I came back to the house from Iowa City because she'd forgotten the sewing machines. Her mother desperately wanted to sew and knit all extended weekend. I desperately wanted to be left alone all extended weekend. Being in the same room with someone for 907 consecutive days, with a handful of breaks, tends to bring that out in a body.

Somehow just crushed my left-most three toes on my left foot. Dropped my phone while viddying S about the sewing machines and if they were the right ones.

Having a beer from the 28-pack from CostCo to soak in the sacred silence. Had its twin a little while back down the road. Off I-80. Sitting up against the right passenger wheel well outside while the last the cicadas chirped this year and the wind floated by, and for a brief few moments forgot what interminable hell I exist in.

Thought of K. Which is odd. Because she had forsaken me over being a stupid bitch and refusing to apologize for ignorant shit she had said over a year ago now. Decided to unfriend but not block on Facebook. As if to leave a window open.

Doesn't matter to me. I wasn't about to take on 3 kids with varying amounts of psychopathology, and keep my kid G, all in the hopes of having a second biological child and raising a family of 5. Wouldn't have fucked that life with a stolen dick.

But G went to live with his biological mom, the crazy hippy-dippy bitch, on account of the pandemic. Been almost a year that he's gone over to Texas. He's unmedicated, 2 months ago pissed off his step-mom something fierce over not explicitly following the Guidebook to Apologizing so as to Absolutely Fucking Mean It Completely, and more details than anyone including myself would care to read or remember.

Gonna drive another 2.5 hours now back to Iowa City. There's ribs and cheap whiskey there. Sure I kinda want to overdose, lay in the bathtub, and die. But shit doesn't go the way we expect sometimes.

And you just gotta go with it. There are no do-overs. No mercy. No absolution. No going back. There's just a relentless march forward, sometimes while you look back over your shoulder at what the fuck happened and wondering why. And if it mattered.

Did any of it matter? No. It was all washed away by the fates bringing in the pandemics. For weal or woe, I chose my spouse, without a real inkling of how severe her immune issues were. 907 days of isolation. We haven't fucked in over a year on account of those same immune issues and a persistent genital herpes infection on her part. I mostly believe that's the case. But I don't much care anymore.

My life and who I was died a couple of years ago. I'm sticking around for some inexplicable reason. I'm some untethered boat headed across the Atlantic. No rudder. No wheel. Just the stars and a litany of frigid blood-red waves passing over me.

Time to drive.

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