Not sure where I'm going with this:

I feel really drifty today. Like… an ice cube on the floor slowly melting and sliding around in a tiny pool of it’s own watery carcass.

July is always so exciting. There’s the 4th of July of course, and then my birthday right after… and then my mother in law has her birthday just a few days later. This year… we’re still spinning from all the weddings we’ve been going to and then WHAM right smack dab on the 4th of July my father in law gets married three states away. So we drove out. I’ll give you the big low-down later. I’m feeling far too squishy, brain-wise, to really capture it fairly… but it was magnificent.

So now, on the other side of the trip, the holiday and my birthday – my brain seems to be running on fumes and making things up as it goes along. Now don’t get me wrong. This is not a depressed exhaustion like what I had when I was so sick years ago. This is not the dark, downward spiral that I’m actually a little more familiar with. This is something different. It’s a “collapse on your bed after a tickle fight” kind of exhaustion – where you’re tired and red faced from laughing hysterically and your poor brain just kinda’ goes blue-screen on you for a little while as you recover.

The first half of this year has been so thrillingly LOADED with good things. Good news, great ideas, lucky strikes and re-employment all top the list. A few mind-bending news items haven’t even barely touched on the trend of “all things up” (celebrity deaths, political uprisings, local government asshats, take your pick). It’s a good year. It’s an exhaustingly good year.

In bed last night, I was falling asleep so I turned off the light and the TV and just listened to the sounds of summer outside. The window was open and I listened as every now and then a car drove by. Soft, breathy breezes snuck through the screens. In the quiet I could hear a chorus of toads/frogs out there in what’s left of the dry prairie grass behind my house. The sound of it is so subtle, and so soothing, it felt like I had listened to it for hours when in reality sleep surely took over within a few minutes. Sometimes you can hear coyotes out there. They’ll whoop and shriek as they celebrate their newest kill. It’s an eerie, ancient sound. Last night though, it was just the confused jumble of froggy voices (probably toads?) chanting away into the darkness. And it was wonderful.

I know I slept hard because I didn’t dream hardly at all. It felt like I had maybe taken one or two deep breaths and then the alarm went off with some jarring news about another celebrity death. After my shower, the news was more clear and I realized I had misinterpreted the story. Partly cloudy today too. High in the eighties. Recipie for chick pea salad coming up after the break. I drank my orange juice, gathered what I could of my shattered train of thought, and packed myself off to work.

I have some daisies on my desk at work today – harvested yesterday from the flowerbed behind the house. There is a soothingly green light, dutifully aglow on one of my computer speakers. The pen I grabbed today is the gel kind, and it makes deliciously smooth lines as it scrolls across delivery receipts to produce my new signature. Good grief, that’s my new name. That’s my name. That’s who I am and still it feels like I’m getting away with something.

If I were any more distractible, I’d be a butterfly. I slept hard. My head, it seems, is still asleep and I’m afraid no amount of over-steeped black tea will snap me out of it. Might as well give it a try though.