planet of the squids

still keyed to maximum stress right now, which is pretty normal for being trapped 5 hrs in front of a screen without real breaks

after discovering you sat in cat pee

after having a night of nightmares where everyones asking why you didnt do your homework this week and you keep explaining well my father was in the hospital and they go i really dont care and i dont want to hear it no excuses wheres your homework

blughgggh

i moved my little iron yard ornaments of hedgehogs (like, sillouettes on stakes) to the sawed stump. the soft rot in the center meant i could cluster them all around it like they're up there having a hedgehog meeting. the smell of it was incredible because there's some intense humidity right now and a real desire from the sky to let loose and rain - but it hasn't happened yet. it was the smell of undiluted and fresh wood rot turned to dirt, mixed with the dry sawdust smell of when it was cut. clean, soft to the touch crumbling dirt has its own sweet scent. mixing together was really wonderful. highlight of my day tbqh

also wired headphones arrived so i can adjust the volume on the mp3 player via the mp3 player when listening in bed or whatever yayyyy

no ttrpg tonight, GM's either busy or recovering from the doctor and i forget which. i'm going to take the chance and seize on a few hours fucking around playing final fantasy. though i should undoubtly do some stretches and such first. like i said. tethered to a chair for five hours.

i have been poking at some new podcasts, though there's really a derth of good new stuff right now. i think i mentioned land's end - a story abt a shepard with a mutating flock. i also liked dead arcology, a post-apoc scifi told from several points of view. there's a lot on dead arcology still to be explained and uncovered and i like that. i'm interested in the hexings too, but the sound mixing (especially for the censorship beep) really needs some help. it is way, way too loud. and used very regularly. which makes for a disruptive and kinda annoying listen in parts especially at night. theres a few other i'm meh on that i found but i guess if they begin to wow me i'll write them up.

pop got his oxygen setup at home, and i didn't have a chance to take the scooter out today. i mean shit i didnt even have a chance until about ten minutes ago to wash the piss laundry. streaming day is kind of do literally nothing else and pray you make over min wage while youre at it. but i do absolutely feel i get treated more humanely when it's pencils pens and paper.

tired, should eat, being heckled by a goblin to pull out a cat bed for her.
later

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