I'm living in perpetual 7 a.m.
Waking up kills me, though not in the depressed way it did two years ago. Then, I had graduated and contracted West Nile and found myself trapped in a terrible condo on Cathedral Oaks — fevered, jobless, with coyotes howling and large stretches of nothing separating me from anything. Then, I had no reason to get up. Today, as I contemplate my twenty-fifth birthday tomorrow, I have reasons to wake up and go make something of myself, but for whatever reason the May Gray and June Gloom has SADdened me more than it has before.
What's worse than waking up at noon when you didn't intend to? Waking up slight hungover at noon to an overcast sky that nearly tricks you into thinking you could get up in time enough to appreciate the morning.
This morning, I just stared, hoping I somehow hadn't wasted half the day. When I rolled over to look at time, the bedside clock was turned away — likely because the clock itself is now conspiring with the weather to set me up for a fall. (I've actually long suspected the alarm clock of malice.) Flip. Noon, right on the dot.
The next cruel trick comes with opening the window. Necessary to clear the room of the smell of sleeping bodies, opening the window lets in this cold air that gets into my clothes, through the covers I just dove back under. I hate this. The me that was standing in front of the closed window didn't know for sure that the air outside would be so mean. Somehow, this new day could have presented the warm, muggy kind of overcast that we occasionally get here in Santa Barbara. But no — it's the June Gloom, which I feel started especially early this year and I worry may not give way to the beautifully lazy upper-90s days we had here last July.
I'm still in a bathrobe as I type this, because it constitutes appropriate clothes for this permafog. In a former life, I didn't wear bathrobes, except around Christmas and possibly only on Christmas morning for the opening of presents. Most mornings of the year began with the cloudless blue skies that signify a day in which wavy lines would rise up from anything with a surface facing the sun. Not only would bathrobes be inappropriate, but more often shoes and shirts would be as well, at least for the first few moments outside. Lizards would be out, sunning themselves. Here in Santa Barbara, I worry for the lizards' welfare.
I just looked out the window again. Not so much gray at the moment, but definitely icy blue, like how you might paint a picture of Antarctica if you didn't want it to be just white. Icy blue like a pissed-off bridesmaid.
A newsflash: Something changed. The gray remains, but I'm told something has, in fact, just changed, just in this past day. We don't know what, but the closet door knob falls off now. Can I blame the weather for this too? Can I blame the weather for me now being in my mid-twenties as opposed to the comfortable early twenties demographic I previously claimed?
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ReplyDeleteThat was me. I accidentally posted a half finished comment. Odd though, I didn't fill in the word verification, so it shouldn't have gone through.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, aren't you supposed to have these introspectively gloomy moments a bit closer to your thirties? I hope the sun comes out soon up there, and chases the fog away. It doesn't match up well with the walrus picture you have up.
this may or may not cheer you up, and you may or may not already know of this band, but YMCK, a japanese "chiptune" band, imagine if the creators of all those wonderful 8-bit musical pieces had put lyrics to them and then sold them on CD-R's, currently listening to their last.fm similar artists radio station (just for the first song but i can't bring myself to stop the songs are just so damn upbeat), i know it must be weird to get musical recommendations from "little alley" but i've read this blog enough to have you come to mind when anything nintendo related comes my way, and as a bonus, they are so under the radar that allmusic.com has yet to flesh out their profile with any useful information
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