How am I so depressed and exhausted this early into the darker months? It's just after 8:30 and I'm climbing into bed. Today, I tried to make myself a salad for lunch and through a freak accident, ended up sending my sharpest kitchen knife through my wrist, glancing off bone, miraculously avoiding my narrow blue veins. I dreamed that I was in my beautiful cemetery, running, and I went to finish but the gates to the exit were closed up tight against me and I was trapped with the dead. f it keeps up like this, I'll probably be dust by November. I'm in a very bad mood. 

At least running is good. Not that I have much to show for it with work being as shitty as it is and a thousand other things interrupting my planned runs. This evening, my boss texted me "are you okay?" and I realized I forgot to control my face again in a meeting. I have really got to be better about that; I can hate this job all I want but if I don't keep it up while I find another one I'll end up homeless in addition to depressed, and wouldn't that be a cute anecdote for my enemies? 

 A week of lovely weather. It was even cold when my team and I went out to our creek cleanup day and started raining by the end of it. Still, it was quite a success. I've been making a team to clean up that same stretch of Lewis creek for 4-5 years - and this was the first year I could tell the creek was noticeably more cheerful and less trashy for our efforts. Tons of frogs, fish, beautiful cardinal flowers blooming... it was nice to see one thing made better in this life of endless worsening. 

Hard to believe that summer is dying all around me. The first trees in the graveyard have their hints of color; the crows are massing up, conspiring, surely getting ready for the Unseelie to take control back over the hidden courts. A coworker told me that everyone on my team thinks I'm about to quit. Is it possible I've lost my ability to look blankly placid in a meeting? 

At least there's always taking a long break to go buy plants. I think I'll put in my greens bed now that a couple of my heirloom tomatoes have kicked it. Tonight should be soothing in that way - gardening in the cool as the twilight creeps in earlier and earlier. 

 Hello there. Listless today and a little sad. I have my river cleanup with the team I put together later, but I can't seem to muster much endorphins for it or anything. I'm sitting on the porch watching the hummingbirds start drama with each other. I keep thinking I should get up and do something, but I can't think of what. I wonder if the rain will hold off. It's a cool day for wading into a river, but I suppose someone has got to do it. 

 It's easy to love this world when the weather is as nice as it is today. I made bright, colorful jars of pickled yellow squash, red onion, jalapeno, tomatillo, and cucumbers and homemade lemoncello that will be ready in a week or two. 

God, my brain is so cliché sometimes. Last night, the dream conversation was literally set on a stairway. As in the saying "stairway conversations" or l'esprit de l'escalier - as in, things you meant to say but only came up with later. Still, the feeling has stayed with me all day and created a strange mood: a mellow, strangely calming presence. The last few weeks I feel so keyed in. 

Timely, as work has been atrocious this week. I resolved to find something new when I was in a fury about it last night, but this morning, of course, my lead and PMs have been very placating. I just need a break from it, a long weekend or something. Maybe I'll take Monday off as a personal day or something. 

It was one of those cool, rainy mornings where the Morning Glory stay blooming well past the usual time of day. Supposedly, the weather is going to become cool and sublime this weekend. Maybe I'll even get out and hike. I want to go to the farmer's market and buy a big cup of lemonade with ice and wear a straw hat and a skirt and drink it down until it's bitter and watery. 

Sometimes I look back on this blog and feel like my entries used to be so much better, with richer details and more life to them. Even when I was writing something dumb, it was more kinetic and interesting. These days, I often feel stupider, more inclined to make dumb mistakes, and overall less creative. I wonder if I'm just old and tired, or if it's a Covid thing. I leave my house less; I talk to less people and see less things every day than I used to. 

And maybe some of it is whatever long effects I might have from the really bad bout of Covid I had back in April. In the last month, my hair has been falling out. Well, not like falling out in chunks, but when I brush it or run my hands through it, I end up with a handful of shed hair instead of one or two pieces. It still looks normal, but it was freaking me out. I finally looked it up and apparently it's associated with having a super high fever for multiple days, like happened exactly to me when I had it. It sets in a few months afterward because of some kind of chemical effect that body trauma has on a hair level, similar to how POW sometimes have their hair turn white because of body response to torture. Thankfully, this minor version is supposed to go away in a couple months, and it's not like I don't have hair to spare. I was relieved to have an answer to why it was happening, but it also spooked me a little bit, thinking about what a big impact that actually had on my body even if I feel mostly normal now, if stupider. 

I had a beautiful weekend in the woods. I don't think I've been to the site in over a year, maybe even back to when we first took Bean there as a puppy, although now I'm second guessing that. I have a vague memory of going to it last year and finding a cardinal flower on the bank that had grown there every year, but also, a yellow jacket nest  - which of course, I took as a sign and omen. The general static of anger in the universe toward me. The curse. 

The yellow jackets were gone this time, but there were cardinal flowers. I tried to take that sign as a generous one, but who can say? If any universal spite was lessened toward me, would I even know it? It was raining in the beautiful, dreamy way that it does out there sometimes. That always makes the veil between sleep, life, past, present, and future feel thin. The whole weekend and now, continuing into this week I have been absolutely brimming with dreams. Last night, I even dreamed about the first dog we had when I was a baby: an English bulldog named Brittany. I dream the usual things too - always the conversations. 

If yellow jackets were a recurring theme last summer, this summer might be water: finding it, submerging myself in it. If the weekend before last was swimming with the snakes, last weekend was the reservoir. It's further down the dirt road past the real lake - a huge concrete dam that rises abruptly up out of the woods. It's dangerous to swim too near to the dam itself because of the pumps and currents, but further in, there was a kind of beach under some ancient, towering rock structure. The water was so warm - almost hot, unusual for that area - and maybe it was my imagination, but I could feel something pulling at me, plucking me deeper toward the middle where the current was. When the storm came, it was nice to climb up under the natural cliff shelter the towering rocks created. I think it must be very primordial: something about my hunter gatherer brain that liked being up under a rock shelter that surely people have used on this continent for thousands of years, looking at the storm but safely out of it. The reservoir of course wasn't there, but those overhang shelters are all over Appalachia and it's a good bet they were used. 

 Here I am, totally jinxing myself, but I just had such a good run. Full sun, 89 degrees, and August humidity, but it was the first time in a month or two that I've run like I know I can, where it feels good and powerful and strong. It's been so long since I thought "okay, a little faster" and felt my body respond to it like it knew what it was doing, not this little sad hobbling hopskiplimp step I've been doing with this energy. Ahhh! I don't know. I'm happy!

 This week. Ugh, take me to the woods. I just want to cook over a fire and lie down in a creek. It's strange that this weekend will be just about the first time I've done that proper this entire year. My life seems smaller sometimes for that. 

Well, at least I'll have dog date tonight as a midweek break from the inanities of my job. There's nothing about it that's even annoying enough in an interesting way to write out for posterity; it's all just so stupid and broken and lacking in leadership and process. I know I'm slipping behind, things I should be keeping on top of better, but it's so hard to care.

At least running is going a little better - knock on wood. I've managed 5 miles every day this week with no major blowouts. I think all it took was breaking down and asking my obnoxious, fitness-obsessed uncle about it over the weekend. (Who had no meaningful advice about what the actual injury could be except to give me a 40-minute lecture about how I was getting old. Perhaps my legs thought I'd suffered enough.)

Here was a funny thing, though - when I was a teenager in high school, I used to write a lot of fanfiction. I have been a little obsessed with Star Wars again since watching Kenobi, and I tore through two of the novels this week alone between runs, dog walks, and cleaning. One of the novels was so much like the silly plot in one of my fanfics from literally my senior year of high school that I went back and found the secret place on the internet where it's still up. I hadn't updated the story since 2005, and didn't remember it being at all popular when I was active in the community. But I had the nicest fucking reviews? A lot of them from long, long after I stopped writing/updating. The most recent one was from 2016 and it started out "I know you'll never read this and you're obviously not working on this story anymore, but..." and went on to be just so sweet. 

It was extra nice because frankly speaking, re-reading the story, it was objectively terrible. But I was such a kid. Of course it was bad.