First Kitten Spring

Brand new, November 30th, 2012

Roger is my kitten. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving 2012 I walked with my parents in the empty lot behind their house, reviewing the disarray of sun-baked brush piles, firewood, and discarded fenceposts. Weeds rustle and a shape moves, the underbrush colors fooling the eye. Out in the stony open, the shape becomes a little form with a tiny kitten face. It jogs toward us, happy and interested, unexpected. Hello, little cat! my father says, stooping to it like an outfielder for a grounder. It follows us around on my first-day tour, hopping over logs, digging in leaves, running ahead, darting behind, a tight package of energy in pause and then release.

Then the confused adventure begins: of asking neighbors if they’ve lost a kitten, where a kitten could have come from, nobody knows, do you want a kitten. My father makes a box with an old towel on the back porch, and the kitten digs in the towel and meows, then charges through piles of freshly fallen leaves. He is brighter than the flat brown hulls Texas can produce, the orange of New England. He is a fall cat, and we have caught him.

For the next ten days the unnamed cat moves between the back porch and the garage at night, where he finds a perch on a coiled rug. My parents currently have four cats and they fret a kitten won’t be welcome. No problem: he likes the garage just fine, being the overcrammed American garage it is, full of hiding spaces between leaning and stacked things. My dad makes a litter box for him, scoops out the orange kibble from the steel trash can still bright from the store though twenty years old now. He munches and crunches and purrs and purrs. He is smaller than a package of English muffins. He likes to be held.

Nobody wants a little orange cat, even the teen girl who trusts me with her email, or her Facebook friends she has promised to post the emailed pictures to. My father opens the garage door and the little orange cat stares out into the Texas autumn, strangely bright and barefoot warm, and charges out into the drifts of leaves.

Neighbors

I see friends, have Thanksgiving with my parents. It’s clear the cat has the future of a war child refugee if I go home without him. The airline explains what to do. As a Christmas present, my parents pay for a vet exam and shots at the same vet I knew growing up, still at practice in the same little house off the same main drag, the same exam room where two dogs and three cats I grew up with were hoisted and held and checked and kept from decline as much as medicine could. Dr. Rice is a kind man, not slow but measured, country but knowing what city means. Three months is as good a guess as any for the age, he says, explaining about teeth. He asks me about Seattle. Well, I do imagine it must be spectacular to see. The paperwork name is Little Orange Cat. 

Serendipity provides the airline-compatible carrier on an unplanned trip to Austin, in a pet store that is stereotypical Austin bohemian. The friend I haven’t seen in twenty-four years has six beers when I have one, and gets a blonde, slinky, and very Texas woman to give me a hug. He says I’m lucky, that I’m doing well. In my rental car back to Fort Worth, the sky is as clear as all the nights of all my growing up, the stars immutable, everything human underneath changed.

The little orange cat has no fear of the black mesh carrier, peeking out with sustained, quiet interest. Women smile at him on the rental shuttle bus, a woman heading back to Alabama unbelieving I would pay extra to fly some strange cat home. Oh, you’re such a good man. They’re all kill shelters down here. Ever’ one of ‘em. 

Departing is a long wait, bright with blue plains sky through glass, nothing to see but silver aircraft and a concrete sea. I find a corner where I hope he’ll stay contained and let him out, entertain him with the fuzzy pink and yellow toys my mom provided. He complies, batting them, look at me, standing up on the window lip and looking out at all the moving, shining things. Here, now, he is completely unlike me. He is all delight. He has no idea what sadness is.

At the gate

At home, he tears through the house, throttle wide open up and down the stairs, in every room, leaping, flinging. If he is uncontrolled he is also unafraid. His little meow comes from under the bed and closets: yip! yip! Texas has been in a hard drought’s grip for many months, and I wonder if he has ever seen dark clouds and rain.

We are committed, he and I. Health insurance and a pet license want a name.

Not long after he took up in my parents’ garage, I was holding him, giving him as much attention as I could between visits and phone calls. He purred and looked out the window, bright and interested. His name came like he did: unbidden but somehow unsurprising. How about Roger. Roger cat. 

Opinions varied on the name’s suitability. Improv teaches first answer is the best answer, and this answer came first, from the beyond where all ideas come from. I stopped wavering. “His name’s Roger,” I said. Roger goes on the forms.

He has been here through the remainder of fall and winter, the dark, lonely, questioning, unsettled, existential days. There have been good ones too, but it has been a rough time. The SAD light only does so much, but I have been writing, finish a class that was a writing and performing challenge. A great friend saves me from Christmas alone, and it’s fun to come home and have a little Christmas for my cat, who bats his new toys around or curls on the floor with them, biting and tearing.

I’m old enough to know he won’t be a kitten long, his insufferable cuteness falling away by the week. The loss of his kittenhood is visible in pictures.

December 27th, 2012

February 16, 2013

April 7, 2013

I wonder if childhood for him is like it is for us: understanding our lost world of long time only in retrospect. And my rueful understanding now that many of us didn’t have much innocence.

Does he miss tramping in the Texas backyard leaves? 2012′s bright autumn is all new for him, the only holdover whatever a kitten can remember from the first three months. Nobody knows about his life before he showed up at the neighbor lady a week before. I imagine a brown, late model pickup truck chugging to a stop beneath a streetlight, a door opening, the little cat being placed off the road, under bushes. Did a grownup do it? Did a little kid watch, bucked in, told to keep quiet or she’d get something to cry about? Nobody will know but him.

Early in January I am fretful, afraid, stressed. I am at work again and conflicted between it and writing, the important writing. I don’t feel light any more, but a collapsing, manageable anxiety. The friend on the phone is talking me down, explaining, being reasonable. It’s going to be all right. I hang up, ready to get to bed early. Roger tears a feather off his toy and gobbles it whole. I panic, thinking about the crunchy stem, it going through his bowels. I call the friend back; no answer. I struggle with a decision, any decision, collapsed by fear and doubt and then the silliness of the whole thing. I find a 24 hour vet and go. Safe than sorry. The friend calls en route. I’m almost there and we decide to go ahead, or I hear a confirmation I’m not insane. The clinic is beat-up, lost in fog. Inside there is a crazy woman showing the kinds of worms in the food she left out too long. She drops a can and the vet techs, struggling to be composed, tell her not to worry, they’ll clean it up. WHY IS THERE ALWAYS A CRAZY CAT LADY, I text my friend.

The vet is from somewhere in India where the culture is to always say yes. What should I do? Oh, yes, that can be done. What do you recommend? Yes, we can do these things. I agree to an x-ray, which ends up not showing much, maybe some small bits of feather in his intestine already. He can be kept overnight and given a barium x-ray and monitored. Yes, we can do that. My friend reassures me that cats eat birds and birds have feathers, that it will almost certainly be a non-event. The vet keeps recommending strange procedures and extra add-ons and I decide $150 is enough.

Roger was fine. I was a mess the next day at work, but my friend has a great story. The incident encapsulates my fall and winter, ever since getting back from New York City. Roger has always been fine.

—

Now it is spring, the short days replaced by long ones, the attention I had so focused on the early dark and tense cold walks while on the phone with friends now somehow disappeared with January, February, March. Bright warm days have sent the populace into a state of controlled joy. It has been truly warm. The windows have been open.

Open windows

Open windows are new for him, and I realize spring is too. Passing traffic sends him under the bed, but slowly he emerges, first peeking through the bedrails, then hopping up to look full-on. I test that the screen is firm–it’s concrete below. For a moment I am afraid, the depressive mind launching into imagined branching futures of linked calamities. He doesn’t test it. I stand in the sun with him. Whaddya think? 

Spring, like every spring, is new. There has never been a spring like it before; one like it will never come again: standard pop Buddhist stuff. The light does something I don’t remember it doing before. The light really helps.

Spring is a little stronger, things are a little better. Roger loves the windows and the exciting spring outside.

The Man Who Pushed No Pills

THIS CAN BE YOU

Here is the truth: I took meds. Not much of an admission these days. Shrimp wander unafraid into the light and are getting eaten for all the Prozac in the water. Vitamin Z is a popular choice.

I’ve written about this before–look back in the archives for the pictures of the artfully off-center pill bottles with the RX numbers obscured. Among them was citalopram (or Celexa, if you pay retail). I have not written about it before.

As a general-purpose anodyne for the feeble-nerved, my doc explained, it’s beyond compare. She uses it with kids. The most stereotypical psych med side effects–weight gain and a blown clutch on your wang–are minimal, often nonexistent. My therapist wanted me to talk to my doc about it. We talked about it. She wrote the paper. A bottle of orange oblong tablets cost as much as a king-sized candy bar.

From October of 2010 through August of 2012 the little orange pills–snapped in half–were my bedtime ritual. They were with me in my friend’s attic, the flight to Hawaii that made me think of a very green Texas, months on a friend’s futon, the hollow eerie time of a brand new place. Those first October 2010 weeks I remember a giddy mania turning the world to animist magic: birds all but spoke, I heard plants grow, cars actively smiled at me. I floated through a week of the world’s miracle, and then I could hardly stay awake for two weeks. Then I remember the divorce, mainly. Three hour phone calls of panic and guilt with distant friends.

I returned to the therapist in the fall of 2011. She pulled no punches; in my case, strong assertions I am not the failure I presume. The rhododendrons outside her office went from green to winter dull and back to spring shoots again. Spring 2012: she declares there’s no reason for me to see her any more. One sunny Saturday I ride my bike to see my friend sing, and I can hardly understand the happy perfume suffused in the setting sun.

I decide to cut out the citalopram. I make tiny adjustments down over weeks using liquid suspension, a big brown bottle like kid bad-cold cough syrup. I eyedropper out a syrupy orange milliliter at a time. By August 2012 I am done.

September 1 the world inverts. My cat is suddenly, extremely ill, then better, then ill, then gone. A woman I’d grown close to and who showed every sign of wanting more pulls the plug. Vet bills and grief panic me to sign up for unemployment and look for work, astonishingly fruitless. September 2012 was meant to be the start of my writing life. Instead it was a collapse into the grey glass abyss I know too well. I haven’t realized where I’ve been.

January brings a job and a torrent of anxiety, an avalanche of divorce guilt I thought was resolved. I work on the book, meeting initial generous goals, then bogging down in actual writing. It’s May and I have a fractured first chapter, maybe half of the second.

Sometimes I have felt invigorated, imbued with the sense of discovery and creative joy. Most of the time it’s too slow, another job to fear. I am sensitized to the slither of every hour.

I talk to the therapist and the doctor. Both show concern: you have a history, you have these other issues, and so on. I wonder in retrospect why they didn’t sense my making the schizophrenic’s mistake of not needing chemical help. I decide to go back on.

April 11 I take my first half dose. Close to the weekend if anything untoward. I don’t notice much–some stomach upset, a little more dizzy, but both pass. I don’t realize until later I was experiencing gentler mania, walking Alki, my mind running over with images and good ideas, sun and clouds everywhere lit with sun.

April 19 is a Friday, the first night at my old full dose.

By Monday or Tuesday the anxiety has come. This anxiety is not like Monkey, not the ceaseless doubting chatter of the Hawaiian mountainsides. It has no voice and wants nothing; it has no locus and cannot be seen. It shines out of me in a froth of shards. It is a power.

It is worst in the morning, or at night. I call friends interminably knowing there is nothing they can do and unsure of what I want from them. I spend a weekend in a friend’s guest room, wrapped in a blanket with the dog on the bed, talking and talking. One Thursday night I called this friend again, her exhausted from work, me lying on the floor next to the bathroom, the vibration especially bad. I ask her if I’ve been worse. She says I’ve been crazy. Her wish for me is just to have some peace.

Consulting the web is always dicey, but it turns the light on. Exacerbated symptoms are common when starting these sorts of medications, say authorities and nameless forum posters alike. The first two weeks were hell are comforting shared misery. Four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks. I notice I am clenching my fists. I have thoughts about ending up as the men I see hanging around the bus stations, airing out their shoes, sleeping on duffel bags.

Sunbreak

Last Monday I am at Pharmaca in West Seattle, a health supplements store with the twist of also housing a regular pharmacy. I need to replenish some items and ask one of the resident naturopaths about the overpowering anxiety. A tall kid with a blank face who looks like he played basketball  points at little bottles with neat price labels. “Yeah, and there’s this. And, uh, this. It’s calming.” There are many, many bottles. I voice doubts. “Well, you want a pharmacist consult?”

The little window is set in a curving glass wall, the shelves of medicines too strong for mortals curving with it in pleasant faux wood. High in the back is another level where a man in a white coat works behind a railing, his furious pace transferring slips of paper from square plastic trays. Consult, someone calls. Be right there. The man descends the stairs and comes to the window.

He is a kind man, quick, Asian accent a little thick but understandable. I relate my problem: the objective dates, times, dosages, combinations; the subjective need for a way out. He listens, nods, asks questions proving his active listening and commitment to a unique response. The Ambien I’ve been reliant on since November and stopped somewhat abruptly: you’re over it, you weren’t on it long enough to cause a problem. Something else longer acting, short-term to help get over it: very small, no problem unless you take it for years. The big issue–the citalopram anxiety–he is quick as he is careful. It’s not so much the symptoms get worse, but that it hasn’t started to work. You felt mania, but it didn’t last, right? He uses his hands to emphasize a mechanism of action that appears to be one thing but is something else. (I wish I remembered this better.) He seems to be saying it’s  working but I’m not done with the transition. I’ve heard of medications not working again after stopping them the first time. He pinches his face at such old wives tales: No, it will work the same. You are adjusting.

We keep talking. I don’t question if he has something else to do; he seems fine sitting slouched on a hidden chair against a register in a white space of controlled clutter, his eyes focused directly on mine. I realize now he talks and listens like the physician we all want: the doctor we grew up watching on doctor shows.

So what is happening in your life? What is going on, why the change? I tell him since September: loss, guilt, fear, loneliness, frustration with the book that is something more like pursuit. We are too reliant on pills. I mean, atavan, valium, xanax–all those things would help now, so I could suggest that. But think about why you would take those–why, what for? What do you do for fun?

He took a skydiving trip recently. His arms shoot out, his face alive with the thrill of it. You have to find that, man. What is it that makes you like that–really alive? With that, balance. When you have that, it will all fall together. The book will be there, you will see. You need to live your life and feel free in your life. 

Twenty, thirty minutes we talk. Time is a totality, every moment held, let go. At the end, he reaches out his blue-gloved hand and shakes mine.

Every so often a Monday evening is as extraordinary as it is plain, a parting of invisible seas invisible to everyone else. Every so often we get exactly what we need.

Dance Beach Dance

Mass gathers

A friend’s last-minute invite to a beach dance party is the gift I need. Summer has made a special preview visit, confusing everyone with warm air but clammy sand a few inches down. She will make a dance floor for freeform ruckus. Tiki torches will hold in the edges. I have been hiking all day and there will be nowhere to park, but no cannot be an answer to such a yes.

Toss

The sand is packed with revelers, strollers, hangers-on. Teens clamber or slink by, or slide on disallowed skateboards. There is raucous joyous noise reflected in a light without texture, only presence. Mountains rise up out of the water with the sun clear color behind, descending into night’s expectation.

Dance in perspective

The dance floor is installed, an impromptu work of plywood and duct tape. Their fire pit is impromptu too, a hole dug with many sharing hands and roaring with sawed-up pallet wood. The wood is bone dry and snaps and sparks like the dragons inside are breaking free. There are coolers and brown paper bags and the lumpy fabric beach bags of every mom everywhere, stuffed with fixings and backups and the palliative for every childhood calamity.

There are hugs and heady greetings. There will be dancing. The kids have Magic Markers and are anointing the dance floor. I am ashamed to not remember exactly what they wrote, but it was something like Super Fantastic Beach Dance Dance Floor!!! 

Gathered ’round

Night falls in a hurry, which I hardly notice as I talk with someone new. There’s a lot to talk about on a noisy beach, the stars out, waves crashing, teenage girls with tallboys wandering to our dance floor and asking if they can use it. It’s not really ours, my new friend explains, and the teen girls are ecstatic with permission. We watch them hug each other and dance sloppily. They’re happy and not too messy. It’s the beach–there’s already sand everywhere.

The last weeks have been hard for me, grinding and staticy, waiting for the pills to work and assaulted with unfamiliar with side effects I don’t remember from last time. But at the beach, sitting in a fabric chair at the edge of duct-taped plywood, my new friend and I talk about theatre and improv and writing and what it is we are doing right now. It is easy and release. We are in the heart of right now together and anxiety cannot exist.

She has a show coming up, but is weary of anything administrative having to do with theatre. Even handing out a postcard is work, she says. She does tax law and  is thinking of going back to school for more training. It’s exciting and interesting to me. I lean a little forward. Excitement is contagious. We all need to be excited about something. We are all in different places.

Night of friends

Night brings out the crowds as much as the sun has. For all the naysayers, the doomers, those who believe the slightest pause in the desperate pressure of rules and laws that are our only bulwark against anarchy: look to this beach. Drunks, sure. Revelers, sure. The teenage girls and their tallboys have wandered off with their standard issue lunky male companions, maybe off to a plush van for some action. This is all a calamity only to the bluest of noses. Back before cities, before agriculture, back when we hunted and gathered and were done with the day, this is what we did. This is why it feels so normal and so good. Homo sapiens, this is who you are: a happy person, surrounded and sated by friends, ringing a fire.

Heat and light

Like the desert, the beach turns to cold stone when the light goes down. I’m glad I changed from hiking and wore shoes, as much as I dread the sand that will be in them; I can zip my flimsy jacket no tighter. My friend decides to brave the women’s restroom line and I head to the fire.

Fire is an element. It calls to us, but is hard to understand. Still here and now I feel all the fires I have stared into, the same orange coals of shimmering jewel deserts, the same cracks and pops. All those fires are gone and all those fires are here. More wood is thrown on and the fire takes to it like the hungry magic that it is. It is bright and warm and it brings out thousands of laughs all up and down the beach. There must be a way to take some of this fire and take it with me, since I need it so much all the time.

Kids have sharp sticks and are burning marshmallows on them. Far off a girl screams, but their scream of shocked pleasure like when an approved boy pulls them. Piercing white cones arc out from cop cars.

As ancestors did

And suddenly one is there: all sharp in a clean uniform, hands on hips. Hi, folks. Yeah, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we’ve gotta get the fire out. Everyone is friendly and nobody feigns surprise. The cop is apologetic about the limited number of fire pits. Everyone pushes in sand with wedged hands, like we did as kids pretending to be bulldozers. Dark gasps in, and echoes.

Whatever the fire was saying, people no longer hear it. Couples say drawn-out goodbyes and cart off kids. Fewer high school girls with tallboys wander by; the cops shine their light more. In the end there is only our host, her daughter, my new friend, and me. The cops announce the park is closing in thirty minutes and we are left with no more fire than tiki torches.

Before the duct tape is removed, the plywood sheets carted to the parking lot, the sand over the former fire doused with water, we sit in the fabric chairs. Look at those stars! And there they are, eternal above the city. The Big Dipper, even Orion though summer is coming on. Ferries shine out in the Sound and we are quiet here together, the hubbub behind us. For a moment yet it is Saturday night on the beach, unseen waves landing against a soft glow.

Glow

Portents

The magnificent dusk

The sun is out, its fullbore discharge laying the land as flat and glassy as if under summer’s hand. People are energized, unable to believe but believing. The city is in an opposite of panic, an ecstasy that still brushes its teeth. Wow, look at it, people say, and they stop and hold out hands to feel how real it is.

Fogbound

Slowly, the past is slow. It creeps back on us when we thought it was resolved, lumbering reanimated through the countryside, stomping the flowers and knocking the trash into the street. Have you seen the horror movie where the woman screams at the approaching husk, screaming while pausing to reload: why don’t you stay dead?  Yes, you have.

April was rough. Not for any rational reason, and not, as the Puritans would insist, because I deserve it. (Though, given the culture, of course I subconsciously believe this.) The personal odometer turning over with Big Things not yet done, shrugged and rationalized for security or a sense of duty or who knows why–it’s a fact there’s that much less time to do them in. Her time in footlights over, someone in passing muses about what she’ll do for her next career. She meant nothing by it, but it did a lot for me. There is still a lot of future left, given the averages. I like her response better than that of older friends, peering down at me from the sixties, seventies. Forty-three! Hah! You get no sympathy from me, kid. 

A friend has a crisis of obligation, duty and family, and all I can offer is support and listening on the phone. I wonder if I should say anything, and what it could be. Suggestions did not work well with my ex. I learned people just want someone to acknowledge their trial. This person is not my ex. I make a few suggestions, here and there: better handholding than silence on the phone. She keeps talking. I keep listening.

I am writing and it is slow. I have cut back more on the advice of the physical therapists treating my shoulder. Rotator cuff, they say. Overuse. Four to eight weeks.  They give me exercises with a stretchy red band the kitten likes to fling himself on as I pull it, let it go, pull it again. The kitten world is a fabulous one. The shoulder is better, then a little worse, then better. First-thing appointments has a woman pressing and pulling after I run through more exercises. Seems like it’s a lot better, she says. I remember how much the sulfur wire glowing underneath my shoulderblade burned, how much Advil I was taking. Yes, better.

Maybe slow, but the writing is better. The second chapter is maybe half-done, an unimpressive showing for a month, but there it is. More things are coming together: the acting, the improv, life after being tossed in the waves. What is his intention? What does he want? What happens next? Things happening is key. I made an outline so have an idea, but it’s the outline I should have written three years ago, so there’s a lot to find out. Writing is about coherent discovery, making connections that are as natural as they are unexpected–even though you know every story, you know what’s going to happen, you still want to find out. That’s the mystery: how to do it all over again just like before, but different enough to make you care.

It’s a little more than a simmer, but it’s not the boil I need to get done this year. This eats on me. I know this is unhelpful. This blog is not the book.

I have long talks with a good friend, one of many. We’ve had the talks before but she insists this is okay–this is how the inner child works. The palaver about life being a journey is bullshit. You want to get somewhere! But it is a journey, and you can meander. Imagine yourself meandering. She also offers every serious writer she’s ever known is isolated and miserable. I’ve thought about this too. Your life isn’t a problem! Don’t make problems. Seems like the answer is in there, somewhere.

Moon over Thai Hammy

Eliot said April was the cruelest month, then described the muddy tumult of change. April is the month the shine comes off the new year, the excuses of winter idleness gone as Nature blooms irrepressibly up. It’s not a sprint, but it’s getting warmer and still we need to run.

Two Weeks’ Three Big Things

Sun out

I turned 43 in April. Two weeks have passed since my birthday. There have been clouds and sun.

In high school, I decided I was disenchanted with birthdays. I had no parties, did nothing in particular with friends. I don’t remember why. I’m grateful friends persisted, offering cards and happy birthday. Now I relish it. Being honest: I need it. I am told to be grateful, to reflect with grace, and I’m fortunate to be reminded this way when my past tendency has been to pull myself down. You may know this voice: so many things I haven’t done, so many failures to Live Up To My Potential. Friends, I hope you are as relieved as me to know that voice has been silent. It’s made a return the last months, but up and down, very loud then very silent. I prefer the silence.

Cloud city

Last Wednesday, I finished the first chapter of the book. It’s only a draft: incomplete and patchy. But it’s a start. I feel I know it a lot more. Writing it was up and down, wrenching and light, the wrenching parts feeling like grad school, the light parts like the best college, the best of my late 20s. It’s as if I’ve forgotten how free and exciting writing can be and am remembering. I’m remembering the frustration and questioning too. I’ve been staying at my office building after work, squatting in an unused space marked SHANGHAI LANDING, pulling the glass door closed and writing. It’s taken too long, even a couple hours each day not seeming to build up much. (How much exactly I don’t know: counting words was watching the clock instead of paying attention. I write by time instead: half-hour, two hours.) But last Wednesday when I got to the end, it felt like an end that led somewhere. Finished, I sat at the desk and felt light. It was going, even a little bit.

Where it happened

A woman reached out to me and we started talking. We had a phone call where the electricity reached through the ether, lighting us. We had a first date where we ended at the verge. We had a great time anyway. She sent me texts that made it hard to focus on work. We had a second date last Thursday. Friday the tone changed; Friday night she said she couldn’t continue, over the phone. She considered the notice personal. It was a whirlwind. I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t surprised, not really, and not upset. But I don’t sleep well beyond the recent not sleeping well, and I feel a new guilt about the divorce.

Here’s the positive view. We are walking and talking, my friend and me. Now you know what that feels like, and you know what to aim for in the future. He’s right. He’s older, and wiser than he lets on. It’s a good thing to believe.

Storm in the sun

I am not sleeping and must sleep. I am facing the end of the Ambien I got stuck on over Thanksgiving. I could have ended it before, should have ended it when I didn’t have a job to go to, or when I ran out the first time a month ago. I didn’t. It’s a pattern. I haven’t been focused on should have done for a while.

I feel well; I feel unwell enough to remind me of ten years ago. I feel a buoyant strength and happiness; I feel there has only ever been gravity and cold and the raw desperate ghost of loss . The sun fends off some of it.

We are people who feel things in a big way. Walking with my friend, the forest is illuminated with spring. Sounds pretty normal to me. 

God at the Beach

Thunderstorm

Sun came, a surprise. I went to the beach to run, but mostly be outside myself. For the first time in months, the chatter stopped, and then I thought of jokes. Then I thought:

We come into life without guidance, but also without weight. We don’t want what we don’t miss, and we don’t know what we’re missing. Nothing ties us down until we grab for it.

We develop expectations. We expect to reify our wonders, which seems reasonable. But things go wrong, at least it seems to us. Failures and wrongs get under our skin and work away at it. It becomes armor. It still falls away.

I’ve never been religious. It seems way too easy: somebody to listen, always available and infinitely attentive, an assurance that at best shows contradictory signs. I don’t think it’s true, at least not the way gravity is true, or doubt. We need God because we need someone to be mad at.

The wise suggest release. It is okay to fall, they say. If you spread your arms, and if the ground is infinitely far away, it is the same as flying.

On a clear night, look up at the stars. Tell me this isn’t true.

 

The Days Proceed

Busy sky, from Bainbridge

The blog hiatus I declared in November is more apparent now. That book isn’t going to write itself, not with a day job. But I feel I should write here. It feels easier and established. We go where we’ve always gone, sometimes.

Back to reality

Last Saturday I take the Bainbridge ferry. On the other end is a friend and breakfast. He has sympathetic but not codependent things to say about my anxieties, which three days after their early morning roosting have receded. He trains executive bureaucrats for a living, and his tip is: negating polarization. (Instructing bigwigs requires ostentatious names.) Instead of black-and-white thinking (the habit of hierarchies and depressives), figure out how to simultaneously get the maximum positive qualities of both poles. Sit in the middle and be at both ends. My therapist said the same thing about a year ago. I wonder how many times I hear things before I really understand.

Waiting in the city

The big anxiety of a week and a half ago was completing that day’s writing and realizing we both felt convoluted, half-asleep, and dead. Plodding ahead on Chapter 1 for six weeks is a definition of nowhere. I went to bed disgusted and woke in the early unplaceable dark–not morning, not night, all orange sodium streetlight–and felt despair. It was the usual: why am I doing this, why bother, who cares. I felt guilt about the divorce. All this very sharp: no rumination, nothing to dwell on, every feeling immediate.

Then I had an image of a robot waiting for a train. Then, the robot powered by tape, 8-track carts. The character stuck in my then-current Chapter 1 left a hotel room–where I had not really given him anything to do–and moved to early morning not-sleep in his Seattle apartment, the day after losing his job, the day before taking the train to New York. It felt natural and obvious, and the images kept coming as I didn’t go back to sleep, gave in and got up, had something to eat, got the bus. At work I started writing it down on a string of numbered postits.

Gift obscured

I missed the writer’s group my professional writer acquaintance holds and write her to apologize. Reward yourself, she says. Set little goals. Be easy about them. If something looks interesting, follow it. She said that before. I had a rush of postit ideas before. It feels thrilling, like before, a long time ago. Some returns are healthy.

Library

I write the next evenings and feel better; the weekend is two-three solid hours each day. I’m making a habit of writing at the library downtown Fridays after work, and after morning with my friend I do this Saturday afternoon too. We have purpose, the quiet homeless and I–they with hefty paperbacks of a Great Work, others peeking from their dufflebags. The sun is out. It helps us both.

Skewed

Monday work imposes itself: someone has seen something and gotten excited. Overtime is approved. My high energy goes to anxiety for the deadline I’m paid to meet. Writing is brief. The postits feel heavy and are aging. I whine on the phone about it. I don’t have enough time, energy, concentration. I remember that too.

Corporate snow

Friday comes with snow, which I stare at with dread. But the day goes well. There is the smallest of disasters, but I know this only in the end–the problem is never knowing that result beforehand. We are in good shape for Monday, the deadline Tuesday. The weekend is not required. More stress than I needed–stress I allowed–but much less than would have come before. Leaving in the early evening, the sun’s echo beams up into the clear west. It is cold and all right. Stopping at a friend’s birthday, the bar upstairs is warm, and she and the other women wear thin summer dresses and flowers in their hair. That is warm and all right.

Bright west

Saturday was brilliant, clear, the northern spring’s almost warm. I write for a couple hours and clear two of five postits. I remember doing this too, a long time ago. Everything takes a while to get into.

I see a strange, brief performance art piece. A young man with big ideas pulls me into a half-lit space. Someone lights a light. I’m going to give you some important directions. North, south, east, west…. Then I’m pulled away.