bandit king of lunch and string

i have been unusually busy for a full week now without giving myself a flare! i've washed so many wool! and joined the YMCA with gui and took my wheelie on the track. carded much wools, spun two bobbins. poked at garden stuff a bit, brought in plants that don't want to be out in the cold. watered plants a lot. cooked for myself several times. i feel so functional!

today i feel like i should probably chill. i might spin a little, and i did spread out some alpaca wool i washed yesterday, but i'm getting warning twinges and i know i ought to rest.

still, that's way more than i've been able to do in one week for at least a year. gabapentin is magic. i've been feeling muscle pain when i use muscles, yes, but i haven't been feeling any grinding or nerve lightning, and i only get the pins and needles when i stand up too long or leave my leg at the wrong angle in bed. as opposed to like... randomly, just to piss me off.

it's also incidentally an anti-anxiety drug, though that's not what it's usually prescribed for, so i've just been kind of super chill about everything.

 

oh noooo i tripped and fell into another amusing but informative youtube channel! when will i ever be finished watching good videos??

 

dyeing autumn colors on knitpicks sock blend roving for to make winter woolies for son’s bf. my fingers are green! feels good man

 

https://www.grandprismaticseed.com/dye-plants

note to self

 

plan for today is process more fleece, reel off my plied bobbin of cinnamon alpaca, go swimming with seebs, maybe watch some more bon appetit videos. is brad dating his cameraman? he's taken to calling vinnie 'babe'. this could just be a vocal tic tho. he's got a lot of those. a lot.

gotta try to get a photo of my autumn rainbow sock blend i dyed the past couple days. it came out amazing.

 

a thing someone drew for me once

 

putting this here rather than 'dreams' bc it's long and i might add to it as i remember stuff. my brain wrote a psychological thriller from the POV of a character who wasn't afraid. and it was fucking terrifying.

to begin with, i was a nerdy botanist, and i helped my nerdy friend connect with a nerdy girl he was crushing on. they hit it off, and i was glad for him and left it at that. i refocused on my work with 'lantern flowers', a tropical vine with the predatory yet interesting habit that it wedged its fruit into a crack in a tree so that as it grew it pried it farther open, but the gourdlike fruit also sort of molded to the shape of the crack. then the seed would grow directly from the fruit, and have a nice little nursery until its roots were strong enough to dig into the tree on their own. not really a menace to orchards or anything, much too macroscopic, these fruits were the size of your fist and the vines were thirty meters long. what i was doing, actually, was trying to breed them bigger, so the moldable fruit -- which hardened into a very tough and dense wood -- could be grown into molds and used in place of plastics.

everything was great until i noticed my vines weren't thriving the way they should, and found that something had been eating them, practically drilling for their sap, idk like a sapsucker except weirdly regular holes? like a kitchen implement or something. in fact, no animal made holes like that. someone had been taking a melon baller or an apple corer or something to my vines. i was exasperated. distantly it occurred to me that 'exasperated' wasn't an appropriate reaction. the sap was toxic. nobody should be taking it. and yet i was having a sitcom 'oh you' reaction. so that was weird.

at which point a bunch of other weird stuff started to swim into focus. things like how my nerdy friend, who was estranged from his rich bitch dad, had reconnected with him recently, and now they were besties. how the new girlfriend, who had been every bit as nerdy as us to begin with, was now ultra-fashionable, sexually daring, and a little bit vapid. she'd been writing a book, but when you asked her about it now she just shrugged it off with "doesn't everyone want to write a book, though, doesn't everyone go through that phase?" her life's work was a 'phase' and she had turned into a giggling WASP-y husband hunter and i had somehow... not cared. about anything. including my pets going missing. i'd had... two cats, i thought, and a little dog? a little stupid looking dog? what was its name? i couldn't remember. toby, maybe?

i was still not having emotions about it, but i was intellectually aware that this was not reasonable. logically it was likely to be connected to the holes in the lantern vine. i did some more research about the sap's toxicity, but no one had really done any science about it, it was just that the locals were like, do not eat that, do not touch your face after removing it from your trees, you will die. and the chemistry really did look very death-y. surely we couldn't be affected by it, we'd be just dead. or at the very least having convulsions or something. i'd of course been wearing gloves whenever i handled the plant, and made sure my greenhouse was well-ventilated, even though no one had suggested it gave off fumes or anything...

right around then, the girlfriend gave me some chemistry data to look into. when i expressed very mild intellectual curiosity -- unable to feel anything more than that -- she told me that she was not a chemist, and this seemed like a perfectly good explanation. doing what i was told came so easily, i didn't even realize i was doing it until i was well into the task. i wondered if it was a deliberate distraction, as i was a botanist, not a chemist, certainly not a pharmaceutical chemist, and these compounds were definitely psychoactive. some kind of anti anxiety drug, i thought, though something was a little wonky about them compared to the existing drugs. she'd need to consult a real expert to find out what the wonkiness was. i didn't know and didn't especially care, and had completed the task even while thinking about how it was probably furthering the agenda of whoever was drugging us.

when i gave the results back to her and asked her what i'd been analyzing, she said, why, a better use for your darling vines, of course! my boo's daddy has been working on this forever, but you're the first one who's gotten them to grow in captivity, aren't you proud? i was not, i told her, nor was i anything, else, i basically didn't have emotions anymore. she nodded conspiratorially; isn't it a relief? kind of, yeah, i agreed, and she proudly took me to introduce me to 'daddy', who was a classic smarm villain, and way too handsy with his son's girl. his son seemed happy to share her. she, however, did not like being shared, i spotted that on her face. interesting. i asked lots of science questions, which daddy did not seem to mind his son explaining, and thus learned that son (retconned into a chemist, i think at first he'd been a robotics nerd) had used a very small amount of lantern flower sap to synthesize a very large amount of odorless, flavorless dust, which can be mixed with salt as an anti-clumping agent and thus fed to the general public in practically holistic doses. what about foodies? i wondered. the types who only eat sea salt or like. the ones who don't tolerate any additives, kind of thing. a good point, daddy said, and assigned his son to solve that problem.

i switched to eating only food plants from my greenhouse, as i was pretty sure all the food in our now-shared house was contaminated. as my emotions came back, though, i found myself less able to plan, less able to reason. i feared i would be unable to save myself and my friends because i was too emotional about the situation to help. girlfriend noticed my struggles, and confided in me that she'd been off the stuff for a while -- in order to please papa, she'd gone on a series of magazine diets, and unbeknownst to him, one of them involved cutting out all salt and basically living on fruit. "i had the most catastrophic diarrhea of my life," she told me, "but i kicked the mind control. i don't have an anxiety disorder, though. maybe you should take it slow."

i had not realized i had an anxiety disorder. i thought i was just nerdy and shy. coming off the Apathy Salts, though, i was having panic attacks several times a day, and it was getting really really hard to hide it from daddy. we wished chemist friend could help us, as he was always the most practical of us, and the most outgoing, and basically we just missed him. but we didn't know if he was really on board with daddy's agenda. he hadn't slept with girlfriend since we all got dosed; reduced libido was one effect. i, being asexual, hadn't noticed. she, not asexual, said it was driving her crazy, and she wished she could dose daddy so he'd stop feeling her up. her bf had given her the chemistry notes knowing she'd come to me with them, so she thought on some level he was trying to help save us, but he also had epic daddy issues and his dad was watching him closest of anyone.

i pointed out that daddy watched her the least, as she had to go on shopping trips to prove she was hooked on his money. he was misogynistic enough that he basically just assigned her some 'friends' as outwardly vapid as she was acting and didn't consider that they might have thoughts or motives. could they help? she wasn't sure, because she thought they were all fronting just as hard as she was, though for different reasons of course. still, she didn't think they'd report her every move to daddy. she didn't think he cared enough to check up.

so she had one of her friends procure anti-anxiety meds with a story that she had a friend whose parents were scientologists. once i was on a normal psych drug, i stopped having the panic attacks and nightmares, was able to focus again, and realized the solution was staring us in the face:

drug daddy.

of course it couldn't be salt. he was careful about that. bf controlled the powder and we weren't sure whether he was with us or with daddy. so gf and i had to do the chemistry ourselves. we were basically trying to teach ourselves chemistry under the nose of a charismatic billionaire serial killer without him noticing. it was very suspenseful!

and of course he caught us. he ordered bf to lock us up and make sure we 'took our vitamins'. he sold bf a story that gf and i were having an affair. bf didn't seem to care, but followed orders. he locked us both in the same bedroom because that was easier and he was very lazy by now. he said he knew we weren't fucking because i'm asexual and anyway dad wants to fuck gf so if she wants to fuck someone else that's better. anything's better than dad. good on us for figuring it out.

momentary hope! so bf is also secretly free of the influence! no, he's not, he doesn't care anymore, dad always gets what he wants and at least now bf doesn't have feelings about it. he's thought about the alternatives and they all involve feeling terrible. he wishes gf hadn't gone off the stuff because being groped by dad is probably awful when you have feelings. gf told him he was being a chickenshit and she was dumping him. "that's fair," he agreed blandly.

just then i started having a really weird drug interaction, vertigo and micro-seizures. "oh yeah," bf said, "it'll do that. you'll probably die." i pointed out that would draw attention, get the police involved, there'd be a coroner's inquest and everything. "he'll tell me to make it look like an accident," said bf. "he can get another botanist. that's the beauty of this stuff. a few weeks and they won't even care that it's evil. look at me, talking about killing my best friend and letting my dad rape my girlfriend, and it doesn't even mean anything. it's walking suicide. that's what we should call it. 'walking suicide'. it's honest to god zombie powder, and i can't even publish."

"your dad could," i said. "if he wanted to. he's so smug. he'd definitely do it if you got him past his little inhibitions about keeping this all secret. after all, he really does think that him ruling the world is best for humanity, you just have to give him a little push."

"that would be funny," bf agreed, unsmiling. "you'll still be dead, though. you know how long peer review takes."

by this time the micro seizures were too much and i couldn't keep up with the conversation anymore.

and then, infuriatingly, i woke up. I WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS.

 

if i were edgar allen poe, i'd end it there. narrator dies, bad guy wins. whooo spooky. yeah, poe we get it, you're very goth. it's not really narratively satisfying, though. setting up this puzzle and getting the reader wondering how you'll solve it, and then just kicking over the board and going "surprise! you can't! they're fucked!" as if you're not dropping the ball.

no, daddy's going down. bf probably has to sacrifice himself to make it happen. gf is the hero, really; narrator is following her lead.

 

that bear has won the jackpot :D

 

had to cancel teeth cleaning today because of spine needle activities tomorrow. they were like 'no dentistry within 48 hours' and we were like 'it's just a cleaning wtf' but it turns out that the cleaning stirs up bacteria which can get into your bloodstream via small abrasions in your gums, and then they can get from your bloodstream into your spinal fluid and that's Very Bad. so. i don't get to see theresa and become shiny today. fortunately she has an opening next week.

 

can’t sleep. apparently i’m going to be sedated for the cyst poking party, they can’t just use a local. they asked if i have a living will. that’s not ominous at all.