Today has been a rough day. I dropped my son off with his mom at 7:30 am. For the last several days, he said he wasn’t ready to go back. He had three weeks solid with her because she decided to quarantine him because of suspected COVID19. For years, she has been a hypochondriac. Since I know as a dad, I’ll get no sympathy, I decided not to fight her on it. There’s not a court that would say right now, “Lady, just let the kid go back over,” much less any police who would. So my son came back for a week. On Thursday when I suggested to her that he stick around for a few weeks to make up the time, she threw a fit.
It was my son’s idea. He just wanted to spend some time with me. He misses me and I’m sure he doesn’t want to deal with the hysteria of a “Pandemic” at his mom’s place. But, you know, there’s no such thing as a reasonable request when dealing with her. There hasn’t been for 20 odd years.
So, he went back to her today. He was sad, and I’ll be honest, I’ve been a little bluesy about it myself. I feel like I let him down. Sure, there are times when all he does is jabber about video games, and Nerf guns, and Army stuff, and other things he has gotten partial information of on YouTube, but I miss having him around. I miss the company too.
Today, I piddled around with some day job stuff. A whopping total of five emails. I have a month left before the job ends. Today, I invoiced clients for my writing job and didn’t do too badly. The plan was to take today to work on projects I want to work on. Not the blogs, just my own books. I had a great desire to work on the fantasy novel. I got 250 words in and just fucking couldn’t. I distracted myself. I cooked. I fiddled with my new AppleID because the old one was attached to my work email. Then I scrolled through the unholy trinity of Facebook, Email, and Instagram for what felt like hours.
The writing keeps me sane, I like to tell myself. Even now, I can feel my thoughts align instead of thinking about my son walking back to his mom’s car and already getting interrogated by her as he stood outside waiting to get let in. I can put my thoughts together instead of wondering if going freelance means I have to file taxes quarterly now because I’ll be self-employed. Or about the 1940s Ball this summer and how it got canceled this morning. Or why I can’t just sit down and write some goddamned story I’ve been thinking about for 20 years. Or why the University book hit a few thousand words and then just ground to a halt.
The paid blogs are doing great, but that is just stringing words together that mean something only to the client. I don’t care about restoring a rusty bumper or motorcycle helmet laws or any of the things I’ve been writing about for pay. Today was supposed to be my day to get things done I wanted to get done, and well, I watched two episodes of Ozark and made some funny comments on Facebook.
I wondered what the hell is going on with my life.
I fixed my AppleID and now I’m trying to figure out how to synch up my phone to the cloud because I pay for a service but I have grown to loathe Apple products so much now because none of it makes sense. Why buy an iCloud service if you can’t delete things on your computer because they delete them on the cloud too?
And what about plane tickets and AirBnB? Neither of them want to give up money for a canceled trip. I didn’t eat a bat. I didn’t release an engineered disease into the world. And I sure as hell didn’t submarine the economy because people were maybe, possibly gonna die from a headcold. For all I know, I had this crap back in September. The webhost that I had my travelblog site through claims they already chucked all my content, even though I’ve been asking them about it since February.
I think I might be cracking up a little bit tonight. I don’t even know what to say. I just run out of the words.
I’m thinking about podcasting, but what would I have to say that anyone would want to hear? I can’t even get people to read my book. Most of my readers here are spambots with sites that start with Ipsem dolerum…
Nights like tonight I used to go to the gym, but those are all closed now. I have a feeling this virus will resurge soon because people are getting sick of being cooped up and are just going to say the hell with it once it gets warm again, and the government will be clutching their pearls and everyone will go outside and catch a cold…and probably live through it.
There are only so many hours in the day, and right now I’m hating myself a little for wasting too many of them. I’ve wasted enough hours to fill up a collection of years already.
Wendigo Mountain 