Man, is it windy here, gang. You would not believe it. It began yesterday, continued all through the night, and continues this morning.

The wind was so strong, in fact, that it blew a couple sections of my neighbor’s privacy fence completely away, along with many individual slats in their fence.

However, you will notice by the photo below, that these missing segments of fence in NO WAY assist any of my dead leaves in their mission to get into my neighbor’s yard!

I know. Isn’t it terrible? This situation with my dead leaves? Lest you think my sloth has gone unpunished — when I opened my back door this morning to get that photo, the wind blew just a ton of mouldery-spore allergen type stuff right up my sinuses and now I have a colossal sinus headache.

And now that the President has declared that our lockdown will continue to at least the end of April, if not actually the end of May, I honestly cannot imagine, at this point, that I won’t be raking those fucking leaves. God knows, I’ll have nothing but time… I’ll be really hard pressed to come up with a viable excuse for not raking them. I mean, I do own a fucking rake… and I know how to use it…

And in all honesty, if that segment of my neighbor’s fence that’s closest to my god-awful accumulation of dead leaves did give way, and suddenly all my dead leaves blew into his yard? Wow, I get the feeling he would be so fucking pissed at me.

So, yes, this morning, I resigned myself to this notion that I am going to have to rake those darn leaves.

Meanwhile.

Yes, our lockdown is set to continue — for maybe even as much as 2 more months. And with this in mind, I laid awake last night, wondering if maybe I might not want to get out the manuscript for Down to the Meadows of Sleep: The Hurley Falls Mystery, and read it over and maybe work on that right now? (See last evening’s quick post.)

If I recall correctly, I’m about 50 pages into it.  Even though it’s a murder mystery set primarily in a graveyard, it’s also sexy and funny and upbeat and quirky. So it might be good for my brain right now. I’m going to at least read it over and see.

Even though I have all this time to myself during this pandemic, I’m having trouble focusing on which project-in-progress of mine I really want to focus on.

I’m having trouble focusing, just in general. For me, because I lived in NYC during the AIDS crisis and during 9/11, those two tragedies were much harder for me to cope with than this current pandemic. During the AIDS crisis, literally dozens of my friends died quick & horrible deaths in the span of about 2 years — this was before anyone really understood what was killing them. And then 9/11 was sort of just unspeakable.

I have the type of PTSD that comes from a lifetime of physical, sexual, & mental abuse (C-PTSD, also called Complex Trauma Disorder). And even though Wayne and I were officially separated by the time of 9/11, we still lived in the same apartment but he was stuck in the South of France and couldn’t get a plane back to NYC. I had just gotten out of the hospital because of a bad MERSA infection that no one could figure out how I’d gotten, and they’d also had to do a biopsy on something in my throat because they thought I might have cancer — and then 9/11 happened in the midst of that and so I was in full-blown C-PTSD that entire time, and I was all alone in the (quite lovely) apartment, going nuts.

And whether or not you were alone, NYC during and post-9/11 was absolutely awful. And that is an understatement.

And now, even though I know this current pandemic is real and that for people who die from it, it is a really awful death, I’m still living in a place that hasn’t been touched by the virus and absolutely everything in my immediate world is exactly the same, except for social distancing in the store. My C-PTSD has remained absolutely dormant during a pandemic.

It is really just so strange. And yet all of my friends are in areas that are really hard hit by the virus, and of course that affects me, emotionally. So even though I have all this enforced time alone, it is really hard for me to focus. I sit at my desk, but I can’t focus in any meaningful way.

Perhaps switching to a novel that’s more fantasy and has nothing to do with reality as we know it, will help.

And speaking of social distancing, after my walk through the cemetery yesterday, I stopped in at the dollar store to buy two vital items: bathtub drain un-clogger and Hershey’s chocolate syrup! (Yes, I did buy more ice cream the other day; I was back to needing comfort food amid all those organic fruits & vegetables & yogurt & grains. And I ran out of chocolate syrup.)

Well, I went down that aisle that has the chocolate syrup in it, and there was a man standing right where I needed to be, and the store was almost out of chocolate syrup — I could readily see that from my social distance of 6 feet away — and yet I had to keep practicing social distancing. I could not get closer than 6 feet to that guy. So I tried patiently waiting for him to move, and then finally, such was my need to get my hands on one of those two remaining bottles of Hershey’s chocolate syrup, I finally said to him, “I’m really sorry, but I need to be right where you’re standing please.” (A sort of polite way of saying “Could you please move?”)

He sort of just looked at me, wondering, I’m sure, why I seemed 12 yet had all this long, silver windswept hair, and then he begrudgingly moved an additional 6 feet away.

Other than that though, so far, life is pretty much the same.

Although I am sleeping at really weird hours now.  I fell deeply asleep at 10PM last night, woke at 10:30, feeling like I’d slept at least 3 hours and was astounded to discover it had only been 30 minutes. Then I fell back to sleep until about 3 AM and then was texting back & forth with Kara for quite awhile.

Kara is always up at 3 AM, smoking cigarettes and drinking an espresso and trying to get some peace from the 6 wild dingoes that live with her. (They are not actually wild dingoes, but they are domestic dogs that were illegally bred with wild dogs and she rescued them and saved them from euthanasia. Much like me living with 7 feral cats that I rescued, never dreaming I was going to have to live with 7 wild animals for the rest of their natural lives  — and it started out as 12 of them…)  Anyway. Kara was awake, too, and so we were texting. We text every day.  Then I slept for 3 more hours. Then I got up.

It’s like that every day now — I either sleep too much or too little, but always at weird hours. And when I’m awake, I can’t focus. Even when I’m streaming those reruns of DCI Banks, I pause it every few minutes, then I get up and pace around and look out the windows and wish I still smoked and still drank because it seems like it would maybe give me something to really focus on, and then I sit back down and continue watching the show. It’s just weird.

But, still, you know — I feel really grateful for every moment. And all the moments that come on the heels of those.

Okay. On that note… I will get the day underway here, take a look at that manuscript and see how I feel about it.  Get another cup of coffee & hope it kills this sinus headache.  I hope this finds you doing well, wherever you are in the world. Thanks for visiting, gang. I’m still really only listening to Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul.” So, for now, I’ll just say that I love you guys. See ya!