Large Chocolate Mocha Lattes Help.

The price one pays for refusing to have one big fracking breakdown is that one ends up breaking down just a little everyday. I have to wonder if I don’t do it on purpose, though. Perhaps when grief is all you have left, it becomes imperative to hang onto the grief just a little bit.

It isn’t enough enough to freeze me in place. Not enough to intrude on the daily imperatives. Not enough to wear as an armband alerting the world to that special little dark hole I carry within. Just enough stab through the heart when I drop my guard. Just enough so I drop a beat, flatline just a moment, and then gasp for air when the world surrounding me fails to pause for my petite mort, forcing a form of self-CPR to jump start me into the new reality again.

All this over a cat.

Interesting. When I learned the term “petite mort” it meant something quite different from what it has come to mean now. I leave the term in this post simply because the archaic meaning fits better than any other term I know, and because all I can do is give kudos to anyone who knows the current meaning anyhow.

Not unlike Cool Hand Luke, I’m kept from going too rabbit by my own little solitary box of work. We’ve hit the time of year where I need to work hard to keep the work-weeks under 60 hours. I’ve put in my personal record for this job of a 14 hour day a few weeks ago, but most days are a minimum of 11+ hours. There is no down-time on the job, so I am solidly consumed by work while on the job, making the days go quickly. I have an hour between getting up and leaving for work in the morning, and about three hours between getting home again and going to bed, so work at home is accumulating.

Much of that accumulation has been mitigated by the fact that we are doing a few massive home improvement projects at the moment, which prevents anything from having a chance to build up on visible surfaces. I tell myself that just so long as I don’t lose the bills, it doesn’t matter where I stuff things at the moment. If I need them, I’ll find them. If I don’t, it doesn’t matter where they are. I’ll pay for my lack of vision eventually, but it’s getting me through right now.

This morning I’ve escaped the house to a small, unaffiliated coffee house near my home. It used to be part of the Saxby’s coffee house chain, but went independent this summer. It cheaped out by changing its name to “Abyss”, so they didn’t need to buy new sign letters for the storefront but merely rearrange the ones they had. The owner is a Trump supporter, but I’m following a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about that. I’ve already stopped going to the local tea room because the owner (a childhood friend) didn’t grok the concept of separating politics from business. I’d hate to lose my coffee house as well, but so far all is well. I’m keeping my fingers crossed because they make a fine chocolate mocha latte.