082018 I have almost zero motivation to do this this morning. Icoul already shot his wad last night, looking desultorily through old stuff, not making many commitments, loosely once again trying to classify Him & Me episodes in some official way—you know, the same shit he always does when he’s smoked a little bud and thinks, hey, maybe ALL of this is pure genius! In other words he tried to do Schand’s job but he’s not really committed to Schand’s job and just uses it as a ersatz his own job because it’s easier at that moment. Schand’s too nice and indulgent. Lets him get away with frittering away the evening like that, and blowing his load so that this morning there’s no urgent need to do the morning sesh, and the headache and the vague puzzled echo of unsatisfied horniness makes it even harder, and the low pressure system makes it even harder. SO I’ve broken the rules and lain around in bed, and looked at email, and looked at a couple of ecommerce web sites, and noted a post office notification, and put a couple of dishes away, and made coffee, and brought a chair out back here, and brought an old box out to set the coffee on, and brought the Macbook out here (that’s the only part that’s actually working out quite well, aside from the coffee), and there’s a single god damned mother fucking regular ass house fly swishing around out here bothering the fuck out of my legs! WHAT THE FUCK. go somewhere else. you’re not in the house. You have the entire fucking outdoors. You got to stay right here and buzz around me like I’m a pile of horse shit on Harney Peak trail!? Jesus absolutely mother fucking dumb shit christ fuck off you fucking Did I mention the low pressure system? It’s when a purchase (or a SERIES of purchases) sucks all the energy out of the temporal air on either side of it. The purchase advances across the plains of your energetic consciousness, sucking up debris and nutriments alike. The pressure starts dropping and you can tell it’s happening when you start planning the purchase. Sometimes they come on slow and you can see them forming; other times it seems like they’re almost instantaneous, out of nowhere, and bam, suddenly everything’s quiet, too quiet, and your focus is wrapped up, swaddled tight in a tower of cumulous currency deployment. When the capricious atmosphere in your brain gets a certain way (don’t ask me the details, I’m not a fucking meteorologist), you just HAVE to spend some money to equalize it out, to get back to that equilibrium where you can deny, almost deny, almost deny as totally as you imagine your brothers and sisters in neighborhoods like Quietwood can deny, with their brightly lit garages and their golden retreivers and their nice crossover SUV’s backup cameras that tell them when they’re about to run over their golden retreiver and vibrate both butt cheeks in warning, and their perfectly mown lawns with the subtle tracks from the lawn mower wheels going in perfect topographical circles around the perfect circles of rocks around the perfectly placed well behaved trees in their yards, that you are disposable and burning up quickly and made of paper and flitting around in a little leaf tornado on the edge of a ditch by the side of a road on some planet somewhere, or maybe, think the aliens studying from afar, more likely it’s not actually a road, because there’s no realistic way that planet could support anything we would think of (that’s the proviso added in by the more philosophically inclined among the aliens; the mainstream stance is just NO LIFE) as life. And so you quietly, swiftly, dare I say stealthily persuade yourself that you need to make this purchase. After this purchase, of course, you’ll be satisfied, and won’t need to make any more purchases, so as long as you can run the numbers in such a way as to make it seem as though it won’t be depriving your children of braces or a college education, then it’s fine, because after this one (more) thing, you’ll be done, you’ll have everything you need, and you can get on with being frugal and responsible and sensible and sort of ethically superior because, unlike all those fuckers at Walmart every god damned day, you don’t have to be constantly buying stuff to be legit. Those fuckers at Walmart are kind of like a stranger at a restaurant. You internally accuse them of staring at you every time you look over at them--but did you stop and think that if you didn’t keep looking over at them, then you wouldn’t see that they were staring at you? Maybe they’re thinking the same thing you were thinking, in other words, why does that fucker go to Walmart every fucking day, sometimes more than once? And if you don’t take a bag, you’re considered a thief by the old tottering chickenhawk they got “greeting” people as they go in and out. Jesus, what a double cruelty--make it so old people have to work way past when they should retire, and then give them a job so patently meaningless that it can only possibly make everyone involved uncomfortable and full of pity which is always, always, always mixed with disgust. But I digress. So then when the purchase actually hits, there’s a flurry of lightning and thunder. You know. You’ve experienced it. It’s sort of orgasmic, in a preternaturally still, flat, deflated way. There’s a pointed instant of relief, surrounded by flatulent calm, bordering on oblivion. It’s every kind of high at once, mixed together like wondrous pigments that started out rainbow but are now a pile of grey lumps. Then the purchase swoops on overhead, beyond your flailing little noodle arms, and hoovers up everything in its path for a day, three days, a week--depending on the size and subtype. Again, ask a meteorologist for specific terminology. Usually one purchase leads to a creepily fractal webwork of sub-purchases and sub-sub-purchases and so on, right down to little things, little swirling eddies of tiny expenditures like a certain kind of pen from walgreens, because the lurch you’re left in after the main thunderhead has clapped itself out is full of hollow yearnings and echoes, and you’ll do just about anything to keep it resonating for even just a few hours more. Then it passes, the whole storm system finally passes, and life returns to “normal” again for a while--dusty, diurnal, and dumb. You go through your routines. You do your jobs. You put away your dishes. All through this fallow period, patterns start to re-emerge. Little weeds start to grow through the cracks in the concrete squares of your resistance. Blinking dew-kissed in the shy sunlight, tiny buds of intention appear, and hint at flowering. You look around and notice that things are going OK. You’re kind of getting some stuff done, saving up some energy, feeling some energy flow through you in a way that seems almost sustainable. Like maybe there’ll be enough to go around this year, enough to share, enough to really build something respectable out of, for you and your kids, and maybe even a little bit left over to use somehow to connect, to tie in with, to interconnect with your neighbors, and colleagues, and maybe, maybe, dare I say it, the air is clean and full and energized enough that you could start thinking about making some friends. There’s energy left over. You can get out of bed. You don’t have a headache. You have room for rows of thoughts, like newly-sprouted corn, in the rich loamy fields of your brain. Schand even starts thinking maybe it’s time for him to come home and come out and do his job, maybe now he’ll actually have the support he needs, the stability he needs to do his job, and Icoul’s even on board, and it starts to feel like Christmas and your Christmas present is going to be them two working together for a change, actually working together. But then somethinmg happens. There’s a twitch in the wind. There’s a hiccup in the driveway. There’s a mushroom under the back porch. Someone says something and their words are made of tin foil and leftover machine screws and weird jagged light rays that angle across the kitchen like a zap from a chaotic neutral wizard’s staff and hit you in the forehead. A wasp sits down on the arm of your chair and starts wiggling his butt. A precipitant gets stuck to the exact wrong--meaning right--kind of molecule, and around that one tiny seed, the atmosphere starts to rearrange itself, silently, exponentially deadly, faster than bacteria at a bacchanalia, and you can practically see the time-lapse photography of it, burgeoning, undulating, lowering, and you get that feeling where breathing gets a little stale and quick, where words slip out of the sides of your mental mouth and fall limply around you, traveling only as far as an old man’s arc of halfhearted piss. A new purchase is coming. There’s a very good reason for it. You’ll be perfectly content and satisfied after we get this one taken care of. Do me a favor, will you, everyone, and drop everything you were doing and help me get the house ready for the low pressure system. Better tape up the windows and tie down the trash cans. Looks like this one’s going to be a doozy. The fly is back. Bothering my legs again. Only *my* legs, out of all the millions and billions of things out here--he has the entire world to fly around in, and yet he’s as devoted to me as an asterisk to an ambiguous word-- I’m going inside to track my package again.