This year has been exhausting, yes, but it’s been the last ten years – ten years of caretaking, of life-as-performance, of striving for something that was never going to come – that’s felt like a gauntlet. With all of that over now, I can feel the stress and anger vanishing, bit by bit. Learning what to do with the extra mental energy. For now, relaxing and taking my time in my time - and not feeling guilty about it.
/20221130
52ºF, rain: Approaching cyborg installation (set for Thursday, 08 December, at 1400) and training now with far less apprehension / trepidation: plusses are outweighing the minuses and the minuses don't seem so intimidating. Sense of failure dissipating / damned if you do damned if you don't omnipresent but such is the T1D way.
Irony of ironies: my blood sugar is now fully back under control, as per its standard modus operandi, one which seems to operate in opposition to vehicles at the mechanics: Mechanic: "cant find anything wrong with it" / "But there's a burning smell and smoke coming from the engine" / "Didn't see anything" :: Endo: "it's time to start from scratch" / "I was fine last week and have been for a couple of weeks" / "ohmygod it's time to move to a pump and start from scratch and... "
This is the day, the life.
Workwise, realized what was wrong with the main WIP – probably – and adjusted accordingly. Not sure it will solve all the problems but it was one small one semi-resolved. Little victories in this, my daily offering to our lady of thankless callings.
something(?)else(?)
Second day in a row that my Attendance Card has featured me pondering something – though I think this one is more effective than yesterday's.
An unshakable feeling that there's a void, something missing. A part of me, perhaps? The parts that are there are fine, dandy, solid, settled: marriage, writing, all that. No, this is something else.
Writing is fine save the striving of the last ten years. I'm done with it. I'm going to do what I want and stop worrying about what it could lead to. No point; write and publish for its own sake, my own way, my own things. Definitely an epoch of "burn things down and start over" in this, the post-Twitter era.
But that something else has been nagging at me for awhile, longer than awhile. Doing my best to not force it along: have a feeling that it, like anything worth anything, will hit me in a moment of unthinking. Can only ride the waves until then / carry on, etc etc.
to those who
22 November, always, even more than a decade after my Executive Director tenure ended and almost a decade since I resigned from the board, is an anniversary – a morbid one, certainly, but more packed with personal meaning than Thanksgiving ever could be.
How much of myself did I give to that gig? (too much and not enough) How much did I gain? (I found my way to writing, fully, through it – so there's that – but I also gained one (maybe two) very deep, very profund regret(s), forks in the road etc) How much did I lose? (everything – but not everything I lost was worth keeping, far from it) ...
I suppose I'm thinking of it in more extistential detail this year than normal: we signed our wills yesterday and I realized that, outside of my wife's family and one very important exception, I have no one to pass anything on to. Being the end of the line in which your last name isn't your own is simultaneously rewarding and confusing.
Current solution: live what I've got while I can and let the rest of it fall where it may. I've pretty much got the "staying alive" part down – soon with cybernetic enhancement! – now I have to figure out what living entails. Been trying to figure that one out for years. So far, no luck – but if I do stumble upon my answer, you'll be the first to know.
Also: that partially completed thing to my left was supposed to be a dog but my 4'33" ran out before I could fur it out.
colorful dispensary stickers etc
The Morkie officially has her own little container for her required pill containers and cream vials. Fantastical to-dos updated accordingly: combined with my 4-7 T1D demands and two-pill happy pill regimen, her two things x2 (antibiotics) and one thing (puppy prozac) once should let me qualify for pharmacy training and/or a colorful sticker. Vet isn't worried and suspects it's just a wound. Take pills, apply cream, wait and see. I want my sticker.
I'm sure there's more on my mind but whatever there might be is escaping me at present. Here's my Mastodon handle - @twweaver@mastodon.social - because I fled Muskville, at least for now: if I'm going to witness a trainwreck, I'd rather not be laying on the tracks.
(UPDATED) The Morkie's rage and other veterinary adventures
Took The Morkie to the vet to see if there was anything to explain her recent transformations into a wolverine/piranha hybrid (three weeks of seemingly unprovoked attacks on Puppers after getting pissed at Derbz). Doc couldn't find anything physical, prescribed puppy prozac; as we had to go through a pharmacy, we got an amusing call from CVS about updating The Morkie's insurance information. Clearly she's our dependent, but.
(Yes, the The in The Morkie is capitalized; she is The Ohio State University of 13-pound tyrants.)
Noticed on the way home that she was, occasionally, not wanting to put her left hind leg on the ground. Examined and found what looks like a split growth-abcess-infection-blister-who-the-fuck-knows-because-it-could-be-anything-and-everything on her paw pad. Took a pic, sent it to docs: should hear later this morning; planning on another visit in. Efforts underway to not catastrophize (while it doesn't look like it's growing ON the pad but from it, as part of it, leading me to think it's more injury than tumor, I'm nonetheless prepared for the solution to be anywhere from "wait and see" to antibiotic cream and wrapped paw (or booty) to radiation and/or amputation; this being sort of the "check engine" light of Morkies). Going pretty well: if nothing else, we know that her aggressions aren't necessarily because she's a shit and that there is, clearly, something behind them.
I still have to look up how to spell piranha.
i am ready to go back to bed
Rain continues and portends a DerbzBall-deficient day ahead but on the bright side I might have gotten somewhere in one of the Things: this is the morning's victory, so far. Shifting schedules a bit in an effort to make my day less clumpy– or am, perhaps, simply without anything valuable to contribute to the world in text-based form; if that’s the case let this casting into the ether live here in this little space of mine carved with a plastic spoon in the dollar store soap that is the internet.
(non)emergent rhythmic backburning
Current operational theory is that this feeling I've had for a few months - at least since the final days of PRESS (A) 01 – is that I'm moving on to a different rhythm – or, rather, a different representation of my voice – with PRESS (A) 01 being the final statement in that particular epoch (which began with DESCANSO in 2021) and what this this TBD is something new.
(Or perhaps PRESS (A) 01 was/is the start of this new rhythmic epoch?)
Either way: this new unknown rat-a-tat is most likely why the current FictionThing (part of AnotherFictionThing though I suppose now it's MainFictionThing as I've decided to move both MainFiction and ComicsThing(s) to the deep backburner - at least until some sort of new rhythmic permutation emerges, from somewhere) is so appealing – in spite of empty/nowhere: it's in such a nebulous state that I can fiddle with whatever this new/different voice/rhythm is; probably revisit other things only when I can devolve they're back to a similarly nebulous state and find a way for them to fit in with this new? Let things emerge in the writing, not the planning: this is what I'm telling myself.
In the meantime, all I can do is hunker down and stare and fiddle and make sure I don't cross the line into what my therapist once so perfectly likened to forcing myself to fall asleep.
memory / narrative
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.