No, you didn’t… I didn’t miss me, either, so it’s okay. Seriously, I didn’t… My life has been like living in the seventh circle of Hell for about eight months, now, getting progressively worse as time went on. Now I feel like everything is completely fucked… That’s probably because it actually is completely fucked… My stress and anxiety levels have been through the roof and climbing higher all the time. My days consisted of losing myself in the novel I’ve been working on for a few hours (until my eyes got too tired), then I’d play my Animal Crossing game for a bit and the rest of the day consisted of me on the sofa binge watching whatever movies and shows I could watch for free on my Fire Stick and either taking a long afternoon nap or falling asleep mad early on the sofa. I was falling apart… So one particularly beautiful Sunday at the end of May, I decided to take my furry bestie for a walk in the park and have a much needed nature day…

You’re probably wondering why I didn’t take Miko as well as Baxter… Well, Miko will be 13 in November and she’s showing her age pretty badly. A hike isn’t good for her. Plus she hates water. I can’t even get her to go in the shallow creek in my backyard. Baxter, on the other hand, is just like his mommy and just loves to dopp around in the creek no matter how cold the water is. That’s how I’ve always been; it’s very rejuvenating. And the creek in this park gets so deep you can actually swim in it! I wasn’t taking the dog that hates water and wouldn’t be able to hike very far without getting tired or be able to make it up mild inclines because of her arthritis. Even my arthritis was screaming, “Oh hell no!” on mild inclines. I only walk one side of the park anymore because the other side is rather steep and it causes me a great deal of pain to walk it anymore. As it was, Baxter had an issue with all the walking due to his weight. He got a little fat… so he had a difficult time doing a mile walk.

I blame my mother for his fatness… She comes up every Friday and, like most grandmothers do for grandpuppies, she was giving them one of every single type of treat she’d buy for them! There must be a dozen bags of treats in my dining room and they got one of each. Then my cat, Sebastian, started feeling left out and started looking for treats, so now he gets kitty treats! Well… Baxter was gimping for a few days fairly badly after our hike, so I had him weighed and found out he was 42 pounds! Needless to say, I spoke to the vet about a diet and had to tell my mother about cutting back on those puppy treats… How could she not see he was getting fat?! I’d been calling him “Fatster” every time he tried to jump on the loveseat with her and couldn’t quite make it or would huff and puff for no reason. I mentioned quite often that he was getting fat, but she kept on shoving treats down his throat. Well, no more…

Ugh, enough of my ugly mug with my funky pants (although I do like my new haircut). Baxter is a cute subject… All in all, I think he really enjoyed his day in the park. Although I did have a hard time keeping him out of the water on our way out. He wanted to go back in so badly, but he was almost dry (albeit still smelling funky) and I couldn’t out a sopping wet dog in the car and didn’t have time to wait for him to dry. Poor guy… I promised him next time I’ll buy a bathing suit and we’ll go in deeper and go swimming. I’m not sure how he’ll like that. I think he was a little afraid of the really deep water, but if I go with I think he’ll be okay. And hopefully he’ll have lost weight by then and have no stamina. We were almost back at the parking lot when he sat down on the trail and looked at me like, “Nope…” I had the worst time getting him moving again and I wasn’t carrying him because he’s heavy. Still, I think we both needed the nature day and it did us good.

I think I need more of those nature days, honestly… And if the insurance didn’t decided to stop covering my good allergy pills that work and tell me to take over the counter shit I’ve tried before that’s never worked, I would…

It was a temporary fix… I felt good for a day or two, then I was back to my stressed out, anxiety ridden self again. To make matters worse, I had to go get a deep cleaning and root scaling done at the dentist because I have early stage gum disease. Lovely… It’s been over a month and my bottom teeth still hurt from all that picking! Then I developed another hole in my bottom gum (I had one before) and apparently it was the same hole, it just didn’t heal right. You never want to hear the dentist say, “Hand me that small blade…” Um… And what the fuck are you planning to do with that exactly? When she said she was going to cut my gum, I was like, “You’re going to do what now?!” All this with only a topical… It hurt… It was unpleasant… But my gum healed correctly, now, and the hole is gone.

The dentist thing is really just a small, “Jesus fucking Christ, what’s next?!” in a long line of cluster fucks lately…

It’s funny… Just when you get your shit together and things start falling into place and you’re in a better position (financially, emotionally or what have you), life turns on you and dry fucks you up the ass with a cactus. Or that’s how it seems to work for some of us, especially me. Sometimes I feel I can’t catch a break. Or that if I get too optimistic and think things will be okay, now, that’s when disaster inevitably strikes. That’s why I’m a pessimist. I know a lot of people don’t like that about me. They’re always telling me bad things happen because I don’t “think positive”. Yeah, well… I’ve tired the “thinking positive” thing and it’s made the backfiring so much worse. I’m better off being pessimistic. That way, when bad things happen, I’m prepared and not at all surprised. And sometimes good things happen, in which case I’m pleasantly surprised. So it works for me. Positive thinking has only caused me heartache and disappointment and, on occasion, has brought about disaster. No thanks… I think I’ll stay the “Negative Nellie” in situations. It’s safer that way…

I’m trying to get myself out of this funk with a little positive reinforcement, but it’s so hard… Sometimes you just can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I can’t say Morticia is any help… That’s a shocker, haha! Has she ever been any help to me?! Those of you who have followed me for a while know she hasn’t been. She’s like an energy vampire. What little anyone has, she just sucks it right out of them! No wonder I feel so drained… She has a million different problems at any one given time. The question is, how many are in her head, how many are of her own doing and how many are real problems? With her, it’s hard to tell… And if she’s not calling me to cry about something, she’s calling because she’s pissed off about a situation and tells me what she’s going to say to the person or people who pissed her off. The thing is, she never does. She talks a good game, but she never follows through and actually says these things she wants to. And when things need to get done, like calling doctors to make appointments because she needs checkups for chronic conditions, taking meds she knows she needs to stay alive or contacting lawyers when she gets hurt at work and the company is fucking her out of workman’s comp (her latest issue), she never takes my advice even if she knows she should and keeps crying to me…

So I’ve been trying to spend my time immersing myself in my writing to try and escape from everything going on around me… The bad part is that I’ve grown so close to my characters that I often find it hard to separate from them sometimes and their pain and strife becomes my own. And often times I don’t realize it until it’s to the point that I’m really becoming depressed, stressed or just wanting to break down and cry before I see what’s going on. Hence the reason I’m writing a blog entry right now instead of working. It was starting to get to me emotionally and I had to step back away from it for a moment.

Not that I really get much time to work anyway… I thought getting these new glasses so I could see the midpoint better would help, but I’m finding my eyes feel more strained and tired. Not only that, but Morticia knows what time of the day I write (or draw as the case may be) and she seems to think that’s the perfect time to call or something. She’ll ask what I’m doing and I’ll tell her flat out I was on a roll writing and she’ll ignore that and start crying about some thing. What is that shit?! You think that just because I’m drawing or writing that it isn’t work?! Yeah, a lot of people think that… Just because you’re creative doesn’t mean that what you do isn’t hard work. In fact, it’s probably the hardest work there is… especially because you are always your own worst critic.

The rest of my time I’ve spent binge watching programs and movies on my Fire Stick or playing Animal Crossing… I know that sounds silly, but it’s nice when the worst problem someone approaches me with is, “I’ve been trying to catch a ladybug all day and I just can’t seem to do it,” (so I go catch them one) or “I had a fight with so and so, I told them their shirt looked stupid, now they’re mad at me. I got them a gift to say I’m sorry, but I’m too embarrassed to give it to them,” (so I offer to deliver it if they don’t ask me to). And when they get the presents, sometimes it’s clothing they don’t seem to like, they ask if they should try it on, I say yes and when they ask how they look, I say yes, even though they look like a dork. And they don’t know any better because my face never changes. Sweet… I can lie to spare feelings an I don’t have to put forth the effort of wearing the happy face because it’s already there. And sometimes you get really cute, random moments when one of your favorite villagers is wearing the shirt you bought him and you’re both listening to a K.K. Slider song holding color changing glow sticks (which, by the way, I found out you can wave while the performance is going on and I may spam you with those pictures another time, muahahahaaa). It’s just a nice, relaxing escape from reality I desperately need…

Of course I make this all sound like paradise… But if all of this had to be done in reality as it had to be done in the game, you’d have a broken back from all the terraforming you’d have to do to get the island to look the way you want and from carrying large pieces of furniture in your fucking pockets. You’d also have to work your fucking ass off to make enough currency to pay for all the shit in the game. Each time you pay for an upgrade to your house, the amount gets higher and higher. So in order to max out the size of your house and pay it off cost a whopping 5,696,000 bells (the game’s currency) which you can pay back at your leisure. My home is completely paid and I have two others that are maxed and need the final payment made as well as three other houses with 4 rooms (which means I spent a fuck ton). That’s not counting the money you spend on bridges and inclines. This particular bridge costs 228,000, the inclines I used cost 168,000… It cost 10,000 to demolish one as well as move a home or building. So you can imagine how much currency you need to earn in order to play this game. It’s insane!

I think we should all be grateful real life isn’t so pricey for a small home and construction. Then again, we don’t dig up fossils and get money for them every day and no one pays us a shit ton of money for fish a bugs. No one is going to pay you $15,000 for a Dorado, but that’s how many bells you get for one. So the economy kind of works, I suppose…