It’s been rainy today.

Not the kind of steady rain that makes me long to curl up with a book and a blanket and a nice cup of tea, but the kind of deluge that makes me begin a mental inventory of everything in the basement that might possibly be damaged if the sump pump breaks down and the water begins to rise. It’s not been the kind of thunderstorm that me long to sit and watch roll by from the comfort of a swing on my front porch, but the kind of thunderstorm that makes me turn on the TV so I can catch the latest weather updates, even as I compulsively check my phone for the same thing.

The power flashed here, but didn’t completely go out. The wind howled as if a blizzard were on the way. The rain hit my windows with such force that I wondered if it wasn’t hail instead. And in under an hour, the storm had moved on.

But one of the things I heard on the news was that this was only the first in a series of storms expected to hit today, and I had things to do. So rather than wait, I took the opportunity to run to town in order to pick up my medicine and a few groceries.

Boy, was that a dumb idea.

It was dumb because evidently the storm was moving a lot slower than I’d previously thought. It was dumb because when I caught up to the storm (which didn’t take long), it seemed to have worsened and I had to pull over on the side of a busy divided highway to wait for the rain to let up enough that I could see. It was dumb because when I reached my destination, the streets were flooded in places and the rain was still falling.

It was just plain dumb.

I got my prescription, I got my groceries, and I even got gas, so I accomplished my goals. But I also nearly got stuck twenty minutes from home, and I saw someone else who wasn’t quite as lucky – their minivan was stuck on the street, mired in water that it couldn’t get through.

So now here I am, with lovely quiet minutes to work on revising another poem-turned-essay, and all I can do is sit here and stare at my screen. After a relatively productive forty-five minutes, my brain has turned to mush. I’m so tired of mushy-brain.

Mushy-Brain Syndrome, or MBS, afflicts me all too often lately. Maybe it’s a result of being largely at home for the past four months. Maybe it’s a result of sleep deprivation. Maybe it’s a result of being too tired to care about much of anything normal because when your normal routines (read: life) fall prey to the industrial-size wood chipper that is COVID-19 and its attendant economic disasters, caring about how you look and what time you get out of bed and whether or not you should try wearing actual pants instead of leggings for once just seems silly, even absurd.

It’s probably the sleep deprivation talking. Maybe I should try taking a nap?

What about you – how are you doing? Are you sleep-deprived? Over-caffeinated? Cussing the entire time but not ready to give up?

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