Life Itself

Creaking

I’ve reached a stage in my life where I have to work to keep my health. I’ve got various complaints and minor problems. Some of them I have sought medical advice and treatment for, and some of them I have just lived with.

About three years ago, I was diagnosed with a heart palpitation. Because of my age – in Canada, about 2100 men my age died of heart disease in 2019 – my GP sent me off to a cardiologist. I went through a battery of tests, which disclosed that the palpitation was annoying but harmless, but I had high blood pressure and some calcium deposits on my arteries. The advice was to lose weight, exercise, and take an array of drugs, including a statin to prevent further plaque. So since that time I have lost weight, exercised, and taken the drugs as prescribed. At my last appointment with the cardiologist, he pronounced my results excellent, and told me he didn’t need to see me any more.

I have an acquaintance. He is five years younger than I am, and about five years ago he was diagnosed with serious arteriosclerosis. He had a triple bypass, and was at that point merely obese. Declaring the problem fixed, he immediately returned to his old ways, drinking heavily, smoking, and eating gigantic large-calorie meals. I just saw him a little while ago. He is now over a hundred pounds overweight, with an umbilical hernia that can’t be operated on because he is so obese. He has to walk with a cane because his legs are so bad.

I just lost my ex-sister in law to advanced diabetes. She was warned repeatedly, and strongly, over twenty years, that she needed to eat more vegetables, stop smoking, exercise, and lose weight. She had been in and out of the hospital over the last year with complications of progressive organ failure due to diabetes. A couple of weeks ago, she fell in her home where her 91 year old mother was taking care of her. They took her to hospital, and she died overnight. She was fifty-five.

I am determineded to stave off the ravages of time as long as I can. I see friends my age who can’t turn their heads, or who can’t climb a flight of stairs without stopping for a breather. As you age, it gets harder and harder to keep things in decent condition. I do pushups most mornings, and it just hurts – in the shoulder, in the elbow, in the wrist – they’re not disabling pains, but it hurts. I work my neck to maintain cervical mobility as much as I can, and it hurts.

The alternative is not to do it. Just avoid that pain. But that doesn’t avoid it – that just moves it along into the future, and makes it worse.

Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young.

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Last Century’s Clothes Horse

My family sometimes makes fun of me. It’s gentle fun, but fun nonetheless.

I change my clothes often, usually two or three times a day. However, it’s not that I put on clean clothing – rather, I change clothing depending on what I am doing. If I am working in the garden, for example, I have old torn pants that I will put on for that. If I am sitting and writing, I have old, worn clothing that I wear for that – what I consider my ordinary everyday clothing. If people are coming over, or I am going out of the house, I have good clothing that I put on for that.

I do this because wearing ‘good’ clothing to do tasks where they might become dirty makes me deeply uncomfortable. As a result I have clothing that is categorized by how good it is, and whether I

I sat down and thought about this the other day when I got a new t-shirt from a well known manufacturer of quality clothing. I had not bought clothing from them before, in part because I have a lot of trouble spending on clothes. And true to everything that I had read about this company, the t-shirt is very well made. It is exquisitely comfortable. It looks pretty good as t-shirts go. It should last a long time.

And when I went to light the charcoal grill for dinner, I changed it for an old one that is worn thin and bare, the logo cracked and half missing.

I thought about it: why did I do that? Why do I do that, change my pants and shirt two or three times a day? Wearing the old, worn stuff for multiple days between washings?

I realized that this goes back to when I was very young.

I used to think that we were middle class. Not rich, I thought, but pretty well off. There were poor people, and there were rich people, and there was everybody else – they were middle class. We were middle class.

When I look back on it now, I realize that we were not middle class. We would probably be classified now as working poor – my mother worried about money constantly. She managed to scrape up enough to get me, the oldest, new clothing from the Sears catalog every August ready for the school year: one or two outfits. She managed to find enough to get each of my younger brothers something new if I had stained or torn something, but otherwise they got my hand-me-downs. My sister, the only girl, got new clothing, but she had hand-me-down pants and shirts as play clothing.

My mother went absolutely insane if I got grass stains on my school clothing. Eating, playing… I learned to be careful. Back then, parents controlled their children by beating them.

There are other artefacts of this in my personality. I fuss about windows and doors being open or closed. I do this because we ran out of heating oil a few times when I was young. I remember those times, when a visit from the oil truck was a major expense, and I find that I abhor the waste of heat or cool.

And what drives me is fear. The fear of losing something that I can never get back – if I ruin this shirt, there isn’t another one. Heat is expensive… so expensive. If we run out, we could be in the cold.

Even as I write this, I am wearing a t-shirt with a hole under the armpit. It has a few old stains near the hem. I can eat in this shirt, I can sit in my office room and type. I have three newish, nice t-shirts upstairs. I will change into one of them to go out for lunch. I’d like, one day, to get beyond this, but I don’t think it likely.

I’ll also change my pants. My wife will roll her eyes.

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Growing Faint

One of the strange things about the last year and a bit is that we have a shared experience.

That isn’t completely true, of course. Different jurisdictions have attempted to handle the pandemic via different methods. Some countries locked down hard, others less so. Some places mandated masks early, others later.

But we all shared the experience of our regular lives being upended in a short period of time. I, for example, had been looking forward to at least another three weeks of ski season in the sun. And then, within a week, I was in my house, with my family, and we did not go out together. One of us made a trip to the grocery store, masked, once a week.

We saved a lot of money on gasoline.

After the initial shock, I embraced the change. I was one of the lucky, able to work from my home. I set up a home work station right next to the desk I use to write. I got connected and reconfigured my work machine, and for the last year I have been able to do my job just as well as if I had been in the office. Better, actually, because I was never more than a minute from being able to deal with something work-related.

I started a home based exercise program, mostly body weight resistance exercises. I walked on the school field near our house early in the morning. I completed one novel, and started another, longer one. We binged TV shows together.

And yet, last fall, nothing mattered. I couldn’t gather enthusiasm for anything. I couldn’t complete anything – I had a dozen small projects started, and abandoned. Two dozen. More. Nothing seemed important enough to hold my attention.

I was languishing.

Odds are, a good number of you were, too. Hadn’t seen friends in months, hadn’t visited family, couldn’t go to the movies or the mall, couldn’t look at people’s faces when you did venture out into a sterilized world of hand sanitizer, door guards, lineups, masks, and nobody ever touching anyone.

For me, the state of languishing is similar to the state of depression in many ways. The big difference is that for the last year, I haven’t wanted to do things because nothing mattered. When I am depressed, I don’t do things because I can’t. It’s not that there is no point, it’s that they are impossible.

I’m depressed, I thought. That’s all this is, I’m just depressed, and I know how to deal with that. I increased my exercise and used a bright light in the mornings. I replaced my usual lunch of leftovers with a healthy smoothie. I put limits on my screen time, and on social media use.

None of these things helped. I felt better, but I still wasn’t getting anything done. Things still didn’t matter. I started using a reminder list and a schedule, attempting to regiment my life. That helped some, but only a little.

Then two things happened.

  1. I started Mindfulness exercise – at first I meditated for just five minutes a day, then ten, then fifteen. (I use, and recommend, Headspace).
  2. I read an article that my wife forwarded to me. This article. (It’s behind a paywall)

I realized that I was languishing. The things I had been doing to fight depression didn’t work, because I wasn’t depressed. I was in a sort of strange middle ground between doing well and doing really badly. I was in a state of mere existence. Nothing mattered because I couldn’t plan anything. I was in a continual state of reaction, sitting and waiting for the world to do something.

At first, I didn’t recognize the symptoms that we all had in common. Friends mentioned that they were having trouble concentrating. Colleagues reported that even with vaccines on the horizon, they weren’t excited about 2021. A family member was staying up late to watch “National Treasure again even though she knows the movie by heart. And instead of bouncing out of bed at 6 a.m., I was lying there until 7, playing Words with Friends.

It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

Adam Grant, ‘There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing’, New York Times, April 2021

The New York Times article described it precisely. Joyless and aimless.

As I write this, in May of 2021, we still haven’t been anywhere. We still wear masks whenever we go out. We haven’t eaten in a restaurant in forever. Haven’t listened to live music for what feels like the last half of my life. But I have made some changes, and things are starting to improve. There’s a reopening plan where I live. Other places in the world have reopened. There is hope.

I continue my daily meditations. Mindfulness practice has helped me enormously.

I have started writing the second volume of my planned trilogy. I managed to give it a title, as well: The Eye of Esheen Khor. (Titles are hard. I may write about titles one of these days.) Progress on it hasn’t been as fast or immersive as the first volume, but I am working on it, and it is improving.

Some believe that naming a thing gives you power over it. I wouldn’t go quite that far with languishing, but I will say that naming it has given me a strategy for fighting it, a strategy that I lacked before.

Like lockdown, I see light at the end of the languishing tunnel.

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Dreams Are Strange Things

It isn’t surprising to me that dreams are thought to be portals to alternate realities, at least of some description. I don’t usually remember my dreams, but when I do, as I do this morning, they are strangely twisted landscapes in which alternative systems of logic apply.

I don’t actually believe that dreams are windows into anything other than the dreamer’s mind: I recall, many years ago, dreaming of a sequence of numbers that, in the dream, won a lottery. I went out and bought a lottery ticket, and kept buying tickets for some weeks. That number did not win anything.

I woke this morning from a dream.

I was returning from prison – I have no idea what I had been imprisoned for. I walked across the parking lot of a gas station under sparse Garry oaks to my townhouse, which seemed to have been built in the parking lot of a 1960’s era strip mall. When I got to the townhouse, I saw that the front steps had been taken away.

“This must have happened while I was in prison,” I said in my dream, with impeccable logic.

I opened the door somehow, though the knob would have been about four feet higher than I could have reached. I managed to climb in by bracing my feet on both sides of the door frame – again, this dream lodging obeyed its own peculiar logic. Once inside, I discovered that someone was in the middle of extensive renovation. A few dream-minutes later, I realized that it was repair, not renovation, for there appeared to be some rot and water damage that were being removed.

The stairs to the upper floor had been replaced, although they were linked together like the slats on a blind, and you could flatten them into a slide or move them back into being stairs just by pushing on them. The entire lower floor was a skeleton, all of the wall board stripped off, and the bare plywood of the floor exposed.

I decided to go upstairs to see what the condition was up there. I flipped the stairs into stairs and started climbing. After a while, I realized that I was climbing past figures cocooned in sleeping bags, figures that looked at me grumpily as I passed. When I reached the upper floor, I found that once again dream logic was present, for the upper floor was at least four times the size of the lower. I did not pause to reflect on the fact that this was not evident from outside the building.

I found that I had a roommate. I was unsurprised by this, so I suppose I must have had a roommate all along and just not thought of it. The unnamed roommate, who bore no resemblance to anyone I can think of other than Cousin Larry from the 80’s sitcom Perfect Strangers, was in his turn surprised to see me. He had no idea I was getting out of prison.

He had been busy, it seems. In addition to repairing or renovating the lower floor, he appeared to have turned the upper floor into a combination of a bed and breakfast and a call center. There were cubicles around, and the walls had been painted dark. Clumps of people gathered and talked, and there was a general swirl of activity that made finding him a little difficult.

There had to be a hundred and fifty people up there on the second floor of my townhouse. My roommate did not seem to consider this unusual, or even remarkable, and he balked at my suggestion that I needed a place to live, and all of these people, including the ones on the stairs, needed to leave.

I woke up, not having resolved this situation.

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A Difficult Year

It’s been a difficult year. For you, for me, for everybody.

It’s one thing to acknowledge that. We all do, usually in a flippant sort of way. Oh, it’s just more of 2020, we say. Everything is crazy now. That part is true, but it’s a surface truth. Things are crazy right now, but what does that really mean?

I’m the sort of person who you would expect would handle a lockdown pretty well: I’m an introvert, a reader and a writer who makes a day living in a field where he can do his job remotely. I don’t socialize widely, I’m not a party- or bar-goer. I’m just the sort who should be able to survive a lockdown without much trouble.

That’s what I thought.

But that is not what happened. I’ve found myself struggling to stay focused. This isn’t from time to time, either, this is all day every day. I’ve never been someone who needs a lot of social interaction, but the complete lack of connection to anyone outside my immediate family has had a sort of wearing effect on me. I suspect this is true of a large number of people, but I’m not meeting them and talking with them.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we are all social animals. One of the reasons we consider prison (and even more so, solitary confinement) a punishment is precisely because of the social isolation. We employ it as punishment and control for children – that’s what time out is. Isolation for a short time.

I think that no matter where you are on the introversion/extraversion scale, prolonged isolation isn’t good for you. As much as I had fantasies of being alone at stressful times in my life, it isn’t good for me, either.

When the lockdowns started, I got back over an hour a day. I polluted less. I spent less. After the stress of the change, the first couple of months felt freeing – I was able to do my job without leaving my house. I was one of the truly fortunate ones.

But about six months in, I found that I was having real trouble making use of that extra time. I couldn’t get things done. I was in the middle of writing a book – I’d go days where I dithered and only wrote a few words a day. I had periods where I didn’t write anything at all, and other periods where I rewrote, then rewrote again. It wasn’t only that, either. I wasn’t getting things done around my house. Things that I used to take joy in seemed flat and uninteresting.

I realized that I was depressed.

I have battled depression at times in my life. I was a depressed teenager. I went through a significant depression in my twenties that I worked through and ultimately defeated. Since then, I have been able to head it off when I feel it coming on, using techniques I learned in counselling more than thirty years ago. I also suffer from seasonal depression – it was only a few years ago that I recognized this. Now I use a high intensity light for thirty minutes most mornings between October and March, and it definitely helps.

This time it has been a bit different. I think everybody is depressed, or at least more depressed than they were a year ago. You can’t talk to a counsellor face-to-face. I don’t know about you, but for me, teleconferencing is useful, but it doesn’t take the place of actual human interaction.

I miss people’s faces. I miss smiles. I miss cooking for friends.

I decided that what worked thirty-plus years ago wasn’t working for me this time around. I started investigating things that I could do to help myself. I landed on headspace. I realize that this isn’t for everybody, but it has been working for me. Daily meditation has helped me calm jackrabbit thoughts. I am less anxious. And now, two weeks in, I can feel focus starting to return.

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A Christmas Break

I seem to take a Christmas break whether I want one or not.

Part of me suspects that the reason that northern hemisphere societies favor a winter solstice festival is the recognition that this is a dark time for the soul. As the light diminishes, human energy goes with it. Some people are more affected by this than others. I am certainly one of those. For example, this simple little blog entry, the one you are reading right now, took me three days to write.

It almost goes without saying (as he says it) that this year has been particularly challenging. I’ve not felt the weight of grey, sodden skies as heavily as this in many, many years. Some years, here in the northwest, the winters are colder, skies clearer, snow more frequent. Other years, like this one, are a seemingly endless train of flat grey storms pelting water, where a rare day of watery sunlight is a thing to be celebrated. These years do dump a lot of snow in the mountains, the better to enjoy my favorite sport, but this year my ability to enjoy that sport is strictly limited.

I have generally found that I fare better over the solstice if I have something outside myself to keep me focused. Usually, the best thing is employment. I’m less productive there, too, as are many people, but at least I have the structure of a prebuilt social environment, and a set of tasks that must be performed. If I leave me to my own devices this time of year, I tend to fall into counterproductive patterns of scattered thinking and half-finished miniprojects.

Given that the goal of my current writing project, now entering its second year, is to replace my day job income with writing income, I will need to establish some better rituals around writing production. If I’ve learned anything about this craft in my sixty years of life, it’s that you can’t wait for inspiration.

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In The End, We’re All The Same

My friend Tom died a few days ago. He’d gone into palliative care, and then after a day started to check himself out again. I think he was afraid of the finality of the situation. I tried to call him, but he was either blocking everything, or more likely, simply physically unable to answer his phone. Fortunately, he realized that he was physically unable to leave the palliative unit, and he more or less slept the final 48 hours.

The last time I saw him, we discussed the finality of death at some length. I don’t think he was really prepared for it, as I suppose that I won’t be when my time comes.

Tom is the first of my close friends to die. I have lost parents and siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. Tom’s death is different. We were young together, we tackled weighty philosophical questions together. We talked of girls and life and money, music and drugs and history – you know, all the important stuff. We didn’t always agree, and there were times when we didn’t speak for a day or two, but we understood each other.

I don’t have too many regrets other than the one large one, that I allowed my ex-wife to separate us, and that I didn’t rectify that until last year. I offer this advice: if you have a relationship with someone such that you would regret their death, and you have let your contact with them lapse, give them a call.

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Time Draws In

I received notice today that my friend T has entered palliative care at a private nursing facility. On the one hand, that’s not a good thing. It means that, as I feared, things have progressed rapidly. On the other hand, I am deeply grateful that there is a facility like this, and that they had room for him. This isn’t always the case.

As I said to the person who notified me: Knew it was coming. Not really ready for it.

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The Waning of T

I drove up to visit my dying friend T a couple of weekends ago. It was a measured risk: balanced against the risks of Covid was the fact that he is dying and doesn’t have much time left. They stopped chemotherapy as ineffective some months ago, which moved him into palliative care. At this point he is still in his home; I don’t know how long he can continue.

He has always had mental health issues. He’s been diagnosed as bipolar, for example. Looking back, it should have been obvious when we were teenagers, although forty five years ago nobody had ever heard the term bipolar, and depression was another word for weak. You just needed to get over it, you know? T was always like that – up and down all the time. He was, and is, bright and creative. He’s an artist and musician, and has a degree in creative writing. But he struggles. He really struggles. And that’s quite outside of the diagnosis of terminal cancer.

We had planned to go up, my wife and I. T likes my wife – when we see him, he brightens and talks at great length. Like many people with his mental challenges, he is a poor housekeeper, and so he is ashamed to have people in to his apartment. For this reason, we always met him at a pub, where we would sit for three or four or five hours, talking.

My wife had a small crisis with her elderly mother and thus at the last moment she couldn’t go. I had a hotel reservation, so I drove in to the interior, away from the coast, up through foothills and then mountains, past crystal glacier-fed rivers edged with robes of golden fall leaves. The sun was out – a break in the rain – and the air was warm with the soft melancholy of autumn.

When I got to the town where T now lives, I phoned him. He couldn’t come, he said. He was in too much pain. I couldn’t come over to see him, he hadn’t had a chance to clean up. It’s just me, I said. Not the Pope, or the President. But as always, he couldn’t be persuaded. So I went to the hotel, checked in, got out my laptop and wrote some.

Sure enough, a couple of hours later he phoned from the parking lot. He owns a 1994 Ford van – it still runs, and I think he paid $400 for it. But he shouldn’t drive. He’s on enough opiate to kill a normal person, and he sometimes gets sudden pain that causes him to double over. But again, as always, you can’t tell him anything.

We went for dinner to an Indian place. T isn’t able to eat much these days – the cancer has destroyed his pancreas and he has to take enzymes. Even then, anything with processed carbohydrates gives him a lot of trouble. But he can eat vegetable curries, and the spices cut through the fog of probably 12 or 14 medications.

After dinner we bought some beer. Not much, a half-dozen local brews. T can’t drink much any more, either. We went back to the hotel, and T said he wanted to stay there that night. There were two queen beds, so I said sure.

We laid in bed and drank beer and talked. We talked of life and death. We talked of regrets. We talked of all the heavy, difficult things that men who have known each other since childhood might speak of when one of them is dying.

And it was like we had not had a separation of 40 years. For a time, I half felt that those 40 years might have been a dream, that somehow I had fallen asleep and dreamed the years, two marriages and children and multiple jobs, houses bought and sold, tragedies and triumphs weathered, and that in reality I had been here the whole time, talking to my childhood best friend T.

He fell asleep for a while. I looked at him. He was more skeleton than man, and yet the face of that boy was still here: the snub nose, the wide face, the angled eyes. Yorkshire blood, he was once nearly as wide as he was tall.

I do not know how much longer he will live. Not long, I don’t think. But I am grateful to whoever, whatever, that lined up the stars to allow us to reach one another again. I don’t know if I will see him again before he dies. Now, though, I approach that thought with a degree of peace. It is a blessing to reach the point of resignation.

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Two Things Tuesday

Two things on a Tuesday:

  1. I keep going through the coffee cycle. I’m now 60 years old, so I’ve been through it a number of times now. It starts with an enjoyable cup of coffee in the morning. I’m very much a morning person – it may have something to do with growing up on a farm and years of shiftwork, but when the sky gets light, I’m awake. Coffee is not necessary, but it does pick the morning up in a lovely way. Because that first cup is so nice, I find I don’t stick at one cup per day, but gradually, over time, I work up to four or five. And then I notice that I’m getting a lot of acid indigestion and stomach upset. This was the case a few days ago, and so I have cut back once again to two cups.
  2. I need to learn how to add a widget to each post that shows the progress on my current work. I could add it into the sidebar, I suppose, but I think a bar on each post as I make it tracks history better. Or perhaps I could create both: a current WIP progress widget at the top or side, and a snapshot of that widget at the time a post was made.

In the spirit of #2, I am currently at 87,000 of a targeted 95,000 words. Three or four more chapters should do it.

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