2024_07_02 Towards Transience

 I could curl into myself, but I am not going to do that.

Last week I cooked a lamb roast for a friend who is recovering from surgery. At first I was bothered that I couldn't find a single damn measurement for salt in any recipe or guide to preparing meat; whole articles on the matter boiling down to "it's personal preference"-- as if the ideal amount of every single item in a recipe were not subjective (at least up until the point of toxicity).

Once I got past that, I became happy, animated. This roast was going to be really good, and lamb is my friend's favorite. She knew I was making her dinner, but not what it would consist of. What a good surprise! Caring for my friend made me feel alive, like when I was a teenager waking up on summer days.

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I dreamed I was drifting in and out of awareness. That for long stretches I would lose track of time, go catatonic. I was at a psychiatric facility. Though I was half-present, I moved around, made a problem of myself, had outbursts when people were in my way. I was lonely and the attendants tried to mediate and foster friendship. I tried to explain myself: I couldn't remember to take the medicine that would help me remember how to be a person.

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I don't want to belabor the difficulty of focus, the irresistible compulsion to follow tangential thoughts; as if the knowledge that I will eventually return to a thought if it really matters excuses the time wasted on detours. As if time were not an essential component of a shared reality (and its insufferable "consequences").

So maybe I want to get across the pathos. I've done that, here or elsewhere, in some conversation or other. I've had the surreal experience of hearing people express sympathy for my condition, and had to shrug. To say, "how awful"-- and I did it to my friend, and she squirmed uncomfortably just as I had-- it feels off-target. Maybe we could express sympathy with a benediction: "you deserve better"-- so as not to reify what must for the sake of survival remain transient moments of despair.

Towards that transience.

The last few days I've been unable to organize my thoughts beyond expressing a stream-of-consciousness. I lose myself in side-errands or stand too long in the heat trying to remember what I was looking for. I am irritable because I don't want these tenuous thoughts interrupted, dispersed. However. I know this is not the state in which I can hold on to them. I know there are things I can do that will feel better than ... you know, when you write "I believe things will get better", that's a load of horseshit which implies you REALLY believe its opposite, or you wouldn't feel the need to affirm that way. Or at least if I wrote that it would be, and when I read someone else's words... even if they're self-delusional to the point of oblivion, I've read enough novels to recognize foreshadowing.

Point is you don't know the future. And you don't have enough data from your lived anecdote ("plural of anecdote is not data") to make a remotely reasonable forecast. Your routines are subject to disruption. Your control is a farce, but insofar as you can hold onto it, apply it where it has the most impact: your own thoughts. There is a better way to say this. 

Often when we are in a bad place, we tell ourselves it will get worse in order to spare ourselves the pain of dashed hope. This almost mechanical reflex presents itself as self-preservation: hurry up and accept what you "can't change" so you don't have to keep diverting energy into changing the things you "can". It's thought-gravity, like a drop of water travelling down through a crumbled concrete foundation. 

Experience resulted in pain in the past, avoid painful experience. What self-flattery.

Anyway, I can borrow from past experience, too. I know that I have good days and bad. It's possible tomorrow will be awful. It's possible tomorrow I will read this scrawl and make some postable sense out of it. I have to live with not knowing. I don't have to have hope. I have to acknowledge possibilities.