11/21/2024 Holiday Shuffle

Today is second Halloween, now that everyone is healthy and in town. Crow Queen is staying at my place, and she seems a little dispondent today for whatever reason, but I'm trying to remind myself that it's not my job to try and monitor her mood. After all, it's been a pretty crazy month, and we're broken up. Ms. Frizzle and Costco Kitten seem excited at least, so that's good. I texted them at like 7am about what we should eat and they answered immediately. Ms. Frizzle is bringing her boyfriend, who I'm not super comfortable around yet, but he seems like a cool dude.

Tomorrow Crow Queen goes back to her parents' house, and the day after that I go to mine. I haven't been home for a hot minute now, and they said there's a ton of snow out there. My truck, Tuesday, has new shocks and struts, new tires, adn a new alignment, so hopefully I won't fly off the edge of Wolf Creek Pass on Saturday. I'll stay there for a week, come back here for a bit, go back over there for Christmas, and basically flip flop back and forth until New Years. I like viisting my Mom, but I can only stay there so long before I need my sense of agency back. For a week it's cathardic not to make your own choices, but I start going a little crazy after that.

Last year at around this time I got a job at Barnes and Noble, that was half so that I could stay here for the Holidays, and half because I thought the people working at Barnes and Noble were cute. It was weird not having the dual-Christmas thing of a divorced kid, but it felt a little more fair not to see either side of the family, and thus no one could accuse you of picking favorites. The problem is, my sister Jack-o-lantern basically had to tank a full family Christmas by herself. My brother, Frito Baggins, moved far enough away that visiting home even for Christmas would be a tad bit unrealistic. It was kind of cool being here, one of my favorite bands came back to their hometown to do a concert the day before Christmas, and me and Ms. Frizzle went to that, but on the actual day of Christmas I found myself hanging out with mostly tertiary friends. All we really did was play board games (and I've never been big on board games, but I had no suggestions of anything better to do). Jack-o-lantern felt pretty betrayed that none of her brothers came to help her survive the holidays. She pretty much begged me to be there this year. I would've gone even without that.

None of this is going to make writing the book any easier. Mom doesn't really beleive in "down time" and I certainly can't write while driving. I've got one of teh sub plots mostly completed, but that still leaves three more, two of which are being basically made from scratch. It's a little disheartening to think that there's still so much that needs to be done, but actually doing the work feels fantastic. I feel like my passion for writing is rekindling and my anxiety is subsiding when I'm actually writing again. It's nice, becasue there's a lot to be anxious about right now.

10/29/2024 Halloween

Covid has slain my halloween plans. Initially the plan was that me, Her (I think I'll call her the Crow Queen), Ms. Frizzle and Ms. Frizzle's sister, who I guess I'll call Costco Kitten, were all going to come to my place and watch halloween musicals because Ms. Frizzle and Costco Kitten don't handle scary stuff really well. Then Ms. Frizzle and Costco Kitten got Covid. Which is alarming, but they seem like they're doing a lot better and I told them we could reschedule halloween to some time in late November.

The Crow Queen is staying with Crimson Lake while she's in town. He's throwing a party on halloween, and part of me really wants to go and the kid with divorced parents part of me is really nervous to go to a party with two of my exes. Crimson, Crow Queen, and I had a polyamorous situationship a year or two ago that basically turned me off to ethical non-monogamy completely, and made me realize that a polycule feels a lot like having divorced parents. For about a month it was great. For the past year and a half it's been weird. And the shitty part is that I know the weirdness is coming largely from me. On an individual level I've been working to mend the relationships there, but something about hanging out with them when they're together gives the same energy as going to an event that I know my parents are both going to be at. It just triggers my hypervigilance.

I'll probably end up going. I've got nowhere better to be and all the bars I've been looking at are going to be pretty much empty. I really expected more halloween themed events from this town. I guess I'm also just tired of spending holidays alone. I'm tired of doing a lot of things alone.

I've really started working on teh book now. I'm remapping a lot of it, mainly going through the story from each character's perspective and making sure that everything makes sense in their individual arcs and leads to the climax in a natural-feeling way. It's actually super nice to have something to direct all my manic energy towards. It also feels good to excercise that part of my brain again. How exactly would a group of friends storm a castle? What would a drive a spy to disobey her comanding officers orders? What would someone who's thrown their entire life away for love do when their partner is gone? It's A lot of fun.

I'm trying to be better about what I eat, but that of course tanks my dopamine so I need to find something that will be good for rewarding myself but not something that I'm going to get addicted to. So far all I've got is excercise but that's not quite something I can take with me everywhere and whip out in a moment's notice like candy or fast food. I guess I'll figure something out.

10/22/2024 Moving on from Her

She's back in town for the first time in a hot minute, and we hung out. I showed her Murder Drones, and we watched the new Helluva Boss short, made tacos, smoked (but didn't get stoned). Kinda what we had done every night for a while there. There was a bit of distance though. That makes sense, we decided it wasn't going to work in like January, and at this point we're leaning hard into the "Just Friends" box. It still lights me up to see her, and I can tell she was pretty thrilled the moment she stepped into the door too. Like our Superegos dropped their ids off for a playdate.

I've been making life work on my own again. There's momentum that comes after a relationship falls apart, you haven't quite fallen into depression yet, so it's good to try and get your ducks lined up because oh boi is it coming.

This is a little bit of what makes me drive people out of my life, I can tell. The ever present thought of "what are you going to do when they're not around, just wait for them to come back?" and the hope that maybe this one won't leave just gets quieter and quieter. I've got a therapy appointment tonight. I'll bring it up then.

The main thing I'm worried about right now is pulling away from my friends that didn't have anything to do with the relationship. I can tell I'm getting distant with people, and kind of cagey. Ms. Frizzle has been trying harder to reach out, but I keep missing it. I wonder if the real pattern is that I'm trying to find things to distract myself from the world and in the process I'm also distracting myself from everyone else in my life as well. That'd be weird because I think one thing I always thought was that I was less likely to engage with friends if I had a partner... Although another thing that she taught me about myself is that I actually don't know anything about being in a relationship.

I can fix that though, I just need to work on myself a little more and be a little more open to stuff that could happen.

10/02/2024 Working on Draft 5 of Twin Dawns

I recently decided I was going to try chasing my dream of being a writer again after a few years of... not doing that. I have a music-artist friend who went through something similar. he said one day he just woke up and thought the muse was dead for him. That scared the shit outta me at the time, but eventually he got back on the horse. Check out Crimson Lake on Spotify, he even had a cover get on the radio in Europe.

Anyway, yeah I had kinda been worried that the same thing had happened to me. I finished Twin Dawns and everyone who read it was like, "uhhh... it's not your best work." And yeah, I admit that by the time I finished it I was a bit burned out and really just desperate to be done. I was kinda embarassed by it and didn't write anything again for a pretty long time. I've tried to start a few other projects but it feels like I can't move on until I go back and fix things there. I was passionate about writing. I wanted a better reward for that passion.

So yeah, I cracked open Twin Dawns and read through it, and yeah, it's generally pretty rough. I think I know how to fix what needs fixing though, and this time around I do want to have my own illustrations in it. I know I'm not the best illustrator, but trying to hire people has been a bit like trying to herd cats. So even if the pics are mainly just sketches (it's lineart that kills me) I think it'll be better, and contribute pretty hard to the feeling of making something myself.

One of my friends practices witchcraft, and she told me I should try to go back through my diaries and see if I can find a pattern in the energy of the entries and the cycles of the moon. I think occult stuff is pretty neat, and ever since moving to Tulsa I've had a lot of fortune telling done to me and actually a ton of it has come true in really big ways, so I;m pretty game to give this a try.

What really drove me to want to write when I was a kid was this idea that if I wrote stories for a living I could probably live pretty easily adn solitarily on my own. I guess I kinda acheived that dream through just normal means, mainly getting a job, and refusing to stop working from home. That could still come back to bite me, but in regards to my writng dream it kinda took the wind out of my sails. Writing doesn't feel like the desperate fight for survival anymore, and without that stick I kinda stagnated.

But I'm super not fulfilled with my desk job, and while I know I'm "contributing to society" or whatever, I am undeniably working for the man, and I really do not want to "advance in my role" at this company. I want to make stories and maybe help people through some of the darker parts of their life. When my childhood was falling apart, it was stories that kept me going. I feel like I need to pay that forward, and there's really just nothing I can imagine doing and loving better than makeing stories.

9/11/2024 I guess this is where I'm going to posting blog entries :P

If you're reading this, then I've added a link that actually works to this website! :D I only recently learned what the Indie Web is and I gotta say I'm digging it. I missed out on the olden days of the internet when people had to go looking for websites by hand, before Google bought everything and Disney turned evil and stuff. So now I like that it's coming back around.

I love that older stuff, and I recently got a cassette deck that I'm super excited about. It's set up next to my VCR under my TV. The super cool things about these older machines is that you can use them to tape what's showing on the TV or record the audio coming out of it. It's not the highest quality, but it is impossible to detect by modern technology, thanks to the Analog Loophole.

It feels these days like everything is trying to be a subscription service, and it's definitely just so that the mega corperations can bleed us dry. I don't exactly come from money, but also I like owning the things that I pay for. A few years ago I bought all of Steven Universe on Google play, and just recently I looked and all of the original series was removed v_v I still have SU Future but honestly that one is pretty hardcore. All the friends that I introduced Steven Universe to said it was too hard to rewatch SU Future because it was just too heavy. I had paid for Steven Universe, that had been one of my prized possessions. When I had bought the first episodes of it, I toldmyself that I was going to stop pirating stuff and only buy it from legitamate sources from now on. That feels almost poetic in it's backfire-ness.

So yeah, when netflix decided to remove Crazy Ex Girlfriend I was like "I don't think so" and now I have it taped. Most of it. I did not get through all of season 3 before they removed it. I'm sure that I can find it somewhere and get the rest. But either way, I know I could proabbly just go out and buy the box set (a friend bought me the complete dvd set of Steven Univers, thanks Ms. Frizzle!), but I really just don't like how these companies are treating some of our most beloved media, and it feels like the only way to fight back is to steal it dierctly from them.

Anyway, rant over, the point is I have a blog now!