Weather Report

“Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.”

– Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.

-       Plato

Your friends won’t see you to the end I’m sure but you love them anyway.

 - Jack White

I've heart a lot of voices in my head lately, including the strange company quoted above. The common thread in these voices is inspired by the weather. It is something akin to fear that has taken root in my heart like the moss the covers everything here. Fear is just a reaction. Like sweat is a reaction to hard work (sometimes), or like guilt is a reaction to sin (sometimes).

While we cannot always control what happens to us, we can control how we react to it. For me, it’s clenching my teeth and wishing I could shoot deadly laser beams from my eyes. And insomnia, and eventually, fear. Emotions apparently evolve over time. Once, fear would make me cry. Once, realizing my own inability to control my reactions would make me want to be a better person. Those trains have sailed.

These days, I’m not so afraid of what happens to me as how I’m losing my ability to control my reactions. To offset this increasing uncontrollable rage and growing fear, I have found it liberating that at least I no longer cry when I am overcome with nameless dread. I certainly no longer want to be a better person. I’m good enough, and I don’t have anybody I want to accept me as I am. The fucks I now give are well into negative numbers. I finally got USAA sorted and they even refunded the $22 my credit union charged me for the check that USAA wrote and promised they'd cash and then returned to the credit union. Rage is the latest evolution of my fear: you don't want to make me angry these days.

Short of having the roof collapse and direct rivers of dirty rain down my bent back, I pretty much don’t give a shit. I do have a few library books to return in a few weeks. I still have to complete tattoo removal and edit “prayer works” into “strongly worded letters work”. I think the snakes slithering through tall grass between the tattooed words can stay. The traces of green on the bare branches of the backyard tree pictured here are not budding leaves - they are moss. They are my mood of unnamed menace - growing in the rain and smothering everything.

For a while it looked like today would be the second day in a row that it hasn’t rained since I moved here last November. There have been a few days without rain - but so far I have not experienced two in a row. For the record, I’m not talking about two consecutive sunny days. That would be too much to hope. I would accept two cloudy days without precipitation. By the end of the day, it turned out not to be rainy for one and half days.  I hate this weather and pretty much everything it falls on, including the leak in my roof.

The roofing contract has been signed and the deposit has been put in the mail. Now, weather permitting, I will have a roof next month. Then, new attic insulation, then new kitchen lights, then a heat pump recommended by the electrician to replace the struggling oil furnace adjacent to the new water heater that replaced the old one that bled out last week on to the garage floor next to the second puddle made by the leak in the pipe the plumber had cleaned out the day before. 

These days it's not so much fear that makes me go on, but a morbid curiosity to see what the fuck the new day has in store for me besides rain and silent creeping moss.