"Before" shots

I just decided at this very moment to change the rules of Blog Everyday September. The rules are that I don't have to blog everyday in September. Dang, it is easy to change rules without cause or warrant. I feel just like a credit card!

Then again, I feel vague and blobby with super low interest. I have no special offers and I give out no points for using me. I don't give anyone the thrill of instant gratification or the illusion of free money. I can't transfer anything and I come in only one design. So, not like a credit card at all then.

I want to avoid making this blog post a downer. It's just...just....arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. What the hell lately?  My life feels like one gigantic "before" mural on the side of a rotted out dilapidated building. Seeing photographs of myself I think "That's the before shot." I have an iPhone full of before shots now. I am the newbie everywhere and I don't know what I'm doing. I'm full of misinformation and assumptions and I get the feeling I'm getting dumber and dumber with each passing day. Time was I could make a declarative statement, with vim (if not vigor) and not question it. These days, I mentally question everything I say right after I say it. An esprit de l'escalier of a different kind. The kind where I never come up with the perfect retort or answer, not at the right moment or on the stairs afterward. I know I've joked about being neurotic for most of my adult life but I might actually be telling the truth about it now.

I get metaphysically winded now. Yesterday I spent hours formulating a plan for the next three weeks, during which I have no less than six hundred million things to take care of and doing exactly none of them, choosing instead to pull down the blinds and lie down in the dark.

I'm turning my lack of job offers into my own private hair shirt, making the global problem of joblessness a penance for some unknown cosmic wrong I committed in my last life and it feels a bit like I'm stockpiling my inadequacies all at once, for some future bunker where I'll hide out after the nuclear explosion dust of getting old and lonely settles.

I find myself Googling phrases like "How to cope with change" and "Making your own luck" and "How to not infer meaning in the meaningless". I haven't gleaned anything useful but all three of those phrases, among others, were autocompleted by Google the first time I typed them in so this cheese does not stand alone. She stands, unpasteurized with her brethren, susceptible to any foolhardy idea or preemptive worry that comes along.

I need a good boiling.

I just reread all this. I sound a little crazy. Just a little. But I really feel like this is my time to go a little crazy. Just a little, I promise. It's Monday. I move out of my apartment in three and a half weeks. This morning I found a dead roach under my bed, put there by one of my cats at some unknown time between 2010-present. I'm going to go ahead and let myself get just a little bit Tower of Pisa for a moment. K thx.