always right here

I can't seem to move on. Maybe I never do. Maybe I don't even understand the concept. I still tear up thinking about the dog that died when I was three. I'm not handling my father's cessation very well. He wasn't particularly fond of existing, but he was my dad. I can't go a day without breaking down into tears. Every day for two months now.

When Jenny died, I stumbled pretty badly, but recovered and shakily got back into classes and everything. When I injured my knee, I could no longer do the very thing that keeps me sane and made all this possible, but I limped on for a while. When I found out that my father had cancer, I just broke. I failed my classes. Then the fucking pandemic happened. 

Now he's gone, and I'm still an absolute wreck. I hear vaccines are finally on the horizon, but not sure I'll ever recover from this.

to die is gain

My father can finally rest. Goodbye, Dad.

lathe of heaven

"To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven." 

- Chuang Tsu, via Ursula K LeGuin

I've spent a massive chunk of the mental resources across my lifetime, studying and pondering the nature of consciousness from every possible angle. This might have something to do with flipping out, when my sister dismissed my efforts to steer my father's treatment, by asking how many medical degrees I have. She'd never even heard of antipsychotics. She had no idea why my father wouldn't want to ever take one, under any circumstances. I do.

Doesn't matter now. I'm assuming he's still alive, but haven't heard from my sister since being told that my views don't matter because I'm a drop out, and that I had to leave. To be fair, she probably didn't mean leave Hawaii, just for a while. Or maybe it was just a reflexive response to a man being violent: I dropped the phone I was holding to stop myself from throwing it. I walked away from her and hit a stone pillar. My hand is still all bruised and swollen today. I threw a chair.. I pulled the throw, as I realized I was aiming for another neighbor's rooftop solar panel array.. but it still clipped a window. I was way past my breaking point, and she just keeps turning every goddamn thing into a pissing contest argument.

I don't know how he's still alive. He was in awful shape when I left. In the hospital, he'd be in the ICU, but on hospice, he's no longer allowed to go to the hospital. It occurs to me that I should be clarifying all of this, because it's both normal and most people have no idea. It's unbelievable and yet, for the most part, it makes sense. We know how this goes, and fighting it just makes it worse.

Assuming they're not wrong. I choke on that now and then. What if he could be saved and we're just letting him die? Chances are, his case was typical. That's what chances are, and that's where medical science falls short. Human judgment can be needed to catch the exceptions. What if his case wasn't typical? I can go down another rabbit hole here, but no. His situation was extremely dire.. last I saw him. I fear his suffering was greatly amplified by his inability to accept it. I wanted to address that, after my birthday, before I left, but it was already getting very hard to communicate with him about anything.

What really got to me was what they call terminal restlessness. There should be videos on this, but we'd see it as a gross violation of privacy. To see someone in such a state, somewhere between animalistic and childlike, while suffering unbearable distress, writhing around, moaning, shrieking, or wailing. How shameful, right? Why are we not supposed to talk about this? It was incredibly disturbing to witness.

This is a very serious condition. It should be far better documented, such that we all know about it. We should also strive a lot harder to understand it. Not so that anything can be done to save a person's life, but to better protect their last moments of life. They worry about "dignity" and "agitation," but these are people going through the nine circles of hell. I watched my father disintegrate before my eyes.

Throwing a mental straightjacket on them so that they're more manageable is not a solution. It's just burying the problem, so that we don't have to see it. Dad's at peace, because he's just laying there, drugged out of his mind? Neuroleptics don't help a person feel better. They just crush a person's will to express anything. Throw in morphine and ativan on top of the delirium they're already struggling with, and you're basically just euthanizing the person, but dishonestly, to protect loved ones from reality, to ensure that it will be just as bad when it's their turn.

What was especially awful to see, was this decoherence. On the first day, he was speaking gibberish. The second, just mumbling. Mostly stopped speaking at all. Stopped making eye contact or acknowledging the presence or speech of others. Even in moments of calm, just staring blankly. Conscious enough to look in my direction if I sat next to him, but without any indication that he recognized that I was a person, let alone who I was. Conscious enough to keep trying to get up and go somewhere. Anywhere.. but he could barely stand, let alone walk. His pupils were tiny, even in the dark. Each day was worse than the last.

It feels important to me. Our last days of life. Our last moments. Not the moments of the people around us, who get to pick themselves up and go on. I suppose it's almost religious. Maybe it's because I know what happens when we die. I think it's critical to face that, come to terms with it, and try like hell not to die. For those that do though, we should be doing everything we can to make it a better process. Whatever that means to the person who's actively dying.

We can't make a decision like that when we can't face that we're dying, or even what dying means. Eventually, we face the truth, regardless. We should be better prepared. We shouldn't have to face it alone.

almost home

I'm in Detroit now. A pretty decent airport. Much nicer than LAX, which to my surprise, was probably the worst airport I've ever seen. It reminded me more of Port Authority than an airport. 

I wonder how my father is doing. I wonder if he'll even survive the length of my trip. While I was there, I constantly wondered in recent days, if he could understand anything or if he was even thinking anything at all. I think he was already gone..but it's impossible to be sure.

Over the past month, I watched the man I've been closer to than anyone else in my life wither into a skeletal embodiment of suffering before my eyes. All that seemed to be left of him was pain and confusion. It's been the most traumatic experience of my entire life. Tough for him too, I know.

When I threw the chair that broke a neighbor's window, I realized I had to call it. I didn't say goodbye to anyone. I hate goodbyes. I told my father I would be there for him. I told him that I would always be there for him, and then I left.

I want to go home, tend my garden and escape into my routines, but I know it won't be that easy.

fuck cancer

On the fourth day of active dying, my father was still hanging on, but I lost it. Got in a big fight with my sister and stormed out. Now I've got a few more hours to wait, at the airport.

I feel sick about it. The last month has been beautiful, but I decided to take a dump on the whole thing and go home. 

terminal restlessness

My father has always been a trooper of sorts. Life has never been good to him. He would always just take it. He would always keep going. He was never able to relax. With his rational mind already gone, he's all impulse now. He keeps trying so hard not to let the cancer keep him down. He doesn't relax, he barely sleeps. As his body fails him, dragging him down, he fights so hard to keep sitting back up, standing back up, finding some excuse to keep walking around. Even as the world grows dark and muted, as he's getting weaker, his muscles atrophied, his organs failing, he keeps trying.

In a fleeting moment of relative lucidity, he told me that he feels like he keeps waking from dreams, only to find himself in other dreams. Now, he's finally settled down. He's sleeping, but far from peacefully. He's dying and all I can do is sit here with him.

It's surreal. My sister and I have been discussing whether this is something other people have any knowledge of or experience with. I had no idea death was often like this. Neither did she. There are a few differences in our approach. We've been sedating him minimally. We're able to do this, only because we watch him 24/7. It would be impossible otherwise, so what most people see is probably different. If they're even around in the the very last days to see it.

Other people are more familiar with someone in this sort of situation, sleeping until they die, from what I can tell, and that's only if they're dying of a condition that results in this shutdown state it goes into. It occurs particularly frequently in cancer patients, I've read.

It's brutal and horrifying. Watching someone die, day after day, stress filled night after night, while they're tumbling through the worst trip of their lives. It occurred to me that it does seem to resemble tripping on hallucinogens in some ways, and I wondered if it could be similarly guided into being more pleasant. He's calmer in the fresh air outside. I play his favorite music for him. It seems to help.

long day

My father's mind is gone. He can no longer bathe, dress, or use the bathroom himself. He no longer responds to even basic questions about whether he's comfortable or in pain. Sometimes he looks panicked and I put my arm around him.. I tell him, I'm right here, dad. He chuckles and seems relieved. 

Hospice is often accused of accelerating decline, but the truth seems complicated and ambiguous. They say these are the signs someone is dying, and that their morphine use often coincides with these symptoms. It's easy to get cause and effect backwards. I'm not convinced, but he's been incoherent and on another planet all day. He speaks in fragments of thoughts and memories without context or specifics. 

It's as if different parts of his brain are just firing, increasingly incoherent of one another. It was a large dose of extended release morphine. Maybe he'll start making more sense when it leaves his system. Or hospice is right, and this is what dying looks like. I've never seen anything like it.

Death is hard enough to come to terms with when we've got all our wits about us. I find it horrifying that in the end, we're robbed of even that. A defense some of us have spent our lives building up. My father was never really big on that though. I don't know what he believes or doesn't. I'm not sure he's ever thought much of it one way or another.

I've spent all day with him, muttering incoherently. I don't know if it's because of the 30mg morphine ER, his mind is shutting down, or what. This morning, I was afraid he might only have weeks. Now, days. Maybe just hours.

departure

Trying to get my father to drink has not gone well. Given that he barely eats, dehydration is pretty serious. This is my explanation for why he's taken a sharp turn for the worse this past week. They're just giving him morphine now. Took him off of the oxycodone entirely. I'm afraid that simply signing onto hospice has meant agreeing to indiscriminately hastening his decline. 

The decision seems very routine, made entirely by his nurse, that he should now be bedridden and delirious for the rest of his life. His abdominal pain was getting worse, as were dizzy spells, and severe constipaion and irritability. But I can't get him to drink anything, and hospice just treats the symptoms. He signs away his right to agemcy if he's too delirious to make his own decisions. He is the one refusing to drink anything, but the delirium itself is from all the morphine.

I don't know what we're supposed to do. The nurse is acting as if he has weeks to live. I'm still scheduled to go home tomorrow. I'm thinking I'll try to come back in a few weeks, but now I'm not even sure he has that. On the other hand, maybe he has months. If nothing else, I desparetley need a break; I need my own apartment to get myself back together in for a while. I'll try to come back, if he has enough time for it. My sister may need the help more desperately than ever. Hospice people come and go occassionally, but she's mostly on her own, and my father can't be left home alone.

Not sure I'll even get to say good bye tomorrow. I'll try, but he might not remember. He'll just be upset later. 

lost⚓anchor

The longer I go without GH, the worse I get at making decisions. The more I just sit here, unmotivated, waiting for something to change. Helping take care of my father as needed, but otherwise just sitting here. I don't know what to do. 

My routines aren't a luxury, any more than a wheelchair is a luxury. GH alone isn't the issue. My success has not been about self-sufficiency but resourcefulness - and resources. 

My flight here feels like something from another universe, a distant memory, maybe a dream. Every day we sit outside my sister's tiny apartment, overlooking the Honolulu skyline. Like I'm in some sort of paradise while the world is burning.

A year ago, I was fretting about the college classes I'd been taking. I had a knee injury that I didn't yet realize the severity of. I hadn't talked to my father in quite a while, but meant to visit one of these days. I was busy cheering Bernie on. I was still walking my cousin's dog four days a week. I was nowhere near Hawaii.

take care

I was supposed to go home three days ago. Still not sure when I should go home now. My father has been doing much better. My sister doesn't want to give me the credit, but that isn't the point in itself. If I've been helping, that changes what it means to leave. From my perspective, I seem to be making a substantial difference. I'm afraid to leave.

Some of it is cyclical; he may be doing better this week and worse next. Getting him to eat and drink isn't easy. He doesn't know what he wants. We have to be pushy about it, while offering something he might be able to eat. It can't be the same thing too often. It's a challenge. My sister doesn't have the time for it all day long the way I've been doing. Frankly, I might have more of a knack for it, too.

Since I got here, he went from refusing to eat anything, to eating small amounts five or six times a day. He was drinking a lot of grapfruit juice too, but now he won't drink much of anything. So it's an ongoing challenge, but I think his health has improved largely because he started eating again. I've been able to help him get around, so he doesn't fall. I'm terrified of him injuring himself, without me here. It's no small thing that my presence seems to help psychologically, too.

For now, I'm taking it one day at a time. Every moment feels so precious, better spent sitting here with my father than doing anything else. When I'm home, the days bleed together, weeks and months go by so easily. I let almost six months go by, before I could even get here. Now, six months is a lifetime and then some. I'm afraid to miss a single day. I don't understand how I'm supposed to just leave.

stranded

"It's heavy," my father said, looking at me as he lifted the doughnut from the clear plastic the half dozen had been sold in. I knew what he was getting at. A proper dougnut shouldn't be so heavy. These weren't really doughnuts, but your typical cake ring likeness. Not terrible, but not a real doughnut.

I used to care about that sort of thing, back when I used to eat donuts. Donuts and coffee were a favorite breakfast of mine, once upon a time. I was discriminating about the sort of donuts they were, and my father knew that. For the moment, he remembered it. I appreciated the glimmer of who he was, the reminder of who he is, still in there somewhere.

His behaviour makes sense now. Last I saw him was before the pandemic locked everything down. I had some idea, but I had no idea. My sister didn't articulate it to me. Aside from aging about forty years, he's also not the same person he was six months ago. It's difficult to discern why. Maybe Parkinson's disease or neurological damage from the chemo. The sodium deficiency really brought it to a head.

He can't carry on any sort of conversation. Questions have to be very simple and direct. He gets confused when his own sentences are longer than a few words, but he's sometimes cognizent enough to realize he isn't making sense. He knows he's having trouble thinking. No fucking wonder he didn't call me.

My entire life has been devoted to taking care of him since I got here. My sister works from home, and and aside from that, so has her's. My father's also having serious balance and spatial awareness issues. On his good days, he can barely walk. When his abdominal pain gets bad, he doesn't understand why the doctors can't cure a stomach ache. He talks about seeing more of the island when he's feeling better. I don't tell him that he's only going to feel worse, but I'm afraid my tears give it away.

He seemed better equipped to deal with this months ago, but now he's in denial. Naive, almost child like. We can't have any deep conversations about life and death. I just do my best to comfort him.

I had to cancel my flight back home. My sister is trying to get some assistence from what they call "integrative care" here in Hawaii. My father's beyond regular care, but it's been a challenge to get him to agree to the transition. We've struggled to even explain to him why we need to do this. We're also working on giving my sister authority to make such decisions for him. Which scares the hell out of me, but there isn't another option. I can't do it from Vermont, and I can't move here. 

I can't leave either, until I see that they're getting more help, because there's no way my sister can do this alone. Due to the pandemic, trying to get my departure date changed was more expensive than getting a refund and buying a new one-way ticket. So now I'm here on this island in the middle of the pacific, without a ticket home.

Oh, and down to $200 in the bank. My sister has been paying for everything. On the one hand, I'm thinking I should head home as early as Monday. On the other, I'm thinking how the hell am I going to leave at all.

impending doom

I'm waiting to hear from my sister, as to whether my father has been discharged from the hospital. She is waiting to hear from his doctor. My father tried to call her, but she couldn't understand him, because he's been delirious from sodium deficiency. 

I'm supposed to leave for Hawaii in a few hours. The airline was nice enough to send me a notice that the flight is fairly crowded, so if I care about my health or anything like that, I might want to take another plane. Hopefully my father will be out of the hospital when I get there, because if he's not, I won't even be allowed to see him.

I try to come to terms with never seeing him again, but what really gets me bawling is thinking about him wanting to see me once more. 

the calculus of mental health

I've learned to be very conscientious about mental health. It's counter intuitive. The brain hasn't evolved to be aware of itself. It is only natural to see this as abstract - while behaving recklessly with the mental health of ourselves and others, proclaiming our invincibility as we get ourselves killed.

It's not an easy thing to make sense of. What's best for us can involve doing unpleasant, difficult, or even harmful things to get there. So we need to asses whether it's worth doing. How much risk we're taking on, and how rewarding it will be. Sometimes these variables can be quite serious and not at all abstract.

What an unimpeachable characteristic, to say to hell with all that; I'm going to do what's right, I'm going to care about others and do whatever I can. This is beautifully naive, but naive just the same. Consequences can be complicated and indirect. Roads to hell are paved with good intentions,while a better understanding of consequences can be all about doing the most good overall.

there's something about coffee

After decades of gathering anecdotal evidence, I've come to suspect that there is something substantial to coffee aside from caffeine. Occasionally I find vague references to "compounds" that stimulate adenosine, or have other health benefits, but it's difficult to even search for, because the vast majority of material out there treats the benefits of coffee and caffeine as synonymous.

Now that I'm quitting it again, I've realizing even half a cup of decaf feels more potent than multiple cups of tea. I know decaf has some caffeine still, but it should be much less than a cup or two of tea. Maybe my physiology is different, and I'm more sensitive to something in coffee other than caffeine. Or maybe other people just don't pay much attention. I don't know.

I've had to give up decaf too, as it ended up feeling like being addicted to coffee all over again. When I'm feeling especially desperate for a fix, I try drinking some green tea instead, but the caffeine in it doesn't seem to do anything. I remember noting in the past that without caffeine, I tend to blog less, post to social media less, attempt to socialize in general less. Temporarily, I guess, but so far, I keep going back to caffeine, so who knows.

pandemic airlines

Turns out, I am going to Hawaii, after all. As I told my father, if I feel capable of it, I'll try to get there. Well, some aspects of life have been much better lately, and I am feeling like maybe I can undertake something like being quarantined for a month so that I can spend twenty hours on an airplane during a pandemic to see my father for the last time. I can't wait.

I wanted to be a positive influence and really tried for a while, but then covid happened and he went flying off to Hawaii in the middle of it. Fuck. I just have to accept it, deal with it as it is. I'm leaving mid September. Figured I'd try reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying again in the meantime. It's been a few decades, and I don't think I'm doing this right. 

sapolskism

 This is basically my philosophy on life these days. It's also a close parallel to what the diamond sutra says: it is only compassion that separates the Buddhist from the nihilist. Even as you realize none of this is real, and that none of us exist.. suffering still exists. The Bodhisattva vows to keep striving to do something about it.

life..don't talk to me about life

So, my dad calls me at 2:30am a week ago to tell me he's in pretty bad shape. He was rushed to the ER due to a sudden hemoglobin drop, suggesting internal bleeding. He said it was probably his liver, and there wouldn't be anything they could do. I was half asleep and trying to process this. My sister told me it could also be his stomach, and there'd be nothing they could do, either way. 

I spent the next few days a basket case, crying a lot. He wasn't responding to his phone, so I thought he must be doing badly. Day three of not knowing what was going on, he finally sends me this pissy text, because he's upset that I'm having a really difficult time with the prospect of traveling to Hawaii. My sister tells me it was just an endoscopy. They didn't find anything, so they'll try adjusting the chemo.

Did.. he make me think he was dying then leave me hanging like that, because he's upset with me?

...ok.

He really wants me to come visit. Every reason I give feels weak on its own. Other people seem to get the pandemic issue, but for me that's just another compounding factor. I'd go a lot more easily, if that were the only issue. It's also that because of the pandemic, it can't be a short visit. It's also all the way the fuck in Hawaii, so staying for a few days makes no sense.

I can't deal with staying longer. Under better circumstances, it's very difficult to be away from home for more than a few days, but with all the shit going on now, WTF. I just fucking can't. What am I going to do about my 40 plants? Some need to be watered every day. Some need to be watered very carefully. Some are a challenge for me to reach, let alone anyone else. These are plants I've spent the last year taking care of, but sure, they're just plants. If it were the only issue, yeah, let them die, I guess.

I've been trying to get myself to a better place emotionally and logistically so that maybe I could travel. There must be a way to deal with my plants, but it's not just that. It's about abandoning the daily routines that keep me sane, that I've been desperately depending on these past few months. I've been trying to think about how feasible it might be to stay less than a week, despite everything wrong with doing so. Am I even allowed, or does going back to the airport break quarantine?

My father doesn't seem to sympathize. His cancer trumps everything. It's not a fucking competition. I went to visit him for a week out of every month leading up to the pandemic. I was upset he left for Hawaii because I knew that meant I'd probably never see him again. I got to spend a lot of time with him though, and now my sister does.

guilt

I've been thinking about Jenny a lot, lately. She killed herself a few months after I started school. I don't know anything about the new relationship she was in, but I know she had no emotional support in her life otherwise, and that she wasn't likely to find any. I should have known she'd need it.

I just cut her out of my life completely, and occasionally took little jabs at her in my blog. I figured she'd never read it. Knowing her, I figured she'd move on, and prefer not to even hear from me. That's how she was about her past relationships. She'd get annoyed if she even heard from them once or twice a year. It never occurred to me, these were people she dated for a few months. We were together for over five years. That's not the same thing.

Then it hits me. I was fucking terrible. It makes me sick to think that maybe she did care, that maybe she did check my blog once in a while, that maybe she needed help.. and even years later, I was just being selfish and bitter. How was I such a child, so recently?

Why have I been thinking about this lately? I think it's just the depression I'm struggling to pull myself out of. On a neurological level, it lights up parts of the brain associated with negative and painful memories. Whatever they happen to be, the depressed brain then builds up those connections through repeated use. It's vicious cycle that devours millions of lives.

It's not that anything I've typed above is untrue. It can be so hard to see why I shouldn't feel terrible, right? Aside from it not doing any good, I mean, I really fucked up, and honestly, it might have made a huge difference. That's hard to live with.

At the same time, there are a zillion other things that are also incredibly important, good, bad, and everywhere in between. A fixation on negatives, no matter how true they are, is pathological. It's depression. Which is not to say abnormal. Depression is also a typical response to getting buried in too much negative shit all at the same time, but having an excuse doesn't make it any less destructive. I need to get through this.

what doesn't kill you

There's often a fixation on death, when we think about how bad something is, and how we should assess that. How many people are killed by the police, or by Covid-19. Poverty isn't real poverty, unless it kills. Threats aren't serious unless people are dying.

For every death, there are often far more having their potential stolen, opportunities to thrive crushed. Some experiences make us stronger, or wiser. Some of us are better at adapting. On the surface, this variation can give the impression that we need only strive for more positive outcomes. That's not how the circuitry actually works, though. There are causal relationships to everything.

Far more often than death, covid causes severe illness, wreaking havoc on the body in all sorts of destructive ways, sometimes causing long term debilitation and damage. Police violence can be brutally traumatizing both physically and mentally. How many people in poor neighborhoods and in prisons have PTSD from how they're treated by our criminal justice system? Or those in poverty, not getting enough healthy food, growing up in a highly stressful environment, drinking from lead pipes or subject to other pollutants? These things have serious consequences for brain function and development. 

We adapt, and think of it as who we are. We can't measure how much we've lost, or who we might have otherwise been, but there are all sorts of studies and statistics on this stuff, making it relatively clear. Stress in particular can be a lot more destructive than commonly understood. What doesn't kill us can make us a whole lot weaker. Then something else kills us.

When I think of my survival, when my problems feel existential, it's because I'm always thinking about these consequences. I've been trying so hard to get myself out of this hole I'm in, that the thought of backsliding terrifies me. I'm ashamed of not being strong enough to have other priorities, like going to visit my father before he dies, but if I'm not judicious here, I'll be no use to anyone.

Dropping everything to spend a month in Hawaii feels like an impossibly terrible idea, as I'm desperately trying to recover from tumbling backwards these past few months. Just maybe maybe I can get it together. I need to transition to thinking long term, as covid isn't going away any time soon. It's a risk I need to accept. Hopefully I'll just be asymptomatic, but I need to stop worrying about catching it at all. 

As long as I'm trying not to catch it, I can't do anything. I can't go on like this though. There are other sorts of survival I need to be thinking about.

end times diagnostic criteria

I've been seeing numerous posts and tweets listing off catastrophes of the past six months, much the way I have. I see YouTube videos by people explaining that we're right to feel the world is falling apart, blaming it on capitalism, etc. Right or not, lots of people seem to be feeling this way. These lists remind me of an attempt at diagnosis. What the hell is wrong with me/the world, that I/we feel this way?

2016 was a terrible year. 2017 was worse, 2018 worse still, 2019 even worse, and then 2020 has been so bad, it made all that look trivial. No longer singular events, this is a trajectory. Given the way elections have been going around the world, things are not going to be getting better. Just worse and worse.. but that can't be right, can it? 

My moods have been strange and difficult. I don't know what's going on with me. I'm adapting by prioritizing survival, over all else - I should clarify that I'm referring to mental health here. Survival mode. I'm not stocking a bunker in my backyard or anything. I've never so much as touched a gun.

What little I have to spare for ambitions or hopes, I spend very judiciously. This feels like regression or relapse, because it's how I've lived much of my life, but it's also a survival tactic that might not be so bad. It's terrible for overcoming my situation, it's more like entrenching, so it becomes a vital question, whether or not I'm assessing the situation accurately. 

I have this theory that we're all in fact, just crazy. That yeah, things are bad, but such is life. It will get better, it will get worse, it will go on until it doesn't. The reason we're flipping out might be entirely due to the pandemic. The social isolation, the deferment of all sorts of life goals and strategies, all the uncertainty around how this is going to play out, but knowing it's going to be some degree of pretty damn awful.

I'm inclined to say it's mostly about being cut off from physically being around other people, that this undermines mental health in a very fundamental way. We're largely oblivious to it, and even as we're starved, we don't understand why we're wasting away. We're prone to looking to events and circumstances for something to blame.

Or maybe things really are apocalyptically bad. I honestly don't know and that itself feels nuts.

second wave

I have these vague memories of being around people. Community college. Was I trying to go to school, or did I dream that? I don't remember what I was doing exactly, but it felt like I was doing something. I wonder what it would be like to feel that way in real life.

There were martial arts classes too. I used to struggle to go, sometimes my mind or body just wasn't up for it. Sometimes I had to take months off, healing from an injury while focusing on school. but sometimes I'd actually get there.

I have so many nice memories of almost feeling like an actual human being for a while there. It's been a huge improvement for me, such as it was. It was my entire life. Those two things.

Now they don't even seem real. Was that me, doing all that? It all feels increasingly distant and unlikely. I used to bike all over, but I've had nowhere to go for months. I think it's still summer outside.

hottest summer ever

Been in the nineties lately. Over a hundred in Siberia. Every June has been the hottest June on record, lately, this year probably being no exception. July and August will be worse. Turns out SARS-COV 2 is not seasonal, and does not mind the heat. Anyone gambling on that is about to lose bigly. Cases are surging.. 

but I don't know what that means. 

Surges, waves, and spikes don't seem to be as steep as I'd expected, just dragging on and on.

Still not going anywhere or doing anything, myself. Aside from expanding my gardening habits to include dragon's toe peppers, arugula, scallions, and soon tomatoes. I'm getting better at organizing my grow space and plant sizes. This gives me a few more minutes of stuff to do per day. I can't decide if I should be trying to do more, or if I should stick to just waiting this out. I've been feeling so overwhelmed lately.

I'm feeling aimless. I haven't even been thinking about much. I haven't been posting or blogging about current events or anything else. Maybe the heat isn't helping. Maybe I'm just waiting for the next catastrophe to demand my attention. Or maybe it's just one thing after another, most of it still ongoing, and still exhausting.

The ideal was to be at peace with life's eternal piling on of suffering and impermanence, but I want to make better use of this life than that. I keep forgetting this new normal is not normal. That's why I made the last entry, "timelines" as a reminder. I was doing so much better, before 2020 happened. I can't decide if I have to adapt to this new miserable dystopia, or if I should just hold on.. Things will get better again, right?

Probably not before they get worse. The pandemic surge is looking like it might be pretty serious, may be a real second wave incoming as we head into summer. Incidentally, heat waves contribute to all sorts of insanity and this country is already a smoldering powder keg. I can't tell anymore if I'm wisely sheltering in place or just paralyzed by anxiety.

timelines

I've been having trouble remembering everything that's gone wrong lately. I have to think about it for a minute.

About eight months ago, I injured my knee. Small meniscus tear that took about six months to heal. It was depressing, I was struggling with school, failing Calculus II, and as the months went by, the injury was making it generally more difficult to cope with everything.

I had an interaction around that time, and it turned out to be a bad idea. Lasted a month or two, don't want to elaborate, but it really messed with my head. Stressful, painful, confusing. I remember thinking that it made for an especially brutal one-two combo. I remember hoping there wasn't a third strike coming.. 

Then I got the news about my Dad. He's in Hawaii with my sister now. I'm not sure I'll ever see him again. It shouldn't be one more thing to add to a list, but it is what it is. I'm coping, like I'm coping with everything else. Not very well.

Bernie's loss was devastating. I stand by everything I posted at the time. Electoral politics is fucked. My hope that anything will improve politically is fucked. This wasn't an election. This isn't a democracy, representative or otherwise. Five years invested in watching them rig it for the oligarchy again.

Then I had to stop going to visit my father, because we were hit by this global pandemic. I had to stop doing everything. Months later, they're reopening in Vermont, minus anything I'd actually want to do, but immediately we've had a few outbreaks. They're hoping it's not a trend.. but of course it is.

Nationwide rioting still ongoing. I love that they're fighting, but it's brutal to watch, and I feel helpless to do anything. I also feel hopeless about their chances of getting anywhere. Which means being anxious about any number of awful outcomes. My predictions on Minneapolis dismantling their police department? One way or another, they'll accomplish absolutely nothing.

This feels like a lot to me. It's no wonder my sanity is stretched thin, if not in absolute tatters. Not that this is the end of it. Hurricane season looming now. Won't hit me here in Vermont, but they're expecting it to be the worst ever, for some variety of reasons including climate change.

I'm pretty sure about the economic depression, too. We can't just keep bailing out wall st with trillions of dollars, without consequence. Given all this chaos, our leaders will be worse than ever at handling it. Not sure how much time we have before that hits, but dealing with natural disasters isn't going to help. Neither will the mounting civil unrest. No question, it will be getting worse.

There's a terrifying amount of awful shit happening in the world at the same time, but my personal life hasn't been going so well, either. It's so bad, it's surreal. What if I could just disconnect. Be objective. This is the world, exploding. It's not going to go very well, but it is interesting to watch unfold. What if I had a life to live, and I weren't sitting at home all day doing nothing. That might help too.