Are you there, Blog? It’s me, Beth.

Ye Olde Disclaimer / Intro Thing: 

Breathing life into my old blog. I was gonna start one anyway, and then this dusty rag popped up. I’m gonna start posting more frequently for my own mental health but I’ve never written about recovery before and anyway I’m just compelled to state that I know a lot of folks are private about theirs, but I can’t be. I have to share, even if no one is interested. 

Sometimes I feel a little bit like some of my old bar friends might think I’m arrogant about being sober because I post about it sometimes? Trust me I’m not, and today sucks, so I’m gonna write about it in lieu of indulging because I didn’t have time to pencil a relapse into my schedule today, and whatever it takes to keep this forward momentum, I will do. I’m kinda figuring out that recovery is about learning to be the opposite of arrogant. Writing all about myself seems backwards on that theory.. but, again: Whatever. Gotta do whatever it takes. Gotta ramble. I’m definitely rambling now. This is a giant f*ing post by the way so good luck / beware.

I’m starting to type at 3:27pm.

It’s a beautiful Saturday in July in Montana, and I’ve been an irritable, unenthusiastic old sag for five hours. 

The only time today I’ve spent being agreeable with my surroundings was between noon and two-ish, when I was napping on my stomach, arms at my sides like a deadened torpedo at the bottom of the ocean.

Today marks 98 Days since I’ve had any alcohol.

Most of those days have gone pretty well. I’ve scooted around the house in a tidy little routine of picking up clutter, maintaining, and it’s felt good, it’s been good, I’ve been good, but I don’t want to write about that shit because I’m not feeling it right now.

This keyboard I’m typing on is about to become a punching bag, and this post is about to become super whiny and complainy to the reader, especially if the reader is having some normal lovely day and taking care of responsibilities, pausing for a measured five minutes to munch carrots and sip sparkling water and be perfect.

I woke up on the wrong side of the litter box and need to take a giant psychic crap on my dusty old blog. 

Psychic bidet at the ready..

Having to face reality on bad days that pop up out of nowhere is such a bitch. It’s a beautiful day! What is wrong with me!? Montana has like twelve summertime Saturdays, and I’m wasting a perfectly serene one by skulking around the quiet house wishing I could curl up into a ball, wishing it was February again so at least there’d be a better reason to feel like crap.

I make little collage notecards, and I just got about 30 copies made of different varieties and I got stamps and got change from the bank and I wanted to try and sell them downtown on the outskirts of the Saturday markets. 

I got down there and was filled to the brim with anxiety and fear and wound up sitting at a picnic table journaling with my cards out near me, just in case anyone wanted to approach me because I was too panicked to go up to anybody passing by. 

Why would I want to try that anyway? Most of the time I can’t wait to avoid people on the street selling stuff and coming up to me. They’ll be like “Are you registered to vote?” “Yah.” (I am.)

But they could also be like “Have you heard of the lord god our savior Skeletor?” And I’d be like “Oh yeah he’s my fave” and just keep walking. Head down. Evade. Whatever.

I’m kneading at the D’OH of this awful day and it’s taking me back to ~Fear and Shame~

I’m ashamed because I spent over $20 on copying cards and getting stamps, and I’m ashamed because I am so broke these days, I really shouldn’t have. I worked on my setup for like 3 hours after work yesterday and spent $27 ordering delivery cuz I was tired, and I really shouldn’t have. 

I’m fearful because I need a better paying job at some point, I need health insurance, I need something, anything saved. If I broke a bone or swerved into a ditch or one of my cats got sick, I’d have to ask my family for help and that makes me want to throw up everywhere.

Rehab is not cheap.

I am looking forward to remaining successful in sobriety so I can maintain healthy relationships with my family and myself, but when I have this sort of shitty day I definitely feel like an investment, like my mental health is the return that my folks are gonna get from the whole Treatment thing, and my mental health is not doing great today and the fear / shame thing is just bubbling up and oozing out of me all over the place. 

It’s like Ouroboros. Or PacMan. Or Alcoholic.

Facing reality is the last thing I’ve ever wanted to do.

98 Days Sober.

I have a big ol’ notebook full of -isms and mantras I wrote down from group therapy and meetings and stuff. It is super helpful.

A lot of people with over a year or so kept talking about this “pink cloud” they say you float on in early sobriety. I prefer to call it Cloud 9 because I don’t see anything serene about a pink cloud, it reminds me of a polluted sunset, and I think cotton candy is disgusting.

Lately I haven’t been to too many meetings, and I also don’t have a sponsor. Everybody’s like get a sponsor and I’m like I’m fine I don’t feel like it but then everybody’s like I thought I was fine and didn’t need meetings either and god dammit I am just like everyone else.

I felt pretty unique and glow-y and hilarious and creative when I was four drinks deep in under two hours. 

I feel like a burlap sack on the edge of tears and blinded by rage and fury at Day 98 Sober.

Pissed at myself for not getting help sooner - I was going through old journals (fuck I have like 70) and I was afraid I was out of control with drinking in 2011. When I was 23 I wrote that I didn’t want to be 30 and wasted and poor. This is what my mother would refer to as a “come to Jesus” moment. I’m kinda calling it a “have a ruined Saturday but then write about it and drink water and do yoga later” moment.  Ugh f*ck there’s another whole thing, the religious angle. 

Some people in recovery flip over and get hooked on phonics - er, hooked on Jesus. I am side-eyeing the shit out of that. I’ve prayed and meditated and the practices make me feel better but I refer to my god rather as Dear Impeccably Indifferent Universe..

Mental loops and fiery hoops can be absolutely insane. 

I have even felt pissed at my family and my closest friends. For the past few years I had been circling the drain with this addiction thing, my neuropathways were fried and frayed and whisky and beer were sabotaging my everyday life. 

I felt pissed at other people for not noticing! Well, I must have done a fantastic job masquerading as a somewhat normal person. 

I couldn’t ever have just stated, “I’m not ready to get married and I think I need to go into detox / treatment.”

Instead I just thrashed around and circled the drain and almost lost the most precious relationship I have in my life.

Why do people like me do that??

Why couldn’t I just ask for help? 

I think it’s because asking for help is so vulnerable and lame and piteous.

But making it this huge horrifying ugly emergency? I’d seriously somehow rather ruin my own life and die than ask for help? Was the downward spiral its own subconscious forcing of the issue? 

I’ve learned a lot about how to be vulnerable and honest with myself because I’ve had to.

My #1 coping mechanism is gone. Whisky and beer were there for me when I wanted to relax, cry, celebrate, chill, float the river, gain confidence to sing karaoke, fit in, whatever.

Then ten years later this past March I found myself having a grapefruit White Claw for breakfast, crazy mind rationalizing with a shrug, “I mean it’s pretty much juice..”

Whoo boy okay! I am pooped and I’ve aired it out and cried a bit. 

It’s a real thing, man.. At first and for the most part still I’m all “Hooray! Look at me I am sober! I am picking fruit in the backyard, doing great, keeping the house clean, calling my parents more!” 

..then on days like today, Day 98, the mirror reflects the horribly ugly person I was when the booze was all I felt I had. 

This is why folks are like ~cultivate good habits~. 

I can’t afford to be cynical anymore or to shrug off suggestions.. I was so busy rolling my eyes I couldn’t see the ‘right thing’ that was right in front of me.. now I’m rambling. 

Maybe I’ve been rambling this whole time. 

Again, a lot of people are private about their process and their recovery. I dig that and respect it. I’m just the other type of animal. I have to write. I have to share. I intend to keep it up as I trudge through this awful, terrifying and amazing, lovely, healthy sparkling slog of shit. 

notes on quitting... ... ...again!

So I started this blog at least one forever ago, and I started it when I was trying to quit smoking.

I am trying to quit smoking again.

I have had 9 smokes and 4 drags since May 2, six days ago. Normally I would have had at least 60 cigarettes between then and now... so I've come a long way... but I've tried and failed so many times, it feels unnatural to count on whatever optimism I may feel at any given moment.

I want to write about "whatever optimism" I've felt, because I as usual feel "really confident" about "this" attempt.

It's Friday.
Last Sunday, I had 0.
On Monday, I had 4.
On Tuesday, I had 4.
On Wednesday, I had 0.
On Thursday, I had 3 drags.
This is Friday.
I have had 1 smoke and 1 drag. I have been on yellow Spirits for many months now. I made today's One Smoke last for three light-ups, between like 9PM and 11:30PM., and just now when I put it out and it felt like too soon, I bummed a drag off my boyfriend's Parliament.

I've felt excited lately about how the occasional drags I've had have made me feel light-headed and woozy-weird.

I spent almost $8 on a big box of 120 dum-dum pops, which seemed like a stupid expense at the time until I remembered I was spending almost $8 on 20 cigarettes every two or three days. Wowza.

I haven't had a cigarette while driving for almost a week. Cutting out *that* smoke is imperative, important.

I have set a date for nixing smokes altogether: May 22.

Between now and then, I have allowed roughly a week of "less-than-five" and a week of "less-than-one".

I have done well so far and "this time" I feel more optimistic than ever.

I'm sick of smoking, and sick of quitting, and sick of guilt...

...and in many moments recently, during the days I've survived without any cigarettes, I have felt a peculiar clarity. Call it nicotine withdrawal, or whatever, but it's been a remarkable, *FRANTIC* clarity: like I observe the world around me through a bizarrely Present Hi-Def.

The trees here in Missoula bearing their new leaves look greener than they did a week ago.

I save myself from wanting to smoke in the car by flipping the radio station constantly or by listening to CDs I can't help but sing along to.

I harbor about a million separate, private fears, since I have failed at every other attempt to quit smoking.

...but there's, I'm sure of it....

... I'm sure there's something about this quitting.

There's something about quitting this time.

...Something, because this time, I am approaching ten years.

A decade in the garbage can.

Ten years smoking cigarettes.

I can look back and remember the day, the circumstance, the car, the lighter, the street, the feeling.

I was 17. I was with my best friend for-seemingly-forever. She was 16. She had been smoking for a while, and so had all our other friends, but I had 'held out'.

I was seeing some guy, and this day in the late summer of 2005 something had gone abruptly, terribly, horribly wrong, and I still can't write about it without feeling squeamish. Let's just say, if anybody needed or wanted or was desperately searching for a reason to light up and deeply inhale a cigarette, I had one on that day.


We were in my friend's burgundy Honda sedan, headed out from her mom's house and we had crossed her suburban street and were headed across another suburban street in our small VA town. This street was about a block in length, and I remember finishing my story of the day's horror and demanding of her, with a defeated sigh, "Gimme a cigarette."

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Yes."

I was.

That was in the mid-late summer of 2005.
It's May of 2015 now, and I just turned 27, and I am livid about having become yet another slave to the tobacco companies...

They caught me when I was young.
That's where and how they catch everybody. I'm sure of it.
I was 17, starting to get into The Pixies, and Wilco and Fugazi, and Jane's Addiction, and I was 17, and nothing could touch me, and I was free, and I could drive a car now, and I was hot, and I was well-read, and I had big ideas, and I was smart, and I was never going to get older or smarter than I was already.





.......................well, now I am 27, and I want to snatch my life back away from The Cigarette and reclaim it as my own. It's astonishing, how pathetic one can feel when embarking upon the odyssey that is quitting smoking.
It's awful. It's like everything that you have ever known turns into something impossible.

How am I supposed to drive without a cigarette?
How am I supposed to get through a phone call to my mom or dad?
How am I supposed to sit outside with my late-morning coffee on a Saturday?
How am I supposed to celebrate a good song that I love?
How am I supposed to step outside of a bar where a good band is playing alt-rock?
How am I supposed to
How am I supposed to
How am I supposed to
How am I supposed to
                                      quit
                                                smoking
                                                                my
                                                                       regular
                                                                                    beloved
                                                                                                  phenomenal
                                                                                                                     cigarettes?




I have many ideas to try to help myself, because I need help, as do all addicts trying to nix the nicotine.


1: Be Better Than Everyone.

This one is harsh, but sometimes tough love works. Think: Everyone that's dicked me over, been a total irresponsible roommate / lover / friend / general douchebag. They all smoked cigarettes. Be even better than them by succeeding in quitting.

2: Feel Innocent, Accept Life

Colors are brighter, breaks from work are more serene, and little every-day moments spent in the Present are experienced with such clarity that I feel almost frantic while experiencing them without cigarettes. Smokes just rip me away from the purity of life.

3: Remember Being Small

When I was a kid and my dad was my idol, I was furious with him for smoking. When I was about 10, it was the afternoon at his house in rural VA and he was taking a nap after work. I knew where he hid his carton of cigarettes. I opened an entire pack, split open every cigarette, and dumped the tobacco onto a paper plate. I woke him from his nap proudly announcing that I had prepared dinner. He was bewildered and happy and came to the table to find the contents of 20 precious cigarettes split open and spread out on a paper plate.

4: Love Yer Own Damn Self

I want to respect myself, love myself, cherish myself, help myself.
Remaining addicted to cigarettes makes these things impossible.
In order to respect, love, cherish, and help myself, I have no choice but to do so by nixing cigarettes. Smoking only fuels the negative in my life. As a smoker, I don't respect myself. I'm guilty. In part, I hate myself. In part, I am embarrassed to be who I am. I don't help myself. I hurt myself. I am aware of this. I know that this has to change. The only way it can change is if I quit smoking.

5: duh

Smoking is bad for you. Bad bad bad bad bad bad bad.

Not smoking is like being an angel. Good good good good good good good.








I have been a guilty smoker for a long time.
Many people I know just light up on the sidewalk. I can't do that with a clear conscience. I mean, if it's 1AM and it's just the bar crowd prowling the streets with little coherency, I can deal... but if it's 4 in the afternoon and I have a lit cigarette and I see a man with his 6 year old daughter walking toward me, I will feel like a horrible person.


Yeah I care what people think, and maybe that's not really a good thing, but also maybe I don't want to be a smoker.
When I was a kid I saw adults smoking and instantly thought "EW!!!!"
Now, when I am an adult and smoking and I happen to see a kid nearby or half a block away, I think "ew!!!" toward myself. I feel their pending disgust. I try to hide my cigarette - fold it behind my hand, my hip, but kids see everything. I don't want little kids to see me that way. I see myself as that little kid and I see myself as an adult smushing out a cigarette butt and tossing it into a garbage can or ashtray and I see my lungs as they strain to inhale the smoke that my brain has been fooled into believing is necessary.....

...and I'm pissed.

....and quitting makes me irritable and even more pissed, but I'll get over it......
....god dammit.....



Why is it that smoking CIGARETTES is legal but smoking POT isn't!?!?!?!

and on a purely random note, Why is SALVIA legal at all?????!?!

why why why why why why WHY!?!?!


...whatever.
Hello, dum-dums.

Hello, interior superiority complex. I will use you to help myself quit smoking.

Be better.

Whatever it takes.

Whatever it takes.

that luxurious chardonnay lasted two hours

"I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love."  ...on the picnic table outside Kip's.

I'm with a man who gets drunk and quotes poetry on a picnic table with a red Sharpie he keeps in the kitchen uniform he's worn straight from work to the bar. Life is good.

I want to be alone and not surrounded by tourists or coworkers, so 4PM finds me at the bar I left just 14 hours ago.
Caught up with my sister earlier. From her concerned words I could easily gather that the whole family is worried about me. Sometimes, I worry too, but most of the time I live happily an exhilarated life.
At 26, if I were to be hit by a dumb tourist looking for elk in his Escalade, on my bike broken and bleeding out on the Sun Road half a mile from Rising, I suspect I would feel content with the life I'd chosen to live. I don't ever wish I had stayed at home studying political science, going to frat parties and meticulously selecting nailpolish at the CVS.

Quoth Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, "Slippin' and slidin', hey life's a rollerball."

That there is such ignorance and illiteracy in this country baffles me. Y'know, how people like text each other from the same room while they're both in it? Yeah.

Living in MT for so long now has made me feel like I'm becoming more authentic all the time. Practical. Down to earth, with less and less patience for trivial bullshit despite my naturally patient demeanor... Cut to the chase, don't be an idiot, leave me be if I ask you to.

The east coast is hell on my psyche after so much Montana, and while I look back romantically on my years in Austin I don't think I'd go back to stay.


So my family's worried about me, but I'm perfectly alright up here.
I think they've just had a hard time watching me slip away. For 15 months now I've been entirely out of their reach - not an hour's drive away, but 2500 miles away. I've had some serious hardships but I've been learning more than I ever expected to, and blossoming this summer into something really Content.

Missoula is a beautiful little city, and working in Glacier is a phenomenal way to spend the summer - are you kidding? I've made solid, good friendships, met such a kind (and smokin' hot) man, and I could turn a corner and see a bear at any given moment.
I relish in the moments I come to remember where I live, and how, relative to the 9-to-5ers posting on Facebook about their new washer/dryer. I don't mean to come across like an asshole - there are plenty of times when I want a more secure setup. I've just been hitting the gas and feeling defiant for about 8 years now - shifting around every 4-8 months or so. I can't recall my old address in San Antonio - sometimes I forget that I even lived there.

Quoth The Beatles:
"Oh that magic feeling - nowhere to go."

SO! Writing workshops.

bleah!

here's this thing I just dug up from the bowels of my computer, illustrating a little of the dark, dear bloggery...!  I don't always feel this way, I don't even often get down and out like this, but nonetheless.. whatever.. here's some whiny shit.




I think I am becoming a nihilist, if I’m not incidentally one already.

I manage to make a few plans and I manage to follow through with a few of them.

It’s 2014, the fucking world is terminal.

I am part of what’s called the human race. I am a sickness, and I am waiting around to die. I consume almost without much restraint. If I can get it, I will. If I can eat it, if I can drink it, drive it, use it, turn it on, smoke it, wear it, throw it away, I will. Oh don’t worry I drink a lot of water, too, and I have a bagel every morning, and I brush my teeth at least twice a day. I drive a car. I eat frozen pizzas but I buy the ones that seem healthier. Like sometimes the way a product is packaged? Makes it look healthier?

I want it to be the ‘50s, I want to be a housewife who writes and gets published sometimes, with a professor husband, and I want to make meals and clean up and live modestly.

It’s 2014.

Of course all I want to do is listen to music, read nonfiction, drink alone, stare at my face in the mirror and pluck blackheads from my nose with my thumbnail, be judgmental, project my flip-side winning and emotionally mature personality, marvel at how I manage to go about the daily routine, how I manage to do anything at all. 

April Skies

Took one of my spontaneous drives today. They're becoming a weekly tradition.
This time, a first! Drove 45 minutes east on I-90 to stop in the tiny town of Drummond for a coffee + Milky Way bar before turning back.
Followed the Clark Fork and the railroad. Passed the entrance to a railroad tunnel and when I saw clear thru it, I saw a green light on the signal beyond, and the lamps of a BNSF locomotive approaching further down the line.

Passed by an old dilapidated homestead - tiny house, old dark wood, weathered + abandoned - in a high valley near the Sapphire Mountains. The river was across the Interstate from the house but it didn't used to be...
I let loose my imagination and luxuriated in the thought of a small family of frontierspeople, pushing west - west - West - West -West - West, and coming to that one little spot, and the pioneer husband, the pioneer father, he stops and puts his hands on his hips and absorbs his surroundings, says something like "House right there, barn over there," and nods slowly.
I pretended that I-90 wasn't there even though I was driving 75mph on it, and I tried to see the land as it was so recently virgin - even 150 years ago.
I had to reel my wandering perception in for the crazy weather as I approached Drummond - high cross-winds from the north, and blowing sleet.
The tiny town looked like a typical Montanan tiny-town. Hardware store, saloon, one or two little cafes, and anti-meth messages painted on old buildings.

Going back toward Missoula the weather over the pass had become more exciting. My iPod shuffled to "Life In A Northern Town" by the Dream Academy, one of my favorite guilty pleasures, and produced by David Gilmour so don't hate! Hard wind swirling bands of big snowflakes coming down, blowing horizontally, swooping diagonally. It was so beautiful to drive through such dramatic weather - temperature plummeting, a freak fast and short-lived April snowstorm up in the mountains somewhere northwest of Anaconda.. like Winter knows it's dying but has enough desperate energy to spasm and wreak havoc briefly over Granite County.
Jaw dropped, eyes opened wide, the fluttering flakes flew in a grey frenzy against the stark sky, obscuring the mountains all around my little car, rolling swiftly sideways, & my breath was taken, & I turned up the volume for that song, & today's braided pigtails were worn with pride.

Springtime in Montana is here!

I didn't know, couldn't tell how much I was going to love it.
I ended my previous journal with the final dozen-or-so pages left blank. That journal was bleak and it ended well with winter's curtain call. Whup-de-f*ing Do. Bra-vo.

My new journal is ROBIN'S EGG BLUE!! and the sky above today was blue... and my sweater is periwinkle... and my bike is blue.
That's right, dear diary, my bike is here.
Saturday I dropped it off at the shop around the corner.
Picked it up yesterday evenin' and pedaled home - walked back for my car. It was perfect.
So as soon as I drove home from collecting the Beefmobile, I went on a ride around town. Aaahhh.
I did it again today after work despite a ten-hour shift.

All the way from Austin, my bike!
I got it (and its tune-ups) at Clown Dog... San Jacinto at 30th St maybe... and it became my best friend. We got to know each other at the house on Brookdale, on the east side. Over I-35 on 51st, down Duval toward Hyde Park where I worked.
We were together on Tisdale.
The studio on Woodrow. <3 Dozens of days of triple-digit temperatures. Parking at Spider House and stumbling in to the bathroom, shedding earbuds and sunglasses, to towel the sweat off my face and neck.
...Then two years ago, Glacier happened. I left my bike in CandEban's garage. I worked in MT, got a car in VA over the winter, and worked in MT again.

Just now I endured a long, cold, lonely winter (indeed, George Harrison) but, yes! here comes the sun!
and my bike is in Montana!
It's learning Missoula! We're watchful of rogue potholes!
For the first time I can coast through residential neighborhoods and look up to Mt Sentinel and Mt Jumbo, or to the Bitterroot Range when I turn westward to come home.

The crepe myrtles and grackles are down in TX.
Up here it's lodgepole pines and a skyline of mountains.

...and in June, my bike will be with me at Rising Sun. We'll be on Going-to-the-Sun Road together. Man oh man.

I'm beginning my 56th journal the opposite of how my last one began. This one? I'm remembering to number it for Chrissake, I'm beginning it happily and I'm single and it's not about to be winter; it's the very onset of spring. I do not feel stuck in any way - I feel free. I do not feel stumped, I feel thankful and I feel that good ol' "creative perception" kicking in again.

So now, again, I can make every day into a work of art by being open and happy, and able to embrace appreciation.

I'm not in a cluttered, boozey, dank basement apartment crying 3x/week because I can't believe the relationship I'd believed in turned out to be such a waste of time.

Things are looking up!
This is good.

blizzard March 2 snowed in fer days

It's a monumental day in a number of ways:

Julie and I got out of the house for like four hours! We walked to the mall! We walked around IN the mall! We sat down to a lovely lunch!

It was cold but pleasant to plod single-file down the game trail of pedestrian tracks down Johnson St... sidewalks, curbs still totally invisible. As above, so below -- the sky and ground matched starkly white all day and still do. The opaque strip of the visible world seemed powerless to wear any colors today. Even the red car I see across the street now looks grey.

It was 11:15 when we made it to the parking lot of the South Gate Mall -- desolate, a VW Beetle parked apparently for days, covered in a foot of snow. We approached one of the ends of the mall, so all we could see was the bleakness of the great brown wall with its humongous letters spelling out, "Dillard's".

As we walked ever-nearer, I stared up at it, and felt the great windowless box of retail looming over us. We were walking up crunchingly across the lot, and it was very quiet, and I was amazed and thrilled by the post-apocalyptic mood of the whole scene.

Julie & I shared nervous laughter as we approached the main doors around the corner.

Soon, and IN we were, and it was juxtaposition to the extreme. Suddenly there were regular people milling about all around us, with babies and old folks in tow, juggling their DQ soda cups and shopping bags, and carrying on just as if the world outside hadn't already ended.

My new bestie and I exchanged glances that may be exchanged before people step off a ledge with bungee cord equipment tied to their ankles.
First item of business: Find a bench and un-bundle. Gloves, scarves, hats, coats.

We are not people who go to the mall, but we've been snowed in for three days, and it's the only thing within walking distance in this cold. We're people who make thrift-shop rounds. Malls are full of Top-40 music, aggressive sales associates, bedazzled kiosks, and the types of consumers that nearly incited panic attacks within me when I was twenty.
64-oz Diet Pepsi, the sort of consumers who truly believe that, "The more you spend, the more you $ave!"

For the first few minutes the sensory overload was apparent, but we were determined to enjoy ourselves and try to shrug off the sense that we were in a zoo. "People go shopping at the mall. That's what we're doing. We are people."

First: A big shop full of randoms! Horribly cheap, creepy clothing. Montana-themed gifts. Lots of cool kitchen stuff in the back.
Potato peeler. Garlic press. Grater.
Postcards of Missoula for the fam'.

Alright, we can do this!

We'd approach a shop and squint. "Do you want to check it out?"
"I dunno if I should. Maybe. Do you?"
"Meh, I dunno, I guess."

My inner 15-year-old giggled at the sight of Wet Seal, and it was so full of ultra-cheap fun crap on Super-Sale, I found myself leaving with a hat and a floral crop-tip.

Trying on various dresses was the best idea of the day -- I haven't seen myself in anything but layers for months. I've been bundled up and thanks to how my recent relationship disintegrated, I've felt my usual Zip and Zap reduced to more Meh and Bleh.

Summertime is COMING! and I am still allowed to be FOXY! Can't wait to unearth the bicycle and tie the laces on a new pair of purple Vans.

I had a great time feeling 25 in the some stores. I have absolutely no clue what the "Kids These Days" care about in 2014. It made me chuckle.

Then I walked past the Coldwater Creek shop and half-cringed. Julie and I had the exact same thought: We've thrifted their clothes plenty of times, but can't bring ourselves to set foot in there.

We ate at The Mustard Seed which wound up being GREAT. They even had a vegan/GF dessert option. We gorged on delicious food brought to us by a real, live Server. So much more grand and appealing than our dissolving supply of rations at the house. I think both of us were tired of opening the cupboards at home after the long weekend.

Marveled at the thought: This, for both of us, was the first time either of us as adults had "chosen to go Shopping At The Mall," without a Mom or a family-venture involved.

We spent a surprisingly long time at the Gap rummaging through sale stuff, and I got a great periwinkle sweater.

"Recessionista Chic," indeed.

We walked home quietly. It was a good excursion.




How else is today monumental?




Matt returns to Kalispell.

Flipping thru the previous journal for a moment earlier, we had SO MANY issues. He was horrible, and living with that brought out the worst in me. I barely wrote, didn't call my parents the way I usually do, I slept way too late, and got so depressed I quit my job.

From June to December, I held on to what I 'knew' of Matt from last summer and last winter. I held on to June '12 thru May '13... and June '13 thru Jan. '14 were, let's get real now: Disastrous.

I wanted him to be .. who he made himself out to be .. but none of that person really existed.

He was a different person, and I couldn't believe it. I kept vigorously shaking my head, blinking my eyes, blinking again, and repeating -- trying to shake myself out of the nightmare of a relationship that was... actually a nightmare.

Of course I'm doomed to be empathetic forever so I hope he'll be OK, and well, but I can guarantee he's incapable of feeling that way about me, or about anyone, because he doesn't have real feelings.

People may disagree with that statement and think I'm being a twat, but it's a valid statement. He "thinks he feels how he thinks he should feel" about any given situation. I know this because I spent every waking moment by his side for 8 months, which in retrospect were the most confusing, grueling, agitating, stunning and heartbreaking 8 months of my life.

Guess I'm still learning! Yippee for that..

That relationship... It was like I won the lottery,
but the prizes wound up being not worth anything, and even though I still felt congratulated, I'd go to bed at night with Nothing, and I kept thinking its value would increase, but zero times millions is still zero.

Quoth my big sister: "Make him the last loser you ever date."