September 5th

 Had a little more energy the last few days. Not saying much, I still get tired after doing stuff, and yesterday, exhaustion dogged me for most of the day, but I trooped on.

Like a stuck record, Ares is never out of my thoughts each and every day. In that torturing way I imagine Ares where I am, or if he hadn't seen something. He never saw this. Over the weekend I also tortured myself extremely well with his "lasts". Last time he walked out of the door. Last time he got in the car. That hits very hard. Last time out of the front door kills me. Stupid perhaps. But. An awful reminder that he left the house and never came back. Absolutely fucking brutal. Where has my boy gone ? I miss him terribly. I still don't know what to do with it all. There is no solution to this. No fixing. A raw wound. I am beginning to realise this will stay with me forever. Maybe it heals in others. I suspect in me it's just going to give me a new dark shadow. I can't look at a piece of grass or a walk and not think of him.

I am still wrestling, and doubt I will ever get anywhere, with the great pointlessness of life and death. The enormous waste. The horrible cruelty. I think it just probably comes down to how.... good your firewalls are. If you can block stuff out. Wilfully ignore it. Or better yet be blissfully unaware. Then you have an easier ride, in some aspects. The brutal reality is I think that life on the whole is mostly about suffering and at times a horrific scarring level of pain. We all of us end up with "a lot of baggage" by middle age. Telling. The world does a fair job of sticking its head in the sand about it. I think you need quite a developed sense of wilfull ignorance. Something I absolutely do not do. I am ever more convinced that we are an evolutionary cul-de-sac. The price of higher abstract intelligence is an increasing grasp of nihilism. Fermis paradox features in my thinking. The great filter. Not war. Not disease. The curse of evolving higher intelligence devouring itself with nihilism.

There was a Michael Moorcock book a bit like this. Part of his eternal champion bits. Someone at the "end of time". No one cared about the coming end. Everyone just stuck in hedonistic feedback technology. As a kid I struggled to understand why someone wouldn't get off their arse and do something. Now. I get it. All the way out to the edge of the universe, shakes hands with Nihilism - hi, welcome, nothing you do matters. All the way back home. Sit. And do what ? Watch some TV and wait for the end ? Sure. Ironically, full circle, a greater part of my life is now this. The exact thing I couldn't understand as a kid. Bravo Mr Moorcock.

I'm also more keenly aware that everything around me.. is not mine. Nothing is mine. Not "my" house. Not "my" stuff. At best, I just... rent it for a while. The house was here before I was born and will be here after I am gone. I can paint it. Modify it. But it's no more my house than the hill across the river. Ares lived in this house for a mere blip of its existence. His whole world and experience. Nothing to show for it. Gone. As if he'd never been here. When I go, no one will ever know the best boy in the world lived, ate and snoozed here. How much like that has been lost down the centuries ? Monstrous. There is an impermanence to life. I don't take any comfort in that at all. It disconnects me from the world a little bit more. Makes me experience epic time scales a little more. So small. Nihilism gnawing at my soul.

Hazel's mental state has deteriorated this week. I wont get fully into it. But shes reaching down into rage, and nastiness and edging towards that abusiveness she can exhibit. Challenging. On the surface, she doesn't acknowledge it. It's alway something else. On the news. On twitter. A random on discord. A neighbour. The chiro. Me. Everything is a snarl. So much anger. I'm doing my utmost best not to rise to her, give her space, give her what she needs, but it's not enough. Tricky. She's going home for a few days today. Leaving Poppy here. Which is all round a really good idea I think - serendipitous - she has to go home to clean up her flat for an inspection. The house will gain a little calm in her absence. Hopefully it does her some good too. Not sure. I am slowly detailing patterns of her behaviour. Trying to figure out if anything helps. So far without much luck. Patience required. I did foresee this coming as of Tuesday ish. She was building day on day. I nearly suggested she go home early, but, on balance kept my mouth shut. The last time she was home she had a nasty panicky manic attack for a week and a half. She seems well past that event at the moment. But. The rage is picking up. Hmm. Think she needs serious mental health help - someone very good. She is adept at throwing up distractions to hide herself and picking fights. When she starts suffering like that she reminds me a lot of how my mom used to be. Always snarling. Forever picking fights. Like she revelled in them. Sought them out. Then kicked off. It's made me think about what mental state my mom was in. It also makes dealing with Hazel twice as hard for me. I've seen it before. My family and I had to endure it for decades ( my sister says she *still* gets it at times from her ) and caused a lot of issues. Anyway. There is a bigger psychological picture there. And again I find myself out of my depth in diagnosing it.

Did a bit of painting this week ( a gnome ). Bought a couple of things for the kitchen ( which ofc Hazel snarled at, you cant be trusted to buy anything unsupervised - for the record they were a default set of kitchen utensils and a new washing up drip rack, hardly any kind of hill to die on you would think ). On the whole it's a more positive sign in me that there is life still. I am considering doing up the kitchen and the bathroom. Looking at getting the floors and ceilings done. New lights. A lick of paint. It's one of the ways I know I have slightly improved. I start thinking about "pointless" stuff. I am the tiniest bit - the very tiniest - bit excited to give everything a makeover.