Starting
at the end of 2015 the year end look was a little rough, but hopeful. I know I said the year end playlist was up next. It isn't. The look back at 2016 and forward into 2017 is. We'll get to the year end playlist soon, I wanted to hammer this out before I get lost trying to locate music and because it has been weighing on my brain for quite some time and in the throes of a calm and a quiet and thoughtful depression, it is easier to piece back together. I do firmly believe still: if you want easy, kill yourself. If 2016 taught me anything that was it.
I thought fracturing my jaw was the worst pain I would ever feel and be able to stand through and that something like that would never happen again. And then I fried off 15% of my skin with 370 degree oil in second and deep second degree burns bad enough that I couldn't walk or use my hand for weeks. That was the worst pain I have ever felt. The first week or so it was a chilly feeling, like when air blows across your teeth very quickly and it feels like you've just bitten into a snowball at the same time. As hair follicles and skin began to grow back in odd colors and scales the pain got worse and more intense, but I was happy because at least I knew some sort of skin would eventually be there to protect the naked weeping flesh eventually. It was so many weeks I don't even remember exactly. I think the last scales scraped away to serviceable skin some time in late December after it happened in September. It was an eternity.
Definitely not what I intended when I said I wanted to work on my scarification sleeve at the beginning of the year. Looking forward: I don't want to feel anything remotely close to that again. Can we please go back to dealing with occasional week long bouts of lower lumbar nerve pain and the occasional lancing ice pick stab of hip joint nerve pinch. That's fine, by comparison. I laugh saying it, but I am pressing my palms together and pointing them at the sky: please universe, don't hurt me like that again, but if you do - make it a clean break.
I did finally get around to procuring a set of tattoo guns. I also did not get around to using them. A third of my year disappeared trying to heal up from the burns. It wasn't even just the burns that broke me low, it was learning how to use my hand again and build strength back into it. It was rebuilding the musculature in my hips and joints in learning how to walk longer and longer distances and stand for longer periods of time. At one point I could walk, but I literally had to sit down and raise my heel above my heart every five or ten feet because the throbbing pressure of my veins trying to push blood down and back up to my heart felt like my leg was getting torn to the bone by a leather whip.
The year started off pretty grand. All of the work was more or less finished. I'd survived, what was to that point, the worst injury I'd suffered to date and if you can take ten weeks of pain and rehab from a fractured and dislocated jaw, you can take anything. Music was on the horizon and I had a keyboard set up that I was diddling with. I got a cool old motorcycle with part of my Christmas bonus, an old Honda that I still have sitting in the backyard that I want to eventually build into a cafe racer style bike you might see on an old pastel chalk poster advertisement if you lived in racing country back in the 70's. I had a new basketball and had free time to exercise and hit the basketball courts now and then to indulge my sports fantasies. I was really getting into the video game Minecraft and was seeing poetry from a little bit of a different angle.
Graphic design was coming along and my friendships were pretty free flowing as far as I could tell. I was making big plans to create sculptures and designs for some of my friends that I wanted to show instead of just tell them that I cared about them. Some projects were coming along nicely through planning sketches and rough practice designs and concept proofs. With some of my free time I was able to visit people I normally could not make time for and with that little extra bit of money I was able to go out with them to places they wanted to go and eat and drink things I never would under usual circumstances. Life was wheeling and dealing and possibilities were turning into realities. The only real problem I had was making time to keep up with everything at a reasonable pace and I was making it work.
The Summer was hot and long and I did get into a funk wondering what was next. Who doesn't feel some of that funk in the middle of Summer? When everything feels okay it is natural to wonder if everything is supposed to feel that okay. Are you supposed to feel happy, content? It's normal to question. I did get to thinking about other people I know and where they are in their lives and where I am in mine and I started to think about what more I would have to do to experience that kind of comfort and security. I started to, after my birthday in April, start to believe that there could be a way that I could have that too if I kept at it and kept on trucking with high hopes and kept in touch with people and kept allowing them in to my lives.
The facts started to creep in. Started to trickle in. The realization broke in that nothing would change. They're still drifting away faster than that distance can ever be closed. They've only been kind enough not to tell you that you're messaging a part of their lives they don't have time for. So I spent more of the Summer falling away into the night skies and fire pits and walks through the storm tunnels to sit by the river's edges and pull back the fabric of those nights to watch the bridge lights glimmer on the inch high breakers. It was my time to love the air and sky and earth and whomever happened to pop by my backyard or asked me to hop in to theirs. Touring star ships and space stations of all kinds.
And then my body was scorched to hell and back and here we are.
Letting them go was ... you know how when you are discussing something over a hot cup of tea, and you stop to blow the steam away for a minute and touch the cup's edge to your lips to see if it's still too hot to drink and you set the cup down and look up and realize you've been talking to an empty saucer with a dry tea bag on it. Letting them go was ... you know how when a video cassette finishes it's run time and the credits have finished and it goes black for a few minutes and then snaps to static and you realize you are still holding the remote and peering into the static waiting for the television to turn itself off, but there is another several minutes of static instead and you find yourself watching the blue input screen while the player labors, hitches, and then begins to rewind itself. Letting them go was like that.
Part of me is angry that I didn't realize it sooner. Part of me is angry that I let myself trot along, tail wagging, tongue out and teeth yip yapping away, not understanding the hands waving were from the insides of car windows, not the other side of the road on the side walk, a couple of paw skips away to pat my nose, scratch my ear, and let me lick their palms.
Part of me is a little lost. So what now? The business of being an adult? The business of being single? Thirty two is around the corner. Some people I know will be retiring at fifty. Fifty five. Some people I know will be thinking about second kids, third cars, vacation homes, second marriages... my life expectancy is somewhere out there in the high sixties, low seventies. So what now? The game is halfway over and what?
Am I ever going to write anything of significance. I do write for myself first and foremost. I used to do it with the hopes of being recognized somewhere or paraded around like something special. Am I special? No, just a little weird. Okay, a bit weird. I will. Not yet. At least not in my mind. Thirty years to go and many more times to keep trying to set the type just the way I want it. Thirty years to make the words hit other ears the way they hit my own. I don't know if it will ever work. It would certainly help if I could go one year without some cataclysmic injury eating up a third of a year to heal.
Will I be single forever? Yeah, probably. I've been torn up and spit out enough times, unrequited enough times, blissfully lulled to nothing, cut off and scorched enough times, left behind enough times, pushed away enough, to where I simply don't want to feel that again. Much like having your skin cooked off, the scars are forever. Maybe in ten years I'll think about it seriously again. Maybe I'll quit smoking too. Maybe I'll just croak off quietly long before then from some odd organ failure I can't see coming.
There is, oddly enough, a dent in all of the fingernails of my right hand, from the burn where all of the cuticles were traumatized and cooked, that has been slowly growing it's way toward the finger tips to be clipped. Consistent along each finger. I now know exactly how long it takes for my fingernails to grow on my right hand. Look on the bright side.
So what now for 2017? I don't know. I was, as I wrap this up, thinking about going to buy a pouch of tobacco to roll some cigarettes. I might. I stopped enjoying smoking five years ago. It's a way to mark time, nothing more. Thirty some odd years to go. I'll probably have to start some kind of heart medication in my 40's if I don't fix what I put into my body and stretch food stamps more effectively... maybe cut out the beef and pork, more frozen vegetables and dried beans (fruit never keeps long enough). What's the use? An extra ten, maybe twenty, years for what? May as well, push on, I suppose. I still can't grow a full beard or shave my face to bare skin. I'm not getting any taller. I'm not exactly waiting around for anyone. Might as well go for a walk, come home and burn a couple. Get some good sleep. Wake up and do it again. We'll have time for music, 2017. Time for more poetry and stories too. Short ones, long ones, whatever strikes your fancy you scruffy little rascal. Whatever happens, I'll be there for you, never forget that. We'll forge some aluminum and keep exploring. Do it for the love the art and the unknown. There are worlds I've only begun to map. The star fields are massive. Time is not.
///Daedelus- "
Perchance A Bit"
