110118 I feel pretty bad about missing my morning sesh because basically i was hung over. I guess that falls under the category of “see how what you do at night affects how you are able to write the next morning.” Please don’t kick me out of the club, DOrothea. I know I’m hanging on by a thread. But I’m still hanging on. ALso I feel kind of bad because i didn’t get to grading tonight after the girls got home and ian came over and everything was all charged and rides and suppertime and buying shoes and making french toast and trumpet and piano and conversation and candy and dishes and bedtime. And ruth’s being oddly mysterious about the thanksgiving thing: “We’re excited that there’s a chance you could actually come out, and be might need to talk about it.” WTF? Just tell me what’s up instead of all this weird insinuation. Whatever. WHy’m I gonna play the flute It doesn’t matter why. I don’t know what else to say. I didn’t do grading but I’m doing this. Isn’t that funny. THis thing that I don’t even know is anything but a futile exercise. Versus the thing that pays the bills. YOu can see how I’m sort of trying to set it up, without looking as though I’m doing so, as a kind of noble craziness. BUt I think it might just be a plain old craziness. Even that is a thinly camouflaged attempt at redemption via specialness! IT’s probably not even as grand and romantic as all that; just commonplace, garden-variety neurosis. But that’s OK. I told Schand and Icoul that they could exist, and if I change my mind now I’m going to feel like a dick. If I’m going to have to feel like a dick, I’d rather it be for something that benefits someone else, or is born out of my attempt to be supportive, rather than my betrayal of someone who looks up to me and counts on me to be there. Did I mention how Halloween was kind of depressing? I did? No? Well, I will now, I guess. It’s so embarrassing, I don’t know if I really want to go through the cringy details. Let’s just say it ended up as me sitting by myself in a lawn chair next to the fire pit, which i had set up in the semicircle flower bed in front of the falling-down brick divider wall, drinking whiskey and chain-chewing little fruity tootsie rolls while half the trick or treaters didn’t even come over by me because for some reason they couldn’t divine that the guy in the chair by the fire with a giant bowl was part of this whole thing. It didn’t help that the asphalt guys had left a string of flags across the entrance to the driveway. SItting there at the head of all that sleek blackness made it even weirder. A lonesome bonfire on a dead planet, albedo of fresh asphalt, invisible from earth. Ha ha cliches, avoid cliches we always tell them, cliches like “empty nest.” And it’s not even empty. THey’re just getting me warmed up. Cel said she had a good time going around with Millie so many times I began to wonder if she weren’t exaggerating to salve her abandonment by Libby this year. But then she explained, in very calm mature tones, that she hardly ever gets to spend any time with Millie, and she loves Millie, so it was really nice. Well. That was tonight, that little speech, and it made me feel a hell of a lot better about last night. I can handle being the doting buffoon, as long as they’re all healthy and happy. Well. UP to a point. It was another wake-up call in a series of wake-up calls; I really need to “get out there” (hey kids, don’t use cliches!) and make some goddamn friends. Maybe even have sex one or two more times before I shrivel up. It’s that simple. It’s that top item on the to-do list that’s so hard you keep doing a bunch of lowly, less-important, less-pleasurable tasks just so you can still feel productive. It’s the bugbear. THe bugbear is the item on the list you just won’t quite do. It can be tiny or it can be huge. IT really doesn’t matter what actual size or shape it is; it is amorphous and psionic. It zaps your will to live. It’s like gym class tomorrow during the softball unit. You do pleasurable things to avoid thinking about it but you can’t enjoy the things because you can’t stop thinking about it. THat’s not quite true. You can enjoy the things, but it interrupts every now then with a big old cod-liver-oil dose of reality. And you find yourself saying tomorrow I will get up at five am. I will do my writing and then i will stay up and be super productive and get all my grading done, and then everything else on my list. It will be brilliant; you’ll see. That me that exists tomorrow is a real crisp, smart overachiever. He will save us all. He really knows how to focus. He wouldn’t rather eat a bunch of canabutter and drink whiskey and eat candy all day. He’s not interested in stuff like that. He’s got better things to do. Man, I wish I was that guy.