Sunshine didn't materialize. Which is not unexpected and just as well. It's hot, I mowed half the lawn and am moving a hose around to help planted flowers out. The weedflowers don't need anything except not being killed. I am reading on the patio, letting my own sweat cool me as it dries.
"He was feeling a lot of pressure, he told her to figure out who he was if he wasn't drunk or insane. But couldn't he do that work while fucking her, not with much enthusiasm, it seemed....'It's just a guy I know, this guy I really liked actually. Who died.' Without knowing the details, she suddenly, on some intuitive level, understood something about the past year. The strangeness and the kindness, the sense of being a witness to loss and joy. He'd been in love....She didn't know what to do with the depths of his feelings for this man whose existence had been kept from her. She had to be generous now, somehow." Down Time
There's a lot of drinking straight out of the bottle in this novel. Great scenes in which it feels more authentic to be sneaking it and doing it straight out of the bottle without any pomp of ice, private rituals to honor the horrors. It seems to me that one of the things that has fucked people up so badly since the pandemic is the expectation not just to be "fine" but to be unchanged. Even the virgos shapeshifted. Unchanged doesn't seem possible to me. So that expectation seems insane to me. And insane expectations drive people insane.
And still, it's not like it's "over". Trauma is not something that's ever "over", you carry it. (Why don't they teach that in college?) And everything has changed, so why shouldn't we have? And most things got worse, so why shouldn't we have done? A lot of shit broke. At least we can choose to recover. We aren't institutions and we have opposable thumbs.
In black and white written down in front of me where I can just read it, all the fucked up thoughts and behaviors look like what they are: common sense.
"It was a hard time for knowing whether one was experiencing a psychiatric event or just responding normally to what was happening." Theory: that is now just any Tuesday, indefinitely. Adaptation: getting a very firm grip on the diff.
