The long haul

This weekend was not as successful as the one before. It would've been helpful if I'd had more advanced warning that we'd be off Monday. Then I might've been able to put together plans to leave town for the weekend. (I have invitations to come crash any number of places right now.) There were several people I'd considered getting in touch with, but I put off arrangements and in the end didn't make any. Saturday was basically a wasted day of sitting around playing solitaire and making only desultory attempts at dealing with household. Sunday was more successful in this regard.

It helped that I knew I'd be meeting Fig for dinner. I didn't get any shopping done but I did make it to the hardware store. He left the venue up to me so I chose Dak, thinking we might hit the Anvil after. But he had a notion of checking out the Glenwood. I'd never been on an ordinary Sunday evening so I wasn't sure what to expect. (Answer: Deadsville.) He thought Social looked too straight, so we ended up walking all the way to Touché for the dreary end to their beer bust. Not that it mattered much, as we got into a deep conversation of Life After monshu.

I confessed that, on some level, the persistence of this state of affairs hasn't sunk in. I still wake in the morning thinking maybe I'll have found my way back to right timestream, the one where my husband is still alive and Cheeto Hitler isn't about the take over the reins of power. Then I lie there in the dark trying to think of good reasons to get up despite the true horror of my reality. Thank my stars for the cat is all I can say. Annoying as his whining is, it does help ground me.

"You have a harsh inner voice," Fig told me as I related repeating to myself, "monshu is dead. You will never be able to say anything to him ever again and he will never speak to you ever again." But I've got to get that message through my thick skull somehow. I still find myself thinking, "Oh, I can't wait to tell him..." or "I need to ask him...". I guess like any other inappropriate thought, it will gradually become less frequent until I stop thinking it altogether.

Fig wanted to get home and I wanted to putz some more and fit in some reading, so we made it an early night. I had made tentative plans with clintswan's old roomie for Monday. He was supposed to get in touch when he got back to town, but to no one's surprise he didn't. (After I learned how flaky he was, I gave him about a 1-in-8 chance of actually coming through. Maybe that was optimistic.) Still, the threat provided enough external motivation that a couple more surfaces got cleared--notably the dining room table, which had been wearing the same crumbs since Hogmanay.

innerdoggie gave me an excuse to leave the house Sunday and I took it. The whole way down to Montrose to meet her for lunch, I reflected on the irony: If there was a day in the weekend to be a homebody, this--cold, grey, rainy--was it. Instead we squeezed into a corner of the café at the art centre with all our sopping gear and I tried my best to be good company even though my heart wasn't in it. (Sometimes you wonder who is really doing the favour and who is benefitting; maybe in the end the distinction is meaningless.) On the way back, I picked up some eats from Middle Eastern Bakery and had ample opportunity to curse the sluggishness of the Clark bus.

Then that night I slept badly. Not sure why. The coffee in the pie? Taking my allopurinal too late? Looking for songs to make me cry when I should've been reading about foolish Russian aristocrats? My dreams are fantasies; even if the Old Man isn't alive in them, they're always lively. I'm surrounded by people--family, friends--and there's lots going on. Not like the waking world, where every bit of positive stimulation is the result of me making an active effort to seek it out.