“Everything has changed…

Absolutely nothing’s changed.”

I sometimes wonder how others measure their lives. Many become parents and measure through their children, some use a corporate ladder as their meter stick, some stack accolades. I don’t know. I like words. Stories. I count those.

So imagine my disappointment when I come back here after seven months to say, ostensibly, nothing has happened. Work is going well; I’ve been moved to another store. It’s the same. I’m still writing reviews for the site; more so than I was, so that’s something. But it’s the same.

This Friday I’m going to a film festival that I’ve been invited to based on the strength of a screenplay… that isn’t a movie. I’m going to a film festival without a film. What do I do with my hands?

–

Two nights ago I dreamt of the dead. I was in my grandmother’s old home, though she passed away this past April. My brother was there but he was a child; younger than he was when he died. But I was a man, as I am. He didn’t know me, as none of the children in my family. I’m the black sheep of the family; the weirdo who spent too much time in California. I wanted to connect but I didn’t know how to convince him to care enough to get to know me. The uncertainty of it all unnerved me. I tussled his hair as he ran past and knew that we’d never be brothers. I had to pee.

I went to a back room, passing my late grandmother’s husband who was left to mourn her alone. He sat unmoving in a recliner with a false Santa Claus beard. His eyes didn’t even follow me.

I tried to pee in a box lined with a trash bag, but my penis was so shrunken, yet my meatus so loose, that I couldn’t aim. I pissed everywhere before starting to fill the bag, which hadn’t been shaken out, so it filled faster upwards than it filled out within the box. I tried to take it outside to empty it in a nearby lake but the tied bag fell out when I was interrupted.

It was all very nerve-wracking.

–

I quit smoking two weeks ago.