i obsess.

objectively tired v. subjectively sleepy.

I stomped back to the hotel, my stomps growing slower and my breathing slightly ragged, while my son clung more and more tightly to my neck (my appreciation for the clinging growing as we walked, my grip slackened, a result of my increasing exhaustion in Seattle's chilly mid-morning air).  After we arrived inside the foyer, I plopped him down and said, "Now, walk."  We trudged toward the bank of elevators and I silently pushed the buttons I'd allowed him to push earlier, back in the pleasant, sanguine slice of morning where I was patient and he was gleeful and not slotted in tantrum-sequence.

As we exited the elevator, he said, "Now we're on our floor, right, mommy?  Where the wind can't get us.  This is where we can walk to our room, mommy.  Mommy?  I couldn't smile before because my smile was sweepy.  It was tired.  It was sick.  It had a stummy-ache.  So it had to sweep.  I couldn't smile because my smile was sweeping, and it was sick, and it had a stummy-ache, so I couldn't make it wake up when you told me to smile."  The chuckle slid out of me, traitorously. 

"You know, that's funny.  The story about your smile being sleepy woke mine up."  I spoke while slipping the key-card into its slot, the green light blinking kindly at me as I did.

"Yeah, mom.  That wasn't a long story.  It was just a short one."

the teeny, little crumbs at the bottom of the jar.

My heart, no, that weird sensation in my chest sort of *near* my heart, or above it, something, feels dashed.  Feels like it just sat on a cheap carnival ride for seven straight sessions and is now someplace beyond dizzy. 

An old friend who had discovered me through my blog, someone I'd broken with years ago because I didn't have the energy for the relationship, just shat all over me.  Again.  This, after I sat last night, late, on Twitter, and discussed my suicidal tendencies with various Twitter fellows, both intimate and barely acquainted.  I was sobbing between sneezes and coughs and phlegm-dispersions (I have another fucking cold -- or I buy phlegm at black-market prices and revel in it when no one is looking -- you decide) as I wrote the things I did on Twitter, and felt so low and ashamed after.  A broken thing.  I am a broken thing.  And all who care to escape the rock under which they dwell to peer into the intertubes' dank portal are now potentially aware of that pathetic item.

Today, rather than inquire as to whether my health was robust and fine and vibrant, or whether I was a lukewarm mess (undeserving as I am of being described as even a hot mess), she simply told me that I am a gigantic piece of shit.  Because I am, in her mind, irresponsible.  And other words that begin with "I."

"I" managed to avoid telling her to fuck off, in so many words, because I knew I would regret it.  Instead, I told her I don't want to hear from her again.

This is gross.  I am barely capable of holding a pencil between my fingers, *that* is how weak I've grown, and I am told, by someone I chucked a thousand years ago, someone whom I should've never allowed back in, it is affirmed to me by this person that I am worthless.  Sure.  I shouldn't let it pierce.  But the weak parts of me, which are all of them, say, go ahead.  Believe her.  She's right.

it's not anybody's fault.

I've reached my absolute breaking point.  I'm finished.  Kaput.  Finis.  I cannot stand one more ounce, not even 1/2 an ounce, not even an infinitesimal quantity, of pressure. 

(And as I type I listen, observant, to the fan in this laptop racing to cool the motherfucking harddrive off but it will lose, it always does, and I think, yes, that's what I mean.  Pressure.  I can cool off no more than this harddrive.  My mental harddrive is vying for first place this time, though, oh laptop, so suck on that.  'Cause you surely care.  You must care.  You have to.  It's your job.  *Someone* has to.  I cannot be bothered to do so; I'm much too busy being consumed utterly by -- all the STUFF. 

If this post isn't completed, it's your fucking fault, you wretched cunt of a laptop.  Also, if I use some blunt object with which to do in the dog with all of her useless piles of hair, that's your fault, too.)

*nods grimly, eyeing laptop's blue, unblinking power-button-eye in a stare-down*

I was vacuuming at a fevered pace, earlier this evening, while Caleb and Jack brushed the dog downstairs and I conjured even more fevered visions of the dog unfastidiously gracing someone else's, *anyone else's* suddenly hair-festooned home, and I was thinking.  Yes, I was.  I was thinking about all of it.  About how much I long to write, and about how trapped I feel by it, and how much I hate that I overuse "that" in almost every thing I've ever scratched onto a notepad or post-it or in the back of the only thing in my bag that could be written upon, like a book or a magazine or informational pamphlet, and I was trying to think of how to combat this horrid everest of writer's block that has encapsulated my soul, which kind of reminds me of souls bottled and sold in little capsules, yellow-and-red with a tiny stamp on the side that says, "property of so-and-so."  And then I remembered how, on my drive home from work, I was still trying to unravel that very business, and then I remembered, in a tumbly way, all of the days and moments when I've struggled to understand why I cannot write, lately.  And I realize it's because I am no good at the writing-for-work.  The writing-for-pay.  Bedeviled by the very notion of dancing with the devil, the devilish dance, the feverish dance, when one is creating something for reasons not true, not real, not rooted in earnest, bloody afterbirth, with its umbilical cord still spitting blood, the forked tail but a myth to this true, true blue-veined being, its eyes boring into my soul, the greatest drug known to womankind, that out-of-body experience when one locks eyes with one's own creation for the first time, and recognizes - truth.  The embodiment of another soul. 

(Sure, you might attempt to discern whether I'm foggily complaining about my own physical creation of a human, the one who currently bedevils my every thought, my every breath, whether he's growing into my Shelley-esque Frankenstein, and, hell, he kind of is, but only because our children *must* torture us, and once again I'm staggered that Mary Shelley, a girl of NINETEEN, had such a wisdom so as to see that truth so keenly, JESUS GOD AND SWEET POTATOES, she fucking knew -- sometimes I kind of think she knew everything.  Sometimes I wonder if Mary Shelley was god.)

*ahem*

Oh, this is good, it's so rambly and incoherent absolutely no one will bother with it.  It is my intention to lose 3/4s of my audience within the first few paragraphs, if not sentences, so that I can be assured to either be pleasantly alone by the finish, or have one or two blithe, merry, drunk-as-fuck companions with whom I may miserably commiserate, and bless the fucking lord out of any of you who might be that lot. 

Can you believe I'm not even *remotely* tipsy, writing this fucked-up nonsense?

Did I mention, I wanted to write a real story, tonight?  But who fucking has time for that drawn-out extension of wool-gathering?  Not I, no.  I merely have time to bore the piss out of any/everyone including myself with this stream of nothing.

I'm bogged down again by the cools.  The ones who toss these incredible lyrics off with seemingly a flick of their delicate-yet-bold-yet-bad-assed-yet-gourmand wristeses.

I'm suddenly feeling a bit poety.

I crave a good writing session, a lengthy hour or more with my piano, an hour of yoga.  I crave a good run, one of at least a few miles, if not several.  I savor like rose petals made of gossamer the thought of light and air and space and time to shushingly silently slink. 

I will say this: the dog sucks.  But the vacuuming I was forced to do because of her hirsute ass?  Was almost as good as a nice, quiet slink through the woods. 

I guess I owe the bitch a thank you.

*But don't you tell her I said that.  It'll just go to her head.*