Flying Leaps

Good morning, everybody!

I hope that it's all going nicely today. It's Thursday, which always amazes me because, with a twinge of synaethesia, I always think of days like today feels. It's a color like this: 

Now, lest anyone think that Thursday's perceived liaison with this color is a complaint, I can assure you that it is not. It’s distinctive. The sun may be visible on days like this, but it’s not terribly relevant.

So, I started this bit of writing for the blog yestereve, and it went on for hours, but I realized after a time that I likely had other things to do, and I was getting a bit worked up about my subject (about redneck America and the blight of our economic and cultural imperialism and the disgusting depths of our respective and collective sanctimony and how the paradigm of scarcity cripples imagination in worse ways than we’re no longer capable of imagining), typing rapidly and incorrectly, holding my breath through entire sentences (though not this one, thank goodness, because I’d’ve lost consciousness by now) and feeling very motivated, entering something of a self-imposed exile, when Molly came to see me, at which I saved my nearly completed post and we ate berries and talked past midnight until we started to fall asleep and I love her more constantly and I awoke this morning and approached my post to finish it but it was a snarling and seething blob of invective in which I was just getting ready to give those Baby Boomers a piece of my mind and when I remembered:

I quit smoking (for like the bazillionth time) yesterday. Ugh.

No wonder consumerist conformity pisses me off to an unmanageable extent!

I had almost 8 years of being quit, but not really, because I was a social smoker. So, I’m sad that I lost my mock-control of my ongoing low-level nicotine fit.

And I can’t be placated, which is sorrowful, because I’d like to take a placation (NEW WORD ALERT).

Oh, and this is good, and it pertains to the strident post of last night that did not tumble into public view: I’m going to post some writing (later today) that I did (back in 1999) about the town in which I lived as a child (Frederick, Maryland). (Sorry about all of the parentheses. I’m disorganized.)

MY MIND IS CHAFING,

WHICH MEANS THAT I SHOULD

WALK AROUND THE NEIGHBORHOOD

AND BREATHE DEEPLY. AIR ONLY.

THAT’S WHAT THE EXPERTS ALL SAY THAT

PEOPLE IN MY SITUATION OUGHT TO DO,

BUT THEY CAN TAKE A FLYING LEAP.

I WISH THAT I COULD TAKE A FLYING LEAP.

THAT’S WHAT I’LL DO; I SHALL PRETEND THAT

I AM ON AN AIRPLANE, AND THAT I AM GOING

TO VISIT THE MALDIVES. THE INDIAN OCEAN IS

FASCINATING! I WILL GO TO SRI LANKA, TOO.

AND OTHER PLACES AFTER THAT.

Now I'm All Serious

Humans need to have some work done on their stupefying human brains.

Here in Brunswick, Maine, we are out of oil, with perhaps a thimbleful remaining.

Anyhow, I've just adjusted the thermostat upwards by 20% to 60°, so that my wife and children don’t feel like they’re hostages on an involuntary sojourn to a distinctly frostful hinterland. It’ll definitely drain what remains in our tank, which had been relatively plentiful prior to a polar yestereve. But, consequences be damned, say I, when it comes to my family knowing at least a semblance of comfort in their shared slumber. I’m staying awake in preparation of the emergency-refill call that I know that I’ll have to place sooner than later, even though I’ve no means of paying for a delivery (due to a succession of foibles that is keeping the money that I’ve earned at arm’s length). People say that compensation is forthcoming, and I hope that it is.

Granted, the party (where’s the party?) line is that a person should lie in the bed that they made, which is perfectly aligned with the puritanical and punitive notions that founded this intermittently great land. “Serve the heavens with your deprivation.”

This is all well and good, but why do we live in a country that appears to be allergic to alternatives, even as it is ruled by profiteering? It is actually, legitimately preposterous. To fill our oil tank would cost—and this is no joke—$974.00! Without the $50 in fees that we’d be obliged to pay. Per month, at this rate. How on earth can a person afford that in addition to everything else? There is assistance available, but Governor Paul LePage has decided to cut the amount by 70% so that he can provide tax cuts for wealthy people. He says that this spurs job creation, but it does no such thing. What is does do is let people be cold. We won’t freeze to death (I am, as I've stated before, famously exothermic), but there are heaps of impoverished people in the middle of nowhere. Many of them are ancient and proud, and what will become of them in all of this? What will happen? We’ll have a sudden onslaught of AARPsicles, that’s what.

Research into alternative heating has proven to be a fruitless enterprise; a summer visit from a Solar-Power consultant confirmed that a switch away from oil is, more or less, cost-prohibitive ($20,000) for people like us; we could finance it, and there are (rather piddly) tax credits, but they don’t outweigh a bleak employment and income scenario, and they won’t defray initial costs to any appreciable extent. So, in this very nasty meanwhile, we have to continue to “shell” out for heat, which mandates that we’ll accrue no savings.

And this is how the Great, Big “Them” works. I don’t think that it was ever really possible for me to appreciate before this cardboard-salad sector of my life, just what a joke the notion of class mobility is for most people. I would not be writing this post had I not been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis during my final semester of graduate school, only to be shunned on multiple occasions by Social Security and others like them when I sought assistance regarding my disabilities.

It happens to people all the time—gradually, momentum is lost, and you’re suddenly embalmed in the formaldehyde of class rigidity. It’s assumed that you have nothing to contribute, or that you’re cognitively incapable, or that you’re unable to manage adult life. The people that think thus, and strive to impress that upon you so that your limitations are bandied about constantly, don’t see the OTHER, more pernicious, set of limitations—borne of the fact that this culture is fueled by judgment and hierarchy, and that that's the default that every one of us is beholden to examining. 

With a chronic and (supposedly) terminal disease like MS, it’s so often the case that nobody believes in any chance of your improvement, but they’ll placate you when you talk about it by refraining from yawning when you speak. But then, when you are experiencing wellness, expectations of you are frightfully unrealistic, like your health is a bank account that you MUST empty whenever possible—usually by way of exposing yourself to the same stress-filled nonsense that begot this whole cycle in the first place.

And now, there are my wonderful, wonderful children and my stunningly excellent wife, who is my best-ever friend. They’re so, so important to me. And, truly, the love that we have for each other serves as a barometer for a life that is lived harmoniously with my self. That is precisely why all of this tedium has got to, and (I hereby declare) is going to, STOP.

Adjustments: Undue Homework

In "preparation" for twenty twelve (whose name I'd write numerically, were its sequence of numbers not so, you know, counterintuitive, which is to say nearly nothing per the stunted force inside of me believes that unabbreviated living will somehow lead to a life of unfathomable bounty in tender of tremendous importance that is not necessarily negotiable), and amid chronic financial emergency, I have been inspired to review all sorts of "material," shocked to understand at last and at length how very little of it is actually tangible. In a year of precipitous peaks and troughs, I see their collective occurrence as having been dictated and defined by forces and systems of human construction.The weight of this reflection, and the futile hilarity of its implications, feels rather like trying to speak, yet emitting the sound of an activated whoopee cushion in lieu of a voice.

(time elapsed)

It must be stated at this point that I have yet to determine the structure and/or frequency of these posts. It's very clear, during the tumult of the season, that we have to give ourselves over to cleaning; there seems to be little choice by now. I guess that it's sensible to do this, but more significantly, it might keep people from injuring themselves on pernicious obstructions that masqueraded once as "gifts." While it's unfair to inflict attributions of motive upon inanimate things  (as if I know, for instance, that those legos on the floor want to cause pain to my bare feet), I don't think that I care any longer whose interests are at stake.

(time elapsed)

what a fizzlefest cleaning has been! hell if the rooms that i "tidied" are not substantially less navigable than the rooms to which others attended.

certain close associates think that multiple sclerosis has eroded my executive function, and they should be right, but i think that it's more my un(der)developed sense of personal boundaries that has done me in at every turn. it's how come stress acts as a toxin to my body, how come i'm challenged to request compensation for my work, and how come i'm reluctant, despite what most people think, to admit what it is that want. i smell a resolution approaching; i am replete with vague, ominous nausea.

i think that i'll go and prepare for New Year's Eve by ending New Year's Eve Eve.  

hooray for readers!

2/1/2011, 12:26 AM

THE PRETEXT: Does anybody have any old blog posts from "good ideas on paper"? I deleted a ton of them by mistake. You could ask why or how this happened, but you'd get the same unsatisfying answer that I've already gotten.

I refer you now to "Comments." Love, Benb xoinfinity