise.  But as it was, being at the bar didn't make me want to drink anymore than at any other point in my day.  I just don't want to drink right now.  I'm very much enjoying not drinking.

The other half of that coin is that I am very much looking forward to drinking again, later.  We saw a bottle behind the bar that night, of Fireball whiskey; a cinnamon-flavored whiskey that we only just discovered last year, a few months before I sobered up.  And with the seasons turning right now, and the crisp scent of Autumn in the air, I had the thought, "Oh, a shot of that would be delightful for Fall.  That will be really nice to have again.  Maybe next year?"  I realize it isn't typical, but I'm lucky enough that I haven't yet had to say to myself, "I can never drink again."  I didn't fall that far.  I just didn't pay attention to what I was doing, and then realized that I was drinking too much, and that it had gotten a little scary, and so decided that I needed to stop for a while; for some unspecified period of time of at least one year.  And so I've never had to confront that issue, or deal with all the grief and loss of "I can never drink again."  I'm fortunate enough that I've been able to say just, "Not now, maybe later."  And this is just so much easier to handle on an emotional level.  And that makes it easier to stay sober.  Because I can kick that can of "later" down the road indefinitely.

And that's where I'm at right now, and where I've been for a while:  I don't want to drink right now, and I'm looking forward to drinking again, later.  Whether that "later" will ever actually come is a mystery to me.  I honestly don't know.  I imagine it will again, but no one knows what the future holds.  I don't know who I'll be after spending my first year sober as an adult, and I don't want to project who I want that person to be.  I want to find out myself along the way.  And I remember that when I quit smoking pot for a year (that time I had planned from the beginning to do it for exactly one year, and then smoke again, and see how it affected me - I designed the whole experience as a personal experiment conducted on my own brain chemistry), at the end of that year, I found it really difficult to smoke again.  I had built up so much momentum towards staying sober over the course of that year, that it was really hard to make myself suddenly switch directions and do the exact opposite.  Yes, I did want to smoke again, but a huge part of me did not want to, as well.  And in the end, what finally helped push me over the edge was that I had set out from the get-go to do it for exactly one year, and then do it again and see what happened, and I wanted to fulfill that original intent.

I don't have any set time-period of sobriety like that this time around.  I don't have any line of demarcation that I'm going to cross at some point in the future that will tell me that it's time to stop being sober.  (And that was intentional, based on the lessons learned in the experience I just mentioned above.)  So, who knows how long this will last?  Who knows when that "later" will come?  Who knows if that "later" will ever actually come, at all?

And more to the point, whether it does or not is completely irrelevant.  Because thinking about that ephemeral "later" - enjoying the idea of it, looking forward to it - helps me to remain sober now.  And even better, it grants me the ability to do things like go out to bars with my wife, and actually be able to enjoy the experience, without struggling against my desires.  It allows me to accept my desires, and still keep moving forward, comfortably, without having to indulge them.

And to my mind, that's gold.  That's pure magick.

The Biomathematical Quotient Of One Apple...

Yesterday, I said, "It's amazing how quickly you can fall back out of shape."  And today I have to say, what a difference a day makes.

Did the same routine this morning as yesterday.  Yesterday I was legitimately concerned that I might die, and today there was no problem at all.  My heart-rate stayed right smack in the middle of my butter-zone the entire time (the monitor was actually working today), and I never felt like I was pushing myself excessively.  Just felt like a really good workout.

I even went the full twenty minutes this time.

When We Fall...

It's amazing how quickly you can fall back out of shape.

Just a few weeks of not working out (one week at the AGM, one week recovering from being sick, one week having all free time and energy eaten up by work, etc.) and suddenly I feel like I'm back to square one.  I know it's not that simple, and experience tells me that I will actually bounce back into form a lot quicker than it took to get into shape in the first place - but, still, this morning was... kinda scary, if I'm honest.

I thought I was taking it light.  Not even considering the weights at this point, since I'm just trying to get back into the swing of things after such a long absence.  Just figured I'd do my usual fifteen minutes on the elliptical (with a five minute cool-down afterwards) that I start every workout with.  Maybe I'd push it to twenty minutes, if I was feeling up to it.  That is really not much at all; I used to do thirty to forty-five minutes on the elliptical, before I started incorporating the weights into my routine.

But this fifteen minutes was hard.  Much more difficult than I expected.  I was really pushing myself with everything I had just to get through it.  But I did it; I made it through the whole thing, and was relieved to reach the cool-down afterwards.  (No way was I going to try for twenty!)  But as soon as I slowed my pace, I knew something was wrong.  My heart was racing much more than I'm used to.  And I could feel my pulse in my head.  I was having a hard time catching my breath, and I was starting to get dizzy.

Pretty immediately, I climbed down off the machine, and went and sat down on the floor with my back to the wall.  I held my water bottle (which, thankfully, I fill with ice-water before every workout) all around my neck, to cool down the blood in my carotid artery, going to my brain.  I tried to breath slow and deep and even, and waited for the dizziness to pass.  Which it did after just a couple of minutes.

Now, admittedly, I was having a hard time getting a decent reading off the heart-rate monitor on that machine.  (For the whole workout it had been giving me all these low-ball readings that I knew could not possibly be correct, and that made me mistrustful of the other readings that seemed like they could possibly be reasonable.  And then at the end, after not giving me a reading higher then 155bpm for the entire workout, it suddenly gave me a reading of 180bpm, which is way into my red zone, and much higher than I would ever usually let myself get to.  So, was that an anomalous reading, like all the low-balls?  Or was that the first true reading I'd gotten all workout?)  But, still, just a matter of a few weeks ago this was my warm-up, for crying out loud.  And it just floored me!  Literally!

So, obvious lesson-learned is that I need to take it easy, and start slower.  At the same time, my little brother and his girlfriend just challenged me to a contest to see who could be the first one to lose fifteen pounds.  And that's definitely a motivator.  But I have to remember to be careful.  I'm not twenty-five anymore.

And I won't be able to gloat if I'm dead.

At The End Of...

I've started three projects here now, just trying to get something on the page that I wouldn't be completely humiliated to post; a piece of prose, and two versions of the same poem.

It might help if I had anything worthwhile to say.  But I don't.  I'm just trying to create something just to create something.  I'm not driven by a desire to creating anything in particular right now, but just a desire to create, period.

But I'm lost and stymied.  It's all shit.  And I haven't been able to finish any of them, so it's incomplete shit, as well.

I couldn't even manage to successfully have a conversation with myself, usually my refuge in these times of creative void.

...

See?  He's got nothing to contribute today.  My muse is asleep at the wheel.

I guess I should probably just leave.  It's time to go home, anyways.  And that's really where I'd rather be.  I'm taking Her out to dinner and drinks tonight.  I've been looking forward to it all day.

So why can't I just go?  Why do I keep sitting here, trying to create something of value from my office of all fucking places?  What a waste of time.  It'd be easier to do from the bar.  Even sober.

Alright.  Fuck this.  Fuck this, fuck me, and fuck this place.

I'm going home.

Vlurble...

Going non-stop all day (starting with the 9a meeting - wtf? - that left me with no time to make it to the gym this morning - again - only to be rescheduled because someone else was late and couldn't make it - FML) trying to get this latest piece of coding finished by deadline, on top of all this other non-project work I have to do for the company this week - and frankly, I am wiped.  I've got nothin'.

So, instead, enjoy this little piece of bloody awesomeness:

Vicious Circle...

Finally made it back to the gym today.

Once I miss a few days at the gym, I always find it incredibly difficult to make it back.  Not because I have trouble forcing myself to do it.  On the contrary, I really want to get back as soon as possible; I honestly enjoy working out, and I feel like crap when I don't get my workouts nowadays.  It's just that once I miss a couple of workouts, my body enters what I call The Crap Energy Loop.

When I work out, I use up energy, and I end up getting tired earlier, so I get to bed at a reasonable time, and sleep better, and wake up at a reasonable time, feeling well-rested.  So, once I miss a couple of trips to the gym, this cycle gets thrown all out of whack.  Soon a night will come where it is past time for me to go to bed, but because I have all this extra energy from not working out, I'm not tired.  I go to bed anyways, but then have trouble falling asleep.  And then I don't sleep very well that night, so when my alarm goes off in the morning, I'm still really tired and don't feel rested at all.  So then I end up over-sleeping trying to make up for the good sleep I missed the night before, which means I don't make it out the door early enough to make it to the gym before work, and so I miss another workout, and the cycle continues.

I've been stuck in the Crap Energy Loop ever since I got sick.  I missed a week of working out while I was at the AGM, and then I missed another week when I got back just getting over being sick, and it was looking like I was going to miss another week to the CEL.

The last couple of times I've been stuck in the CEL, I've been able to break the cycle by biting the bullet and working out after work instead of before.  I hate to do that (the gym is really crowded in the evenings compared to the mornings, and when I'm done in the office all I want to do is go home), but it uses up that excess energy, and gets my sleep cycle back on track.  But with all the extra hours I've been spending in the office on this project the last couple of weeks, I couldn't even find the time to get to the gym after work, either.

So, I finally managed to drag myself in this morning, exhausted.  Only fifteen minutes on the elliptical, and I was dizzy.  Didn't even bother with weights this time.  Just taking it slow; trying to get back on the horse without falling off.

Here's hoping I sleep like a baby tonight.

Eleven Years...

Eleven years ago today, we were packing to leave the beach.

Princess and I, and two of our friends, had just spent a lovely post-Labor Day week at my grandfather's beach cottage in Delaware, and our vacation was over, and we spent the morning packing up to return to our "normal" lives.  (I didn't know it at the time, but that was the last time I would ever set foot in that cottage on the beach, where I had spent part of every summer of my entire life up to that point.)  When we were finally ready to leave, and packing up the car, I turned my cell phone back on for the first time since I'd arrived a week earlier.  About a minute later, I found I had a dozen voicemails from my father, all from that morning.  I decided to see what all the fuss was about, and heard recording after recording of my father telling me that the United States was under attack, to turn on the TV, and whatever I do, not to come home.

We hadn't turned on the TV once the entire week.  When we finally turned it on that morning, we were all horrified, and dumbstruck.  And as we stood there, watching the towers burning, I remember thinking to myself, with odd clarity, That son-of-a-bitch is going to use this as an excuse to invade Iraq.  My hand to gods, that exact thought crossed my mind, followed immediately by, No - no way - that's ridiculous - even he wouldn't do something that horrible.

We decided to stay another day, because no one was quite sure what was going on at that point, and it just felt a lot safer out there in that sleepy town on the seashore, then back home, next-door to D.C.  That was one of the most surreal days of my life.  We were glued to the TV all day, watching what looked like Hell Come To The U.S.  But where we were, it was a beautiful, just absolutely gorgeous late-Summer day.  It could not have been more peaceful, or serene.  It produced a strange sort of cognitive dissonance that permeated the entire day for all of us.  Nothing we did felt right - if it fit with the scene around us, it didn't fit with the way we felt about what we knew was going on at home; and if it fit with how we felt about the attacks, then it seemed really out-of-place with where we were at the time and what we were experiencing just then.

Not knowing what else to do, we partied that night like it was the end of the world.  We did shots and got wasted and played Truth-or-Dare until we were all drunk and naked.  (Trust me, it was a lot more fun at the time than it sounds now.)

And the next day, we went back home to a world that had completely changed, in ways we would have a hard time understanding or coming to terms with for many years.  I still haven't completely come to terms with a lot of it.


Addendum:  I didn't want to make my post today about this, because I didn't want to be perceived as disrespectful.  But I feel like I have to say it, for several reasons.  It's just been on my mind a lot lately, and I don't want to bottle it up and pretend it isn't there.  And yes, some people might perceive it as disrespectful, but I don't agree with that opinion, and if I start basing my decisions about what to say or believe off of what other people might think about it, then I'm lost.  In my opinion, today is the most appropriate time to address it; the only appropriate time to address it, really.  It would seem oddly out of place on any other day, and waiting until next year will not have changed anything one way or the other, and by then I might have forgotten it, and lost the opportunity to express these feelings for good.

Let me preface this further by saying, I am not a conspiracy theorist.  I do believe that conspiracies can and do occur, but I am also a skeptic by nature, and 99% of the conspiracy theories I hear are clearly, demonstrably, ridiculous.  However, that said, there is something about the official story of what happened that day that has just never sat right with me.  I know a lot of people are going to consider me an ignorant, monstrous anti-patriot for saying this, but that doesn't change the way it appears to me.

I have never believed the story of United 93.

I am truly, truly sorry if that bothers you in any way.  I don't want to upset anyone, and that certainly has nothing to do with why I'm writing this here.  But it also doesn't do anything to change my perception of the situation, either.

It just always struck me as too neat, too tidy, too... American.  It's like something out of a storybook, or a fairytale.  Or a Hollywood movie.  It's just too perfect to be real.  The fact that they just happened to be lucky enough to crash in an uninhabited area.  The fact that the one plane that didn't hit its target just happened to be the last one, and just happened to be the one headed for the White House.  The fact that on that day, of all days, for this story that is fairly dripping with patriotism and Americans-Are-The-Greatest glory to come out, from the government, has just been a little hard for me to swallow.  From the first time I heard it, it has felt exactly like the "your dog went to live on a farm upstate" story a father would tell to his child.

I tend to follow the "Occam's Razor" style-guide when it comes to conspiracy theories:  the simplest explanation is the most likely.  That's one of the many reasons why I've never believed that 9/11 was an "inside job" (even though it would've felt so good to blame Cheney and Rumsfeld for it); the idea that the federal government could organize a conspiracy on that massive a scale is simply ludicrous, and laughably so.

But the idea that they might shoot down a passenger plane that they believed was on a suicide mission to crash into the White House, especially after three other planes had already hit their targets, and without knowing how many more there might be?  And that if they did, in fact, shoot down that plane, that they might, on such a tragic day, tell us an up-lifting story of everyday American heroism, rather than the truth - that the United States government had been forced to kill some of its own citizens, in order to prevent the murder of far more?  Those really just don't seem that far-fetched to me.  In fact, they seem kind of plausible.

And the more I've been thinking about it lately, the more I've come to realize, that if that is what happened, I wouldn't even blame them for it.

Even if the U.S. shot down United 93, they wouldn't be responsible for those people's deaths.  The terrorists who hijacked that plane, and pointed it at the White House are the ones responsible.  There is simply no argument about that.  I mean, honestly, what else should the government have done?  Let the plane destroy the White House, just so that those Americans on that plane could live another hour?  Is there anyone who could truly argue that there was some safe way to quickly bring that plane down without injuring anyone?  If the government had the means and opportunity to take down that plane - and I don't think there is any reasonable argument to be made that they didn't - then, if I'm honest with myself, I don't see what other choice they had.

And you know what?  I wouldn't even blame them for lying to us about it.  Those men and women on that plane are everyday American heroes, no matter how they died.  Just like every single person who died in New York or D.C. that day is a hero.  Don't they deserve to be remembered as heroes?  Don't they deserve better than to be remembered as innocent victims caught in the crossfire between their government and a handful of sick assholes?

Yes, you could make the argument that the lie was self-serving to the ones who told it.  And I don't necessarily think you'd be wrong.  But I think it's just as true that the lie honors the memories of those men and women in a just way; in a way fitting of Americans who gave their lives, willingly or not, so that others could live.

The official story of United 93 might be a mythology, but they deserve that, and much more.  A beautiful mythology to honor their deaths is, literally, the least we can do.

Edgar Oliver...

Edgar Oliver is... well, a very interesting character, to put it mildly (and perhaps a bit too obviously).

A New York writer, poet, actor and all-around bohemian, by way of Savannah, GA, and Washington, D.C., I was first introduced to him through The Moth, and became completely entranced by him.








She and I are going to see his one-man-show in NYC for our anniversary this year, and I am so excited!

(And, yes, that is the way he actually talks; he is not acting or performing in the clips above, but simply telling stories.)

Magick Beans...

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Coffee, without whose potent magicks, this week would have been a complete disaster.

May your Beans roast Full-of-Flavor for All Times in the Percolators of your Dark Father.

Amn.  And Caffeine bless.

We Were Called To The Forest...

We were called to the forest, and we went down.

A wind blew warm, and eloquent.

We were searching for the secrets of the universe, and we rounded up demons and forced them to tell us what it all meant.

We tied 'em to trees and broke them down, one by one.  And on a scrap of paper, they wrote these words.

And as we read them, the Sun broke through the trees:


"Dread the passage of Jesus, for he will not return."


Then we headed back to our world, and left the forest behind.  Our hearts singing with all the knowledge of Love.

But somewhere, somehow, we lost the message along the way.  And when we got home, we bought ourselves a house.

And we bought a car that we did not use.

And we bought a cage, and two singing birds.

And at night, we'd sit and listen to the canaries' song.


For we'd both run right out of words.


Now the stars, they are all angled wrong.  And the Sun and the Moon refuse to burn.

But I remember a message in a demon's hand:

"Dread the passage of Jesus, for he does not return."

...he does not return.

...he does not return.

                    -"Time Jesum Transeuntum Et Non Riverentum"
                      Nick Cave &; The Bad Seeds, ft. The Dirty Three

Working For The Weekend...

So, I figured out why I mysteriously felt the need to do nothing all this past weekend.

Apparently, I needed to rest up so I could come in to the office and work all this weekend!

Oh, joy.

The Interzone...

I had a strange dream this morning.  (Oh, what I wouldn't give for the ability to come up with something interesting to write about on my own, at will, and not have to rely on the random firings of comatose neurons in order to conjure my art from the void.  But that's a worry for another day.  For now, I'll take what I can get.)

+     +     +

I let three birds fly into my home.

Then I laid down on my couch to watch them.

I was paralyzed as I lay there, unable to move.

One of the birds, the smallest one, kept turning into a young woman.  She wore a t-shirt of alternating thick blue and yellow horizontal stripes, white shorts, and white canvas topsiders.  She was sitting on my living room floor, using one of my laptops.  She wasn't beautiful, but she was very attractive.

And while she wasn't quite masturbating, she seemed like she was building up to it.

She was rubbing her hands all over her body with sensuous intent, as she stared transfixed at the laptop screen, her face awash in bluegreen glow.  Every once in a while she would lift her shirt up to run her hand across her belly, or up over one of her small breasts.

Unsurprisingly, I was completely entranced by her.  I could not look away.

I knew she was really a bird, but that didn't seem to make any difference.  Every once in a while she would turn back into a bird again, or I would see her as a bird again, just for a moment.  And in those moments, I could see the other birds, too.  They were poking holes all throughout the walls of my apartment.  Burrowing into them, building nests.

I didn't care.  Couldn't care.  Couldn't even imagine caring.  All I wanted was to keep watching this young woman enjoying herself at whatever it was she was doing.

But suddenly, all too soon, she was gone.  The room had gone dark, like the sky outside was ready to storm.  The walls were crumbling and full of holes.  And I was staring at an image of myself on the floor in front of the laptop, where the birdgirl had been; a projection of my own unconscious creation, from myself to myself.

With this realization, I could move again.

As I started to rise from the couch, I heard a crunching noise behind me.  I stood and turned, to see my living room in a fantastical state of decay, and crawling all over with the most enormous bugs I have ever seen.  The walls and front door were wet, rotten planks of wood, layered with moss a foot thick, like a fallen tree that had been rotting on the forest floor for fifty years.  Indeed, the advanced state of woodland decay displayed in my living room gave off a distinct Rip Van Winkle feel, and I found myself afraid that I might have been watching that girl for a hundred years without even knowing it.  Dark stormlight poured in through the holes between the rotten planks of door and wall.

And the bugs!  Oh gods, they were everywhere.  And they were enormous.  The size of guinea pigs.  Long, beetle-like things, with pincers like serrated scissors on their heads.  Thank the Sun they didn't seem capable of flying.  But they were crawling all over everything.  I could hear them chittering behind the walls.  They crunched under my feet as a I walked.  I discovered that a large portion of them appeared to have been torn apart, their carapaces left discarded about the floor like crushed, empty walnut shells.

I realized that the birds had been eating them.

I stooped to examine some of these remains.  They were covered in this sticky brown goo, like a cross between molasses and motor oil.  It was all over the place.

It was at this point that I began to have a freak-out.

I ran down the hall to the back of my apartment, screaming for help, and found a girl there that I know from the IOT in waking life.  She was cleaning my apartment.  It was completely spotless back there, in fact; no evidence at all of the chaos from the front rooms.  She didn't live there, and we weren't lovers (either in or out of the dream), yet it didn't strike me as at all odd that she was cleaning my home.

I tried to describe the situation to her, screaming hysterically, but she was completely nonchalant about the whole thing.  Very, "yeah, yeah, I'll be right there; let me just finish this first."  Which only made me panic more, as if she didn't understand the gravity of the situation, or wasn't taking me seriously enough.  So I started to freak out on her even more, to try and get across just how seriously fucked everything actually was.  I held out my hands to show her as evidence.  They were cut up and bleeding, apparently from the bugs.  But she still didn't hurry.

Eventually, at my desperate pleading, she followed me out into the living room, to see the destruction I had been raving about.  She was not impressed.  Nor was she particularly concerned.  It seemed as if she viewed it all as just one more mess to tidy up.

I began to run around the apartment, frantically closing all the doors and windows, of which there were suddenly way too many - more than was rational - and all of which were wide open.  I crushed several of the giant beetlebugs in various window frames, as I closed the windows on them.  I didn't actually want to kill them, surprisingly; I was just afraid to touch them to move them out of the way.

I flung open my front door to try and sweep the forest of decay and bugs outside, and in so doing let in warm Spring sunlight, and a life-scented breeze.

And the birds. 

All three returned.

But whether to watch, or to help, or to hinder, or to take me away, or otherwise end me, I will never know.

Perhaps one day I'll remember.

Go With The Blurble...

I did absolutely nothing this weekend.

I spent three days sitting on my ass playing video games.  When I got bored with one game, I'd switch to another.  On a couple of occasions I didn't even bother to stop and eat.

It was Sunday before I realized that I hadn't even thought of writing or posting anything.  That made me feel pretty guilty, but didn't do anything to affect my behavior.

I have no idea why I was such a slug this weekend.  But I obviously needed to do it for some reason, because it was an absolutely overwhelming urge.  So, I'm trying to accept it and let it go and move on.

Now, I want to write something, but again, no time.  They just stepped up the pressure on the project I'm coding for, and it's looking like I'm going to be pulling 10-12 hour days for much of the rest of the month of September.  Not looking forward to that.  And it's not going to leave me much time or energy for much of anything else in my life.

Oh, well.  Nothing to do but go with the flow.  Even when it's a torrent.