Finally, some closure and relaxation

Finally, Kathleen comes to visit me in Tbilisi, and we start to turn the last horrendous six weeks' shitshow around. Here, we're celebrating our penultimate night in a place I started out liking but that I've ended up hating due to this last month and a half of horrible experiences.

I've endured more brutal shit since I bought that fucking bar in a shorter time than I ever have in my life – both of the expected kind, but mostly unexpected. (That mold removal was one of the more enjoyable activities here.)

Two overarching gut stabs:

A) The former owner who sold me the place was a lying, manipulating scammer, either keeping every single one of the place's problems a secret and/or lying to me about them as they arose, leaving me with one big mold-infested cash drain, shitty equipment, and his unpaid utility bills only to ignore my pleas for help and eventually ghost me.

B) The bartender at the place turned out to be a complete fucking nutcase, quite possibly with some undiagnosed mental illness, threatening me to leave the place along with virtually all the customers – who were virtually all her friends – unless I'd immediately tell potential buyers that the only mandatory demand is that she'd remain on the payroll.

Apart from these, I have had more problems in this shitshow with extra expenses, language barriers, shitty bank services, bureaucratic local public systems, and all-round joyless hopelessness than I can be bothered to account for.

Anyway, the long and the short of it, I managed to sell the business to a cool dude who both knew it AND wanted to take it over, and who's now running it to its full potential under a new name. So everything has worked out far better than I dared dream of only a matter of weeks ago.

Currently, though, I'm still waking up after only 4-5 hours of sleep with a pounding heart and relentless thoughts of disaster, having nightmares about being forced to cover up crimes committed by others and to do things I don't want to.

We metaphorically refer to some situations as "a nail in the coffin". Well, for me, this one has been an entire board, at least.