Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I made coffee this morning, something nice for a long day, and so I went to wash the cafetiere and as I took the lid off it bonked against the sink and some warm wet coffee grounds leaked out of the bottom.

mother_bones, doing something else in the kitchen, happened to see it and was very nice and sympathetic. I was more frustrated than it warranted: at least it wasn't full of boiling water at the time (I've had to clean that up! hot water and grounds and shards of shattered glass all over the kitchen), at least it hadn't shattered, at least the two neat shards of glass that had been knocked out of the bottom of the cafetière were safely in the sink, at least we'd been able to drink the coffee...!

But yesterday was such a bad day for this, I sometimes joke that mother_bones's dyspraxia is contagious, and I know my non-existent depth perception and poor peripheral vision are actually contributing to this, but really I feel deep sympathy with the idea of poltergeists at times like this.

Things I swear I'm not touching move, and always in the most chaotic way imaginable. Accidents happen that I can't even re-create: how did that plant pot crash to the ground? Why, when I put something in the cupboard, did cans on another shelf come crashing out? When I took the bins out last night and the gray one ever so slightly grazed the blue one as I was lining them up on the curb, I could see the blue one about to overbalance and reached out fruitlessly as the lid swung open and a bunch of stuff flew out (blue is the paper recycling, so probably the least messy contents to pick up off the road in the drizzle, but wet cardboard is still gross) but as soon as I'd gotten it upright and filled up again it fell over again, spilling if anything even more paper onto the road and why?

All of those things happened yesterday, along with a million less disastrous examples. It wasn't even my plant it was at work! The cactus in the pot is okay, but I'm sad for it. Also it is called Eric (this is a long-standing tradition, pre-dating my use of the name, but does add a weird irony! the broken pot had "Eric version 2" written on it with a sharpie). I took the bins out at night and it seemed like the last fuck-you of the day, it seemed like I really was cursed, or I was being tested, or some such miserable thing.

Superstitiously, I hoped it'd be better today but then by 11am I'd already broken the means of making more coffee (luckily, after a discussion about whether me or diffrentcolours's sister was going to bring a cafetière, she had volunteered! We'd have had to volunteer her today anyway. And mother_bones has already offered to order us a new one.

I know everything is okay but I still feel awful. I hate having to distrust myself so much. I feel really impaired, and not just disabled by society, when things like this pile up. It feels like the world is hostile to me, like I'm not safe in it. "The Malice of Inanimate Objects" is actually the title of an M.R. James story that I really love for the way it builds a menacing story out of a series of small misfortunes that keep happening to one person: he cuts himself shaving, spills things, trips, breaks his stuff... He lashes out at at least one of the inanimate objects, a kite, and by the next morning says he can't shave, and of course he meets a terrible end as befits an M.R. James story. It's surprisingly plausible to see how much of a cumulative effect all these little bad things can have.