Well, another thing has come along to fling my tiny little lifeboat about.

This time, it’s something quite predictable, though no less disruptive : Joe’s work schedule switching to summer mode.

Joe works for the local school board as a janitor, and normally, he works something like a 3 pm to 11 pm schedule.

Makes sense, right? Kids get out of school at 3 pm or thereabouts, and then the janitorial staff more or less has the place to themselves, so that is the logical time to get in all the cleaning that the day staff can’t do when class is in session.

There’s a hidden catch to that, though : if the school is dirty when the teachers arrive in the morning, it’s the night shift that gets the blame, and the people on the day shift know this so they know they can get away with leaving the night shift with half of THEIR work to do as well.

People really are creative when it comes to inventing ways to be shitty to one another, aren’t they? You have one shift with zero accountability and the other with all of it.

These are the injustices of everyday life.

Anyhow, in the summer the kids ain’t there, so that’s when they do all the cleaning that would be impossible to do if school was in session at all.

Complicated stuff that involves things like pulling up mats to clean under them, flushing out the pipes with a high powered hydraulic system, and deep waxing the gym floor so it can survive another school year of abuse by a thousand kids sized pairs of sneakers.

But that stuff can be done on a normal 9 to 5 schedule, so that’s what Joe’s schedule is going to be starting tomorrow.

Well. it will actually be 7 am to 4 pm,. but close enough.

On my end of things, the most direct impact is that with a schedule like that, it is basically impossible for him to drive me to therapy every week.

Not only are therapists pretty unwilling to schedule sessions after 5 pm, Joe is going to be super tired after a full day of heavy labour and it would be cruel to expect him to drive from work to the apartment, then drive me to therapy, then hang around or run errands for an hour, then drive me home.

Normally, he does all that before work on Thursdays. That’s why my therapy appointments are usuallly at 12:45 pm. That way we get home around 2:15 PM and he has time to relax before getting home from work.

But clearly, that is not gonna happen during the summer.

The best we can do is that he will pick me up after work. Which means I need to schedule my appointments for around 3 pm to 3:30 pm so they end somewhere between 4 PM and 4:30 PM.

And, tragically, I was suppose to call my therapist and set that up last Thursday. But I just kept forgetting. I have a low friction brain, and things slip my mind very easily.

Gets me in all kinds of trouble.

So there’s a very real chance that I will not get therapy this week. It’s possible that there will magically be a slot open in the right time range some time this week, but I ain’t exactly counting on it.

Fair enough. My error, my consequences. That works.

And I find myself once more contemplating how disruptive small waves like this can be to my all too placid and becalmed life.

It’s certainly not who I want to be. On any level, I don’t want to be some tiny dinghy tossed back and forth on the waves like a ping pong ball. I want to be a great and mighty steamer that plows through waves like they were made of shaving cream and is so mighty and huge that it makes its own weather.

I am so damn tired of being so damned weak. It’s so fucking frustrating sometimes. My desires are so much stronger than what this useless carcass of mine can actually sustain that it makes me want to scream.

And I am far too old to be able to substitute rage, testostosterone, and sheer bloody minded determination for actual bodily resources any more.

I tghink I need to reboot my lifestyle entirely. I want to just take off somewhere and rebuild my whole life based entirely on what makes me feel healthier and happier and to hell with all the destructive distractions and deadly dulling of my id and my libido.

There are times when I feel like I am not even truly alive. Because no matter what my pulse and respiration rate say (those lying cunts), I don’t feel life at all. The pump pumps and the peristalsis pulses and glycolisis keeps those muscle pumping, but emotionally I might as well be six feet under on a cold winter night.

I am just so fucking numb.

And my soul cries out against it, and tries to goad my mind into waking up and taking charge and bumping up the lights so we can see our fingers wiggle and know that we are acually a live mammal living on Planet Earth.

But the countvaling force is strong and it’s hard for me to find the wherewithal to push back against it for long. As much as I consciously wish to melt and wake and rise, the subconscious forces of my depression remain determined to keep spraying everything with liquid helium until all is dead and safe and calm again.

And I can’t shake the feeling that the whole shebang is wrong. That this titanic struggle is a false duality designed to keep me too caught up in the war to notice the clear, simple, gentle, wise solution that is staring me right in the face.

It’s easy to say I should forgive myself.

It’s just as easy to say I should go easy on mysef.

It’s even easier to say I should really just relax.

But all of that is meaningless and insubstational and worse than useless.

It’s like telling someone who is drownign to try not to breathe so much.

Maybe there is no solution in the linear logical sense of the word.

Maybe the problem cannot be solved by analysis and synthesis and revelation.

Maybe I am stuck in this low rent bardo of mine until I learn to go about things in a whole new way. Something more sane, and intgegrated, and gentle, and human, and filled with the wisdom of the heart.

I have been too damned smart for my own good for far too long.

Time to finally grow up.

I will talk ot you nice people again tomorrow.