The Island of Z

I’ve been having one of my sleepy days.

Makes sense. I am long overdue. And after spending five days fairly ill, I am no doubt in need of some serious mental rejuvenation time.

Of course, it doesn’t feel like mental rejuvenation at the time. Far from it! It feels like my mind is filled with soft electric sand, and every time I sleep, some of the sand drains out…. but only after it fills up in the first place.

Right now, I am willing to just let the sand have its way and catch up on sleep. If it keeps up, I will get irritated with it and start to fight it, forcing myself to move around and be active and shake the sand out of my skull.

Man, when I get hold of a metaphor, I just don’t let go.

Sleepy or no, I am definitely willing to say that I am no longer in the grips of last week’s death spore. I still have some “liquid goo” rattling around in my lungs and a touch of dryness in my throat, but I feel fine, my appetite is back to normal, and I am properly salinated.

I am so glad that shit’s over. Like I said when still in the antiviral trenches, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone, and that applies to your health more than anything else.

So while I would hesitate to call myself “healthy” now, I will say that it wonderful to be back to the far more pleasant level of being ill to which I have become accustomed in recent years.

One little thing brightening my day : I managed to talk Amazon Canada into giving me my money back for Amazon Prime.

It started when I finally got around to looking up the benefits of Amazon Prime. That meant first figuring out which Amazon I had bought said Prime on.

Turned out, it was Amazon Canada. So I fuck around on Google trying to find out what all I get from Prime on Amazon Canada, and it turns out some dude wrote an entire Kindle book about it.

Wow, there are so many it takes a whole book to explain them all, I thought.

But no. I found the information elsewhere and it’s not even a pamphlet’s worth. Pretty much all you get is free 2-day shipping and a deal on 1-day shipping.

Whoopty fucking do.

When I saw that, I instantly made my mind up that it was SO NOT WORTH the $88 it had cost me, and I was determined to get my moola back.

So I wrote a heart-string tugging letter to Amazon about having been sick (true) and financial times being hard for me (true, but not exactly new) and how I knew they had my money now and didn’t have to give it back, but I would really appreciate all or at least some of the money back anyhow.

There may have been some gilding of the truth in there. Trust me, it was a masterpiece of pathos.

Couple hours later, I get an email saying my Prime membership has been canceled and I should be getting the money credited back to my card within 2 to 3 business days.

SCORE! I still can’t believe I pulled it off. I figured that absentminded people like me were the natural prey of free trial gambits like the Amazon Prime one, and there was no way they would give me a penny back. Or if they did, it would be in the form of “store credit”, so to speak.

But nope. I’m getting my $$$ back. Squee! I not only managed to correct one of my recent stupids, I did it in a way that makes me feel smart. DOUBLE SCORE!

So things are looking up for me. I am recovering from getting knocked almost all the way down by that illness, and pretty soon I will be officially on the rise again and ready to go hunting for some writing courses to take.

It helps that tomorrow is every cripple’s favorite time of the month, Check Day. I plan on going on my own to get it cashed, as otherwise I would end up having to it after therapy on Thursday, or wait till Friday night in hopes we would be going out to eat, and fuck that noise.

It will do wonders for my mood to not have an empty wallet. I have like maybe a couple bux to my name at the moment, and that never feels good.

Sure, intellectually I know that I am not, in the grand financial scheme of things, broke. Check tomorrow, Amazon payback, etc.

But being broke is psychologically damaging on a level inaccessible to mere reason. I have “winter is coming” white people genes in my DNA strand and that means I need to have a reserve of resources available at all times in order to feel safe.

I recognize that this is exactly how financial hoarding (oldschool : miser) happens. I can completely imagine myself being the kind of person who can never have enough money because they use money as security against a cold cruel world, which works for a while, but when the real monster lies within your soul, no amount of money can keep it out.

There, I just wrote the plot for an entire CBC-bait novel about a middle aged rich white dude’s existential crisis.

So my plan is to find a place, financially speaking, where I am comfortable. A place where I can have a nice, easy, pleasant life without a lot of worry or hassle on my part.

I have thought for a while now that a glorious place for any artist to be in is the one where you are so financially secure that someone could offer you a billion dollars to sell out, and you could still say no.

Then watch the look on their faces when “more money” stops working and they realize they actually have to DEAL with you, not just “make a deal” with you.

That’s all from me for today folks. I will talk to you again tomorrow.

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