I came to my desk to create an update much earlier this evening and the title was all that I could muster to type out initially. Ho-hum and down-in-the-dumps was the generalized feeling that I had persuant to something of a sticky ending to what had otherwise been a fairly remarkable day. There! I said it: today was a good day. The notion has been something of a rarity lately so I feel it's best that I comment correctly and let the readership know that not every moment of my most recent days and nights has been bleak and bored and basking in a resonating self-deprecation. As has become my custom lately, I rose early, downed my coffee while I checked emails and Facebook statuses, reviewed my daily list of necessaries and must-do's, visualized a fairly clear plan of attack, then broke out my Just for Today and Twenty-Four Hours a Day to read what my forefathers had in store for me decades ago when the words were first written in anticipation that one day, some day, early in the overheated July of 2011, a still-pretty-idealistic guy with just shy of six years sober would open his eyes and require a little wisdom that could be pushed in his direction.
I managed to spend almost the entire day away from the stifled and compressed interior of my house, something that may seem like nothing to most, but is actually something of an accomplished feat for someone who is still obviously in the midst of recovery -finally, neither on the upper or lower side of the halfway mark, but still somewhere in that general area- and is unable to withstand any significant period of time in a seated position behind the wheel of a car or snuggled into the booth of a restaurant or merely sitting in what is otherwise a comfortable and familiar postion propped at a well-worn desk with a second-hand laptop feeling a writer's fingers dancing across his or her keys.
For the first time in several weeks, I enjoyed a lunch that wasn't microwaved from a pouch or re-heated on Pyrex or scarfed down from a paper towel while standing at the granite kitchen countertops in the fully homo-erect-ed position while it hasn't lost any novelty or given way to pain necessitating a change of venue. At lunch, I had the pleasure of company -as well as treatment to the meal- from someone who actually took the time to hear me out and let me talk a little and didn't manage to turn my responses to his questions into the perfect opportunity to about-face and re-invade the conversation with the perception of a world that revolves entirely around him. In other words, someone who is interesting and interested in getting to know anything and everything that makes me interesting and interested in being interested in by him. Did you follow that? Nah! Me neither. My eyes are drooping and I'm pretty thoroughly exhausted, and I really haven't made it very far through the description of my day that I had planned to load into today's post if, for no other reason than that I've been sparse and lazy in content for the past two days.
Maybe a quick cigarette break'll help organize my thoughts and point me in the direction toward which I ought to be thinking and typing tonight.
I didn't go smoke. Instead, I pulled out my print journal, which is, as I pointed out to my lunch companion today, the place where my writing always begins or ends. Unexpectedly and remarkably, my lunch date offered insight into his perceptions of the ebb and flow of energy and ideas in my blog, and while he described the way the one gets a sense of pattern and rhythm present in my endeavors, the words he opted and the gestures he used made perfect sense. For the first time in a long time, I saw, literally visually saw, exactly what he was meaning through the well received constructive criticisms he was offering: just when I'm arriving at an important plot point or detail or conclusion to one of my more richly conceived and copiously constructed stream-of-consciousness conglomerations, I stop. David told me that it seems as if I am hiding some of the best bits, keeping some of the better details at bay, or at least away from the eyes of babes. Perhaps that is the case. Maybe I do deliberately excise some of the juicier pieces of fat because they contain some of the most revealing DNA of my work. As I mentioned, nearly every blog post either begins or ends in my journal. Believe me, that's for the best for now.
After leaving lunch, I was in an intensely contemplative mood for much of the remaining afternoon. I briefly came back home to collect some essentials and to head up to the library to work there for a while. I found a more controlled and less conspicuos locale where I could pop in my ear buds and open my notebooks and click open my pens to fill in forms and complete the most crucial bits and pieces that made up the torso of my to-do list for the day. Productive. I was productive. Of course, I started feeling the pain seeping back into my right hip and nestle an unpleasant wedge somewhere deep down in the joint, sort of hinged and hurried into that little nook just beyond my groin where my thigh meets my hip which meets the underside of my ass which connects to the lower portions of my torso, but not at the surface: down deep. Standing or moving my leg or althering my position in any way doesn't seem to matter or make any difference at all. Once the pain, which only departs for some period (either for as little as an hour or extended into three to four [or not departing at all but merely slowing down to a faint trickle that pulsates manageably, but is never truly gone] hours) of time, begins to make its way back to fully alert and well-oriented to let its presence be known, I can usually throw in the towel on anything getting anywhere near the way I may have previously intended. Once the pain has walked into my party, it's best to turn the music off and start giving signals that it's time for everyone to go: I'm probably going to spend the remainder of my day dealing with getting it under control. Sometimes it works and I can come back to my desk to resume for a while. Sometimes, nothing works and I'm forced to close off and remit myself to a quiet and comfortable and off-the-beaten-path place where I can get lost in my thoughts and try to mentally wil myself back to where I was earlier when I initially found that happy place from which I could work.
I left the library and came home and began to develop an ache in my belly that was somewhere between depressed and frustration and any one of either of their angry and irritating cousins. I kept reviewing my to-do list and looked over my blog and played around here and/or there online, thinking and worrying and wondering and never really finding any one thing to totally focus on...oh, no! To find only one thing on which I could focus my attention may make that one detail all the more important and force me to find some means to eliminate it to the point that it's no longer a detail with which I ought to concern myself. I started feeling better, just before sitting down to compile this blog (and well after originally creating the title to describe my mood at the time) when I pushed my list of everything that absolutely requires immediate and satisfactory solution to the side. There's really no way I'll be able to knock all the rest of it out right here and right now: tonight; therefore, I'm gonna sit back and allow my posture to collapse and look unhealthy and lazy so that I can relax. And just let things be.
And I'm gonna contemplate lunch a little more. Along with that ebbing and flowing and rhythm that I feel certain is totally lacking from this post (seeing as I've been up since six-thirty this morning, and that was after only two-and-a-half to three hours of REM-style sleep), I'm gonna think a little more on being a little more personal and allowing some of those juicier fat bits in instead of putting them in spots where no one can see or read or judge. And I'm gonna see about incorporating a little more honesty and straigh-forward frankness rather than editing my language to the point of it possibly receiving a PG-13 rating from the MPAA.
Just gonna save this tonight. I am gonna have to review in the morning. My guess is that nothing I've written makes any damn sense at all because nothing I'm thinking does. That's an effect of taking medication at night when you're already tired.
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