Another Visit to the Whinery

I think I’m slowly going insane.

Oh, I joke about it.  But, what if? What if I’m actually nuts and I just don’t know it because… gasp…  I can’t hear the voices? (All I hear is tinnitus.)

Hey, at least I would be something. Not just an automaton going through the motions. I don’t even have drama.  Which is… good? 

It’s good. I know it’s good. You don’t know how good you’ve had it until it runs straight into a telephone pole and explodes, which is pretty much everyone says about 2020. It’s good. I’m just bored.

There. I said it. I am bored. I hate admitting it, because the adage is that only boring people get bored, which makes me, by extension, boring. Which is a horrible thing to be.  Not that I aspire to be an unstoppable whirlwind of constant activity, but slowly  a miasma of sameness has somehow settled onto everything like dust, the way soot from a firewood stove gets burned so indelibly into the bottom of a pan, no amount of scouring will ever  fully take it away.  My summer has consisted of grocery store runs and a road trip for ice cream in a heatwave so intense, I tried writing about it and stopped midway because I got dehydrated.  (We went to Picton, a picturesque little town in Prince Edward County, which has a lot going for it – wines, gourmet food, art, and the best ice cream you will ever find in the province. This is ice cream so good you will willingly suffer a two and a half hour drive both ways just to go and have it; this time around, suffer was the operative word.)

I’m just going to have to accept that I am not the right audience for road trips. I’ve only ever had three that will live on in memory: the first, a late October journey into the mountainous heart of Alberta with my friend Karen, right before she gave birth and I lost her forever to a precocious little girl; the second, a June trip to the tip of Tobermory and the crystal blue waters of the Georgian Bay; the last, a Holy Week escape to Bantayan Island as the token girl in an all-male training team. Everything else has been meh.

I can’t bear having yet another visit to the grocery store double for an escape, I just can’t. The constant heatwaves aren’t helping. Last week, I made a quick run to the neighbouring Filo store for victuals and broke out in a heat rash. I was barely out for more than fifteen minutes! It’s bad. It isn’t just the virus that’s kept me indoors, it’s our closest star, too.  The heatwaves have driven me indoors (and driven me mad) since July.  Sunlight, blech. What can I say, I was a naked mole rat in my past life.

It’s all this hideous ennui – which frustrates me, because how dare I succumb to something as innocuous as ennui? This is not my usual time for clawing at the walls. No, I save this build-up of quiet, semi-hysterical sort of swirling, inner insanity for the last days of winter, when I’m feeling trapped by all the enforced hibernation, but we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto. We’ve left Kansas so far behind it’s barely a blip. The “new normal,” according to my friend Gail. They should just call it new. There’s nothing normal about it.