seven stray thoughts swirling as uncertainty swirls more than usual

One, when I get overwhelmed by the needs of others to the detriment of myself, all of my relationships become another job. Meaning: everyone becomes a task on a list, no matter whether or not they are a task on the kanban board the lifeworkflow or not. This is, clearly, a mental – and, probably, a physical – survival mechanism. That said, while my bedside manner well and truly sucks, I do get the job done, no matter what.

(A good friend once saw me shift into this mode and he thought I was having a stroke.)

Two, all decisions I make in the above lilfeworkflow are rooted in what I call "a bias towards certainty" in mind: full-tilt move to assisted living or continued transitional care or try going home? For at least another week, it's the middle one, a bit of status quo – with the bias towards certainty being to begin the process of the first one (and prep allergies for incoming resident cat). The last one seems increasingly less likely.

Three, I cannot and will not continue to sacrifice my own health to help someone who doesn't want to help themselves. I've done it for too long and I know that the main party for whom I'm most concerned knows that I've done everything in my power to the detriment of my health and my career. I can no longer - nor am I willing to - shoulder the burden, both physical and the ones I’ve concocted in my brain.

Four, my fucking back still hurts but at least I know it's not rheumatoid arthritis. That's one autoimmune disorder that I've yet to inherit. Waiting to hear back on x-rays, but it seems that I have at least one bulging and probably herniated disc that's been causing all of the pain for the last several months and making my ability to run up a hill at anything more than a limp a(nother) lost cause.

Five, THE BATMAN is really good. Might write something more about it or this might be it. Maybe a TSR episode with someone? (Speaking of, new TSR coming later today.)

Six, I am not going back to daily written pieces but posting here only when I have something to say. Tried it and the form / results just didn't interest me. I like the mystery of this whenever/whatever approach.

Seven, the switching of anti-depressants was to begin this week but I'm putting it off until more certainty and/or finality comes to items one through three. I'll deal with the continued weight gain. Anything that impedes my mental processing power right now is verboten.

I think that's it.

barnfall

Built in 1858, give or take, this is the barn at my grandparents' house, the center wall of which finally gave way during one of our numerous high wind warnings as the endless transition from sort-of-winter to sort-of-spring unfurls.

Fond memories of playing in its even-then collapsing structures and hidden spaces throughout my youth, the misadventures created and had, through the rafters and among the subletting racoons, of leaping from haybails, etc etc.

Assuming it doesn't totally collapse in the meantime, controlled demolition is scheduled for the end of September. Racoons will have to find a new home.

In the interim: scavenging for bottles and antique glass and pieces and parts for various projects and assorted dusty mementos of my youth, of connection long on the fritz but in the process of rewiring.

As is the wont of memories and connections had and returned.

pataflaflas and other means of heartlandic sanity preservation

I am stuck in The Work so I will write this to give my brain something else to do.

While I first thought that I was drumming again because it helped my hands stop hurting (it does, still) and it helps me think while I'm working (drum while you work) I'm starting to think that it might be because drumming was the thing that got me out of this place 20 years ago, bound for the land of music schools and R's being A's and A's being R's.

Though the source of much of my pain is physically – and thankfully – dead, he's still there mentally (as I said to my therapist, I need you to help me mentally kill someone who's been dead for seven years - ten now) especially in resurgent thought loops, (everyone's laughing at you) the more trapped I feel as the situation surrounding elders spirals into apparent infinity and the seeming reality of my lack of future becomes more real.

Perhaps in this resurgence in stick-pickings-up, I'm returning myself to that state of centeredness and sanity preservation that drumming once brought me – though to discount its onetime usage as a way to really piss off that source of pain, a metonomic fuckyou to his delicate ears, would be to do its boundless joy and widespread utility a woeful disservice.

(ill)considering social

(Written in full recognition of - and because of? - my increased presence on the socials.)

Current thinking/observation: it's not social media that's the problem for me, but how I allow it to exploit my worst, most embarassing traits of needing approval and valuing myself based on the (lack of) others' approbations.

While I want to be gone from it, social, to vanish fully feels like a luxury I can ill-afford, given my location in the middle of nowhere and the total lack of opportunity contained in said nowhere. This line of thinking does, however, strike me as being indiciative of having fallen for the cruel horseshit of indispensibility that makes social, or my attachment to it, problematic in the first place.

Solution(?): treat it as a semi-useful tool (do I check the hammer to see if the nail is still in the wall?) and continue efforts to move towards a default state of assuming that no one gives a shit and be pleasantly surprised if they do. Regardless, the "spinning tires in the mud / treading water / deckchairs on the Titanic" feeling WRT the socials – and my "career" in general – is omnipresent - and exhausting.

Either way, while I have to learn to live with it, to care about it isn't worth the energy, mental or otherwise. "Eh, fuck it" seems the optimal mental status.

meditative implement changeup

Update/202204121627: Making an effort to reincorporate meditation back into my day. Trying one round when I first wake up, and then a second NOT in the evening as I used to do, but it the middle of the afternoon, as it tends to be the time that the dangerous drift starts. No clue if I’ll stick with it, but it’s something to try, as I do recognize the anchoring value contained therein. Journaling/running/yoga routine stays the same.

+++

Ended my 20-year meditation practice near the end of last year after finally admitting that I needed something else – another tool, sertraline – and that it, meditation, wasn't doing the job anymore.

(That being said, I'll echo something Rick Rubin said to Marc Maron, that while he, at the time, had stopped meditating after doing so since he was 14, it remained a tool that he always had should it be needed; right now, it's a tool I don't need, or, rather, would like to try to accomplish the same job without it (though I do use the occasional pause and three deep breaths to re-center myself when I feel myself going off-kilter or in danger of slipping into an invasive thoughtloop.)

Other than meds, the current replacements are running and yoga, less sedentary pursuits which I've been doing for more than a decade anyhow – only I now approach the former as a kinhin / walking meditation practice – and, most importantly, journaling more frequently (at least twice daily, morning and evening) on a regular schedule: though I've scribbled daily illegibilities in a journal every morning for even longer than I've done either running or yoga, I've now embraced it as an at-least twice-daily anchor, a free-form replacement for a sitting meditation practice.

For the time being, it's proving to be a far more beneficial path to "letting go" and anchoring myself in the present. Should that change, I’ll roll with it.

accepting a lack of acceptance and the journey to or against

Every time I do a TSR interview, the worry that I'm unprepared arrives three days before and lasts until the morning of the interview itself (my general method is to spend the day of the interview fully immersed in the guest and their work, so that the conversation is the final part of that immersion). This perpetual unprepared-feel stems mostly, I think, from my inordinate capacity to forget – even though I've been working this way for nearly a year – that I'm ALWAYS working on everything, gathering disparate fragments and shards and throwing them into the project folder, waiting for the morning of to assemble and collate into a cheat sheet / chord progression for the interview itself, usually completed to my satisfaction within my first 105-minute block of the day. Same deal with the newsletter.

I keep telling myself that eventually I'll settle into a rhythm of acceptance but I doubt I will. Perhaps this lack of / journey to acceptance is part of my process and I have to accept that lack of acceptance as part of the deal?

sisyphean traditions

Every time I talk with a great writer of crime fiction (or, I suppose, a great writer of any genre, like horror), I come away with a longing for the ability to string sentences together with that sort of thrilling terseness which propels people stuck in hopeless situations of their own making (in the best cases) through a surprising, relentless narrative but alas my efforts always end up as my usual long sentences and weird glitchy-rhythmic things that hint at something but aren't that precisely if that makes any sense at all.

See, I did it again.

Thinking, though, that I might revisit a notion I had about ten years ago (I pulled the first effort years ago because I liked the character so much I couldn't let her live only in that form; I'm still finding her home), of writing tight, taut stories in the pulp-tradition of two weeks, +/-, and self-releasing them as a challenge to myself.

There are a few ideas that could work in that manner, now that I think of it.

And yes, I still want to get comics stuff off the ground, but that particular and perpetual heartbreak remains my Sisyphus pushing a boulder atop the boulder I'm already pushing up another hill that needs mowed again.

But who knows.

Either way, I'm enjoying myself by hurling these random signals into the ether whenever I feel like it for the benefit of absolutely no one but myself in 15 minutes or less.

workrhythm delusions

Trying out these 10 minute assemblies of ephemeric thoughtlets thought in various workblock interstices, a whenever/whatever chance to let my brain drift within a controlled timeframe so: there comes a moment when you are left with no choice but to accept the reality that the moment has come to stop resisting what the rhythm of The Work demands because The Work will ALWAYS know its needs better than you, no matter how often you attempt to delude yourself – especially if you are, like me, an expert at deluding yourself into illusions of control: this is my great talent, a great talent as delusionally useless and/or uselessly delusional as being "results-oriented," but I am using LinkedIn again so shudder.