Monday, October 22, 2007

GIVE ME A @#$%-ING BREAK...


Good friends from the Ocean Coast of the Great Commonwealth decided to head out to Nowheresville on their way back from the Big Woods, where they had been ogling the fall foliage, and very nicely asked me out to dinner.

Now, I have been having a Pretty Hard Time recently, what with the tapering off of my medication coinciding with my massive allergic reaction to the Goat's poison ivy, and the subsequent treatment with steroids starting with the cheerful caveat that the steroids "could cause anxiety and depression." Well, something sure did. I've been all over the place recently, but pulled myself together to go out to dinner with these friends.

I picked a restaurant that had never failed me -- as opposed to the fancy-pants place they wanted to go -- and it failed me. The food, for the first time in ten or fifteen years, was simply bad. And then they started telling me how I was doing everything wrong. I was looking to support myself in the
Big Woods; I should be thinking "outside the box," finding ways to make a lot of money so that I wouldn't have to work so many hours...

After two hours, I left feeling well-bludgeoned. Well, they paid for dinner, but I wound up feeling like I was the one who paid. I mean, I know that I am possibly digging my own grave by pulling up stakes for the second time in a year or so to move closer to the Goat, and that the relationship itself may not survive the move, but how is anything that has gone on in my life in the last few years "inside the box"? Inside any box? And even if it were, where do they get off laying it all out for me over dinner? What level of hell is that hospitality from?

Oh, well.

Otherwise, things are OK. The
Goat and I have had our ups and downs through the whole poison ivy experience, and I ran out to see him last weekend on a whim, completely ruining my free-lance work schedule that I had so carefully laid out for the weekend.

I did get a couple of solid visits with wonderful friends in before heading out for
Goatville, so it wasn't a complete loss, but when I finally made it home and realized how much I had left to do before Wednesday's deadline, I began to quiver slightly. I had "torched" two whole days I did not have to play with.

And on Friday afternoon, I had the most serious depressive mood I have faced in months, if not years: everything seemed completely futile, and everything seemed completely hopeless. Now, here I am, constantly saying that there is only one thing in my life at the moment that makes sense [the Goat, of course], but on Friday even that had no future, either, and I was just so tired and worn out by it all that I couldn't see what I could do to put one foot in front of the other. I tried calling my far-flung friends and family to see if there weren't someone out there who could talk me out of it, but no one was home, and after leaving a couple of little damp-dish-rag phone messages scattered around the country, it began to seem even more pathetic and blatantly appealing for sympathy than even I in my reduced state could deal with. So I stopped. But boy, oh boy. Friday was bitter.

Saturday was OK, and I got two good visits in; Sunday, instead of coming home to work, as I should have, I continued out into the Woods to see Himself. It was lovely, though I am sometimes taken aback at where I am and what I am doing -- places and things that I would not, could not, have dreamed of a year or so ago, and all somehow following inexorably from my decisions of last summer...

If this isn't where I want to end up, or where I find my foothold for the next couple of years, I will at the very least have had a degree of exposure to what I
am in fact capable of, which I would have not thought possible just a year or so ago.

Be careful what you wish for...

Hang in there, all.
It's a rocky road on this particular slippery slope...
C

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