thorne_scratch

Thought I should change up the end of the year Mountain Goats song. I rather liked listing ten good things that happened last year at my usual NYE wrap up, so I thought I'd try that again.

( Ten good things that happened in 2025Collapse )

It's been a rough year. My purse was stolen. Raccoons invaded my house. House flooded again. I'm losing my goddamn hair. My cousin died. My uterus has gone goddamn haywire. I'm getting caretaker burnout. Watching my mother's memory get worn away like a rock in a river is taking a toll on me. I hate how easily I can get angry and annoyed now with her even though it's the disease's fault, not hers. I hate how I can never be alone. But I'm incredibly afraid of missing or wasting time with my mother, even though her health is better than it was right after my father died. I worry about how much worse it can get. I feel so... like I'm unlearning stuff, and I'm too afraid to do things I would have before. Like a butterfly reverting back into a cocoon and caterpillar stage, or some shit. I worry that I'm losing my memory.

Sometimes the kids want to be cuddled, though, and they come to me for it, and I can kiss the tops of their heads and smell their hair. Sometimes the winter sunsets are incredibly beautiful. Sometimes I can wander through apple orchards with my friends and eat kettle corn and laugh, or through cider festivals, or beaches, or parks. Sometimes my sports teams win. Sometimes I can smell honeysuckle in my mother's backyard during the spring. Sometimes the fireflies are so thick in the trees that it looks like Christmas lights. Sometimes I eat a perfect peach. Sometimes I'm driving down the ICC and I see the phone tower that is (badly)n disguised as a tree and it makes me smile because of how much my dad loved that damn thing and pointed it out whenever we went by. Sometimes I hear a song on the radio that Louise loved and I remember something from college that I haven't thought of in a long time. Sometimes someone leaves a really nice set of tags on something I post on tumblr. Sometimes I take a nap with the window open in spring and I wake up while it's still light out.

One of these years, it's going to be a good year.

Happy Year Year, everybody. See you on the flip side.

It's the brief, glorious season of peonies here, an underrated time.

( Spring's rich pageantry, or somethingCollapse )

The universe did throw me some small pleasures as well, today: I got to nap for nearly two hours, and there were about ten perfect strawberries on my wild strawberry plants. That was nice. I wanted to eat all of them myself in one decadent handful, but filial guilt made me take them back to my mother and share half of them.

Chicks are hopefully coming at the end of May. I'm trying to get in the habit of creating things to look forward to.

I don't think I can use the "Year XXXX will be my villain origin story!" quip again, because I'm pretty sure I've used it in... 2014, 2016, and 2023 at the very least. But it might be the newest narrative arc of my villain story? 2024 was not as bad as 2023 in that getting shot in the knee isn't as bad as getting shot in the face, but it was still sub-optimal. It would be nice to start one of these with something positive for once, instead of "wow that year sucked" so I'm thinking real hard about what I can put down here.

( Ten good things that happened in 2024Collapse )

Bonus: Just remembered my youngest nephew going batshit happy when I got him the right Paw Patrol truck this Christmas and running over to hug me spontaneously. Inject that into my veins, man.

I had some bad nights this year, where I lay awake and wondered if it was worth being alive. Never for more than a little while, and never with any real worrisome actions in mind; more of a complete inability to think of anything that was making me happy or worth caring about. Then, something fairly significant happened that wiped away one of my biggest problems with basically no repercussions to me. It was jaw-droppingly amazing how my state of mind improved. It's not a permanent fix, but it kept me from getting much worse. So, it's something to take with me into 2025-- sometimes you do get help when you don't expect or hope for it. And that's pretty good, isn't it?

Happy Year Year, everybody. See you on the flip side.

Louise died on 4/20. I used to wonder if she got some sort of post-life personal satisfaction from that; I hope so, because you'd like someone to get some kind of benefit from it. Last year my dad died on 6/9, so now I've been wondering if it's just a thing in my life where the people close to me are going to keep dying on meme-related memorable dates. If I had a nickel every time, etc. etc. And I mean, I hope not, but it's something I'm keeping a wary eye on.

( A little bit about Louise, a little bit about raccoons and other animal issuesCollapse )

Anyway. Speaking of animal life in the house, next week I get the ducklings in from the farm rental for my nephews and niece. Ducks come first this year; the chicks come in June. I'm looking forward to it, not only because I like baby ducks, but because my youngest nephew loves baby ducks. I have a video that I once shot of letting him see them in the box for the first time, and it's one of the purest examples of childish joy and wonder and surprise I've ever seen. I rewatch it whenever I need cheering up. Expect far too many pictures.

2023 was an annus horribilis, or possibly just an anus. I can't think of a damn positive thing to say about it. I can't think of anything about it in broad strokes except all the shit that happened! Most of the last six months are just awkwardly compartmentalized away in some dark and spider-ridden part of my brain; at some point I'm going to have to look at and deal with them, but that's a job for 2024 Thorne, I guess.

I can think of plenty of ways next year can be just as bad, if not worse, so I'm just going to hope for better.

Happy Year Year, everybody. See you on the flip side.

To start off, I had NOTHING to do with Pope Benedict dying. I want to make that clear from the beginning. But it made me think about how that lady tackled him at Mass, and how when telling me that story, I learned about the Swiss Guard playing pickup basketball with the Legionaries of Christ.

thornescratch: I'll always remember standing in the Vatican garden outside his funny little office tower thing
thornescratch: Looking up at the open window
thornescratch: And wondering if he could kill me with lasers for having improper thoughts in the Vatican
thornescratch: Also my cousin telling me about how he and some of the other priest candidates sometimes played shirts and skins pick up basketball with the Swiss Guard and wondering what he thought of that
thornescratch: My cousin I mean
thornescratch: Not the pope
thornescratch: Though I'm sure if the pope played shirts and skins pick up basketball the Swiss Guard would let him win
thornescratch: Maybe they would have been obligated to help him dunk
thornescratch: Like all those dudes Putin plays hockey against
thornescratch: Diving out of the way whenever he shoots

Now that we have that out of the way.

When I opened lj to write my tradition NYE entry, I found saved text from my last draft that I hadn't posted, which was about Louise's mother dying. Which happened back in February. So you can see how often I've been opening lj. It was not unexpected, and in retrospect, this made her last conversation with me make sense. She wanted me to take a lot of crystal and china. I already have, like, four different sets of crystal and China from various people (including her) but she talked about how much it would mean to her to know it was still in use and to maybe come by and eat off it with me, and. Like. I'm not a monster. So I said yes.

When I went to the wake, I had my inevitable run-in with Louise's aunt. Lot more weeping this time. Same funeral home as before. The next time I go there will either be for Louise's father or Mike's mother, though I don't know if there'll be anyone left to notify me; Mike probably will. The funeral was the next day, and I spent most of it being polite to people I only ever see at funerals. This includes one of Louise;s high school friends who is now a grandmother, and finding out that bit of knowledge and knowing we were the same age took me out at the knees. Louise's aunt cried on me some more. I'm still bad at being comforting, so I tried to make her feel better by eating a lot of the weird sweetened wheat dish you get at Bulgarian funerals; no one was eating it and she seemed distraught by this. Since there is no mayo in it, this was not as difficult as when I had to eat potato salad for Louise's mom, but it was a lot of wheat. One must do what they can, though. And I left the funeral full of boiled wheat and with several boxes of crystal/china, which I must now wait the sufficient period before I can tactfully donate it.

You know, I let my lj revert back to a standard free account because obviously I'm not really using it enough to warrant a paid one, but it vexes me which icons are left, because they're not what I would have chosen. But it doesn't really seem worth the risk to let my credit card information fall into the hands of Russian bot-thugs to buy a new package, nor the annoying shuffle and re-upload of deleting and finding new ones. Kind of a low priority problem amongst the things currently making up my top ten (needing a root canal, someone shooting a hole through one of my windows, various health issues, goddamn coworker quitting and pulling a reverse uno on me right when she was set to take over two of my projects I'd finally succeeded in transferring out, existential dread over dying alone and unloved, etc.) but still.

In a couple days I get a Flidget! That makes up for all of it. Mostly. We shall need so much bail money.

It's raining out, but the Caps just won their game and scored nine goddamn goals, and my brother just called with his two kids to wish me Happy New Year, and my niece told me she loved me, and I spent like six hours sitting on a bench and talking to a good friend yesterday, and I had a great visit with Twig and Lunar a few months ago, and I have clean sheets, and slow cooker pork chops, and a bottle of sparkling wine on the ready. It feels like the last couple years are a nonstop slog, but I've found good moments.

Happy Year Year, everybody. See you on the flip side.

I had all this ambition of doing a real entry, and then things went a bit to shit. I'm tired all the time. The house still floods. Work is bad. Everyone around me keeps having medical crises. Big things, and little things-- my mouth feels constantly raw at the edges, and the skin at the corner of my lips keeps splitting and not healing in sync, first one side, then the other. As soon as one side finally closes, the other one's all fucked. It makes smiling (and annoyingly and much more importantly, eating potato chips) difficult, and seems uncomfortably metaphorical.

And yet. I can work remotely so I don't need to wake up at fuck o clock in the morning every day. I have a house. I have a job. I have a new Star Wars show to nitpick with my friends. I've been very lucky with my health, and so far (knock on wood) my loved ones have also all come through, and we're mostly all vaccinated.

I would have really preferred not to have had as much involvement with scrotal gangrene as I have this year, but I suppose one must look at it as a learning opportunity.

And there are good moments. Today I saw the Van Gogh immersive exhibition, and it was worth the price, very much so. It's hard to sit in a giant room, surrounded by moving projections of his sunflowers and fields and crabs and birds and stars and skies, and not feel happy about being suffused in beauty and art. The exhibit also incorporates music and excerpts from his letters and quotes. And he said so many thoughtful things, and Van Gogh was brilliant, but I can't believe the one quote from near the end of his life-- the sadness will last forever.

It doesn't. It won't.

Happy Year Year, everybody. See you on the flip side.

The cicadas of Brood X are here, though it keeps throwing me off because I'm used to cicadas in general showing up in July and August rather than May. Cicadas are associated with mid to late summer in my mind, the noise of them and the way they just sorta drunkenly bumble through their business. Having them here now in May just adds another level of surrealness, though it's not like everything isn't surreal enough already, what with the pandemic and so forth. It's hot enough now to feel like deeper summer, though. Last night I was driving back from the store with the car windows down late at night, and it felt like summer, all warm and velvety.

Last year, I actually did get to pay more attention to spring, since we were all working from home and in lockdown. This spring, I feel like I missed everything because work just demands too much. My birthday is in three days, and that's just not registering with me either. At some point I ended up in the back half of my thirties? I have a mortgage and shit? I'm as surprised as you.

( Time is a flat circleCollapse )

I'm sure hockey is about to piss me off something awful, but I currently don't have the energy to get as bent out of shape about it as in past years. I mean, I'm sure I will get pretty pissed at some point, but right now, it's just lower on the list.

What a weird fucking year this was. It doesn't even feel possible to eulogize it, not the least reason being it doesn't feel safe to assume it'll die properly, or at all. I've seen horror movies; I know how this shit goes.

Comparatively, I've been lucky. My various social media platforms keep turning up memories of places I've visited around this time of year in past years, and that all seems so long ago-- I used to go places? Do things? See people? My God!-- and even if this past year has been not so much with being able to see friends and family, I still have most of them.

But seriously, this year sucked and I just want it over. Let's hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and shoot down the middle in 2021. Also, stock up on booze.

Anyway. Happy New Year, everybody. See you on the flip side.