Of Punching Flowers and Mating Pigeons

I accidentally punched a flower. I didn't mean to, something about it made me want to flick it and it tore right off, with the heart still intact. I felt terrible afterwards, and it made me think about the fragility of life, and how it may have already been dying because it was stupid enough to lean away from the sun, but then again maybe it likes the feel of the sun on its neck instead of its face. All flowers are girls, and bees are dudes. It's an interesting matriarchy of an ecosystem that surprisingly works.

My cats have learned to not mind each other's company. It started out on the day they got their flea vaccination, something about their joint demise brought them closer together. They are also very wary of spots that have each other's smells on them, it's amazing to watch. My cat was sleeping on the beanbag earlier and my other cat sniffed it and went away on its own, it also avoided the bed on its way out because my other cat was on there. Wouldn't it be great if humans were the same way?

I watched the night roll on by twice, once when it was still dark, and another time when the sun was up. It's amazing how life surged into the otherwise quiet street, filling it with cars and pedestrians where there were only delivery guys and garbage collectors. I thought about the garbage collector today, there was no one else walking on by and it made me think how he was safe because he had nothing to lose. Who wants to hurt someone without getting anything out of it? That guy owned the place.

When the sun was up, I saw a pigeon timidly approach another pigeon, presumably the female, only to have her fly away when he was close enough to have a pigeon cuddle. It was heartbreaking to watch and it made me aww and giggle at the little guy. I hope he gets some soon. He was rather handsome but his feathers were hella ruffled round the back. He may have been in a fight too, bad day for the little guy.

Good day for me! I've been watching Scrubs, for four days in a row now. It's something to do and it gives me company. I missed a big interview today because I overslept, but I luckily managed to reschedule it to later this week. It took a bit of groveling that I'm not proud of, but I managed. I'll make it if I have to stay up all night, since I missed 7 alarms today. Makes you think...really dark things mainly, so I'll let that trail off right around here.

The dogs have been coming on by every day, I want to feed them but we have no leftovers, and I'm too broke to buy cat food let alone dog food. I wish our neighborhood had one of them crazy ladies who fed strays, too bad it's me for this neighborhood.

You know, I've always thought JD was super lucky to have Turk, I never thought he was lucky to have Carla, which makes me think about the way I'm built and what it really takes to make me happy. Maybe I'm thinking too much into it, but they really have a connection, you know? Carla is needy and always makes up fights about nothing, making mountains out of mole hills as Turk once said. Him and JD just support each other and have fun. Better relationship, hands down.

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

I've been looking out the window because I love doing that in the middle of the night and I gotta tell you, it's just not the same when you're no longer smoking. That's right, I finally quit, now I smoke heated stubs out of a pink flat dildo that goes just so well with my nail polish. Anyway the dogs aren't out today (yet) and it's a quiet night, a blanket canvass of eeriness worthy of Nightvale. The next thing you know, Cecil is gonna dangle from upstairs and drole on about Carlos and how his new haircut is criminal.

I have to ask, why do trucks light up so much? They look like toys. How many lights do you really need to stand out on a highway? Some of them are like a moving party, and they flicker so much they might give you flashbacks of your past. 

This time of night, I usually make vanilla tea and panic about work. Right on the clock, I made coffee this time and wondered what the hell is going to happen to me if I mess up the couple of interviews I got lined up this week. People starve quietly, I came to learn this year. Look around you, there's probably 60 people starving without you knowing about it. 

The internet just bailed out on me so I'm writing this and it might never see daylight. The night is nice though, that's the best I can do in terms of analogy with my current mental state. It's like warfare in there, chimpanzees are jumping out of dim corners and flinging me with poop for daring to challenge them. 

It's really so quiet this time of night, sometimes it torments me, but right now, I'm just enjoying the fact that every homo sapien within a 10 mile radius is sound asleep, and I'm up confusing my cats' biological clocks like I one day confused my rooster into announcing daylight at 4 pm. Yes, I had a rooster, it was a well-meaning gift from a farmer who finally had the baby she wanted to my mom. I kept him around till he got too big and bird flu threatened to kill every last one of us so they took him to a farm. I believe he was happy there, dad said he bolted right as they released him out in the open. I still think about him sometimes, how many kids he must have had before he cuckoo'd for the very last time.

I usually get a bad feeling around this time of year, but I'm not feeling anything this time around. Maybe closer around December I'll sniff a dead person before they drop like I always do. I hope not though, it's been a nothing kind of year and it feels like it's going to end in pretty much the same way.

Whisper sweet nothings into my ear and make me hot cocoa, I'm looking forward to Christmas. I don't think I'll have anyone around to set up the tree this year, I don't like anyone enough to invite them over. I'm not too sad about it though, I'm going to enjoy putting up the tree and baking bad cookies that I'm probably gonna throw out anyway. Cookies are really complicated, you know that?

Something about this time of night makes me want to introspect, but there's nothing in there unless I mean to scoop out darkness and smear it all over this page till I come across a new shade of black. My darn old brain isn't a friendly place to be in right now, it's riddled with anxiety and bad dreams and more anxiety. Honestly the best thing about my everyday right now are my cats, little balls of love and mischief. 

It's going dark again, peace out.

Of Dying Friendships and Friendships That Need To Die

The dogs are back!

They're howling into the night as I write this, it's making me very happy. They're different dogs though so I need to be careful about feeding them. I don't want to lose a finger to goodwill. You typically only lose sweaters to those. 

There's something about writing in Times New Roman that's soooo nostalgic. It's only in the editor but I still enjoy it. I think I wrote all my college papers in Times New Roman, so this is bringing back all sorts of memories right now. This and the fact that it's five in the morning and I'm just sitting there typing my heart out and paper rocketing it into the giant black maw of the uncaring internet. 

I've been thinking about writing a book again...as soon as my writer's block is gone. Who am I kidding it's going to take years of just prepping myself up for this. I've always wanted to write scripts too but I doubt that any of it will see light of day even if I spend every waking moment writing stuff for Netflix. This writing project has been taking up a lot of thought though so maybe, just maybe, I'll go through with it. figured I'd start off with writing here again until the cogs in my big old noodle are properly greased. 

I missed the show today, I ended up sleeping it off, but I got a big day tomorrow. Lots of things happening. Interview in the morning, a women's summit in the afternoon and about five shows that I need to choose from in the evening, all in different sides of town. I haven't slept yet because I woke up at 7 pm and this is basically tea time for me. I'm wondering if I should stay awake or take a long dissociative nap until I have to move. I'll leave that for later.

How did I use to write again? oh yeah, I sat there and poured my heart out into the void. Let me try that one again. I've been stalling.

Friends.

Friends are really complicated. I was daydreaming earlier and I wanted to know what it would be like to have friends support you while you're public speaking and I literally felt uncomfortable with the idea of having supportive friends there. I'd rather writhe in pain and suffer for breaths for the longest first five minutes of my life than have a familiar face I can look at in a crowd of judgmental Simons who won't stop (s)cowling.

Oh yeah, I still daydream. I daydream all the time, when my mind is not completely blank, which also happens all the time. It's either a JD situation with puppies and eagles and red tractors in outer space or the deafening but dependable buzz of total white noise. There's something wrong with my brain, I want to give it soup and tell it to take a few days off from being a thinking organ, but I'm pretty sure what I just described is a variation of brain cancer. 

I did not just make a cancer joke. 

How do you make friends as an adult? Do adults even have friends? Everyone is so disconnected these days, the closest thing we get to an emotional breakthrough is an Instagram reaction. I'm craving animated, stimulating people who bake you cakes and take you dancing and boozing when you're down. I don't think these guys exist anymore though, everyone is super depressed.

It's the pandemic, I tell you, it broke something in the collective hive mind. The whole world pretty much lost its ladle by the second year. Man, I wish I recorded my own flights of fancy while the world was dying, but I was too busy trying to hold on to my own sanity and failing.

That's okay though, the best and the most interesting people out there are completely out of their minds. Every genius was cuckoo, and every artist is dysfunctional in more way than they let on. Now, all that's left for me to do is become an artist, or solve a mathematical equation dated in the 11th century.

I don't remember if I wrote about it yesterday or not but there's this language exchange thing happening in the evening that I'm thinking of going to, but I'm scared of being too awkward or running out of conversation starters, or faces. Maybe I'll go, if I'm still awake by that time. 

It's really shitty that every first conversation with an expat is the same. You talk about cultural differences, boast about how you managed to get over them and talk some more about how many people haven't to give yourself a sense of accomplishment and achieve immediate closeness that fouls time itself. But that applies to everyone else too, there are conversation templates that people follow because they're too scared to go off track.

I talked to a friend today that I hadn't talked to in 12 years. Can you believe this? I'm at an age where I can say that, haha! It was nice then he had to take another call and promised to call back then blew me off. I waited for three hours before I gave up and watched something. It reminded me of my old waiting rule...it's pretty straightforward. It goes like this: never wait for anyone or anything.

I've been doing this thing where I look at the positives of everything that happens as well as the negatives, it's been going well and making me feel brighter than usual. I'm betting another year of this and I'll be two inches happier than the next buster. 

Banana just rolled over and looked at me like a crazy person. I guess I'm typing too loudly. I want to get one of them clickety keyboards that gamers rave about so I can type and it sounds like a typewriter. I'll file it in my list of things to buy when I have an income again, next to a gym membership and Muay Thai classes.

Oh yeah, friendships.

Why can't we just exchange sandwiches like we used to back in the day? It's was much simpler back then. What you lack in general length, you gain in emotional fulfillment. Get me one depressed eleven year old!

I have this friend that's been hiding her pregnancy from me. We had a bit of a fight and she found out right after, then I found out by accident from another friend. We eventually made up and had a couple of chats before anyone said anything, I figured she had to be the one to say something first then I remembered who I'm talking to and brought it up. I then asked her why she didn't say anything, and she literally said: I just wanted to know what you would do. Like I'm some sort of Guinea pig she could poke around for hyper casual entertainment. 

This brings me back to a common topic on this blog - why do people enjoy being treated like shit? I was never into that sort of thing, immediate turn off, but people really dig it. Want to make a new friend? Show little interest and treat them like they don't matter, and they'll be all over you. I don't like that. I see it happen all the time, and it baffles me every time.

I don't want to dwell on this too much, because it's not worth it, but friendships are about as straightforward as a wet spaghetti. Try to logic your way out of it and someone will eventually say one spaghet is still a line, it's just taking the long way round. If they're a little smarter, they'll tell you the shortest distance between two dots is another dot if you can time travel. 

It's really hard to make friends when you're older, you want to hold on to your old friendships no matter how shitty they are because you know for a fact that by the time you meet someone else and get past their weird defenses, survive your first fight and earn your first secret, that's another three years out of your life that you're not getting back to make another friend. These things should really be scheduled, you know. You want to work on them as much as you work on that Spotify playlist you play at parties, time the drop and all that.

What do people want out of friendships anyway? I know what I want. I want stimulating company, understanding and gestures of love. It's pretty simple. And it's nowhere to be found within a thousand mile radius. Vapid conversations, mass sent memes and a lot of likes is what you get instead.

It's starting to get dark in this bitch. Peace out.

Of Howling Emptiness and Mud Slides of the Soul

I've never been on a mud slide. I've also never sat on a fountain. When I was young, I didn't have access to a green space. It was just my grandmother's house, and the occasional times I opened the door as a kid and walked out only to be escorted back home by the baker down the road. I don't know where I was going, even back then I had the urge to leave, run, escape. 

Open the door and just go.

But where do I go? 

Growing up makes you forget a lot of things, like how to make friends or how to get out of bed. There's a mud slide in my soul and my heart can't stop going on it, sliding down to my stomach and back up again. This weird pain, that traveling pain. What is that? Is it a bug? Is it a lovebug? It's cuffing season after all. I'm not into anyone though, and no one is into me.

Life is an expanse of endless vacuum that rides along space and time. 

The dogs left. No one fed them, and I didn't feed them enough. I hadn't seen them in a few months when I noticed the howling I'd come to depend on was no longer there. I miss them most during the night, when that thing in my chest starts beating at me to do something, anything!

Sometimes, it really does feel like my heart is beating out of my chest, or that it's trying to leave my chest in any case. I bet it has nowhere to go either. It's mine after all, how could it want something that I don't know about?

But it does. It does want something and I have no idea what that thing is. I've been out of a job for nearly a year now and that kind of space leaves room for unidentified objects to fester. It's not for lack of looking too. Lack of luck, though, yes, I believe. I've never been lucky. It runs in the family.

I don't want to sit here and lick my wounds. It's been ages since I logged on to write, but it's all the words that are swirling in my head right about now. I'm just dumping them here to see what forms. Maybe I can make sense of it regurgitated.

It's been rough, but I've been finding ways to make things beautiful, like I always do. It's something inside me, a generator, maybe that's what's whirring off tune. I'm listening to this LoFi Harry Potter mix and it's making me feel like Christmas. It's not even Halloween yet. Not that either matter without company, or do they?

Company.

Company.

I don't enjoy most of the company I get these days, and it's few and far in between. I guess the word for it is loneliness. I've been lonely lately, but people aren't filling it. Not enough conversation, not enough stimulation. I had a crowd a long time ago but they're all gone to their own places in the world, tangible and ethereal. 

Making friends when you're 30 is like waiting to fall in a ditch, only it's the 21st century and there aren't any of those anymore. I'm pretty sure I'm getting the worst of it because it's in my mind. If I was one of those "age is just a number" crowds I wouldn't be suffering as much. Or maybe everyone is suffering and no one is saying out loud. People tend to do that in large numbers and it's just a terrible idea. They also tend to do the opposite in large numbers and it's an equally terrible idea. There's no way out, really.

I'm having a bit of slump, just in case that wasn't clear by now. I feel discouraged most of the time, it feels like everything is so predictable. I was on a yacht with some friends last week and there were so many people I could talk to, but instead I chose to sit there and watch the water. It felt like the more dependable thing to do. The water is a memory I can look back on. The conversations, not so much. A few years of friendship and then it's gone, and I'm left here starting over and over and over again.

It's Groundhog's day, every day is more of the same.

I'll pick this up another time when I have brighter metaphors in me. So long, internet.

Of Strays, Dark Matter and Ginnungagap

I fed the dogs yesterday, for the first time in what feels like a million years!

It's not Itchy and Scratchy. I don't know where they went. This new pack is huge, and I am a little worried about them, traffic is dangerous now and I've noticed them get stuck on the little road islands between both highways. They seem to be doing well so far though, and they're gorgeous.

They had been howling at four or so in the morning when I started playing with them from my window. I copied their howls in whistles, and one responded. He didn't know where I was though, so I used my mobile flashlight to show him which window the sound was coming from. We played like that back and forth for a while, then I decided to do something I haven't done in so long.

I decided to go feed them.

I put on some pants and grabbed yesterday's chicken leftovers, and I went downstairs. They didn't know me until I did the flashlight/whistle signal, but they wouldn't come. They couldn't cross the road.

There were so many of them so I was apprehensive about getting too close. I haven't done dog rescues in such a long time, so I'm rusty. I did cross though, and stood on the sidewalk with my hand out and the pot smelling awfully nice - I had warmed it up for them and there was some roast potatoes in there too.

They barked at me, chasing me out of their fiercely defended territory. I stood my ground, then when I realized they were hostile, I dumped the food on the sidewalk and crossed the street again, back to my home.

Except, the one who responded to me in the window followed!

He looked rather sad that he scared me. He didn't even take a single bite, he just followed me back, and two more followed him.

I told him "scared!", and my heart was beating out of my chest. My legs were shaking. I haven't done this in such a long time, I was afraid I may have lost my touch. Nerves are everything when you're dealing with wild dogs. You have to maintain your adrenaline levels.

They let me pet them, and they listened to me when I said "down!"

I played with them for a bit and was filled with joy. I promised them to be back again, and I went back upstairs. With any luck, I'll train them to cross the road and come for runs with me by the end of the year. New resolution!

I spent an hour or so playing with my cats, introducing a variety of new and old toys, and working on their inter-play dynamics, introducing them to each other in new ways. They all had fun, Ludwig perhaps the least, but I could tell they were all relaxed by the end of it.

I also did some animal flow, and the knots in my back felt a lot better.

I wondered why I hadn't done this in so long.

It is such a huge part of me, my relationship with animals. I cannot let the world make me forget.

I will get my mojo back too, and not be scared when I play with the neighborhood dogs again. Dogs are not scary, people are. Animals are amazing creatures, we do not deserve them.

Khalo Sobhy passed away, that marks the last of grandma's siblings. She's not doing okay, but I managed to calm her down considerably last night. I used a mixture of things she believed in, telling her he's in a better place, and promising her he'll come to her in her dreams tonight. She hadn't seen him in so long. I also haven't seen her, or him, in a while too. I got busy.

It's astounding how busy we can get, doing everything but the things that matter.

I woke up with a weird feeling yesterday. It didn't feel good, so it made sense when I got the news. I can always sense these things coming. The little hairs on the back of my heart prickle right up. 

This year, I'm going to pay more attention to my spiritual well-being. I am currently interested in seidr and animism, and I am determined to become a shaman. I mean, for all intents and purposes, I've always been a bit of a shaman. Fairy abductions aside, the whole thing really is quite charming. Beautiful celtic and norse lore, interesting people who call themselves heathens and pagans but are some of the nicest I've ever talked to, and ancient runes verging on scary accurate more than 90% of the time.

Odin hanged from Yggdrasil for nine whole days and nights to gain runic insight. Grandma has always known things she possibly cannot, and I dream of people before they die and see signs in the universe on my evening forays. Might there be something outside the realm of reason?

I believe, as always, in the possibility of everything, and this new hobby is giving me hope where once there was only bed and horizontalism.

I'll take it.

The other heathens are mad at me for refusing to worship though. When I told them that I'm interested in trees and animals, and that they're too free to care or ask for my soul in return, they were offended. I've always known I'll never make it into heaven, but it's kind of funny that now I'll never make it into hell either. 

Guess it's Ginnungagap for me! 😂😂😂

I'm planning on doing some reading, and maybe some running or general movement, today. The last couple of years have been filled with darkness, and it's not about to lift anytime soon, but it's not my job to babysit others in their personal nightmares. I got my own to worry about, and they're so much funner.

The wrong people die, and the wrong people live. Isn't that annoying?