Lately, I've been hallucinating ghosts of my past works, and my brain itches to be creative. I suspect that I haven't been truly productive in my hobbies since 2016, maybe as far back as 2015. It depresses me. However, I feel hypocritical and a waste of human tissue if I start drawing or writing again, seeing the state of mess I dwell in currently. I want my mother to retire. I need my room to be clean before I feel... safe? Is that the right word? At ease would be more like it. I'd feel more at ease if my room was clean and my mother retired and she'd have a clean spot in the house to fall back to whenever she gets tired of cleaning. Because when she retires, it won't be a real retirement, where you relax and enjoy the fruits of your labor. My mom has always worked hard, and she's taught my sister and I to do the same, but she's a packrat, like her mother before her, and me after her. (I think the Army traumatized it out of my sister.) I've been working really hard to get past my own vices and clean my room, at least. My goal is to have a clean living space within my room by the end of the year. Sounds easy, but believe me that it isn't. Piles of mess are heaped everywhere. You can't see the floor, and there's roach and rat droppings everywhere. I've mentioned the pests, right? Yeah, we've had a rat infestation for about a year, now. It's horrendous, and to top shit off, apparently, I'm allergic to the damn animals. This past Sunday, I lost my glasses, which forced me into a cleaning spree in my room. I got rid of two bags of trash, and two of recycling, and barely made a dent. That was just the shit under my cot! Anyhow, that took all of Sunday, so by Monday, I was dying. I couldn't stop sneezing at work, my throat was raw, and my nose was runny. I took two different kinds of allergy medication and the symptoms barely began to subside by midnight. I wasn't able to fall asleep until 3 AM. I'm doing better now, although my eyes still burn a little bit.

That's the reason I haven't drawn or written or anything. I mean, what's the point? Rats are just gonna chew everything up, anyway. Since my mom and I have gotten much better at cleaning up after ourselves, especially after eating anything, damn rats are starting to turn on each other. I found the dried up carcass of a headless rat under my cot, and another that was just the skeletal remnants of a skull and spinal cord with about three ribs and a piece of furry rawhide on one flank. Super gross, but fascinating. When Abiu was killed by the rats, and I went on a killing spree, I ended up taking out 14 rats total. There were still at least five running around, and now I've begun to see little ones, which means they've procreated. Fuck! (Yeah, that's what they've been up to, seems like.)