A little in the afternoon on Friday

I am stoned in my office, very mildly stoned, a single puff of the indica strain, the strain that's supposed to slow you down.

But I'm anxious. I have been anxious all day. I think it has to do with Penny, who had to get up early to get her blood work done for IVF. Today was her first and last pregnancy test since the transfer we did twelve days ago.

It's going to be negative. Penny probably took a test yesterday already and knows. She'll tell me later. I almost asked her this morning before she left – I wanted to say "What are you expecting?" But I stopped myself. I stop myself a lot.

Penny has texted me from her workplace to inform me she has one of the worst headaches she's ever had and I asked if she could literally leave the shift sick because if it's that bad she should come home and rest.

Usually she powers through these things but just wants to complain. I'm just reminding her that she has a choice, she could leave if it's bad, just follow library process and leave.

It doesn't matter what she does. It doesn't matter that the test is going to be negative, either. I can hug her and say penny I'm sorry, I'm always sad, it doesn't matter how many times we try, I'm always sad when it doesn't work. And it'll be okay because although we wanted to have a child together this is not a life or death kind of want, like eating or breathing. We will continue to eat and breathe and surf the internet like normal people. We will grow to accept that it isn't going to work out. This is what I hope. I am probably delusional. It will probably always be a struggle for her, not being a mother. Denied the chance, is how she will see it.

I wanted to do more with my day. I haven't really done anything. Washed some towels, reached out to Sri to check if I could work on [some project] and the answer is essentially no, we have to wait until Monday with group discussion, so I'm blocked on that which means I can do whatever I want today – I could potentially do prep work for that project but my energy levels are just shit, it was all I could do to ride the elliptical for 20 minutes and put in 15 minutes of range of motion exercises for my shoulder.

I've been waiting to feel better today, just kind of waiting. I don't know for what. I feel like I didn't sleep last night, washed out. I tried to nap and couldn't even though theoretically the coffee from the morning should have worn off and I wasn't on anything else and I felt tired as fuck. I put 40 minutes on the phone timer and closed my eyes. I felt like I was stuck in the lightest of light sleep, the sort where you can still hear yourself think and you feel you might even be able to minorly influence your thoughts, but I couldn't shut it off, could not make the constant stream of chatter turn off.

I have days like this. It means I have background anxiety about something. The anxiety is fueling the chatter. Without the anxiety I can turn it off, the words finally shut the fuck off, and there's quiet and space in my head, just images and sensations, the animal state. Only the animal can sleep.

I read yesterday that most good writers are neurotic and "well of course they are! that's why they write!" Probably that was in Anne Lamott's book on writing, Bird by Bird.

I have to take the dog out. I may or may not write this afternoon, after the walk. When I say write what I really mean is work on my book. I think I need to separate the two in my head. I can work on my book without writing. I can think about the plot, I can construct the timeline on the whiteboard.

Then again, I may instead lay down and try, again, to nap. I may turn on Zelda Ocarina of Time remake and see if I can finish hunting down the remaining skulltulas – I have eighteen left and this could be done fairly quickly if I follow youtube guides. I may jerk off for the second time today in an attempt to simply obliviate the words inside.

The actual things I think about are the unpleasant things in life that I don't want to talk about on this blog because the repetition is horrible. I read somewhere that writers often don't want to write about their most common thoughts because they are so tired of thinking these thoughts over and over again that the thought of writing them down was just beyond the pale, why write down which is so blunderingly obvious to us internally? It would be like writing down 1 + 1 = 2 and so on. So I have thoughts like shit i better work out and i'm lazy if I don't do it and what will happen to my shoulder recovery if I don't do it i could be in pain for the rest of my life i could end up like my brother M and hate myself and regret the surgery decision forever, I don't want to do that or be that or live that life and ok ok we will just do it and which artist should i pick from the plex to listen to on my headphones to make this a little more bearable and let's pick these exercise pants over those and shit where did i put that particular white stretch shirt that I like, is it the second drawer or the third, there it is, on we go, does my shoulder hurt when I do the shirt motion

and so on over and over, my chatter directing what I'm doing and where I'm going and only rarely being gifted time to think something more floaty

Even doing that little bit above was exhausting. I'd rather write about just about anything else.