The Management have now asked me not to walk behind the Phase 2 apartments on the nice grassy walkway because it’s not covered with tarmac. They apparently only want people to walk where there are OFFICIAL walkways. No walking on the grass.

So i cut a pathway into the conservation land that surrounds Avalon so i can walk a slightly longer route through the woods, and that will make me happy because it gives me something to do for a while, cutting this path through the woods.

Eventually the new path will join up with an older one, and i’ll have a way to get to NARA Park the back way on foot through the woods and not disturb the precious Phase 2 residents by someone having the audacity to take a walk.

It gives me something to do, something harmless (but still vaguely productive) to worry about.

Maybe part of the reason i miss Ojo so much is that he was Sandi’s familiar. Lots of witches have cats as their familiars, so it makes sense that i became more attached to Sandi’s familiar after she died.

I don’t have to worry about scaring Ojo with the vacuum cleaner anymore.

I don’t have to worry about stepping on Ojo‘s tail when i walk around the apartment anymore.

Ojo will never show up in the bathroom in the middle of the night with me anymore.

I can open up a canister of whatever and not have Ojo scrambling to the kitchen in case it’s cat food (because he knew he could always wrangle a treat out of it from his old man, who was such a softy).

I don’t have to prepare meals ahead of time for Ojo, usually in batches of four, with essential fish oil, ground up steroid pills, and powder from gabapentin capsules added to each meal. But it was 100% worth it; after a while i didn’t give it a second thought.

And i miss it. I miss him.

Sandi & i were blessed to have Ojo in our lives, and Ojo benefited too. Lots of love all around.

“To everything, Turn! Turn! Turn!
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose, under heaven” [The Byrds, 1965, Pete Seeger 1959]

Just keep going; that’s all you can do, really. Turn!

(And i can finally pull the blinds down all the way on my porch door — Ojo doesn’t need a space to look out anymore.)

What’s really sad about the situation with R? I probably don’t even remember the issues we were having — whether it was Sandi wanting to say too much on their websites or discussions, or if i was the one saying too much; i don’t remember. I guess it doesn’t matter, because R does not seem that interested in being friends again anyway.

They’ve moved on with their life; i suppose i should move on with mine.

Recently I’ve started rereading the Rabbit novels from John Updike, starting with Rabbit Run (1960). Part of my strategy for dealing with the world is to make up a little stories to myself to explain why things are the way they are. And reading Updike again, maybe i think my friend took their non-binary name from the Rabbit series. Or not. At least it’s worth thinking about.

Ten months ago, my wife died. Our cat, Ojo, just had to be put to sleep today; and i’ve spent most of the day crying. It’s almost as if Sandi still lived on through that cat, and she didn’t actually die until today. It’s just been a year of mourning, and i’m worn out from it.

Maybe i can never move on. Maybe i’m just as stuck as lots of other people are — manacled to the past — as they drag it along behind them. Maybe this is it, and the rest of my life will just be dragging all the wreckage behind me.

At least most days shouldn’t be as bad as this one.

I wonder if other people feel held back by their past; i’ll have to ask, if i ever happen to meet any again. Maybe i don’t want to ever meet anyone again. Maybe i am done. Would certainly simplify the hell out of things i was done.

All right, that’s enough.

I don’t ever want to be in love with anyone again. Love has *not* been a positive thing in my life. Yes, i’ve gotten some life experience out of love, but it’s mostly just brought me pain.

I came to this realization thinking about T. If i keep interacting with her, i’m just gonna fall in love with her and it will only lead to pain, whether or not she could actually love me back. It’s just pain. I need to not see T anymore (or at least not very often).

I don’t know … i wish there were something positive to do, but the only thing i can come up with is negative — don’t do this; don’t do that; don’t see T; don’t try to help her more than you have to. I’m just a fucked-up individual who can’t help it. I’ve just got to stay away from love.

Like Linus said in Peanuts: no problem is too big to run away from.

I sit on my patio and listen to the wind rustling through the trees. The sun is bright; the skies are blue. I can hear various birds in the trees. And if I activated my Cornell Bird app, it could probably recognize most of them.

Even though I am pretty disabled (traumatic brain injury) and my Social Security income puts me well below the poverty line, i am also very privileged. I am privileged to live in a good town in a good state in a good country. I would never have survived my injuries if considerable resources had not been put into my care. I was not expected to live, but I did. My TBI probably falls under the category of diffuse axonal injury, meaning that pretty much the whole brain was damaged. I was young and my brain healed remarkably well considering; but i no longer have the emotional endurance to work any kind of a real job, and most of my energies go toward just taking care of myself, now that Sandi is gone. I know that I am one of the very, very lucky ones.

Now, in my 50s, i get to spend some time writing again. I was always sort of a reluctant writer; it was not my first choice of occupations. My memory is not so good, but my creativity and brash spirit live on. My discipline also kind of sucks, but this blog gives me something to do every day.

I am really thankful for what i have and what i can still do. Maybe I was not grateful as a kid and that was part of the problem. Maybe i was not a very good person (originally), but i’m trying to be one now (post-TBI).

I was never great with people, and I’m probably worse now. All we can do every day is to go along as best we can, any of us.

Some seventeen years ago, i hurt someone whom i had been close friends with for about thirteen years.

I made a mistake; i was only a year or so into a new romantic relationship with B, someone i probably should not have been involved with in the first place. R wanted to get together for one last lunch before they moved far away; but this new relationship was in a delicate stage, and i was too afraid to confront the flood of emotions i was sure to feel when i saw R again.

So, like a fool, i told them no for lunch; and i didn’t get to see them.

I guess i was afraid to compare the depth of friendship i had with R to the comparatively shallow new relationship with B — i was trying to stay with B, and not give up too soon.

So i was an idiot, and i let the chance to see my friend slip away. Whatever online contact we’d previously had … it dwindled over time. This was all a long time ago (to me), and i don’t remember things very well to begin with.

A few years later, Sandi sought me out on Match.com and asked me to marry her (after a year or so). She didn’t have a problem with my being friends with R — not like B did — but i didn’t prioritize the friendship with R like i should have.

Again, my fault, my mistake.

The marriage with Sandi went well (or at least as well as it could between two stubborn people), but Sandi’s health started to go downhill. She eventually had to stop working and took Social Security Disability. The doctors couldn’t find a whole lot wrong with her, aside from discovering an autoimmune condition, Sjögren’s syndrome.

Then a few years later the unexplained bleeding started, and we knew it had gotten more serious. (Sandi’s GYN at Lahey Hospital had previously found a large uterine fibroid, but after an MRI, determined it to be benign — they never biopsied the fibroid.) Now, years later, they biopsied her uterus, and the findings were inconclusive.

But Lahey suspected cancer; they were just too timid to begin treatment and only ran more tests. Sandi wanted a second opinion and got one from Emerson Hospital, who took one look at her records and started her on radiation therapy the next day.

Stage 4B uterine cancer, already spread to her lymph nodes and her bones. That was the conclusion.

Rounds of Chemo followed the radiation, and then rounds of Immunotherapy; but it was too late to do anything but make Sandi more comfortable and slow the cancer a little.

Eight months after the diagnosis at Emerson, Sandi died — not before we went to several Ben Folds concerts, a vacation in Maine with friends, and a few other modest celebrations we could manage — including a lovely Samhain ritual on Halloween that our UU church put on, with as many friends as good fit around Sandi’s bed! She died seven days later.

This is when i really began to miss R, grieving for Sandi. In decades past, R had overseen every pagan ritual i had ever been a part of.

Now i begin my quest to reconnect with R. I’m not very good at finding people, but i will do my best.

Let’s see how it goes.

I would not blame R for not wanting to reconnect. Despite my limitations, i did not act very well toward them. Maybe they can forgive me; maybe not.

At least i’m in a better position to help them out a little when they need it. My life has become simpler over the last nine months, and more affordable.

As i look back on the last thirty years, i see how much of an effect R had on my life, especially intellectually. My writing style, for one. My interest in pagan matters, which Sandi shared. The development of my tastes in music, literature, and people. All shaped by my interactions with R. (Even some of my word choice, capitalization, and punctuation is influenced by R.)

Maybe i can earn R’s trust again, make a fresh start.

I always took things too seriously. I suppose I still do.

What did I have to worry about?  Only the good die young.

And no, of course i’m not better off. Every day is a struggle not to give up hope, not to give in to mindless hours of getting high and blotting out reality. Fuck reality; i’ll take fiction any day … or at least some form of escapism. 

In the end, it’s not worth asking people out.  Too emotionally traumatizing.   If i know someone well enough to maybe want to go out with them, it’s a foregone conclusion that they don’t want to go out with me — otherwise we’d already be involved. 

And all those cliché things lovers tell each other?  I never have to say those cheesy things to another person, ever again! Woo-hoo!

You may be with someone and they get to the end of their life; there may well be no resolution, but just an end. When that person dies, you will have to rediscover meaning in your life without them. It’s difficult.

You’re here for a while, you do some stuff maybe, and then you’re gone. At the end, just like at the beginning, you are the only real audience for what you create. Yours is the only analysis that will matter, that will even really exist. Maybe you wrote stuff or did stuff for your family or friends or teachers or boss or somebody else once upon a time; but eventually they’re not gonna be there, and they’re not going to experience your life anymore. It’s only gonna be you.  And it has to be enough; you can’t go on torturing yourself. 

The end of life is disillusioning.

You go all the way through life, and you end up being all beaten up by it. Not like you had any choice of being born in the first place — it just sort of happened.

Try not to let it get you down.

~

“Don’t take any shit from anybody.

Billy Joel

Did you ever watch Mad About You in the ‘90s?  Do you remember the theme song?  (‘The Final Frontier’)

It had this slightly misogynistic line:“Tell me all your secrets, and i’ll tell you most of mine, …”

I hear that now and it bothers me a little.  The woman is supposed to tell him all her secrets, and the man says he’ll only tell you most of his.  That really doesn’t seem fair.

Tell me all your secrets and i’ll tell you all of mine.  That would be fair, but is it as good a lyric then?  Does the tension between “all” and “most” in the lyrics add something to the song?

Maybe.

Or am i being over-sensitive? Maybe I have too much time on my hands and I should be working more on my own shit.

I took a 4-mile walk today, so i guess that was something.  Doing errands.  Not a trip to NARA Park, unfortunately.

~

I guess i can move at my own pace now; married, i always felt like i had to hurry and get things done according to somebody’s schedule, but now it’s just me. Maybe i’m a little slower. Maybe i stay up later than i used to — who cares? You take enough THC and alcohol, and it doesn’t really matter at all.

Well, i learned a lot by being married. I learned about people, i guess. I learned about myself. And i learned that i wasn’t very good at marriage to begin with, so I’m sure not gonna try that again. I’m too disabled to make much of a spouse anyway. I gave it a good shot, and that’s enough. I’m done.

It’s a lot easier this way. Nobody’s gonna read this stuff; it’s not gonna have any effect on anyone. I don’t have to talk to people. I don’t have to see people. No one will really notice.

I can watch reruns to my heart‘s content. I can listen to music. Or not. It doesn’t matter. I can even say that it doesn’t matter and no one will say “Don’t say that it doesn’t matter!” — Not anymore.

I can pursue my useless little self-involved projects. It won’t bother anyone. Ojo the cat doesn’t mind, as long as I feed him fairly often. My friends leave me alone, and that’s just fine; i really don’t have the heart to see them anymore anyway.

My imagination is enough to keep me busy. My books and my videos help pass the time. THC and alcohol help, too. I only have to go to the doctor once a year or so; i’m healthy enough.

People just leave me alone, and that’s the way I like it. I can just simplify my life and i’ll hardly even notice the passage of time. And if i don’t think about the past, it’s like it didn’t even happen. I’m certainly not worried about the future — the world can look out for itself. Don’t get me started on the United States. I’ve already basically given up on it. People here are useless.

The years will go by, and it will become easier. Then it will be decades; and before I know it, i’ll be really old and then I won’t have anything else to worry about. There’s no point in worrying. There’s no point in caring. The world is just gonna go on the same way it always has.

It doesn’t really matter. It’s easier this way. I don’t need any more life experiences. I’ve had plenty. I’ve got my books. I’ve got my music. My videos. That’s all I ever really wanted. I can go for a ride. I can take a walk. I’m free.

I realize some now why disorder (in our shared space) bothered people in my life so much.

Today i was able to take the time to put up some shelves in the bathroom which i’d been meaning to for a few months. And i could tell right away how much it eased my mind.

I’ve never been great at doing unpleasant things in a timely fashion; maybe nobody is. Now that Sandi is gone, i’m more free to keep my own schedule … but it’s taken me a long time — 9 months — to get back on track with getting things done. (And at this point i’m starting to force myself to get to work.)

Also, with Sandi not here, i feel like i’m maybe ready to actually do something creative again with my life. So I got the website, dsm32.org, to try to force myself to get some writing done.

And i still have a tendency to look back rather than look ahead. Why do i think the answers are in the past and not in the future sitting right here in front of me? Or maybe that’s just in my nature, to introspect, which is why i enjoyed fiction (which is usually written in the past tense) — reading and writing, and also discussing.

Just this morning, I was thinking back to a money question that I faced in 1992. I could’ve either taken Cornell University to court for a monetary settlement about my suicide attempt, or returned and finished my degree. I’m not sure of the actual legal merits of the case, but it could have involved a substantial settlement. And even if I had lost, perhaps it would’ve motivated Cornell to put up nets under the bridges almost twenty years before they eventually did. Having a number of relatively-easy-to-jump-off-of bridges around the campus of a top 1% university is perhaps in advisable, given how competitive the students typically are.

But then my mind began to lead me down a rabbit hole of thinking well what if instead of jumping off the bridge (you idiot) what if you had done something else … become a lawyer instead, say. Don’t get me started.

I don’t need a bunch of money. I need to do something that I will respect myself for.

(I’m also watching Ally McBeal episodes from the ‘90s, and that’s a show which touches on a lot of high-personal-performance issues and makes me think about love again, and how to value it in my life.)

Anyway, let’s see if i can get myself to engage in 2025 once in a while too. (even though i prefer the ‘90s).