Stress.  Lots of it.  It fills all of the corners of life and clutters the walking spaces.

It’s not my stress, mind you.

Pretty much everyone with a daily presence in my life has bombs dropping all over their personal landscapes.  I’ve successfully not taken on anyone else’s problems (listen, sure, offer advice, noodle things out with them, but the problems are their problems), but I’ve been finding that the constant awareness of strain is wearing.  Clearly I should be a hermit … but then I’d have to take breaks to the local pub to get my social fix, and where would my hermitage be then?  Besides, so few Edwardian gardens have openings for a good hermit anymore.

Anyway.  Naught to be done on that score but hold the course and continue to try to divorce my energy levels from everyone else’s.  I may or may not be able to do that, but I’m closer than I’ve ever been.

In other news, Libby, you were oddly passive in my dream last night.

Here we go.  The usual fluffy stuff, lust-ridden entendre, and (everyone’s favorite) navel gazing.  Gazing, hell — I examine my navel intensely, learn its habits and stalk it until, triumphantly carrying its carcass over my shoulders and returning to this, our little etheric village, I can lay it out for all to have their part, providing for us all.

(Okay, here’s where I reel myself in and, teeth set to exhibit my exerted will, entirely stop myself from going off on some tangent about an entire aboriginal culture who hunted and lived on the thundering herds of navel.  All parts of the belly button would go to use in this culture.  The umbilical scar would not merely be prey, but treasured cohabitants of the high plains.  Meat, of course, and leather, would be had from them, but warmth, too, in the form of harvested and dried lint, and even the hairs from the more unruly could be woven into useful — I said I wasn’t going to do this.)

Here’s what I found in my navel today.  

Death, pouring beers.

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