Feeling Slightly Better

My depression is slowly lifting and I'm finding it easier to handle more than one thing at a time. Dealing with anything that sets off my anxiety is still hard, but it's no longer as overwhelming as it was. And I've stopped wishing someone would just fucking kill me, which is great. I am not the "woe is me, I wanna die" type as a rule, and it helps to know my Mom would kick my ass if I walked in front of a garbage truck just because she had the gall to go and die on me.

I'm still having really vivid and disturbing dreams about people getting killed and chopped up and thrown in creeks, swimming pools, pig wallows and other assorted bodies of water. The other night I dreamed I took Mom's severed head and wrapped it in a blanket to throw in a river, but some people downstream found it weeks later and everyone was freaking out on the news because they thought it was a dead baby. They were all like "WHO KILLED BABY FRANKLIN!?" And I was pretty fucking pissed, not to mention horrified.

The bodies-in-water dreams date back to 1993, and I have at least two or three every month. Just lately, they've been freaky as hell. Like the one where the guy's wife and kid got sucked into some kind of machinery at a swimming pool. I could see her pale, limp hand bobbing around on the water and it was eerie how real it was. Not to mention that was one of the dreams where I could smell. Ugh.

And then there's the one where Henry Rollins and I were hanging out. I asked him for tips on how to be a champion bodybuilder, and he was really mean but somehow still fun to be around.

He took me to a hog farm and we spent some time digging around in the muck for pieces of some guy who'd been killed and eaten by the pigs, and I ended up accidentally poking my fingers into somebody's brains. Then we went to a concert but his voice gave out, and Rain showed up and drew a picture to cheer him up.

My tomato seedlings are thriving, and I'm considering planting some stuff outside in a few weeks. I've tried to garden before, but the results were shitty due to bad soil and space limitations. Plus it was 1999 and I didn't think of using the internet for help when things went wrong. Even though it took my skull splitting open from stress to make me slow the hell down, I do enjoy having a hobby. Maybe it's the endorphin rush I get from wasting time, but it seems like my days matter more now than when I tried to make every single second of every day count.

I just beat FF8 again. I liked it better this time through even though they really dropped the ball on a certain Disc 2 plot twist. I think I even like junctioning more than 7's Materia system. I never use the majority of my summons, but at least they were still useful in FF8. Also, I never used the item menu except once toward the end of the game, to summon Phoenix. And I didn't even need Phoenix; I just wanted it activated so it'd show up now and then when my party got annihilated.

And that, aside from the return of my art mojo and my sudden love for time-consuming, boring housework, is pretty much all that's going on around my neck of the woods just now.

I feel a bit like the dad in Beetlejuice, trying desperately to bird-watch in the middle of a maelstrom.