I am giving thanks this year for being healthy again.
Wednesday, I finished work, came home to walk Finn and suddenly thought it would be a good idea to lie down on my couch and not get up for awhile. I hit a wall. Long story short: I went to the emergency room, got a cipro prescription and made it back home just in time for a shaking fever to confine me to bed for the next 12 hours. The thing about being suddenly and seriously ill is that your brain doesn't have time to catch up to the newly constrained situation. I'm bopping along, brain filled with the intertwined significances of relationships, work, writing, hobbies and politics when the gears of thought and cognition slow, grinding to a stop, until I'm left operating on pure reptile processes.
Ultimately, all that's left is a thin anguished whine.
sick. sick. sick. sick. sick. sick.
The combination of antibiotic and Tylenol slowly push back the tide of misery. I begin to reemerge. As a science fiction writer, I appreciated the cyber-punk aspect of a brain reassembling itself from a few fractured pieces. Not to be too melodramatic but I was down pretty low. What appeared first were the practical concerns of getting ready for yesterday's trip to Long Island for Thanksgiving. All of the little voices cataloguing the things I would need to fold up, pack together and move to the car. Then the quick realization all of this should be the last of my worries. Then thoughts of my wife and family. Then above it all the questions. How could I be this sick so quickly? How will Obama's second term be different from his first? How could I be this miserable? What is a metaphor? How will I ever make up these 12 hours I just lost? Would my current project work better in first person or third? Because there wasn't really an organizing principle as such, all of these thoughts cascaded together, interrupting and disrupting each other. This isn't multiple personalities, it's the separate voices of a chorus if the conductor walks out mid-song. Discordant cacophony.
So I go to sleep. When I wake up the conductor has returned and the chorus has retreated into a very low (harmonious) hum. My brain had to retreat even further from cognition to reestablish equilibrium. I go to sleep again and I wake up basically reintegrated although obviously drained from the ordeal.
Why am I sharing this with you? I think this blog has prefigured what I just described to you. I think that my periodic reviews and political musings have in someway helped me with my central challenge in becoming a writer. Developing a voice. I have written most of my life, in one form or another but I always felt disconnected to what I was producing. A sound and fury. In a similar way, this blog has been a jumble of impressions, reactions and partially congealed ideas. Over time I've felt the pull towards doing more than just evaluating what I see. I hope to assemble this together into one perspective. My perspective.
So I will continue to investigate my reactions to movies and books. I am incapable of avoiding politics so expect more in that vein. The time has come, however, for this blog to return its original purpose, a document and record of my trek towards becoming a writer.
Wednesday, I finished work, came home to walk Finn and suddenly thought it would be a good idea to lie down on my couch and not get up for awhile. I hit a wall. Long story short: I went to the emergency room, got a cipro prescription and made it back home just in time for a shaking fever to confine me to bed for the next 12 hours. The thing about being suddenly and seriously ill is that your brain doesn't have time to catch up to the newly constrained situation. I'm bopping along, brain filled with the intertwined significances of relationships, work, writing, hobbies and politics when the gears of thought and cognition slow, grinding to a stop, until I'm left operating on pure reptile processes.
Ultimately, all that's left is a thin anguished whine.
sick. sick. sick. sick. sick. sick.
The combination of antibiotic and Tylenol slowly push back the tide of misery. I begin to reemerge. As a science fiction writer, I appreciated the cyber-punk aspect of a brain reassembling itself from a few fractured pieces. Not to be too melodramatic but I was down pretty low. What appeared first were the practical concerns of getting ready for yesterday's trip to Long Island for Thanksgiving. All of the little voices cataloguing the things I would need to fold up, pack together and move to the car. Then the quick realization all of this should be the last of my worries. Then thoughts of my wife and family. Then above it all the questions. How could I be this sick so quickly? How will Obama's second term be different from his first? How could I be this miserable? What is a metaphor? How will I ever make up these 12 hours I just lost? Would my current project work better in first person or third? Because there wasn't really an organizing principle as such, all of these thoughts cascaded together, interrupting and disrupting each other. This isn't multiple personalities, it's the separate voices of a chorus if the conductor walks out mid-song. Discordant cacophony.
So I go to sleep. When I wake up the conductor has returned and the chorus has retreated into a very low (harmonious) hum. My brain had to retreat even further from cognition to reestablish equilibrium. I go to sleep again and I wake up basically reintegrated although obviously drained from the ordeal.
Why am I sharing this with you? I think this blog has prefigured what I just described to you. I think that my periodic reviews and political musings have in someway helped me with my central challenge in becoming a writer. Developing a voice. I have written most of my life, in one form or another but I always felt disconnected to what I was producing. A sound and fury. In a similar way, this blog has been a jumble of impressions, reactions and partially congealed ideas. Over time I've felt the pull towards doing more than just evaluating what I see. I hope to assemble this together into one perspective. My perspective.
So I will continue to investigate my reactions to movies and books. I am incapable of avoiding politics so expect more in that vein. The time has come, however, for this blog to return its original purpose, a document and record of my trek towards becoming a writer.
Comments