six years ago today my blood sugar was 877 and i was ten minutes from dead

in

I know I tell this story every year but it's a flashpoint in my life, a reawakening and a retooling whose reverberations are felt still, always, at the fore and aft of my mind.

Short version: active runner and yoga practitioner lost 40 pounds over the course of one hot summer and, while something was off, couldn't figure out what was wrong (and wouldn't allow anything to be) - thought it was heat and flu and such (and general pervasive stress over one of the many summers of the mother) until breath became constant, "firebreath," and standing, never mind walking, was an impossibility; ER, within five minutes or maybe it was five hours, Guess what, you've got Type One – a determination made only through a blood test because their glucometer didn't go up to my number, 877. Two days in ICU – all I was allowed was ice chips (I still fucking hate motherfucking ice) – and slow recovery, a night nurse to whom I owe everything for telling me that I wasn't a monster, for reading me the doctors' reporting so I understood what had happened and that it wasn't my fault; and now, back to the land of the living in this new, completely transformed iteration of life in which, for me, everything changed, but for those around me (see "summers of the mother" though those summers are gone now) nothing changed.

That being said, I think – or at least tell myself – that I've reached, 2,189 omelettes (I've eaten the same breakfast and lunch for the last six years, with some small variations to the latter) later, a begrudging detente with my reality of sameness and discipline and have relaxed – thanks to age, mileage, and therapy in talk and in pill form – many of my own manias and compulsions (the OCD is nil at this point though the depressions come and go) about TFD, This Fucking Disease, as I've come to call it, the knowledge of how close I came to my end (and how close I've come over the years to ending it all myself) without doing anything I consider worthwhile haunts me, day in, day out.

But hey, as they said in THE HOLY GRAIL, I'm not dead yet; omelette 2190 awaits.

being my anything written

in

The empty continues and I've returned to this, especially today:

"The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck when the truth is that you're empty... (but) if you accept the reality that you have been given – that you are not in a productive creative period – you free yourself to begin filling up again."

Lamott then adds, "I encourage my students at times like these to get one page of anything written, three hundred words of memories or dreams or stream of consciousness on how much they hate writing... ": these morning pieces are, as they have always been (I see now) in their way – some with more urgency than others – my anythings written.

Glimmer of hope, perhaps? I'll take what I can get.

Also: might have stumbled into something resembling if not acceptance then at least resignation – what's the difference between the two, I once asked my therapist; (shrug guy emoji), he replied): I don't necessarily feel better about it or less terrified (oh, those things I attach to my ability to put words to page) but I'm seeing the empty, dry well for what it is: an empty well.

That said, the question remains, as it long has, of how to fill the dried well back up. What brings me joy, a friend asked: my Switch, for one; the other, I realize now, is entering that period of, if not flow, then that time when the thing you've agonized over reveals the simplicity of its required realization (simple ≠ easy).

You may consider anything to have been written.

phantoms of swallowed sand

in

Week ends/begins as it ended/began, the brick wall ctd: simultaneous shock, resignation, and pervasive weariness over total stalling out on all creative fronts: neck deep (at least for the last few days) in that feared state which Isabel Allende likens to "swallowing sand," though my only point of reference is the "eat a spoonful of cinnamon" test/dare/internet thing from a decade or so back because I did it and have an experiential knowledge from days young and stupid.

Maybe I'm simply worn out from trying to break through again, from pounding a little harder against that diamond brick wall from Capaldi's best episode of DOCTOR WHO, my hands bleeding, my brain on something that passes barely for autopilot.

Rewatched, for the umpteenth time – though my first in probably 20 years (and K's first time – and her first silent film) – the 1925 Lon Chaney / Mary Philbin PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and, of all the times I've seen it, I think this may have been the first time I've seen it with the technicolor Red Death sequence; planning to pick through some of the extras – especially the bits from the 1930 sound version – that Kino's latest beautful Blu version gifted.

Unrelated though no less important: I am now in possession of a high-powered electric leafblower: beware, zombie-leaf horde, for I will now vanquish you without melting an icecap.