At 3:43AM I woke to the percussion of clinking glasses and raucous laughter seeping through the too-thin walls of my neighbour’s house. Sometimes I suspect it is an Airbnb. I hear unfamiliar voices while tending to my herb garden, and I have noticed the strange, inconsistent kaleidoscope of lighting, shifting with each new set of guests. But at 3AM on a Sunday night, with workers and students hours away from their alarms, is it really time for a party? Or am I just becoming old, intolerant, brittle?
“Don’t go to bed mad” only makes sense if you share a bed or a kitchen with the people you argued with. Alone, it is better to sleep. Half the time when I am angry I do not even mean it. My brain just wants friction, something to gnaw at. If I stay too long on the phone with my mother her voice sharpens into icicles, each word stinging. She complains that I never call, then complains that I do, accusing me of “wasting her time,” and then squanders the call narrating the ragebait she finds on X. I remind myself to call only when I need money, or when I need something within her domain of expertise. She claims she has been “inspired” by my dumbphone experiment, though I know she will not last. Anger is her favourite fuel; it keeps her moving.
Without scrolling, my brain begins to stretch in directions I had kept sealed. Things I avoided return in sharper colours. I think of the GP last year, visibly orthorexic, who interrogated me about exercise after I strained an abdominal muscle deadlifting. She was slick, irritable, snapping like a bad-tempered turtle. My father calls her his “favourite doctor,” recommended her to me with enthusiasm. I could not fathom why. Luckily, I am rarely sick. Insomnia, perhaps, or the slow erosion of enamel, but nothing that yet threatens to undo me.
Perhaps Noble Hills is losing its novelty, or perhaps I am simply restless. Yesterday I wandered the new road. All I found was a picnic spot that might hold for a month before houses and cars arrive. I liked it better when it belonged to the landscape, not waiting for nature to reclaim what it already owned. Still, my updated DAP carried me with its stack of 70s and 80s tracks. The radio continues to feed me new things, especially from the stranger frequencies. Lately I have been drifting between Arctic Outpost AM1270 and Ambient Sleeping Pill based in NJ.
I bought a pack of chicken kievs, which I oven baked last night, and the quality of the chicken was so abysmal I gagged at the point where flesh and gristle met. I had meant to eat them over the week, but I do not think I can stomach another. I also do not want to waste money by throwing them out. I do not know what is going on with supermarkets, if they are cutting corners, but I do not even want to think about what is wrong with the chicken itself. At least I have some frozen meal prep I can microwave, and a stack of tuna cans. I will work it out.
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Ishamel
grandpa needs his sleep <3