A collection of depressing random thoughts

They are roofing next door. That is after adding a whole other story on fourth of July weekend, and so, twenty feet from my house, there has been a fairly consistent pounding, and men screaming in Portuguese. Last week, some days, not everyday, it went on until 8 pm. Through naptime. Through dinner. Through my evening tea.

It makes me feel like I am going insane.

Maybe I am going insane. I am definitely pushing the well-adjusted line into bat-shit crazy. They also raised the roof, so all the green treetops I once saw from my dining room/living room window are gone. I just see the side of an incredibly unfriendly house. I could have that view in the city. It is a lesson for anyone thinking of skipping the cement for "greener" pastures. I just keep thinking no one will ever buy our house if we want to sell it. Ever. I feel so trapped. So claustrophobic. So tired. All of it combined makes me so sad.

You need the most love when you are most unlovable. I am wholly unlovable right now. Sad. Incredibly, out-of-control anxious. I am trying to figure out how to soothe myself and then the pounding starts again, yet my daughter sleeps. There is a lesson in that.

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If you have noticed, my favorite punctuation mark is the ellipse. My speech is also filled with lengthy pauses, and well, I guess I use them to indicate the lengthy, chin-scratching pause that accompanies my stilted speech.

I also know this is an improper use ellipse. I just don't care.

:::

I want to blog about something profound and lovely, but it's just not in me today. No insights. No beautiful intentions. All day today, I saw my death next to us on the highway in a sudden lane change, in the turn of my ankle walking down the hall to my father's room, on the dark steps to the laundry where I was caught up on my own shoes...I think sometimes that I am putting on my own oxygen mask first. That is what I need to do. Does she know that I am trying to fit the mask over my face first? Does my husband? Do they realize I am trying to save myself, so I can save us all? Will they forgive me?

:::

I thought of a poem today, as I folded laundry, imagining my husband finding me after a particularly ridiculous set of foibles that end with my death. It is called a Black Stone on a White Stone, by César Vallejo. Translated by Robert Bly

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris–and I don’t step aside–
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down
these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on
wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself
with all the road ahead of me, alone.

César Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him
although he never does anything to them;
they beat him hard with a stick and hard also

with a rope. These are the witnesses:
the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,
the solitude, and the rain, and the roads. . .