Come A Violent Roar
On a Monday already slated to be a stretch of my physical and psychological resources because I can’t go back to sleep for very long after getting up at six in the morning to give a cat her twice-daily pain meds, and then wait while both cats have breakfast since I’m already up but can’t leave the food out, because I have to take one of them to an acupuncture appointment, half an hour before that alarm a roaring sound erupts in my bedroom scaring me out of a dead sleep and my bed.
At first it seems like the cadet heaters in the wall somehow are supercharged but, no, it’s that the floor registers from the old furnace system have suddenly and mysteriously come on and are blowing air, which they have never done, and I’m scrambling to text my landlords and suit up go to the basement and hope there’s a fuse box switch or something, and now my entire fucking nervous system is on fire.
In the kitchen to grab some latex gloves before heading to the basement to touch who knows what I notice that inexplicably there is a fair snowfall outside, which neither of my weather apps had forecast, because apparently I’m not disoriented enough by the cold air roaring out of the long-dormant vents in my floor.
Scrambling to get down to the basement through the trap door and steep steps without killing myself because I’m both violently awake and cognitively half-asleep, and don’t forget the dyspraxia, I dodge the remains of my old bed frame which I’d thrown into the basement having had no way to have them carted to the dump, I head directly to the fuse box, hastily-grabbed ear defenders keeping the furnace fans noise at bay, and find two different switches labeled for the furnace. Shutting them both off, the furnace roar ended, I return upstairs to find all the power off. It’s back into the basement again to figure out which furnace switch in the fuse box actually isn’t for the furnace.
Several times in all of this I close the trap for only to realize I hadn’t shut off the basement light, so more dangerous early-morning, nerves-shot clambering around the steep stair-ladder to the basement.
At the end of all this, after firing off an email to my therapist saying that I thought I might be about to crack, although I couldn’t say anymore or at this point whether it’d be mental or physical, I go to write up a version of that email for this blog—what eventually becomes this post—only to find that the backend won’t load. Sites appeared to be loading, or at least pages with caches; but anything that required a truly new request just hung. I couldn’t even access the server through my provider’s web console. It’s nearly an hour before I can access anything.
I’ve not been able to get back to sleep. I’ve canceled the appointment at the vet, because I can’t in good conscience subject either the cat who is on pain meds or myself who is not to a trek in what will still be temperatures in the 30s and precipitation of one kind of another.
Of course, by this time, there’s little to no chance of getting back to sleep until the adrenaline and whatever other stress chemicals subside. There is only the slowly-increasing additional strain of being forced by my own body to remain awake.
Welcome to a yet another brand new week of the relentless routine of being beaten up on the regular.