My current “gotta” list is growing. The deer are eating the vegetable garden so quickly that it is visibly diminishing daily; a fence must be erected*. Cinderella’s wedding flowers must be completed. Paperwork for loans must be completed before collections agents stalk and slay me. The carburetor on the truck must be reassembled before I lose parts or forget what I’ve done.
I’ve been swamped with “gottas” at night, and then stay up too late so that I don’t enter the work-work-sleep cycle and get pissy. Unfortunately, the work-work-read-sleep-don’t-write cycle makes me pissy, as well. And the wakeup-stare-groggily-write-slowly&uselessly cycle doesn’t please me, either. Bridgette, normally more than able to accept half (or sometimes more) of the load, is down with a shoulder injury & meds.
I have a finite number of things to do, and they’re not repeating tasks. I am not, for instance, obsessing about housework. Perhaps I should just clobber as many as I can and see if I can regain control of my schedule.
*Granted, the vegetable garden could be written off; the money it took to grow it, the time spent creating the beds out of sedementary rock, the emotional commitment could all be tossed out. But I’ve lost every damned thing I’ve grown for two years to those thrice-curs’d ungulates, and will be damned if I’ll feed them another season. The past two nights I have chased them across the acreage, flashlight in one hand and a rock in the other, naked under the full moon with a mind washed in blood. I don’t know that I care that much about the vegetables. But I loathe those deer, and will sooner see us all go up in the forest fire I will set to slay them than support their smugly well-fed faces another year.
…and, yes, I meant literally that, unclothed and armed with stones, I chased the deer through the night, murder in my heart and a primitive growl at my lips. The dog lay up on the deck, watching the spectacle with incurious eyes each time. Oh, she’ll bark and howl at descending darkness, point and lunge at moths, and she’ll whip herself into canine meringue fury over the neighbor’s pig, but when the deer casually step through the living room, eating the houseplants as they go and checking the refrigerator as they pass the kitchen, she just passes the time of day with them in a familiar and comfortable way. Dog! Hah! Don’t get me started.
Crossposted from Epinepherine & Sophistry