I generated AI images all day.
We ate leftovers for lunch.
I just generated AI images all afternoon with no concern for anything else. I’d got kind of obsessed with it. It took up the rest of the day.
4pm. Sam comes downstairs and says, “Let’s go.” Take the dogs for a walk.
I’m in the bathroom. Oh, the wedding tomorrow? (now, today) My nieces wedding. In the country, tomorrow. I should have thought about it before now. I’d done nothing. I’d not even sorted out the clothes I’d wear. I should have done stuff.
I just thought I’d transfer the money as a present, but I’m thinking about it now, is that wedding enough? I should have put more thought into this?
Should I have got a cheque, or a money order, or whatever, and put it into a card to give. You know, so I had something to give?
Should I have got a card? Does anyone care about cards?
Not to mention I find social settings kind of stressful, Sam does too. Not with friends, of course, but these aren't friends, these are my young nieces friends.
Oh, I started to stress.
We take the dogs for a walk.
There is a couple sitting at pubs out door tables. They “oo” about the bulldogs. They want to pat one of them, both of them.
Of course you do, I think wearily.
“This is Brun.” Otto walked ahead with Sam. “He’s a bit… he’s got a bit, since he’s become a teenager, he’s a bit less likely to want to be patted actually.”
“Oh, fair enough,” they say. They pat Brun. He performs like a dog getting patted.
I’m thinking more about the wedding. I took one of the hotel rooms because I thought it was a few hours away, you know, 2 ½, or the like, but it is only an hour and twenty minutes.
I wish we hadn’t got the hotel room. That was a mistake. I can’t really back out of that now. We should have just left at the end of it, and made a clear get away, that would have been the sensible thing to do.
Why didn’t I give that more thought?
Drive up, do the wedding, drive home afterwards. We could have looked after the bulldogs ourselves. Charlie could have gone to work. (Sam made Charlie give up a night of work to look after Brun and Otto)
Why didn’t I get a cheque/money order? Why didn’t I get a card? Why did I get a hotel room? Why did I get all of that so wrong?
Sam starts to nag me about the gym as we’re walking up the street. Initially, I thought he said he wanted to go to the gym?
“You want to go to the gym?”
“No, you. Go to the gym, or cancel it.”
“Oh.” Not now.
“You are just throwing money down the drain.”
“Am I?” Resigned sigh.
You know I’d been thinking lately that things are wrong. Mark & Luke are coming to town. They asked to borrow my car. Oh, yeah, sure. I didn’t really want to, but I said yes. David now asks to borrow my car when he’s in town too. At least David gives it back full of petrol. But he ran up toll charges. Mark is kind of careless with stuff, so it would be nothing for him to run up toll charges and get speeding fines, or scratch it. Oh, he probably wouldn’t scratch it, but… oh, um? Am I just being selfish, but it’s not a hirer car.
David, Mark and Luke, don’t ask to stay because they think we have house mates, which came from the one time when we had friends staying from overseas. Then, after, that they said something about not being able to stay because of our housemates, incorrectly, and we just kind of agreed.
I’m not sure why, but they think it is still the case, and you know, it is easier that way.
Mark and David have so many lovely qualities that it would be hard to mention them all, Mark is my favourite person on the planet, after Sam, of course, but they are both, what I call, anyway-back-to-me people, yes, kind of self focussed, you know when people’s best qualities and their wost qualities are often the same qualities. So in the process of thinking about their own needs, that is where this confusion about not being able to stay has come from. I’m not sure if that makes senses, but it makes sense to me.
I love Mark dearly, but he is hard work when he stays. He complains endlessly about Brun and Otto, wants them put outside all the time, which Sam absolutely hates, and I do too. Mark kind of spends his whole time subtly complaining about anything and everything, which I am sure he doesn’t even realise he is doing, and Sam hates that too. Sam likes Mark, but he hates him staying.
You know, I got all the lovely, fabulous stuff with Mark over the years, but Sam has never really got all of that to counteract the negative.
Anyway, they are coming to Melbourne, and I can’t help but think it is all kind of built on a lie.
“Have you cancelled it?”
I tune back into Sam. “What?”
“Have you cancelled it?”
“What?” I had tuned out.
“Your gym?”
Oh, we are still talking about that? “Yes, yes I have.”
“Really?”
I just looked at him like I really didn’t want to hear this again, now. I wanted to scream. YES, SURE I SHOULD HAVE CANCELLED IT, OR SUSPENDED IT, OF WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU DO WITH THEM, BUT I HAVEN’T, NO, I HAVEN’T. IT IS JUST ANOTHER FUCK UP, IN A LONG LINE OF FUCK UPS THAT I HAVE MANAGED TO ACHIEVE LATELY, but I didn’t. I just sighed heavily.
“How many hundreds of dollars have you thrown away.”
I didn’t answer.
“Or is it thousands by now?”
Usually, I just ignore him. Usually, I can stay calm with such things, maybe to my detriment, but I couldn’t. “Oh, shut up will you!”
The wedding. The gym. Mark and Luke coming down, and the lie about the flat mates. The lie about the flatmates with David, for that matter. Otto being a problem with people visiting the house. The mistakes I have been making at work. My car? I just wanted it all to stop. So, I stopped. I stopped talking. I just went silent. You know when everything starts to overwhelm you, in the end, sometimes, you just have to put up your shields.
We walked the back streets of Fitzroy in silence. You know that warm, almost satisfying silence that comforts and kind of separates you from everything all at the same time. The kind of silence you relax deep down into, losing yourself.
I’m sure Sam thought I stopped talking to him, but, really, I stopped communicating with the world.
4:45pm. We’re at the bar with the big dog bowl. The two boofs have a big drink of water each.
The sun is shining. Crows (I think they are ravens) are calling from the top of the light poles.
Fifteen minutes later we’re home.
We ate pasta for dinner. Really nice pasta, I might add.
I couldn’t generate any more AI images for my 2019 blog, as I suspected that I was just wasting my time, anyway, so I plumped up the pillow on the big couch, Brun jumped up onto the couch behind me like the hot water bottle that he is, and I drifted off the sleep.
Mano a pata.
What a fuck up, was all I could think.
And it all stopped.
