Another Annual-versity

It was one year ago this past weekend that the auctioneers came to the old house for the last time, took what they were going to take, and I loaded up the last of what I wanted, and turned over the keys to the new owners.

The old house. . . it feels like a dream now. I can still "see" it in my mind's eye, can still mentally navigate it as if it were a bit of virtual reality, but that thirty-five years of history? Gone. It almost feels like it happened to someone else.

I have word through my father that the new owners are planning to tear the barn down. They may already have done so. This means that the old place literally isn't the same place that I lived in anymore.

Although it was nothing but a hardship at the time, I guess now I should be grateful for the move; among other things, it kept some thoughts and emotions at bay that have lately been catching me up.

I can't believe that this coming May, Mom will have been gone for two years. Two YEARS. Two years and it's still an open wound. This morning at work a book landed on my desk that had no obvious connection to the memory, but it dredged everything up anyway, and I had to run to the men's room to cry.

I have so many reasons to be thankful at this point, and yet the memory still has the power to cut me down at will.

One year ago today, the new house was strewn with boxes. Today, it's a home that I am happy in, but it seems that I still have plenty of baggage to unload.

-- Freder

Winter of our Discontent

There are days, more and more often, when I feel like I'm losing the war. I'm hoping that it's just the effect of winter, that things will start to get better when the seasons change. But I don't know. I end up in tears every single night. There's shit going on that, even with my almost complete lack of shame, I can't type about here on the blog. When people ask me "How are you?" I don't even know how to answer anymore. I mean, I can't tell them the truth.

Holes. . . and a Discovery

I couldn't understand why the palm of my right hand hurt so much yesterday. It was over-all ouchie, but just at the base of my thumb it was particularly painful and red. I wondered about it all day. Then, around dinnertime, the coin finally dropped: on Saturday I dug two hundred and sixty holes in my lawn with a hand trowel. DUH! You think?

I'm a slow thinker. When rapid decisions are called for, I usually just freeze. If they got me on Hell's Kitchen, I'd probably just stand there with a spatula in my hand looking bewildered and repeating to myself, over and over again, "Oh my god! Oh my god!"


"Wake up!" Chef Ramsay would shout.  "What the **** are you doing?!"

"Yes, Chef! Sorry, Chef! Oh my god! Oh my god!"

Anyway. Two hundred and sixty holes exactly. I counted them.

A Hole is to Dig. I'm sure that my neighbors thought I was crazy, especially when I started in digging holes along the strip of grass beside the road. But I was planting daffodil bulbs. My father left a plastic bucket full of them on my doorstep. It's more than likely that some won't make it, but with any luck my yard will be dotted with daffodils next spring.

Most people plant daffodils in garden beds. But out at the old house we had a section of the back yard that was full of them every spring. My mother used to say that planting daffodils in that section of lawn was the best thing my father ever did.

I'm taking the idea one step further. I'm going to have daffodils all around my house. Don't know how I'll mow the lawn, but I'll figure that out when the time comes.

By the time I was done, having cut the grass just prior to the planting, I was so shagged out that I flopped on the porch and just evaporated. My shoulders were complaining bitterly at my treatment of them. My heart was beating so hard that I could feel it pounding against the back of the couch. But, yeah, it was a good kind of tired.

Today we've had two periods of torrential rain, so my daffodils are getting a good soaking.

Next, the hosta has to come out, to make way for hydrangeas. I don't think that's going to happen right away!

*

Yesterday I bought a combination printer and scanner. I wasn't planning on doing it. It was just there, with a sign overhead that said $49. I couldn't believe they were serious. Ah, but t probably doesn't work with a Mac, I tthought. Checked the box. Yes, it does! It's been so long since I was able to print or scan anything at home; even so, I stood there and thought about it for several minutes. I told you; I'm a slow thinker.

Later in the evening, printer / scanner ensconced and software installed, I cast around for something to test the scanning bit with. I finally settled on the black and white portrait of Mom that's been sitting in my kitchen here ever since I moved in. It was taken by her sister-in-law, my Aunt Sharron, maybe twenty-plus years ago, and is hands down the best portrait of her that I have.

In the process of taking it out of the frame, I found three more photos concealed underneath it. Photos that I had no memory of ever seeing before. All of them terrific. In one of them, she's seated on a wooden rocking horse with her brother, my Uncle John, standing beside her.

But my absolute favorite of the lot is the one that's heading up this post. Maybe it's that she's standing inside the "hoosegow" that's out in my back yard right now. Maybe it's because I've come to think of the structure as "my TARDIS," and this makes me feel as if she's just popping off for a bit, out for another lark in time and space, you know it's bigger in here than it is on the outside, possibility, possibility, possibility, see you later.

Maybe it's because she looks happier than I ever saw her, ever, in the last five years of her life.

I'm not putting it back behind the other pictures. This one deserves a frame of its own.

-- Freder.

By Any Other Name

I try to be brutally honest in most things here on the blog; but sometimes (like this morning) it seems as though I'm writing around the point, rather than getting to it. Not being deliberately misleading. Just not getting it.

There's something that I'm missing.

Does anyone else ever feel this way? As if the monster is standing right behind you, but no matter every which way you turn, you can't manage to see it?

Just like a movie, really. The audience can see the monster, but the character can't -- until it's too late.

*

At work on a Sunday. Seems pointless, really. Perhaps things will pick up as the day rolls on, perhaps the upperclassmen will start to return. Even so, it seems silly to be here at eight bloody o'clock in the morning when the campus is deader than Rock Hudson.

*

Ah, now. Speaking of Death. Although I sometimes personalize him (or her, depending on my mood), I dislike euphemisms for death, especially since my mother's.

"Passed Away" isn't the worst; the "away" part at least acknowledges the truth. But "Passed" or "Passing" to me smacks of Magical Thinking -- as though your loved one isn't gone. . . just, you know, moved sideways into another dimension.

To say that they are "with God now." That's the worst. Surely, if you are Of The Faith. you have to believe that all of us are with God, all of the time, all of our lives. What then is the purpose of this phrase? Does anyone really believe that our dearly departed are gleefully cavorting on the playground in the clouds with the Bearded Old Man watching over them like a benevolent parent? Does anyone really believe that our dead are busily having tea parties with Jesus in the stratosphere?

"Called Home." What does that mean? My mother's home was here with me. She wasn't called. She was taken.

"Crossed Over."  The Styx aside, death isn't a river that one ferries across, to emerge on the other side, Just the Same, only in a Different Place.

I have a hard time saying "dead" and "died," too, and have to force myself to type it, as when I had to write about my Uncle Orly earlier this week.

The word that I feel, the word that I know, is "Gone." It's the only honest word, the only word that expresses the emptiness. We like to imagine that our loved ones are "in a better place," but the reality is that they aren't where we want them to be: here, with us. How can death be a better place when what it means is the absence of life?

At their worst, euphemisms for death can even be used to justify the taking of life. I've been feeling well alone, in this past decade, with my belief that George Bush did a terrible thing when he invaded Iraq, and that President Obama has been wrong not to bring a swift end to it. Two wrongs don't make a right. All life is sacred. It's galling to know that the same people who want to outlaw abortion are perfectly OK with killing as many Muslims as possible. When Jimmy Carter declared with a smile that "Today, we are at peace," I was one of the ones who snickered -- because I believed that it was finally and for all time evident to the plainest idiot that War is never the answer. Now look at us. Carter's peace was a bigger accomplishment than I believed.

I've said good-bye so many times that it's become monotonous, a litany of goodbyes, like a string of Hail Marys assigned in penance: "Say a thousand goodbyes and call me in the morning."

Say a million goodbyes.

Say ten million goodbyes.

Keep on saying goodbye. . . until it's your turn.

In my case, there isn't going to be anyone left here to miss me. That's probably for the best. I'd hate to be responsible for anyone feeling the kind of sadness and loss that I feel on a daily basis.

-- Freder.

Uncle Orly

My Uncle Orland died yesterday. He was my father's older brother.

We weren't close. My father moved us to Maine in the mid-'60s, and the families, which had previously been very social (we summered together at Lake Vermillion, always did the holidays together, and had dinner often at each other's homes) went their separate ways. I saw my Uncle Orly only twice after I reached adulthood. The first time he took the fedora off of my head and rearranged the creases. The second time he called my car "an American piece of crap" (well, he was right) and told me, "This is what 84 looks like."

That bluntness was characteristic of Uncle Orly, but also of my father and of their father, Grandpa Adolph. Uncle Orly often said things that he shouldn't have said, especially to my father. Once, he took my father aside and told him off for being so critical of me. He said, "Don't you see what you just did? He was working really hard, and when you cut him down he completely deflated."

Once, he took me aside and complained about my father's hair. "He has beautiful snow-white hair, and he makes himself look ridiculous by washing it out with that Grecian formula stuff."

Remembering comments like that makes me wish that I had known Uncle Orly better. He was right about a lot of things, but being right doesn't always make it right to say it. There were sometimes Inappropriate Incursions.

Uncle Orly had white hair for as long as I knew him. He had piercing blue eyes and a strong voice. I used him as the physical model (though not a character model) for Mr. Sentack in my short story "Punch & Judy" (available elsewhere on this blog). He liked the outdoors and he liked racing cars, and he liked being the Alpha Dog.

I didn't have those words to describe him when I was a little boy, but I could sense it about him, and it's confirmed when I watch the footage of him in our family home movies. When he entered any room he was in command, but somehow in command from a distance.

There were stories from my father about their scouting days, about pranks played. One of the pranks involved the streetcars of St. Paul, although the details are lost to me. I'll have to ask my father. On another occasion, a Scouting trip (this was back when the Boy Scouts were really Boy Scouts, and much time was spent in the wild), the boys were investigating an abandoned house and Uncle Orly rigged up pranks to play on the others, to make them think the place was haunted. According to my father, Uncle Orly was deeply engrossed in this when he sensed a presence in the room, felt a hand on his shoulder, turned around to find himself alone. But that may have been a prank as well.

Uncle Orly was legendary for the Treasure Hunts he would sometimes set up for us kids, if he was cajoled in the right way. My sister and I had a taste of this when his family visited us in Maine, I think during our second summer. He started in the front yard and went deep into the woods out behind the house, leaving us clues of various kinds at every step of the way. Some were written, some were blazes on the trees. Some were too hard for us to figure out ("What's a hoosegow?" we asked our mother. It was the jailhouse that now rests in my back yard). We spent the entire afternoon on my Uncle Orly's Treasure Hunt, and finally found a cache of lollypops and candy in the mailbox far down the hill at the end of the drive.

I have nothing but supposition to base this on,.but after the loss of his middle son Brian (who has been very much on my mind of late; I'm planning another post about him), Uncle Orly appeared to go into a tailspin. Bad things began to happen. I won't type about them here.

Based on what little I know about their relationship, I would describe Uncle Orly's marriage to Aunt Lucille as one based on mutual disrespect. And yet they married for life, and seemed to have some good times with the bad. If Uncle Orly treated my Aunt badly, he paid for it in later years when his health began to go and he had to rely upon her "mercy." Once he fell on their front step and broke his hip. Aunt Lucille walked right past him, she had a church function to go to and couldn't be bothered, she left him lying there in the front yard. That's probably the most extreme example of how she dealt with him on a daily basis in his last years.

This week, the nursing home called to let her know he was going. She had another church function and that was more important. By the time she got home from that, they had called again telling her not to bother.

From my father's reports of Uncle Orly's final days in the nursing home in conditions that I am certain he found intolerable, I do not feel sad for his loss. But I feel terribly sad for his family and for my father, who loved him warts and all. And I feel terribly sad for me: because it seems like they are beginning to drop like flies, and I know that within a decade's time I'll probably be all on my own. I cried all last night and this morning, and at the same time felt disgusted with myself for all the tears over someone that I never made the effort to know as an adult.

My mother disliked Orly, and she had good reasons, but they were the reasons of grown-ups, and as I've already pointed out more than once I really only knew Uncle Orly from the perspective of a child. Still, her feelings colored mine as I grew up, which accounts for why I regarded him warily on the occasions when we did meet.

She disliked the way he treated my father. My dad worshipped his elder brother, and in return Orly was often condescending at best. She disliked the way that he treated his wife. She disliked the whole Alpha Dog thing.

For my part, I prefer to remember him as the man who created the legendary Treasure Hunts.

-- Freder.

A Blooming Tragedy

We interrupt our regularly scheduled post with the saddest news. Terry Pratchett, British author of the Discworld novels, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's and says he will consider assisted suicide when the time comes. Presumably, when he can no longer write or work for legalizing assisted suicide in England.

Here's a link to the NPR story.

I can't say that I've read all, or even most, of his novels. The man is prolific. The one bitter little gripe that I have about him is that nobody who is that prolific has the right to be so good.

Lots of writers have attempted the comedy-fantasy, but none, to my knowledge, have brought such humanity to their work. Pratchett isn't just a genre writer -- the stories are character-driven and the humor is a full-blooded mix of satire and verbal slapstick that masks an underlying seriousness and concerns some of  the big questions of life. It's not for nothing that Death is a recurring character in Pratchett's novels; in Reaper Man (one of his best) The Powers that Be actually sack Death because he's developing a personality. Can't have that happen!

The bumbling witches and warlocks that populate his early novels aren't shallow characters. They bumble not in the form of pratfalls but because they are human.

A friend of mine is a huge fan of P. G. Wodehouse. I don't know why I was surprised to learn that she is also a big fan of Pratchett's, but it's easy to see the connection once you think about it. They share the same lightness of touch and a distinct British-ness that colors their work. Like Wodehouse, you can pick up any one of Pratchett's books, start anywhere, there's no one beginning point, all avenues into their worlds are good. But there the similarities end: where Wodehouse draws eccentricity out of the natural world, Pratchett draws humanity out of the most eccentric of fantasy worlds. More so than Wodehouse, Pratchett has something to say. If you haven't read him, you should.

I don't feel sorry or sad for Pratchett. My sense is that he is as emotionally well-equipped to face the challenges ahead of him as well as anyone. And although the prospect of Alzheimer's must be worse for a writer, who makes his living and defines himself out of his own head and personality, all the evidence indicates that Alzheimer's is harder on the family than it is on the sufferer.

I'm sad -- and angry -- for us. It's not fair. More damn tears to hold back. Pratchett might have had more than twenty years of activity and as many more books ahead of him. It's a crime. We're being robbed. Why couldn't this have happened to Nicholas Sparks or Danielle Steele, instead of Pratchett? Why does this sort of thing have to happen to people who bring good into the world?

Thank you, Mr. Pratchett. You will be missed.

-- Freder.

The Way Some People Die

. . . is the title of a book by Ross MacDonald. I'm reading a collection of short autobiographical pieces by MacDonald (real name Kenneth Millar). Millar describes emotional and practical difficulties at various stages of his life, "seismic upheavals" such that I think anyone could appreciate or identify with. The real difference is that Millar never seems to have suffered from a creative block.

He could always write it out within his fiction. That's what I had learned to do as well. But it's not there anymore.

These days off, or at least the unoccupied hours, are deadly to me. Not being able to write is like not having a mouth. Beating myself up over it doesn't help at all.

If I were to hire MacDonald's detective, Lew Archer, to help me solve the case, he would find several causes (as I have done), but perhaps he could find solutions that are evading me.

First, and possibly foremost, I used to drink while I wrote. Not "get drunk," mind you -- if that happened, the work came to a screeching halt. But a drink or two or three, taken over a few hours, would lubricate the gears, get them turning again, unlock my imagination and free my hands from restraints.

I don't have that tool anymore. My gears are frozen and rusted badly in place, and my imagination seems to be bolted shut, barring only the random images of horror that sometimes burst out when I'm trying to lie at rest.

The other thing I've come up with is the feeling that, with all my grandparents gone and now my mother gone, too, there's nobody left that I need to prove myself to. My friend BC would likely say to this, "Prove it to yourself!"

Myself. That's the person I least care for. The only person I hate more is my sister, who helped make me this way.

I honestly believed that a few days off, some down time to gather myself, would be all that I needed to get going again. Instead, it's having the opposite effect. It's almost as if the outrageous craziness of the last nine months kept me from experiencing a level of the grief and despair (which hardly seems possible), and now that things have calmed down a lot, the silence and the vacancy has allowed a fresh tsunami of emotion to hit me. Not being able to work at any creative pursuit (not even my scrapbook of the old house, which is filled with associations that I can't bear to reflect upon anymore) -- and beating myself up about it -- is having real emotional consequences for me. It means that I have no outlet.

Blogging about it all seems to be the only thing I can manage. But it makes me feel that I should change the title of this blog to "The Broken Record."

*

I came to the Millar book yesterday when Annie Proulx's Bird Cloud fell through for me. Proulx is an alum of the college that employs me, making Bird Cloud the no-brainer choice for Book of the Month when it comes out in paperback this October. So, I thought for once it would be nice to have actually read the book of the month.


The book is a memoir of Proulx's experiences building her Dream House in what used to be a protected reserve, which is now privately owned by her. Right away it got off to a rocky start for me with a long stretch of present-tense writing. As a young man, the present tense never bothered me much, and I even used it myself on occasion when immediacy seemed an important element of my story. But now that I'm a crotchety Olde Farte, present tense just really deeply annoys me, especially when the writer seems to be using it for no good reason. That was the case here.


Then Proulx launches into a far-ranging history of her family, and although there were small points of interest I largely didn't give a damn. Something is wrong in the "Reading and Dozing" process when the dozing starts to take up much more time than the reading. Proulx was still in the middle of this preliminary ancestral ramble when the chapter abruptly ended. I realized that I'd plowed through the whole first chapter, and Proulx had yet to begin the story that I showed up to read.


Fortunately, it was an advance reader's copy (the home shelves of most booksellers are full of these, I imagine), so I had no money in it and could take it back to the store. It went straight into my bag. Life is too short for books that can't come to the point.

*

On Friday afternoon I drove all the way out to South China in my Highly Illegal car. My lawyer had said that she wanted to see me. I was then as I am today keeping the fact of being emotionally overwrought just under the surface. It turned out that she wanted to make a distribution from my mother's estate.

As a result of this meeting, my father and his wife are now completely paid off in what they loaned me to buy this house, and this house is now 1/3rd mine, free and clear. I was given an additional amount. I won't type the number, but it's enough for me to pay off all my credit card debt and buy a car outright, without having to go into additional debt. This amount still leaves a considerably larger amount left in the estate, that will come to me later.

So -- things should be looking up, right? I should be feeling better about life.

I am not. It's actually deeply upsetting to me. Tears are running down my face as I type this. I cannot escape the fact that in order for all of this good to come about, Mom had to die. I'd give it all back, and more, to have never had that happen.

-- Freder.

Say "Wensleydale!"

Smile, though your heart is breaking. . . Does everyone know Charlie Chaplin wrote that song?

With the current season of Doctor Who going on hiatus until September, I knew it was time to get the DVD set of last year's episodes and get myself caught up. It arrived day before yesterday and I dove right in. I've watched two episodes in two days -- that's got to stop or the set will never last long enough!

But it's been my Drug of Choice while I wait for the Prozac to finally kick in, and thereby hangs a tale.

For the last four days, whenever I haven't been a) at work or b) watching Doctor Who (and sometimes even then -- Stephen Moffat's scripts are very much character driven and when all the plot points finally come into focus they generally add up to an emotional exclamation point) I've pretty much been in tears, all the time, over nothing at all, over a general sense of loss that doesn't have a particular name. I know why it's happened: last week I cut my dosage of Prozac in half.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, on a number of levels. Prozac takes the edge off of the lows, but it also takes the edge off the highs -- and I want my highs back. When I was on the high end of the curve, that was when I felt juiced and creative, that was when I could get writing and drawing and good stuff like that to happen. I don't feel creative anymore, and it's becoming an issue. If nothing else, the way Stephen Moffat has turned Doctor Who around encourages me to want to turn myself around. But the adrenaline isn't there anymore.

Last night's Who introduced The Smilers. They look like those old fortune-telling machines. When you behave yourself, they show you benign happy wooden faces. When you do something to displease them, the whole head swivels around and you get the un-happy face. Keep up the bad work and the head swivels a third time, and you don't want this to happen. Not only do you get the very unhappy face pictured above, but you get a one-way, all-expenses paid trip straight down into the belly of the beast. You might say that they've gone off their Prozac, and if you encounter one in the above mood, you're going to be very anxious to get them back on the stuff.

You'll still be shit out of luck, because it takes days for the changes in dosage to take effect. I thought that I was fine for the first three days. Then all of a sudden one night -- bang! -- sobbing. It was only after two days of this that I thought: You think. . .?

"The Beast Below" isn't the best script Moffat has turned out for the show, but, you know, if this is the worst he can do then Bring It On. The first episode of the season was so good that I watched it twice the same night -- with subtitles on the second time, to be sure I caught the dialogue that got past me the first time. I've been a fan of Doctor Who since the old days when the monsters were made of rubber, and special effects consisted of cardboard spaceships danging in front of a blue screen, since the days when the stories often went rambling on about nothing for much too long ("I know! Let's split up the Doctor and his companions and have them run around aimlessly for two episodes!") and sometimes the only thing holding Who together was the actor playing the part. I think most longtime Doctor Who fans will know what I mean when I say that we loved the show without reservation, but were often quite embarrassed to admit it. There's no need for embarrassment anymore. The show is as good as anything on the air, and better than most.

My own Beast Below is still somewhat on edge. Last night there were fewer tears, but I wandered about and sat out in my back garden in a haze of sadness, unable to appreciate what a beautiful evening it was, until looking at my jailhouse reminded me of the TARDIS and decided me on going back inside to swallow another episode whole.

Well, it's better for me than some other drugs I could be on.

-- Freder.

Memorial Day

A terrible bout of tears at 5 AM on Memorial Day when I should have been asleep.

The realization that I am "on the spectrum," so to speak, brings with it a lot answers to the questions of what a lot of "normal" people would -- and have -- judged as being an unhealthy relationship with my mother and an unhealthy reluctance to leave home.

But there was nothing Freudian about it. I had Asperger's. No one in the family had a name for it, but we all knew that something was wrong.

Mom was my Protector. Home was my Safe Haven in a world that I could not begin to understand.

How difficult, then, to suddenly have the roles reversed when, six years ago now, she had to have her right leg amputated due to diabetes, and I was suddenly thrust into the position of being the Support Person -- physically, emotionally, financially. . .

Coping, coping, coping, my life and hers became a landscape of dealing with things that were a horror to us both.

And still how much more difficult to lose her so suddenly, without significant (to me, anyway, although a neurotypical might have picked up on the signs more easily than I did) warning -- and then to be assaulted by my sister, entering My World and stealing from the estate, turning things upside down; by the legalities of death; by the auctioneers coming into my home and tearing it apart into a horror, a ruin, literally, for me, ripping my Reality into shreds, turning a rich world of organized clutter into a Depression-era state of Chaos --

A year ago today, we laid her remains to rest around the  old house. This was made necessary because Memorial Day was the only day that I could  get off from work. I was drunk, of course, as I am drunk now typing this at 5:30 AM, for the same reasons.

I gave everybody a chance to say what they wanted to say, and then I said my piece, and then in deference to my hypocrite sister, who wanted Jesus present in some form, I recited the following verse, the only verse that I know by heart, because it's from a favorite movie of mine, and as an Aspie I am good at remembering these things, even drunk --

My name is known: God and King

I am most in majesty in whom no beginning may be, and no end.

Highest in potency I am, and have been ever!

I have made the stars and the planets in their courses to go

I have made a moon for the night

And a sun to light the day also..

I have made Earth, where trees and grasses spring.

Beasts and fowl both great and small

All thrive, and have my liking

I have made All of Nothing for Man's sustenation.

And of this Pleasant Garden that I have Mostly Goodly Planted

I will make HIM gardener for his OWN re-creation.

There was a pause. Then my father said something along the lines of Amen -- and, I do not exaggerate, everyone RAN for their cars. ZOOM! There was dust in the air in the wake of their tires tearing up the driveway.

I was left alone.

I thought, Why did they all run away and leave me?

Then I went inside and poured another drink.

-- Freder.

The End

I don't know what time it was when I left the hospital. It had to be around two-thirty, going on three AM. I was in a dazed state, the tears had not yet begun. The building seemed completely empty. I was carrying my mother's prosthetic leg and a shopping bag full of her things, including a Babar book that I'd bought on Friday to cheer her up and which she never got a chance to see.

I can't believe that it's been a year. Sometimes it seems like that much time cannot possibly have passed, and other times it seems like too much has happened to possibly be contained by just one year.

The parking lot was deserted. I drove home through a dead world and somehow made it in to work the next morning, and every morning after that. It was graduation time, I wasn't allowed to take any time off. The falling apart happened gradually.

Mom and Mickey Mouse were born the same year. She grew up on Disney animation, and her whole house was filled with Disneyana, among other things.

It still doesn't seem real. Go figure. Nothing seems quite real to me anymore. All something I dreamed. I go through the motions, pretend to be a Real Boy. That's what life has become.

Goodnight, Mom. Goodbye.

Baby Steps. . .

Eddie Fox and Buster Keaton at the graveside of Roscoe Arbuckle.
From chapter eight of "Tinsel*Town."

Today I took the bull by the horns and began assembling content for the new website. Instead of just re-posting the same old files, all of my comics are going to be "remastered" to a significantly larger size, and reframed to reflect a whole page of story instead of the original 3/4 page serial installments. The computers are faster than when I started doing this, the screens are bigger, and I think the new sizing is pretty darn nice. When I post an update, it will be an entire chapter of each series, instead of just a page at a time. It will still take a while to get everything online, so I'm not in danger of having to create anything new for a while. That's a good thing. I need to take this slow.

In order to do all this, I had to un-stuff the original files from my old computer, and while I was at it I burned them onto CD -- the first time I've ever had a really proper back-up of this material.

I dreaded starting on the work, but it was time. Once I got into it and started seeing the new results, it became enjoyable. But it sure is hard to work with graphics when you have a persistent pussyquat determined to sit on your lap!

*

One year ago tonight, I was at my mother's bedside in the hospital, holding her hand,  while she seemed to get farther and farther away. I refused to accept what was happening, was still hoping for the best. That's what I do.

Around seven o'clock my sister came in. She stood at the foot of the bed and started talking. With one thing and another, her usual "wonderful" bedside manner and the fact that she didn't have any trouble at all accepting what was happening and was determined to "help" me reach the same stage, I ended up having a not so small meltdown, and was politely asked by the hospital staff to leave.

At home, I fed the cats and poured liquor into myself, repeating as necessary until I fell into bed.

Shortly after one AM, I woke and could not get back to sleep for thinking about Mom. I decided to get up and go back in there to be with her. I took a quick shower first, which I needed badly.

As I was getting out of the shower, the telephone rang.

One of my mother's favorite songs was "Somewhere," from West Side Story. She kept the lyrics by her side in the last years of her life.

I was going to play it at her Memorial Gathering, but I goofed somehow, or there was a technical glitch, or something, and that one never got played.

So I'm making it up to her tonight. She never heard the version that I'm going to post here (performed by Tom Waits, of all people), but I feel certain that she would have liked it, maybe even loved it.

Here you go, Mom. This one's for you.

-- Freder.

Time Marches On

It's so ironic that the virtual end of the move and the transition falls, almost to the day, on the anniversary of my own personal Hiroshima.

Exactly one year ago today, I came home from work to find that my mother was not sitting in her usual place, in her cat chair in the kitchen.

(You can't see it very well, but my cat Patches, self-proclaimed Queen of the Universe, is sitting in it in the photo above, taken in the old house at the height of its clutter.)

This would not have been such a distressing thing, had it not been for the scene I'd experienced that morning, described a few posts back.

There were empty cat food tins overturned on the stove. The kitties had not come to greet me as usual. The television was playing to an empty room.

I ran into my mother's bedroom hollering, "Are you all right?" and heard, faintly. . .

"no. . . I think I'd better go to the hospital."

I found her sitting on one of her stools at the end of her bed, slumped against the bedpost, breathing hard.

I called 911 from the phone that sat in the pile of dolls and stuff at the foot of her bed. They stayed on the line with me, and I stood with the receiver in one hand held to my ear, holding my mother's hand in my left, until the ambulance arrived.

It took half an hour, and when they came, unfolding their massive stretcher in the yard, I hollered at them, "There's no way you're going to get that in the house."

They ended up walking her out to the stretcher, and I ended up kicking myself and kicking myself and kicking myself.

Damn. I mean, I could have done that. I could have walked her out to my car, and driven her to the Emergency Room, and I could have saved half an hour, and maybe that would have made the difference.

Damn it. Damn it all. Oh, god, it could have made all the difference.

That night, she and I both believed that she was still going to survive this.

That night, a small part of me, something that the rest of me could not bear listening to, knew something that I could not bear to admit.

I'm going to post some music over the next few days, Highly Illegally.

So, let them sue me.

Here's the music for tonight, Let me know if it doesn't work.

To my knowledge, my mother only heard this song once, and it moved her to tears.

My first thought was to play it at her Memorial Gathering, but I made the decision early on that there would be No Sad Songs at that Event.

It will already be known to some of you. It's one of my favorites.

Take it away, Van!

Nothing White or Black

Alcoholism is one of those things that you wish was as simple as everyone says it is.

What I'm about to type is not self-justification. If it were, then I wouldn't feel as conflicted about it as I do, going so far against the grain of what's accepted as it does.

I used to get up in the morning and go to the kitchen before I even went to the bathroom. I used to show up for work with anywhere between three and five strong drinks inside of me.

And the actual fact is, I was a better employee when I showed up for work half-cocked than I am now and have been for the better part of a year, since I started showing up for work completely 100 percent sober.

I knew the policy. If they caught you drunk on the job, you were out, no questions asked.

And so I had to focus. I had to accomplish things. I knew that if they knew the state I was in, it was all over -- so I made myself the best damn employee that I could. I did my best and I got a lot done.

Now that I show up for work 100 percent sober -- honestly, I'm lousy.

I can't focus on anything, It takes me DAYS instead of hours to get things done. My mind wanders here and there, I waste time on the internet, the past is oftentimes much more in my eyes than the present. . .

If I were my boss, I would fire me, and re-hire the guy that I used to be.

The same thing is true about my driving. The stigmata about Driving Drunk in our culture is so intense that I am certain I will catch a lot of heat for this, one way or the other, but the fact is that I was a better driver half-cocked than most people are sober.

I was a better driver half-cocked than I am sober!

I think the reasons are the same. I was aware that I was impaired -- and so I was aware that I needed to focus, be careful, and not do anything that could harm anyone.

This morning, completely sober, I tore out of my driveway at about Mach Nine and swerved across the lane and put the pedal to the metal because I was running late. I shouted at the car in front of me: "Get the hell out of my way, asshole!" At the intersection, when the opposite car did not move when it was clearly his turn, I shouted, "Come on! What are you doing, idiot?! Are you a moron? Go, stupid!"

I'm not saying that the Emperor doesn't have any clothes on and that alcohol isn't everything that common sense says it is. Even Rodney Dangerfield wrote in his bio-book that he couldn't understand why pot was illegal and alcohol wasn't, because he saw alcohol ruin many people's lives, but he never saw the same thing among pot users.

I'm just saying -- nothing is as simple as anyone makes it out to be.

Alcohol may have hastened my mother's death -- we drank together, when I wasn't drinking alone -- but it also took a lot of pain and anxiety out of her life. Even now, knowing everything that I do, I would not deny her any of the drinks that she took in the last five years of her life, including the ones that I poured for her on the last morning that she spent at home.

On the morning of Friday, May 14, 2010, by the time she made it into the kitchen she was exhausted and in terrible pain. These situations were not abnormal. . . just maybe a little worse than usual. By the time she had had a chance to relax in her chair, and had a couple of drinks inside of her, she said, "Oh, I feel so much better now."

That changed while I was away at work.

The end was near. I knew it. And I kept on throwing alcohol down my gullet because I desperately wanted not to know it.

It didn't work.

-- Freder.

Sensory Overload

You're looking at a photo of the Living Room in the old house, taken after my mother's death, but before the auctioneers came to pillage, plunder, and destroy.

The whole house was like that, almost.

This is going to seem choppy and disjointed, but it's going somewhere, really, it is.

For the Store, I ordered Temple Grandin's latest book, The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperperger's. I was all over it as soon as I could decently do so (i.e., as soon as I was not on camera).

This may be the next step that my reading will take. Where the reading that I'm doing now is all still in the area of diagnosis and description, this is focused on living, and is overwhelmingly positive.

But for now, I'm still in the realm of basic learning. The Guide, as I've written here before, is eerily descriptive of my life. I keep seeing scenes from my own childhood, and explanations for my behaviour as an adult.

I've written about mornings in the old house before. I've written that I had to get up earlier and earlier in order to beat my mother into the kitchen, so that I could get my morning chores done before she came into the room.

It's true that this was made necessary because the house was so impossibly claustrophobic, so fully packed with Stuff, that it was hard enough to get from the sink to the refrigerator to the front door, hard enough to sponge the floor, when I just had to step over her chair. But when she was sitting in the chair, and I had to climb over her in order to get everything cleaned (sort of) and everyone fed -- well, that was just plain Too Much.

But there was more to it than that. I needed some quiet time, some alone time, some peace and solitude in the morning, in order to gather myself somewhat before I had to start Being Social.

And yes, I was drinking as a coping mechanism then -- I needed to get a couple of shots of vodka and orange juice into my system in order to cope with the assault that was about to come, the Daily Bludgeoning that is life as I know it.

As soon as my mother struggled into the room and sat down, the television came on. Some mornings, this was like a brutal slap across the face. The volume was always too loud, the insipid Morning Shows that she wanted to watch were intolerable to me with their huge casts of Preening Idiots all yammering to each other at the same time about Nothing At All. For some while, the local CBS affiliate ran Guiding Light in the morning, and that was barely tolerable, because it had a discernible storyline; but once Guiding Light was cancelled, morning television was just a daily ramming of nails into my forehead.

For my mother, it was her connection to the outside world, the only connection that she had. For me, it was an almost unbearable onslaught of White Noise. In my mother's world, the television was on 24/7, there was never any quiet, and I coped by retreating to my own end of the house, and by learning to block it all out when I could not escape.

The combined task of doing my morning chores, filtering out the noise of the television, and interacting with her in what I hoped was a meaningful way was, many mornings, more than I could cope with, an emotionally exhausting Chinese Water Torture without the actual cachet of Asian Spies gloating over me while I suffered.

I learned to fear the distant sound of her canes in the front hallway. Clack, clack-clack. Oh, god, I would think, she's coming., Have to hurry up and get this done.

And so I kept getting up earlier and earlier, in order to beat her there and get some of the basic things done, so that I would have a few less things to deal with when she came in.

The problem was, as soon as she found out how early I was getting up, she'd come in that much earlier, in order to be with me. She was desperate for some social contact, and I was desperate for some peace.

One morning I absolutely snarled at her: How freakin' early do I have to get up to beat you in here?!

She balanced herself on her crutches, and said, "I didn't know it was a contest."

I was wiping the floor under the cat food dish clean with paper towels. I think that I bowed my head and just sighed. I thought, she doesn't get it, she doesn't understand, but I didn't have the words to say that to her.

The next thing I knew, she was turning in place and struggling back out of the room.

"Well, for god's sake, don't go now that you're here!" I said.

"I'm going," she said.

Are you wearing shoes right now? Cross your legs, look at the soles, notice the Heel.

That's what I felt like.

And yet there was another part of me. The part of me that closed my eyes and closed my ears when the television came on and splashed over me like a bucket of ice-cold water every morning, the part of me that shouted inside Oh my god! Oh my god! Why does she have to have that so freakin' loud?!

As my mother laboured her way painfully back down the stairs, through the narrow and claustrophobic front hall, to sit on the padded stool in her own room, in front of her own television, most likely resentful, most likely not understanding why her son was "being so mean to her," -- as she said to me several times -- there was the part of me that gathered myself in silence, and sighed, and inwardly said:

-- Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.

-- Freder.

Flowers for the Dead

I know that other people are thinking this, because I think it myself sometimes: It's been a year. Why aren't you over this? You should be over this by now.

In just a couple of hours, it will be -- would have been -- my mother's birthday. She was no worse off than she had been for some time. I thought she had a few years still left in her. Instead, she was gone in two weeks.

For the past two mornings, and tonight, this evening, I've had much more than the usual amount of tears.

I can't believe that it's been a year. My perception of time has been even more whacked-out than usual.

A year ago, the largest problem seemed to be my mother's financial troubles and the way that they were tapping me out, too. Every couple of months she'd come crying to me to ask for another thousand dollars. I didn't mind the drain on my finances so much, because I'd sold a piece of art for a lot of money and I could afford it. What I did mind were the waterworks.

She was so dependent on me for everything -- most especially for company -- and it was emotionally and physically exhausting. She used to complain that I stayed in my end of the house too much. But with the job and being responsible for absolutely everything around the house, I desperately needed my Alone Time to recuperate.

Now I know why. My senses were completely overwhelmed. No wonder I kept myself well pickled pretty much 24/7. Life was demanding the very things out of me that were the hardest for a Probable Aspie to give.

Last Spring was a good deal warmer and sunnier than this one. The weekends that began the month of April were sunny and hot. On Saturdays, we made our errands run into town. It took the whole damn day. Mom would walk out to the car, and then at every stop we made, I would pull her wheelchair out of the trunk, set it up, and she'd wheel herself through the various stores. It was a lot of work for her, and she performed like a champ.

Until we got home. Somehow, somewhy, the walk from the car back to the house hit her like a ton of bricks. The sun was high and bright and hot. She would collapse into a chair just short of the door, and I would have to stand over her with an umbrella to shield her from the heat. I'd plead with her to do what she could to get into the house where it was cool and she could rest -- because the umbrella wasn't helping much. A couple of times I ran into the house to get her a glass of ice water.

That walk from the car to the house was a real point of concern. On Friday the fourteenth of April, I was looking ahead to Saturday and worrying about that walk.

We never got that far.

On Friday the fourteenth of April, just a year ago, she walked out of the house for the last time.

That's another post. For now, there's nothing left but to cry and cry.

I spent the bulk of today planting more and more nasturtiums. . . in pots and planters, along the edge of the side back garden. I'm done now. I hope that they come up. Some stupid atavistic monkey stuporstitious part of myself still imagines that I can bring her back if I plant enough nasturtiums.

Not that kind of Vet. . .

Kennebec Vet has gone all Yuppity on me in the last few years. They used to be a real country Veterinary, owned by a couple of crusty old gents who did the best that they could and treated the animals well, but who didn't believe in mollycoddling the pet "owners," if you get my drift. A while back they were bought out by a significantly younger crowd, who moved the office into a flashier, upmarket location, spent a lot on money on bells and whistles like computer touch screens for the visitors to play with while they're waiting, and so on. The assistants are now called "techs" and they wear hospital uniforms and specialize in telling you obvious things in soothing tones -- it stops just short of hand-holding. Caring and Sharing is now as much a part of their agenda as rendering your Quat heat-free.

I hadn't been there since Mom died, and so L____, the only holdover from Kennebec Vet's pre-Valley Girl Days, got the news for the first time. It's funny how taking my little Honey to the Vet dredged up a lot of emotion that, obviously, hasn't been put all that far behind me.

I'd noticed that Honey was drooling a little bit in the past couple of weeks, but it didn't appear to be anything serious until this weekend, when a lower canine suddenly jutted out of her mouth and started causing her some trouble. I thought that it might just drop out (they sometimes do) and she'd be fine. On Sunday night she still seemed pretty normal; but by Monday night she was clearly in pain, and not eating anything even though she wanted to.

On the one hand, as Whitey had shown us a while back, the tooth-pulling procedure is fairly straight forward, and something that cats bounce back from pretty well. On the other hand, I've learned that surgery is surgery, and any time you take a cat to the vet (or a human to the hospital) Complications can arise, and you may end up not seeing your loved one ever again. Of course you should never think along those lines, so of course I did. The Quats are just about all that held me together during the last year, and Honey is extra special to me. In some ways I am still smarting from the last Big Tragedy, losing Honey would be another blow that couldn't be shaken off easily.

She cried and cried on my lap all through the (thankfully) short drive, but once we were inside and being cooed at by the Designer Vets she behaved like a regular sweetheart, even through indignity of having her temperature taken. A lot of time was spent explaining this and that to me (they now charge a walk-in fee -- when did that happen?), but the actual checking in her mouth was cursory, as I knew it would be, I knew where we were headed well before the vets did.

What surprised me was that they could take her right away, and that I wouldn't have to leave her overnight. That was a relief.

During the drive home it was my turn to cry and cry. Like I said, this opened up a whole fresh can of Emotions.

They ended up pulling ten teeth, and they didn't even need to suture her because they came out so easily. The operation was over by ten-thirty or eleven, and I picked her up on the way home from work. She was out of the anesthesia, alert, looking cute and obviously happy at being out of pain. Of course she cried and cried all the way home, but it was a sign of how well she's adapted to the new house that when I set her down she sniffed the air and went around checking it out, just to see that she was Actually Home.

She was eating soft food in nothing flat, purring and making her little rolling mew sound just as if nothing had happened to her.

By this morning the pain killer they'd given her had clearly worn off, and she was working her mouth a little bit. I gave her the antibiotic and the pain killer that they sent along with me (she's not the easiest quat to give medicine to, but not the worst, either); then I had to hie me into work.

It all meant another $340 hit on my credit card, but some things you just can't question. When it comes to my little Honey, who still wants to snuggle with me every morning, the Stepford Vets have me over a barrel.

I Have a Dream

This morning I remembered my dreams, for the first time in months. Better they should have stayed unremembered.

My mother kept on dying, over and over again, and I sobbed dream tears, tears like I haven't had in several months.

There was a jagged hole in the floor. I was afraid that the cats would fall through it, one by one. I covered it over with a heavy rug, but that didn't put down the fear and anxiety.

My mother and I were watching a movie in a theater. It was a fun, colorful picture, but then it turned ugly. This is how you can tell it was a dream: Anderson Cooper came out of a dark, twisted doorway and smiled, proclaiming that he was going to rape the heroine, who had already fallen down on a fire escape. Vague menacing figures spilled out from behind him and rushed the camera.

My mother grew visibly anxious and distressed. I said, "Do you want to leave?" and she nodded.

Instead of getting her into her wheelchair as in real life, I walked beside her towards the theater lobby at the painfully slow pace that was, in later years, the best that she could manage. Mayhem unfolded on the screen behind us. There was screaming, and it could not be blocked out.

I woke with a heavy head, and my whole body feeling as if it was weighted. I felt as if I was walking through a foot of mud.

I used to love remembering my dreams in the morning. They took me to fascinating places and sometimes inspired me. If this is what my dreams have become, I'm glad not to remember them anymore.

I went through my morning chores, not feeling anxious or depressed so much as just heavy and tired. It was Trash Day, and as I carried my two garbage bags down to the street I saw an older woman approaching along the sidewalk from below the house. It was obvious our paths would cross. This distressed me in a minor way. I hate being seen by strangers on my own land, and I dread chance encounters, because you never know how they will work out.

This woman was coming along at a clip. She was quite cheery. She greeted me, and said, "It's going to be a beautiful day!"

There was a cold wind and I wasn't convinced. She said, "There'd be something wrong with us if we complained on a day like this!"

I said, "You're right. Thank you." I set the bags down snd she passed behind me, and we both went about the rest of our day.

Bits 'n' Bytes

Tonight I started working on the new site in earnest. Until now, everything I'd done had been in the area of just trying to clarify my thoughts, and in researching the software that I would be using to create the thing.

It's deeply frustrating to me that unlike the "old" days, the software doesn't come with manuals anymore. At best, there's access to online documentation and tutorials, but I never knew a tutorial that was worth a damn to me, and the online documentation is so loosely organized that I find it difficult to get the information that I'm looking for.

For instance, Flash now comes as three separate products. Which product would I use to accomplish specific functions? It was hard to get answers even to those basic questions, and the answers that I did find were written in corporate geek jargon, certainly not in English; like an archeologist looking at hieroglyphs I had to puzzle out the meaning of what I was looking at.

Tonight I simply organized some graphics files and started to create new graphics for the site in Illustrator and Photoshop, and it was all the more dismaying to find that even these programs that I formerly considered myself proficient in have changed so much since the versions that I used that even simple tasks required frequent trips to the HELP menu. Very little of the functionality is organized the way that it used to be, especially in Illustrator. The learning curve just got steeper.

But that's OK. I'm going to come out of this with an expanded skill set. I think.

I'd had an idea for the new main page, and all of the reading and research I've done in the past couple of weeks has caused me to realize that I have to scale it back. Not ruling anything out for the future, but I have to start with a simpler design. Once I learn the basics I can modify and build from there.

To put the frosting on the cake, I'm also going to be learning Dreamweaver and Cascading Style Sheets, and tonight I realized that I couldn't start with the home page at all -- it was better for several reasons to begin with some simpler content pages, and then work my way back through the hierarchy to the more complicated and fiddly home page. Baby steps!

In other news. . . maybe getting another step closer to being Done with the move has had some impact on my emotions. Tonight for the first time in a while I could not stop thinking about Mom, and while I was doing the dishes I suddenly found that I couldn't see anything that I was doing because my eyes were full of tears.

Yesterday I had a regressive, anxiety-ridden morning the like of which I hadn't experienced in a long while. I started out all right, but kept on getting more and more panicky and full of dread. It got worse and worse. At one point I even started to hyperventilate. I don't know what brings these things on, but I hate 'em! Thankfully, these kind of mornings are growing fewer, and today I was fine.

So that's all the blah-blah-blah I can muster up for you today, Dear Diary. One foot in front of the other, and maybe I'll get somewhere eventually, to coin a cliche.

-- Freder.

The Human Whirlwind

I accomplished so many goals this weekend that I deserve a gold star!

I also learned that it's pointless to clean around boxes, because the minute you get those boxes out of the way, the floor is dirty again.

My house is notably less strewn with boxes than it was going into the weekend. Mind you, there are still boxes. But places that were barely navigable are navigable again. Progress is being made. Of course, sometimes this involves taking certain things out of one box and putting them into another, or just throwing them on a dresser or a bed, kicking those decisions down the road; but the overall trend is in the right direction!

I found the nuts and bolts for my drawing table and last night, until well after one AM, I reassembled the bloody thing. And re-assembled it, and re-assembled it. I kept getting parts backwards. This is not because I was hitting the bottle too heavily. But it had been y'know, more than three months since I took it apart, and the design is almost counter-intuitive, I had the base pointing in the wrong direction to start with, and that had a ripple effect through the whole process. The first time I put it together it would have worked great -- if I had wanted to draw lying on the floor! The second time it faced backwards and would have required the artist to become a contortionist.

I can have a salty tongue, and as this went on you would swear (the operative word being swear) that I had opened a fresh canister of Morton's Iodized and dumped it into my mouth. By the last round I wasn't even attempting to string the cuss words into a coherent sentence, it was just Verb, Verb, Verb, Adjective, Verb, Noun, Noun, Noun.

But I got the damn thing together -- and suddenly, my notions for the room were pulled into focus. I stood in the doorway and admired the view. It didn't matter that there were still boxes and things all anyhow. I had a drawing table and a chair in front of it, an art cabinet at its side with a light on it, suddenly the room said  "Studio." It's the sunniest room in the house. It has shelving and storage and I even found my scrapbook and laid it open across the table.

It was RIGHT.

I worked a little in the Halloween room, got that bed made, got some things placed, it's looking good, too. The back bedroom is still another matter, I've done nothing in there.

I hung a lot of things downstairs, refining the design of three rooms, and decided where to hang some of the rest.

I found several things that were missing. There are still some items that have gone AWOL, but finding what I did makes me hopeful that the rest will turn up.

I scored some vacuum cleaner bags, so I'll be able to do that when the time is right! And I redeemed almost four months worth of bottles.

(Sometimes when I do that, I think back on the year when I was conducting a long-distance relationship with a mostly great gal from Virginia. It lasted about five minutes, but while it was on she made one trip up here to New England, and one day we were driving down the road and passed a bottle redemption place. She saw the sign that said REDEMPTION, and where she came from, redemption meant only one thing! I had to explain to her that no, the people in that house weren't snake-handling or speaking in tongues.)

And I hied me over to one of those Big Box Home Improvement stores and ordered me up a clothes washer and dryer.

I'd like to know how they found out my name and address and the fact that I'd just moved into a new home. But find out they did, and almost one of the first pieces of mail that I got here was a ten percent off coupon on any purchase up to $2,000. I knew that would come in handy, and kept it in a safe place.

Nonetheless, when the time to use it came around, I forgot to bring it with me and had to run back home for it.

The good news is, home was five, instead of twenty-five, minutes away.

I spent too much time looking at all the different models. The front-end loaders looked so cool that I was tempted to go that way. But for about half the price (with the help of the coupon), I has able to get a high-capacity, low-energy, low-water, high-efficiancy washer and dryer, and get out of it for under nine hundred smackers.

My credit card definitely thinks I made the right choice.

After this weekend, I begin to look at my life and the place I am at and compare it with my life the way it was six to nine months ago, and the difference is stark.

I still have flashes of sadness, but it's not the same.

From mid-May until the chaos and stress of the move overpowered it (and sometimes even then), I was, I think almost literally, a prisoner of my grief.

As the new house began to take shape, the sense of newness unfolding fell into place beside the grief. The two emotions are growing together. The one takes the hard edge off the other, and the other reminds me that this particular hit of the restart button came at a horrible cost, and that to fail to take full advantage of it would dishonor my mother's memory in the worst way.

I was going to add a soundtrack here, to share with you what I was listening to this weekend, and to reward your attention for wading through all this drivel, but Fairpoint is rearing its ugly head, the interwebs are not cooperating, and I'm unable to upload the file. Tomorrow, for sure!

-- Freder.

So Much Hot Air

Yesterday the CD-ROM arrived from the auction house containing every photograph that they took of the the things from my mother's house (at least, the things that were in the second auction just recently). The banner pictured above used to hang on the back stairway leading up to the guest suite. This was a part of the house that was once used quite often, was closed only in winter, but which in recent years had been completely shut off. It was one of the areas of the house that acted a bit like a time capsule: on the rare occasions I ventured in there, the back staircase felt a bit like an abandoned storage room in a museum.

I plan on using the photographs, which are beautiful, in an array of creative projects. I'm especially looking forward to an additional CD-ROM of pictures from the upcoming Toy and Collectibles auction. There is a children's story that I wrote years ago, based on Mom's collection of toys and dolls. At the time, I was just learning how to use a computer and programs like Photoshop, and my efforts at generating electronic illustrations were crude at best. Now I have some experience, and Creative Suits CS5, and I plan on putting them both to use.

One of the very few items of real value that I kept out of the auction was the star of that story. He is sitting upstairs in the studio right now. I will need more photos of him than the auction house would be able to provide.

The first line of the story is: "The bear was lonely, and his socks didn't fit."

Also yesterday, I had the first "bad morning" that I've experienced in a while. What brought it on, I wonder? Too little sleep, a hangover from the night before, both? When I came down to the kitchen a wave of sadness hit me, followed by the familiar claw of anxiety.

But -- it wasn't as bad as some of the bad mornings I experienced at the old house, and today I was the almost perky, practically OK person that is becoming the new normal.

It's been a peaceful week here. I've been Taking Deep Breaths. With the move behind me, a layer of stress is dropping away and the World That Was is getting smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror.

It's still a part of me. I just don't live there anymore, and where I am living is so full of possibilities that I'm still just looking around.

I love the new house, and think that the basic layout of the furnishings worked out really well. The cats appear to agree with me. It's home now. Everybody's stretching.

Being able to write this blog from home is a danged good thing, too. It's both a daily task and a challenge. Getting into the habit of writing something, anything, every night is exactly what I need. It won't always be the blog. I hope that, sooner rather than later, I'll be able to find it in me to work on other projects.

Baby steps! That's my mantra!

Here's the soundtrack for this post.

There was a brief rearing of the past last night. The new owner of the house called. He wants the keys that I left with my lawyer, and he has questions about the things that were left behind. I understand his concerns, but I can't really help him. That part of my life is over. He needs to deal with the lawyer, or with my sister, who after all is the one who sold him the place right out from underneath me. It's time for her to step up to the plate, and do her part, and have her closure, if she wants it. I am done.

*

This evening over dinner I watched the animated "film," 9. I have to use the quotations for a couple of reasons. First, no film was harmed (or even touched) in the making of this motion picture. Second, as a movie it could be a great video game. Could, because as it stands, it doesn't even have the value of a video game, the interaction or the solving of puzzles. Even for a modern CGI animated movie, the "plot" is astonishingly thin. Why did they bother to hire such great voice talent when there is so very little dialogue in the picture, and most of what dialogue there is consists of grunts, wails and moans?

Literally, the plot is nothing more than an explanation for the graphic design. And, yes, the design is wonderful, but you know what? Wonderful design is everywhere these days. There's a surfeit of it, and I say that as a designer myself.

Literally, if you've seen the trailer for this movie, you've seen everything that it has to offer and then some. I'm glad that I was eating my dinner while it was on, so that I could say it wasn't completely wasted time.

I'm on my bike. Fiddle-dee-dee, tomorrow is another day.

-- Freder.