salted tongue

So I think that officially I have my first cold of this cold season. It knocked my ass back on the couch and slowed me down for bit. I've been eating cough drops like candy and going to bed at least an hour earlier than my already pretty pathetic early bedtime.

And I'm starting to come up with a surplus of time; not that I have the money or the motivation to do anything with it, but I have it now. I have that feeling like when you've been in a car so long, like hours and hours, usually when you're the passenger and the world has been moving by your car window for so long, trees and signs and everything flying by your periphery and disappearing somewhere behind you... that when you stop, you feel dizzy. Like everything is still moving, or should be moving but is now slowly sliding backwards.
I guess it's the slow dizziness of getting off a ride at the fair or spinning in circles. Nothing is moving now. It's all just suddenly stopped and my eyes are tricking my brain into things that aren't happening anymore.

It's the changing of the seasons that often leads me to think that I need to change something with myself. Like who I was in spring and summer is not who I will be this fall and winter. Right before the change, I dream of running away or of waking up somewhere else as someone else... which invariably alarms Jason, with whom I swear everything is going great, which it is. It's just that feeling that with my hours being cut, time being ample and budgets being stretched that I start suspicions of a life a bit more wasted in busying myself with things so fleeting.

I just am starting to see the worry lines etching across my face. The cold is ripping through my unfinished house with leaky windows that are looming over my head. But, like an idiot, I lived paycheck to paycheck even when the paychecks were good, and so now that they are not, I'm stretching a bit more thin.

I'm starting to apply to all those jobs that six months ago i swore I would never go back to, but now a desk and a corner that I can call my own for around 30 hours a week sounds lovely.


And I hate having so much time to sit at a computer now. I've procrastinated on billing. My desk is a mess so i don't even sit at it. My website has lapsed and is now no longer in service. I don't mind much though. There are moments where I can't wait to plan for next year, but tonight... I just feel like sinking down into a pile of blanket, doing shots of cough syrup and wishing that my piano would just fucking play itself.
My music is driving me mad as of late. My musical partners in crime are not to blame, though I might rationalize myself into thinking that my lack of persistance might somehow be their fault. It's not. It's me.
When I was little, my mother would set a bell. For a half an hour a day I was chained to the piano chair, plunking out whatever new songbook I talked my mom into buying me. Most of my time I spent checking the bell to see if a half a minute had passed or not, sometime stopping mid stanza to see how much closer that bell was to ringing. My mom got wise and added on an extra minute every time I got up. I thought it was cruelty. Now i wish I could only have that type of peristance.

I promise myself to become a better story teller.

I promise myself to not watch the bell, but just play until it rings.

I promise myself to not watch the wrinkles stretch... but rather put on some sunblock and go outside to play.