leafy VOW

in

First morning with the Superlocal and I'm already in love: No more alarms, no more worrying / thinking about how much time I'm investing into The Work – a simple glance at the position of a piece of metal in the space between two 2.5mm magnetic balls and I know enough to figure I'm close enough; a marvelous antidote to growing feelings of being rushed about.

Fully addicted to THE VOW: while I'd followed the Alison Mack saga of strange and listened to Sarah Edmondson and Nippy's A LITTLE BIT CULTY pod, I didnt know the full story – and am forcing myself to not look up anything about the participants: I want the makers of this bit of documentary brilliance to tell me in their way, their voice – a must, must-watch.

An electric leaf blower demonstration for my grandfather this afternoon: he's been despondent over the weather making it impossible for him to see it in action earlier. We've been trading weather reports. Looks like today's the day – have to remember to charge it up because I'm certain he'll want to run the battery to nil as part of his "Consumer Reports in human form" scientific examination.

superlocal

in

Week of indulging my passion for unique timepieces continues: CW&T's Superlocal, their 24-hour magnet-and-steel daily ritual sculpture (inspired, in part, by Mason Curry’s DAILY RITUALS book), had been on my radar since I fell in love with their Pen Type-C (at first use on the day it arrived) and I finally let myself take the plunge: a hefty, stunning work of art and function that’s already giving me notions of how to reshape my day.

memory / narrative

in

Memories of Boston while making coffee / motor oil ten miles from where I grew up (though at this point, those memories have ceased to be actual memories and have become personal, internal narratives winding, looping): fascination at how those memory / narratives are centered around one person or, in the case of Boston, four – one to four being representative of, indicative of, an entire timeframe / an entire place / an entire iteration of self: joys, fuckups, regrets, longings: moments in time colliding and metamorphosing into some unconsidered shard of themselves.

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.