01 October 2023

Have not paid the rent yet — will get a postal money order tomorrow; I’m not late til the third anyway — but did get a little driving in, so have food for a bit. Will not be doing jack squat tomorrow other than housework because I am just about out of t-shirts and my trousers could use some washing.

(I am not being pretentious. I don’t know how else to put this so I’ll just say it outright: I never know who’s reading this thing. I prefer to write for clarity where I can, and people in one country know what I mean when I say trousers and people in another country will be brought up short if I say pants when I mean trousers. So I went with Trouser Nation on this one.)

And because I need a fucking break, so there’s that. I was only close to six hundred yesterday. I crossed over today. Six hundred in a week! Jesus.

I did work out I can do this with more breathing room if I do a similar amount daily but for five days a week. I just wound up crammed at the last minute because I was stupid and rested on the $500 laurel in my savings account most of the month. Big mistake. Will I make that big mistake again? Probably. I am not my own best friend.

I am going to keep it up like this until I’m on the other side of the heaviest days in my Shark Week, and then probably look at that flex gig app again — the only one I currently have active with work somewhat near me where I can still request shifts, now that I’ve screwed that up too — and see if “we have worked out the bugs” means it has stopped asking me to resubmit my I-9 and identity documents. If so, I have additional options to what I’m doing now. I dread the changeover to night shift, but I would be able to point to that as proof of a job, especially if I grabbed a longer-term block of shifts instead of doing it piecemeal one day at a time. Fudge things, you know? If I go with something with low enough rent it won’t matter anyway.

I also still — STILL, since I left Matt’s house two years ago — have some things I’ve been meaning to sell, so I really should start taking a hard look at that. I am still not selling my Big Man collection. Not yet. But other things are viable candidates and have been. I’ve just been putting it off.

I think I want to get a post office box before trying that, because I need a consistent address for when I get out of here. I very much doubt I will still be here come December first. Lease ends 30 November. I’d rather go with a UPS box because they’ll accept more types of shipments, like FedEx if need be, but the post office is cheaper. The only question is where to rent a box. I am inclined to just stay in Dublin as my home base. I miss Clintonville, but I feel so unwelcome there now. Although if I can get that apartment I had looked at there (or an apartment in the same community — I would imagine the specific one I saw has been leased by now), I’ll go ahead and get a box there too. Big “if,” but we’ll see. I have the entire month of November to work that out.

This month I absolutely must check my account status with AEP and Columbia Gas. It’s been so long I’ll be surprised if they even still have any records of me, but I have to know. Can’t play around with this. I will not be allowed onto a lease if I can’t turn the utilities on.

This month also has a Friday the 13th. October is my favorite month for this. All I need is to meet a black cat, and month fucking made.

Other plotting and scheming going on. No energy to talk about any of it. The last two years have absolutely done my head in, and I’m nowhere near out of the woods yet.