Plague

i guess i didnt see it before i wrote yesterdays entry but the White Ranger and the Pink Ranger were just driving down the street on a motorcyle. alph was like oh wow i didnt know the pink n white ranger hooked up lmfao thats pretty awesome tho just cosplaying and riding your bike. really brightened up my day

and like i said i was tired, i fell asleep aroudn like 6?? just out

not doing a whole lot less tired today, but because its a whole ten degrees farenheit cooler than it has been i was Determined to go Outside. watering the plants is one thing, i wanted to drag some logs towards the garden and go for a walk in the woods. which i did. i saw a great blue heron, a few toads, and a kid on a dirtbike.

but because i was tired, i turned back before the beaver pond u.u

trying to multitask best i can - cleaning my costume for plastic city comic con and taking photos for sticker club and whatnot. but - tired. v tired man. so tired, is the man.

i still need to make a price sheet for the con!!! if for nobody elses reference, alphs,,,

i mean i cant just sit at a table the whole time in costume can i??? sheesh

audrey naughty today. luna spicy, starting fights she cant finish with everyone and yelling her head off. letting her have catio and some supervised time on the back deck mellowed her out. its hard to be a kitty.

ren especially acts so elderly... not super steady on her paws all the time and content to wash herself and curl up between meals and snuggle and purr all night. but she did want to come to the back deck, which surprised me. lately she's just blinked at the sun like ughhh and gone right back inside with no interest in the forest smells or plants or bugs. she was a little more alert today. i guess she has good days and bad days, like any elderly being. i annoy her with constant smooches.

havent heard from my prison penpal in a while and i'm worried they're scraping all email. keep meaning to write a physical letter and then having no energy boo hiss

listened to kids see ghosts earlier and the first few tracks reminded me of disco elysium for some reason? ?? obviously mr west was on there like bluh guy pls go back to therapy but it was still really good music, and its not like i paid kanye for it. i really liked "4th dimension"

alph is home, mail route hard, tired life. tired, tired life.

i think i lost my plastic jakks glameow figure ... oh well not like itll be that hard to replace eventually

need to finish this iced tea and drink like a lot more water and see if theres any energy left for drawing. gotta try

why is the arborist not picking up the phone to get money from me for his workers
why is the scooter still randomly idling at full throttle
why did it take a fucking half hour of getting misgendered to get off the phone with the bank when i realized i just accidentally transfered the wrong amount of zeros to cover a purchase and they WOULDNT LISTEN TO ME SAY THAT and thEN TRIED TO TELL ME T HAT and IF I DIDNT NEED LIKE FOUR SCREENS BECAUSE BANKS DONT EVEN WORK ON DESKTOP ANYMORE MAYBE WE WOULDNT BE IN THIS MESS WOULD WE FUCK my life oh my god

i am trying to paint whatever
its becoming really apparent that if i have to write a full on entry every day even when i dont feel like it im just going to wind up screaming and screaming and screaming some days huh

feel like trash, read a whole bunch of the immortal life of henrietta lacks instead of being productive. medicated cats. pushed an order through for something to show off at woo pride to compliment the dragons.

tomorrow is streaming which is not a low stress endeavor but the income is needed in a dire way so here we go why not

i despise the grind

monitor replaced. arborists came a day early!!! and i couldnt get them paid bc even starting red with the kick throttle made her throttle just. stick. like wide open full speed. i dont know why this is??? im glad i took a video or id think i was losing my fucking mind, because when alph got home to look at it... of course she didn't want to do it again. he changed the battery out tho so at least the automatic start works again. maybe it is related. maybe not. machines are curious beasts.

replaced the monitor - dislike giving a dime to walmurt but it's that or like, an hour trip. aint nowhere else with monitors nearby anymore, the computer store truly is a thing of the past. why do that everyone wants a cursed rectangle. bah and humbug. the new monitor is slighlty smaller and a warmer tint? but whatever, it stays on, that's the main thing. it was hard to even pay to make prints or look at refs before. fucking rest in pieces

also i chipped my glasses right in the middle of the lense already arbg bgabg of course i did, i drop everything. i was painting and they hit the hard wood floor or bounced off some edge somewhere and now theres a tiny foggy speck that i cannot remove. i have only my own self to blame for this, but the paintings are coming along ok???

i think my dad is just glad to be home, im giving him a few days to not have me annoying him calling at all hours. hopefully he'll have an o2 setup by then for worst scenarios? hopefully.

the big ash tree by the driveway on top of a giant pile of rocks has come down, i said that then got derailed still being upset that i couldnt pay the guys bc of scooter behaving crazy. but it is a big sad feeling to me. looking at the stump, the rot was all through the center. there was no saving this tree, there is no saving any of these ash trees at this point i feel. maybe if the beetles lose all their food supply and die out and we wait like ten years then we can start replanting, but right now our entire forests up here have lost a mainstay tree. maples and oaks are still prevelent, but should something attack /them/ i don't like to think. i still dont like to think what this means for areas where ash trees grew densely. areas that were shade for hundreds of years are now in sun. old root systems might hold soil in place for a while, but especially at these high altitudes... ah well. frightening as the prospect of a flash flood is, i think i'd still rather face that than a forest fire.

a forest fire, see, there's actually parts of the ecosystem evolved to come back after one. what do you think pinecones are all about? there's whole species of pinecone that's like: i need to be on fire to make new baby trees. there are all these amazing things in nature to respond to threats that occur outside an organism's control... but we've fucked with the balance so much, the threats now occur at wildly unpredictable and frequent bursts that nothin and nobody wants to keep up with or their head will explode.

so like obviously ive been a stressed out mess today. not a surprise because i had a very stressful week of my dad being in the hospital very far away!!!! but i hate when it comes out in a pinch point crisis like 'tree guys here a day early and u cant pay them without risking life and limb lol lmfao lol' i am never at my best then. i am never at my kindest.

alph brought me a frozen coffee to cheer me up but also i was like what if that was my dinner. my big old stress response has Always been 'physical needs shut down' - and like i said, the med i'm on does jack shit for anxiety


speaking of for the first time ever the pharmacy wanted to shake a finger of concern at me for taking venlafaxine with tamoxifen. the entire reason i am ON venlafaxine is because it is one of the SAFER ones for tamoxifen. like i had to do so much homework on this but a lot of SSRI and SNRI either dont work as well or inhibit the work of the cancer drug when used because of liver enzyme competition. i've known this for 5-6 years, because of course the first thing i -did- starting a new medication was read as much as i could about its interactions with ANY of my OLD medications. that's just due dillegence??? like, studies are dry but that's what overviews are for. and you read enough studies you can put together a risk/benefit assessment picture for yourself. that is WHY i stopped taking sertraline (zoloft) even tho it helped mitigate my anxiety and shortened the length and severity of depressive episodes. i just. i dont know. i feel so tired when i'm telling my doctors things like that, and when it takes six years for standard pharmacist knowledge to catch up.

i am so tired of it all, etc. that's why i took a depression nap with ren, again. she's always there for me to have a crisis snuggle.

tomorrow i gotta try to meet w the arborist and pay up, i cant stand the idea of not getting him paid. i am still feeling upset over all the little compounded misfortunes and miseries today, but i always am. i feel like an ancestor of mine on the emerald isle got drunk and urinated on one of the fae folk and i'm still paying the debt. it would be a very doyle thing to do, see.

i half watched (screen blacking out, plus i was painting) some lousy horror movie called Birthright (2025). i thought it might go somewhere because the premise was a pair of moms trying to have a kid together inherit a house with a SINISTER PAST and that could mean ghosts! or demons. or demon ghosts. unfortunately it was just boring cult sins of your parents stuff with a side of take your meds dont be crazy (i HATE when thats part of the conversation in horror. just throw a lil ableism around why not) but of note were two parts that made me laugh. one, some dude got his neck sliced off with..... a deer antler. like lmfao even if you sharpened the point it is a piercing item. the antlers pierce, they do not slice. as a big part of team knife i assure you of this. like if you DID make it a blade, it would look a lot different from its normal deer antler shape. it'd be all thinned and sharpened. anyway

the second good part was whoever trained the dog (simon, a golden mix?) had him perfectly trained to do a seen of boofing. you know boofing, right? when a large sized dog is at attention watching something they've deemed suspicious and wants to bark, but also, they know humans are not the biggest fans of bark bark so instead the kind of try to quietly bark and it comes out 'boof' - like a self muffled bark. so simon the dog went "boof" on a nature trail several times in sequence while being called by the actress. and i compulsively boof'd back. it was just my natural response when dogs went boof in real life!!!! like i'd boof and ask them what they saw, and then boof a little with them when i saw it was like, a person walking a dog or whatever. sometimes dogs growl a little and boof, sometimes they just boof... but i guess it's a sound i miss, living dog-less as i am these years.

though i do have two cats in the studio with me right now. pretty okay trade i guess.

i wish i did more than stress about shit and paint a tiny bit today, big Wasted Day feelings. big emotions are such a drag sometimes.

i have a neighbor, shes like in her 60s/70s. she lives alone, mostly just talks to her brother and neighbors. she spends most of her day just cleaning up and taking care of the playground area in our neighborhood. i really cant help but feel like... people dont realize how much of the world is held up by people like her? and when people like her are gone, there's gonna come a time when either they need to relearn how to do these things for themselves or pay people to do them. i feel like america's community destruction for the interests of white supremacy is nothinig but a snake eating its own tail and no good comes of it. everything falls apart when white supremacy gets its way. which is also why i dont trust anything complying with the demands of white supremacists in advance... and there sure are lots of those motherfuckers about these days.

i should get off gmail. talk about going full animal farm, google erasing their "dont be evil" motto. though i guess i felt like they were always trending that way ever since my friend ran a mage in D&D who set up a google-esque empire devoted to the acquisition and retention of all knowledge in trade and it sort of almost instantly leaned sinister in its allegiances and intentions when granted that great powerful access. one might say we essentially ran a simulation of what the endgame of google was going to be, and it was evil. even if begun with pure intentions, when morality was not being enforced or rewarded in any meaningful way... great power of any kind sort of rapidly corrupts anything it stays in prolonged touch with.

which i think was the original idea behind 'lets not have monarchs' but when you concentrate power within one group (old white men) you still get the same problem....

'it could never happen here!' everyone kept telling me when i warned them over and over again it most assuredly was in fact happening here and has happened here before and if you are sincerely still in denial things are gonna get real dark real soon and i will be ~later days~ from your dangerous untrustworthy ass at that point

and yet they are shocked i hold my distance

well no one ever accused my sister or mom of being particularly observant or in posession of strong critical thinking skills. sucks theyre also posessed of the vice of comfort over facing an unpleasant truth. o h well. my personal vice of self destruction is, at least, a little more socially acceptable these days. smoking one weed a day in emulation of Kim Kitsuragi isn't the worst thing ive done to this meat cage by far. but it really isn't the best either. even once a day, i still sometimes wake up and need to do a nasty cough. or wake up feeling a little bit of a wheeze. even if it goes away, and even if i stop doing this all winter because i can't go outside and keep the smell out of hte house, it's not at ALL great. do not smoke, would not reccomend it for anyone's safety alone, 1/10 on the safety for your body longterm scale especially if you're doing it a lot and not filtering it or using a nasty dirty pipe.

but also, there have not been enough studies on vapes to convince me they're substantially safer yet- especially with additives for flavor. and currently especially with weed, vapes are a much /much/ stronger concentration than smoking a joint... which causes tolerance to build a lot faster. which in turn makes it a more expensive habit. so i also would not reccomend /those/...

i guess to crib the Jim's Big Ego lyric, all things being equal: they're not. all things being healthy: they're not. that's the nature of vice, it's going to bite you in the ass somehow. but like taking antidepressants while also taking a cancer medication, you i guess do a risk/benefit assessment and decide for yourself what you're going to run with. and for me personally, i think the benefit either equals or outweighs the risk to smoke a weed once a day, so here we are. "but what about the paranoia" please, like i havent been quoting the edgey 90s tshirt since i was a child that says "you're not paranoia if they're really all out to get you"

as far as tshirt wisdom goes, i gotta say that's pretty S class. def miles above my other teen favs like "youre just jealous the little voices talk to me" (hey, not everyone has inner monologue/dialogue. their loss!) and "one tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor" (i was nothing if not obvious in signaling where my mental health issues was going to lead me in the near future. it was the bad of my guardians for not expecting me to also be furtive and guarded about displaying such weakness around them....) and really if you had to hold all the tshirt slogans of my youth up (including Big Dogs) against Moby Dick and ask me which one i'd rather read again? considering it'd be my 3rd or 4th time thru Moby Dick and i /never/ found it an enjoyable text? i'd go tshirts lmfao that's just my personal trashy taste in literature.

and yet i will ocassionally chew on gormanghast ... i guess gormanghast paints a better or at least more viariable visual picture for me. strange castles filled with mold and dust and ritual, weird mountains and towns clawing in misery on the hope their art might someday be immortalized in the halls of the slow dying weird monarch lines. trains of hundreds of white cats, furious and clever evil youth, kind of sharp in their biting satire but also too chattery to make it of value doctors and their totally unattractive but extremely horny sisters... gormanghast has a lot going on. it just takes ten thousand million years to get there. moby dick is more like an anxiety of being trapped in a car with an unstable person (basically, my youth in pennsylvania with my mom at the wheel) only dragged out with death metaphors for chapter after chapter. it is just not for me, it is just not enjoyable to me. force me to relive the poor taste of my teen fashion and i will bear that with a smile. another drag through melville? i can only hear about whaling history so many times without wanting to just quit the argument abaout if the bed will be soft or if one clam will feed both ishmael and quequeg entirely and go read about whaling (or read melville's previous book Redburn, which is about whaling but without the death symbolism) ... things ive said a million times.

they tell you repeating stories is how you can tell you're getting old

buddy i feel like i've been old for a long time now and nearly dying sure didnt help

but i will be here tomorrow i guess
for whatever the fight i have left in me is worth

so the hdmi port on my monitor is loose or dying or whatever, oh well. thats life for you.

pop got to go home from the hospital tonight!!! he's got a pulmonologist he's planning to meet with now, and probably needs like oxygen at home and stuff. sucks. but i'm glad he's able to go home and that they all agree he's doing better than when he came in. he wasn't gasping between his words today at the least

audrey peed the couch, a sure sign she believes things are returning to normal fsdfasdf shes eating SOME of her medication, not all, but ... we'll get there. perseverance in the pee war is key.

i moved all the insulation rolls to the garage early cuz there was a chance of storms. one of those situations where you know that if you leave it out there to get ruined, it's 100% gonna rain. and if you move it, it wont rain. currently its thundering its ass off but not a drop has fallen. i tried to tempt it by putting the laundry out over the railing to dry, but no dice.

steam cleaned all the pokeyman plush that will be going to market and wiped them down to get all the dust and cat fur that lingers atop. the only ones who show a little wear and tear are the really, really, really old ones that have just tagged along since gen1 or whatever. i hope they find their way to new trainers.

felt kinda better-ish today, but not 100%. hearing my dad feel significantly better certainly didnt hurt. but i dont know, a lot of brushfire anxiety and a lot of nightmares still. and the monitor blacking out is really annoying. ugh i really shouldnt have taken saturday off streaming, its of Course income that woulda covered a replacement monitor blrag argagjf grr

well, i promised myself i'd work out so i really ought to. but also i just put on fivel goes west and its still a really gorgeous fuckin movie god damn those backgrounds purdy.

i read another webbed comic today, revenants. it's still seemingly early in the story, a very character driven mystery. but also in a very specific way extremely from the uk in a way only people who've never lived in american gun culture get about the like, horrible hell of american gun culture. it is very clearly not like pro get a gun and shoot a guy, but the fascination is i guess like being fascinated with both the machine's ability to do only one thing and the fear of that. because for all the gunshots flying around in revenants, i cant help but notice the creator cuts away from or keeps its distance from the bloody death every time. i like the character emma the best, the protag (until the latest arc) seemed to live with the superpower of not being traumatized by gun violence. i think america is unfortunately already full of people with this power & it leads them to make rash and dangerous choices. with guns. but given the latest arc, i feel like that was an intentional choice about the character. and i think it also reveals some anxiety about like 'what if when you did pull a trigger, you couldnt help yourself and just wanted to kill again like a switch flipped'

really my biggest question is why these kids all trust their cell boss. i aint seen no evidence he's right and doing anything but manipulating a bunch of traumatized young folk. but perhaps i am wrong.
there goes the monitor again. man this sounds like a chase scene with tiger the cat too wahhh

i should just ask on socmed if anyone wants to do a commission to get a new one gghhghdhfds

i really try to keep social medias off my phone bc it is total total cursed object brain poison. but the phone is an anxiety rectangle anyway innit

oh i hear a few raindrops!!

and tiger the cat is about to open a caboose and bump into a doggi. teehee

later taters

pop's still in the hospital, and i continue to feel very low at my inability to make things better ~in general~ if not in specific. even if i could drive the 11 hours by car, what would i do when i arrive? idk.

i keep mixing up pcos (poly cystic ovarian syndrome) with copd (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) which is what my dad has. which isnt the first time, wont be the last time, and is very funny to doctors.

last night both me and alph just went to bed like two hours early. depression tired, for sure. the problem with depression exhaustion is that it doesnt matter how long i sleep, the problems aren't gone by the time i awaken. which is i think what the brain is trying to do. just fast forward through the stress. crumbs to that, i guess.

thet insulation for our attic crawlspace arrived today, now i just need a day it's not actually dangerously hot and also alph is home in order to start the insulation process. it's all very tightly wrapped in plastic but i'm secretly hoping if i leave it outside i'll tempt the weather into rain. we're very dry here. imo, brush fire risk. when i reach up and clutch the leaves of our lilac tree, they're so brittle they crumble in my palm like it was fall. just dried out completely. forest fires really frighten me, i used to have nightmares about them a lot as a child. so this ambient anxiety is also a factor in how i'm feeling. we already have an air quality alert until 11pm for high ozone at high elevations.

my monitor has been acting weird today. it's probably a mixture of the heat and it being the cheapest monitor at the micro center a few years ago. it keeps going all black regardless of if i'm jostling anything. then i have to wiggle the connective wire until it comes back. the monitor itself gets really warm so i'm thinking it may be a heat related issue. but so far so good today on the internet/phone staying up.

no cultures have grown from the samples they took from my dad so the thinking is... this is just what COPD looks like. random pnuemonia and bronchial infections that send him to the ER and require steroids and antibiotics via IV to fight off. i dont like it. it feels like it's the end of the road. i've been leaning a lot on ren (my cat) for support, because she's very attuned to my moods. but it also makes me think how my cat might outlive my parent only to die shortly after, and that sends my brain into a spiral too.

i know i've posted about it before, but this really is just more affirmation that venlafaxine doesnt do anything for my anxiety. ymmv, every brain is different. but for me it's not done a damn thing. recently they had me go up on it, taking a higher dose. no change. but come october i'll only have 3 more years on my cancer drug tamoxifen. then i can go back to ssris that work for me. but i really hate it. being anxious takes up so much energy and derails so much thinking, wasting so much time.

managed a few household chores today, in spite of unplanned depression naps. got some work done for the indie game project, but not nearly what i had hoped to be at by this date.

i kind of hate that my prediction that trump would declare martial law in DC first is coming true. i kind of hate how i see through all this shit and yet can do nothing about it but try to help others survive it.

speaking of my friend raile's car engine is destroying itself. please help him & his husband joe out if you have a few spare dollars. https://www.gofundme.com/f/car-engine-is-trashed-need-a-new-car


i know that in theory i should be able to change my scooter's battery on my own, but also, when i feel really low i lack any confidence in myself. so uh. it isnt happening yet. it is really sincerely hard to push past the urge to just go to sleep and hope not to wake up in the same reality. as full of weird shit as my nightmares are (like getting a glass smashed on my back and then cleaning up the shards?) i can walk around shirtless in them, and run a hand through my hair. so whatever those realities are, they're preferable. even if i'm haunted just as much there, in different ways.

what is a haunting if not a love story anyway?

i really do prefer the long form journaling for talking about things like emotion. i really do. there's such an unconcious pressure in microblogging to remain positive and bubbly and have a smiling outward face. it feels very much like you're working as a cashier. and i understand why? there's so much non-human negativity coming from all sides. news doesn't care to consider your emotions before posting, and so that smiling persona becomes a refuge. but it's false, and it takes a toll on the person who's got to keep up that facade. granted, being honest and open about my mental health ups and downs was what got Someone to start screaming at me to quit blogging all together... but i think they were wrong. i think they were selfish, and wanted a world where the only one with a right to talk about it was them. which they never did anyway. so, i remain pointlessly open about my brain trying to eat itself.

days til PCCC are closing in... i really gotta get these plush steam cleaned for rehoming.

ttyl.