Amen!

My cat Libby on my parents’ dining room table. 

Running out of things to do

Spent my Sunday watching church services after throwing up in the morning. It’s finally sunny today, but we might in our neighborhoods waiting for life to resume.

This crazy kitty has brought me a ton of laughs, She did stop one bad habit, drinking from the spicket, but she unfortunatedly has picked up a ton of weight,

RIP, DJ Avicii

Avicii dead at 28. Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/obituaries/avicii-dead.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur One of his best videos: https://youtu.be/IcrbM1l_BoI

Posting tonight at midnight.

I’m yours (part II)

I want to live in your unbreakable heaven. I want to listen to you sing as you develop. I want to say things I can’t say on the Internet. I’ll roll the dice when you tell me and roll my eyes only if you let me. I want to find the balcony where you sip tea. I love you.

Cycles

For me, the pains associated with cancer come in cycles. I’ll feel good for a few days, and then I’ll crash on the weekend. It’s a nice metaphorical picture, but throwing up first thing in the morning feels like a never-ending journey. I heard a nurse talking about which was worse: nausea or pain. I’d say it’s a tie; one brings the other.

As you’re sheltered in your home, try listening to some music (like this mix), read a book or just go for a walk. We will get through this!

Singles

I’ve been a bachelor for most of my life -- sometimes out of choice, sometimes for lack of money, but I always had a hope that one day I’d find the right woman -- one who would accept me for who and what I am and be able to share her baggage with me. I struggle with that fear more than any other -- especially after being diagnosed with cancer. I worry that my pursuit of just surviving will render me unsuitable for marriage. And that’s how I get into my spiral of gloom. It’s like, if I’m not going to have a partner I love, is life even worth living? I love my brother and I know that he’s the only person who is supposed to matter to me, but I do confess that I resent being trapped with no good choices.

My favorite president

I vividly remember my only visit to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. I have the photos from it in the house where I found peace and quiet for the first time in my life. 

President Lincoln was said to have suffered from depression, and I can identify with that. It leaves you empty, so you need the closeness of others but don’t want to spread your glass-half-emptiness.

I’ve sought comfort on the Internet ever since the February night when my maternal grandfather died. He had lost an arm in a train accident long before I was born, and I don’t think he ever really got over it. To me he was the quiet yet grumpy Scotch-Irishman who wouldn’t dare let his wife Mary tell him what to do, and she wasn’t smart enough -- or didn’t care enough -- to realize that her insistence in doing things her way NEVER ended with him coming around to her point of view. And yet when he died around Valentine’s Day that year (when I was a junior in high school), they had the sweetest parting moment. He shared a “Be Mine” candy heart with her and then fell asleep forever. I was chatting with friends on AOL at the time. I heard my mother scream and then ran into the kitchen to ask my father’s mother what had happened. They told me, and I sort of matter-of-factly went back to chatting online. I didn’t process it until the next day when I had to excuse myself from Physics class and then proceeded to the bathroom to weep.

Before they closed my grandfater’s casket at the funeral, I tossed in a poem called “Flowers for Ivere” (he was named after the soap, but his poor parents didn’t know how to spell). He was buried in the section of a Memphis, Tennessee, cemetery where all the legendary newspaper men and women were buried. He was one who communicated through the stories he’d show us when he thought we might enjoy reading the news. He would stay up late into the night to read every word of every paper every day. Those were much better times. s

We young people love to criticize the “Boomers” and those even older, but I suspect we are the dumb ones, not the other way around. They could appreciate the little things. They were stubborn, but stubbornness is a necessary evil when you have to go through life armed-man. And he wouldn’t dare let my grandmother help him button his shirt. He could do it himself, thank you very much. (He did, however, enlist me to help upon occasion.) That’s the type of things I miss -- the little intangibles that didn’t matter back then, but now that they’re gone and we’re spending a day reflecting on dead people, I think about those things.

I never got to find out about his family, and I’m afraid I’m about to miss out learning about my father and the things he’s alluded to but doesn’t have the heart to tell me. Some of it I have inferred, but I neither want to ask the questions I’d like to ask nor do I want to hear the answer.

I long to go back to those days that seem almost like dreams, the stories I haven’t shared because I don’t feel it’s my place.

I’ve never been good at public speaking -- I often am silent in public, and that’s interpreted as being stuck up or that I don’t like anyone but myself.

After brain surgery, my perspective on everything changed, but I still feel like that little boy trapped inside his head. I only seem to be able to express myself when I type, because that’s about how fast my brain moves before jumping to another thought process. 

This is the type of stuff I wanted to write in a book so that I could drift away from dwelling on all the negativity of the world. I want to live, but I feel I can do that only if I have a ying to my yang. Music is what makes me happy, so I know that’s where I tend to gravitate. But I don’t know how to leap from my current reality (a messy home in a mostly quiet neighborhood a few blocks from the water in Florida) to where I want to be, which is with someone who has captured my attention. And of course there’s a new wrinkle -- that I have to move back to the city I felt I needed to escape from, which is now flooding just like it did two times when I was barely old enough to remember anything.

The leap is the hardest part, and honestly I think I would have stayed silent forever if I hadn’t nearly died and then woke up to a reality that I’m not allowed to talk about except in these long diatribes that don’t really say anything.

I would like to take a minute to think Mrs. Cunningham. Fluff truly is overrated! And so today on President’s Day I’d like to do something that you’re not supposed to do as a journalist: bury the lead. And while I know the old adage that I shouldn’t put off till tomorrow what I could do today, I still want to hold onto the anonymity for another day. Many people who know me probably know to what I’m alluding, but it’s not a good idea to be a blabber-mouth -- even on an underused social media platform where secrets go to be buried. My family’s neighborhood (to which I soon will have to return sans a miracle) is under a flooding threat, and it’s not my place to share this good news lest I steal his thunder again.

Plus, I’ve got to go pick up my crazy cat from the vet. She’s supposed to be a comfort animal, and she is very pretty, but I miss my dog, who my brother and I affectionately called Mr. Pup Dog. He’s buried under a rose bush in the house where I grew up -- back in the day where you didn’t need TV or anything else to entertain you. You could just ride your bike and be free of it all.

For all of you 39211 brats like me, I’d like to say: Long live “The Dip.” Those days were the best ever!

And P.S. If a certain woman reads this and wants to “be the man,” I leave my light on. ;)