07 January 2026

So, the reason I title these with dates is because I hate trying to force myself to be clever, which I would have to be in order to think up a unique post title each and every time. Dates are unique. Fuck it.

Anyway. Recap of the dogsit.

I am scheduled by myself at work on Thursdays, which means I have to do absolutely everything, including post-breakfast cleanup. I am usually also catching up things that one of my coworkers didn’t do, but was supposed to do, during her time opening and closing early in the week. So it ends up being a long day. I’m always scheduled until noon even though I’m by myself, which should have meant being scheduled until 1pm. I usually end up there until 1pm.

Parker has a tiny bladder and needs more frequent pee excursions outside. I can get through an entire night without her barking to go out at least once, but it’s not the default situation. So I was expecting a pee puddle when I got back to the house. I had let all three dogs out before going to work, so I thought there shouldn’t have been anything worse than that.

Shows what I know. There were five or six poo messes on the first floor. No pee puddles, oddly, so I’m guessing Parker wasn’t involved. This was the two old men, so to speak, who apparently had not taken me seriously when I had invited them to go outside and potty. I mean, they’d gone outside. They just hadn’t gotten it all out.

They didn’t make that mistake again. My returns to the house were uneventful for the next two days. Great Pyrs don’t actually like making house messes, apparently.

(L is not a good listener on this stuff; I told her about the experience later, and she said sometimes you just have to leash Jamie and take him out. JAMIE WENT OUT. The problem is what he did while there. Oh… never mind. I wasn’t looking to her for solutions anyway.)

We had really nasty weather on the Left Coast for L’s return and she was delayed at least twice. What should have been a Saturday afternoon return morphed into a past-3am arrival Sunday morning. I don’t know why, but I had a wicked case of insomia that night. I suspect it was worry over what I’d do with the dogs if L wasn’t back yet, which was silly: just do what I’d already been doing. But insomnia is not logical, it seems. I tried, but I don’t think I got more than four hours’ sleep.

I knew Favorite Coworker was going to be at work that day and would happily take the extra hours if GM could reach her to go in early and, if not, GM could hold down the fort til FCW got there. So when L returned after 3am, accompanied by lights and barking (“MOM! YOU’RE BACK!”) and hooraw, I called my GM and begged off. I feel bad about it, but I’d have felt worse if I’d hit someone with the truck in the rain and wind on the way to work — you get weirdoes crossing 101 sometimes at four-thirty in the morning. On bicycles. No lights, no high-viz, no light-colored clothing, no nothing, and they see you coming and cross in front of you anyway. I didn’t fancy committing vehicular manslaughter on the way to work, even if they would have let me off on account of the victim was a moron. I also didn’t trust myself not to turn into a massive asshole on the job, Sundays being what they are. So, you do what you have to, I guess.

The fun bit is I tried to go to sleep after that and my brain still wouldn’t shut the fuck up. So I spent my semi-illicit day off being basically a zombie. I even needed to replace the battery in my mouse, but I had no AA batteries, so I just went without until Monday when I was fit to operate a motor vehicle again.

I’m not getting any younger and it was a multi-day recovery process, aided by my realization that I haven’t taken my supplements in literal months. So I’m back on board with that as well and I can feel a difference already.

—

This being a three-day-off week meant that in practice I actually had four days off, and it has spoiled me. I don’t miss having no money and being terrified of starving to death or losing my place here (my paying half utilities is one condition of my stay, and I did not have enough money to start over somewhere else), but I do miss my time mostly being my own. Even when I was doing gig delivery driving in Columbus to keep my extended-stay room, I got to decide when I started my workday and when I ended my workday and even which jobs I would do. Heady stuff. Hell, one of the attractions of my current employment is that I do it with almost no supervision and can make my own choices just like a grownup. (We have certain standards we have to maintain, like which foods we offer and what we wear to work, but apart from that.) But I still more or less have to do what I’m told when I’m told (on those occasions I am told), and I am not the boss of myself. Not really.

There are two reasons I haven’t been a business owner this entire time. One: my executive functioning is absolute shit. I could have had any number of things going the entire time I’ve been in NorCal, but I find myself doomscrolling and fucking off on phone games. Even here at Substack, where the threshold for Having Created Something is so low it’s in the fucking basement, I can go weeks between posts. This is why I’ll never conquer the world. We’re lucky if I can remember to get coffee filters on a Walmart run. (Yes, I write up grocery lists. I don’t remember to put it on the list.) Two, I have no idea what the fuck to do for a business because no one’s ever really interested in anything I do. To be fair, most of the things I’m interested in are not things anyone else needs. Even when it’s something kinda cool, like the portraits I sometimes draw, nobody gives a shit about art or craft — they want factory-made or they want Photoshop or they want AI. I have always been a poor fit in this world, and it’s even worse these days.

But man I miss my time being my own. Still, there’s no denying the need for money. I think about retraining into a Real Job(tm) and building my life around that, but there’s nothing that really grabs me; the target job I’m seriously considering is only attractive because it lets me stop dealing with the public and will pay well above minimum wage. I’m still not going to be the boss of me. I’m still going to be constantly at risk of being victimized by other people’s drama. I’m still not going to feel like it’s my mission in life.

So one thing I’ve been pondering is whether I shouldn’t be using this time to set up my own thing after all. I mean, I can’t see myself getting a chance like this again, and I’m not getting any younger. But I probably won’t do it because, again, my executive functioning is shit. If I’m gonna be in the poorhouse anyway, might as well be gainfully employed while I’m at it.

—

When I first came here, I sold my car to Carvana for $2000. I was told I’d be walking distance from town, and I knew there was a fair chance my car would not have survived the drive from south Louisiana, and I also knew I would be on the hook for insurance and maintenance if I couldn’t find a job right away, and I needed starting-out money. I still question myself about the decision to this day, but mostly I’m positive it was the right one.

After getting this job, I realized I was finally positioned to get another car, because I don’t actually need to spend nearly sixteen hundred dollars a month. I have been able to save at least $250 a pay period, and sometimes more. I’ve got decent credit at this point, too.

I thought at first I’d go with Carvana, since I had an account with them already from having sold them my old car. But I learned they don’t deliver this far out. I was not happy, because I don’t want to buy a car off Marketplace. I don’t trust that it would pass smog (California’s mandatory emissions testing) or that it wouldn’t have some weird hidden problem. Going with a corporate seller would mean an auto loan and payments, but I’ve done the loan calculator thing and as long as my rate doesn’t go much over ten percent, even with full insurance I should have my ducks in a row.

But since Carvana disappointed me, I’ve learned there are a couple other companies that also sell online and that will deliver to me. This is important, because if I’m ever going to be on my own again I’m going to need to get around. It’s too dangerous to just rely on a bicycle and I’m hopelessly out of shape for that in the first place. And I don’t necessarily want to stay here. It has been downright magical sometimes, and I really like Neighbor, but I want my life to be my own again and I’m tired of sharing my space or my life with people who are more or less uninterested in me as a person. If I’m going to be alone anyway, I want to be really alone. (The ability to fart in your own personal space without a housemate making a moral case out of it is underrated, I feel.)

But even before then, I want wheels. There’s still stuff I want to see and do here without it taking me all day to get there. I could stand to see my brother and niece a bit more often, too.

Well, we’ll see what happens.