Blue Dreams

I'm feeling blue.

And for no good reason.

Maybe it's because I'm having so much trouble getting this paper out. It's the easiest fucking topic in the world, but I feel like trying to write it is like pulling out a rotting tooth. I'm sitting in a diner with a cup of coffee and a diet coke, and an aching lower back from too many hours staring unproductively at a computer screen and a stack of books about World War I. That "voulez vous" song from Moulin Rouge is playing on the diner radio. It's making me think of the summer B and I went to New Orleans and the Florida coast.

I hope I'm not crazy. I hope that the worst of this moodiness is just hormonal. I'm 10 days late for the second month in a row. Don't know if that's too much information, but sometimes I get the sense that no one's reading this, so I don't really care. I give out way too much personal information on this blog anyway. But the bottom line on the "lateness" thing-- It's making me anxious. I've decided not to freak out just yet...especially since I went through a "freak out" last month and it turned out to have been unnecessary.

Last night I stayed out way later than I should have given my state of exhaustion at the start of the evening. I drank Jack Daniels for half the night, and for the other half, had some specialty drink called the "Velvet Hammer." It was sweet and creamy and kind of like a White Russian in general, except that there were cherries in it. I like having cherries in my drink because then I can tie the stems up with my tongue. Back in college when I first learned that trick, I used to give the tied cherry stems to B, and he would put them in his wallet. When he pulled out his money, sometimes a dried cherry stem or two would fall out. Kind of gross...

On the way over here, I bought a pack of sour cherry gum.

It looks gray outside... like it's going to rain any minute. I'm only five blocks from my apartment, but I don't have an umbrella and really don't want to get stuck walking home in the rain--especially with my laptop. So I guess I'll just stay here and drink coffee and diet coke indefinitely... at least until my bladder bursts, or the caffeine high approximates the pleasure of real coke.

The wet air is making this war reading even worse. I keep thinking of the muddy trenches and rats and disgusting things in general.

Oh! I had an awful dream last night. Two days ago I was in the bathroom at a restaurant and noticed not far from the door on the bathroom floor an overturned tiny tiny roach struggling to flip itself right-side-up. The problem is that it had obviously been stepped on by someone, and I began to suspect that that someone was me. I am dreadfully afraid of insects--anything with lots of legs, or twitching antennae, or anything creepy crawly like that. I've never killed an insect in my life (at least not knowingly). (The closest I've come is once when I was home alone, I saw a spider on the wall and couldn't ignore it, but couldn't kill it. I took a bottle of windex, closed my eyes and sprayed from a distance. When I opened my eyes it was gone, but I wasn't sure if it had died. I didn't sleep the whole night.) It's a silly phobia, but it's very real. I have trouble staying in the same room if I see an insect. Anyway, realizing that I had come into some kind of physical contact with that thing really freaked me out. So last night in my dream, the roach came back for revenge. It was enormous. It was walking around on "hind legs" of sorts, and came into my apartment to murder me. I don't remember anything that happened in the dream. Only the presence of the roach.

It reminds me of a recurring dream I used to have as a little kid. I used to dream that an enormous starfish had intruded my home and was coming to kill me. Again, I don't remember much of that dream. All I know is that burned into my mind is the memory of a fucking HUGE faceless starfish making its ways up the staircase of my childhood home (carpeted in 1970s rust-colored carpeting) and slowly moving towards my bedroom.

What's up with that?