Got to be birds flying higher

I slept eight hours last night.

Eight hours!

Now I'm thinking the shoulder pain that was keeping me awake was not a statin side effect at all, but some kind of reaction to hyperextension that happened when I tried to grab something at a weird angle while I was lying down.

Anyway, it's resolving.

###

And I wrote 500 words on the opening of Chapter 7.

Five hundred words!

I'm thinking the deal with Daria is that she deliberately mistranslates testimony in a court trial, although her exact motivation and the details of that court trial are hazy at the moment.

The voice that's emerging is quite distinct from Grazia's voice. More formal and reflective. Cooler. More analytical.

So, that's a good thing, too.

###

Meanwhile, we are back at war with Eastasia.

What am I talking about?

We have always been at war with Eastasia!

It is impossible to have any sympathy for a murderous mullah who executed anywhere between 7,000 to 40,000 Iranian protesters between January 8th and January 10th of this year.

Nevertheless, I am completely opposed to American interference in what's essentially another sovereign nation's civil war, and I don't want to spend $5 for a gallon of gas.

Plus, of course, the Iran War is a classic wag-the-dog maneuver designed to distract the American public from the fact that the Department of Justice redacted all mentions of Trump's name from the Epstein files.

Disinformation aplenty is aflowin'. But my favorite factoid is that the Trump administration, despite telling Americans stranded in Dubai and Bahrain, Get out, get out, get out! Get out NOW, is refusing to provide them with any State Separtment-mediated assistance. That's my boy, The Donald!

I can't wait for the flood of influencer TikToks: Here's how to escape from Dubai! It's eZeeee! And you can do it, too!

When I mentioned to Ichabod that I was scheduled to work at Schlock every day between now and April 15, he told me, "You can't do that. That's absolutely insane," and began talking to me about self-care.

He's wrong: I absolutely can do that.

But he's also right: It is insane.

Thing is "self-care" is kind of an alien concept to me. New Age fluffle. I mean, my idea of self-care involves eating a gallon of coffee ice cream and vegging out for 12 hours straight to Season 3 of The Gilmore Girls. Which any therapist worth his/her salt would characterize as "self-destruction."

But when I woke up this morning, I absolutely did not want to go into the office. Even before it began to snow! So I called in sick.

That's self-care, right?

I was surprised to feel a twinge of bona fide guilt when I called in. Because Schlock doesn't care if I show up in their office or not. To Schlock, I am simply another ass in an office chair. I have no actual supervisor.

I make my life harder than it needs to be.

###

The work itself is not difficult.

I actually enjoy doing taxes. Doing taxes is not so very different from reading someone's tarot cards.

Yesterday, for example, I got to counsel a 75-year-old woman whose 50-year marriage had suddenly fallen apart.

"Has your husband filed yet?" I grilled her.

Her husband, still living in what was the family home, pays property taxes, mortgage interest, etc. The woman had never taken the slightest interest in the family taxes but had some vague notion they had always itemized.

"See, the thing is, if you're married filing separately, you both need to use the same type of deductions," I told her. "So if he itemizes his deductions, you'll have to as well. Except you don't have as much to itemize. So, you'll have a smaller deduction to protect you against tax liability if he files first and itemizes. Whereas if you file first, you can use the standard deduction, which for you is $17,250—"

Is that so hard to understand?

I didn't think so, but she had a hard time following my logic.

She wanted to do was to talk about what an absolute prick her husband was.

And, of course, I wanted to talk about that too! Girlfriend! He did what with his secretary? And she's how old? Does his secretary not understand that Viagra script or no Viagra script, he's essentially recruiting her to change his Depends?

Except talking about the piggish X was not what this woman was paying me to do.

###

Most of the time, though, I do absolutely nothing.

I am getting paid for it!

But sitting in that office day after day puts me in a Mood.

All I am is a drone, I think darkly. Nothing about me is vibrant or interesting. I've led a bleak life, entirely bereft of the intimacies and adventures that characterize other people's lives.

This is making it very hard for me to interact in a positive way with other people right now.

Like on the phone with real-life Daria the other night, I found myself hugely turned off.

She's Anaïs Nin! Everything she says is pretentious and self-serving. By strength of personal magnetism, she has managed to construct a world in which she is forever the consummate objet du desir; it's the one constant in her life: Everybody wants me!

She uses people! She picks them up by the wing! She tells them, You fascinate me! I want to know everything about you!

Then she drops them.

I was consumed with envy!

This is not an accurate assessment of real-life Daria, whom I don't know all that well, but who's never been anything but 100% supportive, open, and affectionate toward me. No, I was projecting my own negative mood onto Daria.

But even understanding that, it was impossible for me to shake the negativity.

Anyway, the real-life Daria biographical details are not enough to center Part II around. Her relationship with Brian turns out to be not so very different than my relationship with Brian. Closer, definitely. More physical: They slept in the same bed when they visited one another. They cuddled. He would spend hours stroking her back, which was one of the single most thrilling physical experiences she could ever remember; she dissolved in the touch of his fingers trailing down her spine.

But their explicitly sexual relationship ended after the first year or so.

Periodically, over the course of the 35-year friendship, they would try to have sex again from time to time.

But it never quite took.

So, I can't use "sex" as the Big Theme in Part II.

I'm gonna have to come up with a whole fresh subtext as well as a plot.

Sigh...