Wha..? Hunh? Was I asleep?
*Groan*... It's been a while. It's been a lot of whiles, actually, for a lot of things. Been a while since I answered the phone. Which wouldn't be unusual, except that its been ringing. It's been a while since I answered the door-bell. Or paid bills. Or did laundry. Or hung out with anybody.
Well, it's fucking February. Traditionally, it's the month where I shave my head and quit my job, "just to shake things up a bit." But that routine is a little too predictible, so I guess I had to do something else this year. So, without announcing my plans to anyone (especially not myself!), I quietly curled up into a little ball of antisocial angst, and took a month off. From life.
Ayayayayay! The results aren't great. The apt. is horrifying. It was messy before the "vacation," now it's a menace to public health. My grooming and hygiene standards took a temporary nose-dive, but that's no biggie.. Like I say, nobody saw. I haven't been taking care of my skin, so there have been localized rebellions where patches have attempted to secede from the union. It's the return of "creepy necromancer hands," only it's not (yet) so creepy and it's not just the hands. If the threat of "creepy necromancer face" isn't enough to scare me into some minimum form of self preservation, I don't know what is.
And there have been casualties. I've lost four houseplants, maybe only three. This is why I can't have pets. Enid, my china doll, was a special friend. She survived some pretty miserable conditions, and has been to the brink of extinction and back several times -- but this time, I think I pushed her beyond her limits. *Sigh*. Well, Enid, we never really knew eachother anyway. And then there's the plant I call "the Canary." I didn't have much of an emotional attachment to it, but it did play a special role in my life. This plant was like a psychic barometer in my house, and an early warning system for all the other plants. You see, the canary was always the first plant to wither when I slacked off in my watering duties, which is usually a sign that my willingness to cope with the upkeep demands of reality is declining. And when the canary withered, it looked DEAD. DEAD DEAD DEAD. But a little water, and 24 hours later, it would be fine, and by hamming up its play-dead routine it managed to save all the other plants who had been drying up more quietly. It's the canary in the coal mine. But this time it's really dead.
This is why I am not to have pets. Ask me sometime about Oscar, the water dog.
So the other day, I pulled my shit together and decided to CLEAN THIS SHIT UP. But first I busted out the handy-dandy disposable camera to take some "before" pictures (I'll try to post 'em when I get them developed). But that's as far as I got. That's what really worries me. This isn't the first time I've fallen down and just gone to sleep for a while. As a defense mechanism, it's got plusses and minuses, but I mostly know how to cope. But always before, when my little mental alarm clock went off, telling me "Okay, enough, get up and do something now!" then that's all it takes. I get up, dust off, wipe the drool off my chin, and start kicking ass again. But this time, I hit the snooze bar. Boooo!
But whatever. I'll work it out. February has the fewest days, and is somehow the longest month. But it does end. When I have the chance, I'll have to dig up a poem I wrote called "April". The year isn't there yet, but I could use the glimpse of springtime to come.