Lately I feel like I have been on a downward trajectory.

Every day I feel a bit more tired, and depressed, and reluctant to do anything that is not strictly speaking “fun”. I feel lazy, and self-indulgent, and hedonistic.

In other words, it’s spring.

Happens to me every year. The weather turns nice and I get lax. Something about all that sunshine makes me want to kick back and have fun and nothing else.

But within that, I have also felt a sort of decline. Like in a deep part of my mind, I am very slowly falling asleep.

It’s not an unpleasant feeling, other than some mild annoyance at being tired and a little cranky when it comes time to get off my ass and do something, like fetch food.

Or go to wound care, like I did this morning. Or whatever.

Now normally, I would instinctively fight this sort of steadily sinking into somnolence. I’d be all “I don’t want to sleep all the time, I want to stay awake and have fun!”.

And it might yet come to that. Being sleepy all the time gets on my nerves.

But maybe I just really need the rest. My restless mind is like a shark on the hunt at all times, always looking for more intellectual stimulation to feast upon and always searching for answers in its hyper-vigilant quest to see dangers coming and deal with them before they happen.

And that’s a terrible way to live.

Because I never truly and fully relax. Even when I am asleep, that shark-like part of my mind patrols relentlessly and keeps me from getting enough of that really good deep REM sleep that is so important to mental health.

I can only assume (and hope) that if I succeed in convincing my deep deep mind that I am, in fact, safe, and nothing bad will happen should I let my guard down and show enough trust in the world to turn my back on it for a while, I will finally be able to get enough of that filet mignon sleep to wake up with a healthy mind.

I can’t really imagine that could happen. Obviously logic alone is woefully inadequate. No amount of logical argument is going to vanquish an irrational fear birthed from a horrific trauma from my early childhood.

And the sad truth is that if it’s not accessible via logical analysis, I am stumped. I have no frigging idea how to go forward.

But that doesn’t mean that the task is impossible.

It just means that I will have to develop the tools to do so as I go.

Because I am not entirely blind to the murky world of pre-rational emotion. I remember what it was like to be a child. I know how the world felt to me back then. I know what the world was like when feelings led to other feelings without there needing to be a logic to it other than the deep calculus of emotion.

For most of my life, I avoided such deep waters because they made me uncomfortable. I vastly preferred to stay within the sanitary and air conditioned comfort of my cerebral world where even the strong emotions were mere grist for the mill of my intellect.

Which is absolutely useless for healing. Instead of expressing, cleansing, and closing the wound, it preserves it perfectly in the freeze dried depths of my deep freeze mind.

Well that is officially fucking over. Spring is here. Bring on the flood. Let all those suppressed emotions wash over me like a tsunami.

I will survive. And the world will be a warmer place when I revive.

More after the break.

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Slice and fold

So once more, Pizza Hut got my money because they still take cash.

It’s the very end of my month – check day is tomorrow – and I wanted a treat but all I had left was cash. Both my main card and my second card have been sucked dry.

So Pizza Hut are once more my heroes. None of the delivery services take cash any more. Most of the chains that deliver don’t do it any more because they have, sensibly enough, stopped doing the delivery themselves because Skip the Dishes and Uber Eats will do it for them for free.

That’s one of the main reasons I abandoned my old fart ways and surrendered to the digital money revolution and got myself a card to use online.

And that’s how I pay for groceries and dining in. But not Denny’s.

For Denny’s, I pay cash. For me, putting the money down to pay the bill is an important part of the dining out ritual. I’ve eaten in restaurants, both by myself and with others, since I was quite young, ergo my habits are quite deeply ingrained.

And paying with a card just feels wrong. Especially the tipping. Tipping via the card doesn’t feel like tipping at all because it’s just numbers on a screen and I have to just trust that the global megacorp will pass that on to the server.

Not nearly as emotionally satisfying as handing the server the cash directly.

Decided to try one of Pizza Hut’s new Melts. They’re basically a panini. Take a big slice of your chosen pizza, fold it in half, toast it panini press style, boom, you got a Melt.

Kind of a boring name, but whatever.

And it’s quite good. I knew the odds were pretty good that I would like it because I love paninis and I love Pizza Hut’s Meat Lover’s pizza, so it was their game to lose.

And the best part is, they don’t have whatever weird chemical was in their P’zones that made me turn against them quite hard after a while.

My guess is that the P’zones arrived to the restaurant frozen and I was reacting to whatever weird organic antifreeze they put into pizza sauce to make it taste okay to most people after being frozen.

Because I can’t hack Pizza Pockets or any other frozen pizza type product.

Having weird food sensitivities seems so very on brand for me.

For I am not of this Earth.

I’m from the one next door.

Everything is exactly the same there except their Urkel is white.

You can see why I had to escape a nightmare hellscape like that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.