This One Fucking Got Away From Me
I’m not sure what happened today. After lingering in bed to crank out my earlier reminiscence, things slowly and then quickly went completely sideways. At one point I felt like nothing so much as Wile E. Coyote just after realizing he’s run himself off the edge of a cliff, but just before mavity takes hold.
Sometime between getting out of bed and getting out of the house for coffee, it became very clear that my autistic skin was paper-thin as my nervous system was rattled just from the cat’s repeated and plaintive insistence that she is bereft of the 24/7 handmaiden to which she’s recently decided she is entitled.
Before heading out, I’d discovered when searching for something that there’s an entire run of one of my blogs from two decades ago that I can’t account for with a downloaded archive, which likely is stuck on that old OpenBSD drive I’d need to win a lottery in order to have someone look at, and in the process ended up reading about some exchanges I’d had with Dave Winer.
Well, let’s see. In our little row on the weblogs-com mailing list, Dave W. told me “don’t forget your meds”, “part of a larger movement that wishes to erase me from their memory banks”, “you’re a coward”, “idiot”, “selfish and cowardly”. And my favorite, in response to my stating that I was no one’s scapegoat: “Incorrect but close. You are no one.”
(Much of this apparently was around the fact that I blogged pseudonymously, and so apparently was not to be trusted because I revealed neither my proper name or that of my employer, despite the fact that anyone who knew how to use WHOIS could find my birth name in about thirty seconds flat. Anyway, I put this in the litany of today’s stressors because I just didn’t especially need to be reminded about this old bullshit right now.)
Sitting down at the coffee shop, I turned on the Kobo (to which I’ve had to resort because of Kindle’s ragged right edge problem) only to have it immediately shut off because it hadn’t been charged, leaving me feeling out of sorts and sort of at sea.
Back at home just long enough to grab a backpack to run my Safeway errand since today was my SNAP re-up, it was evident that my sensory threshold was approaching nil, my temper on a hair trigger, and my decision-making capability compromised, and what should have been a ten-minute trip took half an hour.
At that point, I was late getting lunch underway, which potentially jeopardized getting in the daily walk, which additionally was meant to be a second grocery errand further afield. In the end, I dragged myself outside again but by the time I got back my nervous system was one jostle away from a sobbing fit.
Things don’t go this south this quickly unless my resources were under some level of demand that wasn’t consciously registering, and for the life of me I don’t know what those demands could have been, but this one has almost entirely gotten away from me, and I’m feeling at a pretty substantial loss.