March Sweeps - Day 59

March has lasted longer than February did.  Isn't that odd?

I had a good deal of work to do today (and I didn't finish all of it) before I could think about writing or exercising or entertaining myself.  I talked to Someone for a moment about what social distancing means for them rather than for me, and I guess it's pretty hard to not be able to be out and about with your friends and make new friends and, I dunno, have strangers approach you and want to not be strangers.  I have a fair imagination, but I can't quite picture what that would be like.

All I know is, I have gotten really sick of my nephews running around and breaking things, fighting, screaming, singing, and crying.  I'm reminded of the "And Mom and Dad can hardly wait for school to start again" part of It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas.  I am lucky, I know, that I could go to the park again today, with my laptop, and edit audio for a while, and watch all the people running or jogging or climbing the stairs (and one girl/woman who just laid out a blanket and--I assumed--read there on the grass for a half hour or so).  Many people are not so fortunate.

But it's like that old saying, Every day above ground is a good day.  Although when I did a search to see who said that, the first answer that came up was Pitbull, and I don't want to be above ground in a world where Pitbull originated that saying.  Seriously, that guy sucks so much, he should really hate himself almost as much as I do.

I went to the storage unit again today, just so I could redo the song from Friday (was it Friday?  Maybe Saturday) because the wind pretty much effed that whole recording, despite me doing it over and over and over again (oh, can't you see what I'm trying to say, darling?).  While I was recording, a car pulled up, right there next to my own car.  It was an old man, who had a unit just three over from mine.*

"What is it you're doing?" he asked, and I realized afterward I'd never turned off the recording, so it caught our whole conversation.  "Some kind of photography?"

Well, I thought up a lie and I thought of it quick, I was making a video for a cousin who's sick.  She's in quarantine, I said, as you've probably heard (and my cousin Camy actually is in quarantine right now, so it's not so absurd).

Then the old man told me all about his struggles moving stuff from one storage unit to another, and that he'd had his belongings in one for eight years without ever once going there and getting stuff out.  It reminded me of my mom's storage unit in the next town over.  She's only been there twice since we rented it, back in 2018.  Although, in my defense, I went there the other week, to see if it would be a good place to do Storage Unit Serenades.  It wasn't.

I probably should have spoken to the man for a while, since he seemed to want somebody to talk to, and in this period of social distancing, loneliness can grip us even tighter than before.  But I got the hell out of Dodge, embarrassed at being caught videoing myself (which sounds like I was doing stuff with fresh produce and a lot of KY jelly, but it really was just singing a song), and after I'd driven away, I realized I didn't get the Darth Vader figure out of storage that I'd sold on Sunday night.

Whoops, guess I know where I'll be going tomorrow.  Any song suggestions then?

I did a podcast with Big tonight, pretty much instead of writing.  I imagine it will please more people than my writing would, but it's still a bummer that the whole day is gone and I've only written two hundred-something words.

But I drank a Coke Zero at around nine-thirty, so I won't be going to sleep anytime soon.  Maybe I can write just a little bit more before it wears off.

Okay, at 1:45am, I decided to challenge myself to sit down and just start writing a story, from the beginning, and see how far I got by two.

It went pretty well, actually.  At two, though, I had just under five hundred words, and I was enjoying it (is that important, do you think?  Or should it always feel like work?), so I decided to go a little while longer.  At 2:19, I had just under a thousand words, so I wrote another sentence, and stopped at exactly a thousand.  It's what Big Anklevich would've done, I imagine.

So, here we are.  And I'll sign off now.

Words Today: 1223
Words In March: 39,373

*Does that sound weird, me describing some old guy's unit?  Is there a better word I can use?