what a day

20 hours ago, I decided to start lessening my night meds some more, because I had an appointment across town at 9 AM, so I needed to get up by 8 AM. Hell of a night, not in a good way, I tossed and turned and maybe got 3 hours of sleep. But when I woke up I wasn’t that tired…. and it was just, I’ve been sleeping an average of 9 hours a night. I don’t buy into the modern humanity trend of undersleep…. because sleep is like a dry run for death, it’s literally the best thing.

but I figured I could get away with it. I fell back into that “I just have to do this this and this”, which is what tends to lead to me doing too much, but it is what it is.

so I didn’t even drink any coffee, because last night was hell, I didn’t want to be any more awake. Guys, I love coffee, this was a sacrifice.

and I drove to therapy and A; got there early (a rare treat), and then B. got a good parking spot and C. made the one elevator that works. so Karma or God or whatever was up to something, is my read on all this. I’m fairly chill about it, but I think I was right.

Then I get to therapy and find out that he has an intern. This is a normal therapy thing, non therapy folks. They ask you if it’s okay, and I always say yes because who knows where it’s going to go? My regular therapist is a cool Native American guy, and this lady was basic as a psych grad could be, but she pulled it off, it was almost sweet. IDK, just different than I expect. Usually my therapist and I comiserate about enduring modern society, he’s all “change takes time” and I’m like you’re working in social services in this state, neither of our lives went to plan.

Right, so apart from repackaging my basic story, which I’ve done a few dozen times…. nothing was accomplished. I think that’s okay, part of the thing. Even so, therapy is kind of something I do performatively at this point. My family thinks it means I’m trying to get better, it’s a smoke screen while I get on disability and engage thrust away from this backwards place.

Then, it’s surprise midweek project because my parents front door lock broke. It fell apart rather spectacularly for a lock, it waas almost interesting. There are these little slugs that make the lock work, and they just fell out, I’m not a good enough locksmith yet to understand how that happened, but it was weird and cool. So then I go ahead and replace two other locks at the same time, because I can key them all the same to the original key, locks are pretty cool. But all three of them gave me different kinds of grief. The front door even when it was done kind of stuck…. I had to come back later and fiddle with it, and I don’t know how I fixed it.

Then their side door…. tested my limits. I almost gave up. I got the new lock in, but the old frame was giving me grief. I forced it closed (mistake), and it got stuck shut….. and I had to take the whole darn thing apart and put it back together. Oh, and I managed to program a remote to my parents garage, should have done it years ago, but it’s done now.

and I get home like “I had a full day, lets do our grocery shopping and I’ll be done.” So we do grocery shopping, and when I get home my wife mentions that she wants me to work on the car because she needs it next week. This is where the day took a seriously weird turn.

I was going to fiddle with it for maybe an hour. The best I could do in that time would have to be enough…. then this old guy pulls up and offers to help, and asks me to get into his car. I’ve been listening to true crime podcasts, so to me this looks like the beginning of a rape/kill situation. Thing is, I’m suicidal, and I also look at him like “he probably can’t run that fast.” Turns out he’s just a lonely old guy who wants to tell stories, and is willing to do car work for company, which is an exchange I can make.

It wasn’t just the stories though. The guy was 70s blue collar. He dropped some seriously casual racial slurs while we were working on it. He apologized for cussing, but not for the racial slurs. But, I’m at the doing my own auto work level of broke, I decide that I can swallow my desire to tell him those are not words we use in 2023, and we worked on it for a good five hours……

and I get home, take a shower, and launch my ship in game….. but I forgot a gyroscope, so I’ll have to relaunch tomorrow. and it’s just been a really full day. I need downtime now, but unclear if I’ll get enough of it.

but we fixed the car way better than I would have if I’d have done it alone.

and the ship worked fine apart from not being able to steer it once I got it out of the gravity well. This game is seriously improving my patience. I’ve been designing this ship for two days, and today I was tempted to start fresh, has happened a few times. Most of all, my mind is sort of coming back. I don’t have all of what I once had, but with my modern cynicism and lack of investment feels almost like a super power. And the guy that helped me was in his 70s and it was clear still doing the thing I keep doing, picking himself back up and puttering around fixing stuff.

It’s not hope, because it doesn’t look like it’ll get better, but it looks survivable, the rest of this life thing. Fifty eight more years, at most, I can do that. Or maybe I can’t, it’ll be interesting finding out.