The Honest Courtesan

Long-time readers know that I have kind of the opposite of seasonal affective disorder; because I’m so high-strung the short, gloomy winter days actually bring my natural tensions down into the manageable range, whereas the long, bright summer days increase my anxiety to the point where it can become almost intolerable.  Even when it’s a rainy day, the higher levels of ambient light throw my pineal gland way off, and it’s very difficult to get my brain to calm down before midnight (it’s not so bad in the morning because I use blackout curtains and cover my eyes with my hair).  Like so many other things, I’ve learned over the years how to manage the problem to some degree; as anyone who’s ever visited The Den (as I call it, evoking ideas like “Snake Den”, “Den of Iniquity” and “Drug Den”) knows, I keep it rather dark in here, and then of course there’s my nightly cannabis edible.  I usually consume that about 11 or 11:30, but when I’m out at Sunset I tend to start a lot earlier because I know I won’t be required to go anywhere or do anything.  Maybe that’s one of the reasons I’m more relaxed out there; Jae says she can actually see my shoulders drop, and Grace agrees with her.  Because of that, I’m trying to bring as much of that experience as I can into the city; I no longer answer voice calls from numbers I don’t recognize (at any time of day or night, but especially in the late evening), and I’m trying to enforce an 11pm writing curfew on myself whenever possible so I can force my brain to just relax into the THC and wind the fuck down.  It also helps that even though the summer days are longer here than at lower latitudes, they’re also much cooler, which removes one of the things that used to stress me out about summer (true fact: in my twenties I used to lose roughly 5-10 pounds every summer in Louisiana because the heat killed my appetite for anything more than a glass of iced tea and maybe an egg salad sandwich or a few french fries).  No mitigation technique is perfect, of course, but at least my advancing age makes the summers seem much shorter than they used to be, and once the Dog Days are over I can start looking forward to the comparative (emotional) peace and (mental) quiet of autumn.