Mind afire at five

Woke up at five a m, my mind afire.

My feet were cold. Warming them up necessitated turning on the light, reaching for a blanket hung over a nearby chair, unfolding it and laying it over top of my bed; a series of actions sure to wake me up so thoroughly I'd never get back to sleep. And it was one of those nights when I'd been awake enough to note the passing of time: one o clock, two o clock, three o clock, etc. So I lay there trying to endure the cold and finally caving and turning on the light to reach for the blanket.

I have a 'firm' rule: no getting out of bed before six a m. Not that it does any good or that I stick to it at all costs, but still, at five a m I am not inclined to get out of bed unless I have to (for example, my bladder in distress). Hence my mind afire. When I say my feet were cold what I really mean is everything below the knee. The cold feet expand, I feel half dead below the knee and I know it is working its way up. Used to be just the feet, now it's not.

I had the thought, we create our own reality. I create my own reality. Not just attitudes and stuff like that but literally. Everything. The world I live in is of my own creation. I think we know that when we are very little, but by the time we reach adulthood it becomes entrenched: reality just is. You can mess with the edges, tweak it here and there, 'improve' yourself as it were, but the hard core of reality just is. And now, at five a m with my mind afire, I see that in old age the edges of reality are starting to curl up and disintegrate, revealing its flimsiness. If I wanted to I could just peel it all away, but I cling to it. Want to prolong it as long as I can, however unsuitable or knocked about or whatever.

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Friday nights two of my boys and I get together online to watch a show and chat. Last night we talked about Hallowe'en. My experience and my oldest son's experience are totally different; he and his wife live for Hallowe'en, I endure it. My son set up a kind of outdoor photo studio and invited all visitors to have their pictures taken in their Hallowe'en costumes. They had hundreds of visitors and he produced hundreds of stunning photos. Really stunning. I am in awe of his talent. The backdrop is black, the colours are brilliant, the costumes amazingly creative. The personalities of the individuals in the photos leap out at you. Whole families out trick or treating together and obviously getting a huge kick out of it. One photo after another of joyful people having a really good time. I guess in their neighbourhood they are renowned, everyone comes by on Hallowe'en. 

He was explaining the photographic technique he was trying out that night but it all went over my head, I was just stunned by the quality of the photos. He's shown me other stuff he's done and I am equally stunned by it. Why is he not a professional photographer?

I have dabbled in a variety of creative endeavours but have not developed any one talent the way he has with his photography. In some ways I feel like I have wasted a whole lifetime dabbling instead of getting down to just one thing the way he has. Well, not just one thing, he has a family and a job and a life besides photography, but you know what I mean.

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I called a friend yesterday to ask her help/advice with a landscaping idea I had. She came over in the afternoon and I laid out the idea and walked her around the property to see what she had to say or could do. She said that she could help me with some of it but not all of it, I'd have to get someone with a back hoe or some such for what I had in mind. But she did start to help me get some metal posts out of the ground around my vegetable garden. I had fenced it to keep Hapi out, but I was trying to get rid of the fence because it was more a hindrance than a help now. The metal posts are firmly embedded in the ground after being there for a decade. Nevertheless my friend being a lot stronger than me was able to pry six of them out of the ground, with a little help from me. All within less than an hour.

After she left I collapsed sick. That's what physical effort does to me now, I can make the effort and feel good doing it at the time, but afterward I pay for it in spades. That was part of the mind afire thing at five a m. This is my life now, I'm not seeing a good end to it. Things are only going to get worse. At some point it is going to become unbearable, the bad times outweighing the good times by a lot. 

When I first got sick, over twenty years ago, it lasted for five months. When I told my doc that I was getting better, he was sceptical. He said, Alright, but don't do anything for a year. He meant nothing strenuous or physical: no running, no sports, nothing beyond a bit of walking. I was scared enough by those five months of being sick that I took his advice seriously. Also my life was such that there was not a lot of opportunity for strenuous physical activity, it was a relatively easy thing to give up. And I got twelve good years out of it.

Ironically things went south after I moved to Nova Scotia. On the one hand my life opened up and I had lots of friends and lots of stuff to do, and after twelve years of health I believed I could have it all. My second and third bouts of illness happened after moving here, each one only lasted a couple of months, I still thought I was in the clear. Well, the honeymoon is over. My old doc's advice still stands, but is way harder to follow now.

A tale of a cat

I've just moved to the next level of pandemic self-isolation, the car is in the garage.

It has been making funny (not ha-ha) noises all spring, gradually getting worse until last week it was a full-blown exhaust system set free. I had friends tell me that some young men would pay good money to have a car that sounded like that, but I found the noise most troublesome at the deepest levels of my physiology. I don't know which was worse, driving with the windows open or closed, but opted for open in case there were dangerous fumes associated with the roaring and sputtering noise.

About the only thing I use the car for these days is to drive Hapi to the Reservoir when I think she's not up for the walk to get there, and occasionally to drive down town to pick up something or other than I can't fit into my backpack. My mechanic, B's son, gave the car a good looking-over and determined that this was a job for a licenced mechanic in a bona fide garage, and recommended one that is out of town. Last week I called to make the appointment, was told I could bring it in Monday afternoon but since I thought I was going to be busy that afternoon the appointment was made for Tuesday morning. A day or two later my plans for Monday fell through and I called back to see if I could get the Monday appointment since Tuesday morning was a tad less convenient. The guy said sure.

What I didn't know was that he had made an appointment for someone else but right before I called that someone else had cancelled so the Monday afternoon time slot had reopened. However Mr Garage Guy forgot to write my name into the time slot so when I arrived there yesterday he was puzzled, aren't you supposed to be here tomorrow? But no matter, he still had the open time slot he just wasn't prepared to fix anything then. He'd take a look and see what parts he'd have to order. With the car up on the hoist he showed me the source of the problem, the catalytic converter hanging by a rusty thread, so to speak. Then he noted my bald tires. I knew about that, I was just hoping that I could make it through the summer with the small amount of driving I now do. He did not agree.

The upshot of it all was that he would keep the car over night and see what he could do about rounding up a replacement "cat". He also told me of a dealer in used tires who he thought sold reasonably fit tires if I wasn't in the market for brand new ones. I'm not. This car only has to last as long as Hapi does, after that it's toast as far as I am concerned. Under normal circumstances he would go online and order the cheapest cat he could find, but these days delivery of online goods is so delayed that I might have to wait a couple of weeks or more. That would entirely depend on Hapi remaining healthy enough to walk to the Reservoir in hot weather and her health is so up and down that I can't predict that. Getting a ride with someone else is not in the cards with physical distancing and all that. So he's going to try to find one locally.

Mr Garage Guy drove me home. First time I've been in someone else's car in months. He had a super big truck, it had an extra step just to get into it, and we drove with the windows open. We chatted about all sorts of stuff including haircuts, roadwork (it's started) and family members living in the States. He'll call me today to let me know what the situation is with the cat.

There's a shop in the next town over that sells peanut butter that I really like. I hope I get the car back before I run out. I usually get my drinking water from a spring on the other side of the Ridge but I have already run out of that and am drinking town water (flouridated, not tasty). And eggs. I won't be able to go to the farm to buy fresh eggs, I'll have to make do with store-bought. Oh the trials and tribulations of a pandemic!

Sick thoughts

Somewhere out there, a young Goldfinch couple

I am tired of being sick, really tired of it.

A couple of days ago I noticed the 'Service Battery' notification on my laptop and started the process to do something about it. Among other things it involved running the battery down to nothing and leaving the laptop off overnight. Since I did not time things well, that meant a large part of one day and the following night. Now it's recharging but the 'Service Battery' notification is still there. Maybe it will go away when the battery is fully charged.

Having the laptop out of commission for most of the day I dug out a recently purchased but as yet unused Chromebook and started configuring that. Among other things it meant configuring my email and so I was more or less tied to email for the day. I have to say I am really tired of all my friends who crow about the amazing stuff they are doing in isolation. I feel like telling them all to just shut up.

One friend sent an email with pictures of the face mask she rigged up and I did kind of jump on her. Then I walked the dog and came back and wrote an apology. Haven't heard back. Think I'll stay away from email now that the Chromebook is setup and I'm done recalibrating the laptop battery.

The news is appalling. It's amazing how quickly the big issues of the day disappeared from the media, turns out they weren't so big after all. We're living in a century of huge life changing issues now. The pandemic is obvious, totally unexpected by all those predicters of future trends. Climate change was the one that was supposed to knock us off our feet, and in various localized ways that is happening. But the pandemic is everywhere, sudden, and having far reaching effects. It's not just people getting sick and dying, it's mass unemployment, markets crashing, politicians and medical experts taking over the airways, so on and so on. Maybe my parents' generation experienced something like this with the Great Depression followed by World War II, but that was kind of sequential, over a period of almost two decades. This is the whole nine yards all at once.

While writing this I am also corresponding with an old friend on the west coast who is a bit of a night owl. It's 8.30am here and 4.30am there. She has an online home business and she's an artist, her husband does kitchen installations and they live in a really nice coastal rural neighbourhood. Each home lot in the neighbourhood is over half an acre and surrounded by tall evergreen trees, the beach is a short hike away and there are lots of old logging road trails. So she's relatively well situated for self-isolation but she's living in a province that is pretty hard hit. She just told me a friend has Covid-19 and the friend's husband is in the ICU with it. You can live in paradise and still be vulnerable.

I phone another friend who lives in that same coastal rural neighbourhood and she has an underlying health condition in her lungs which will ultimately kill her. I won't be able to visit her again, so we talk on the phone regularly. I think I am suffering a bit of an oxygen deficit because after the call I am exhausted and out of air. Seems more tiring than walking the dog.

Anyway, she's a fairly devout Christian, if a bit eccentric about it, but she does firmly believe in an afterlife and feels sorry for people who don't. I keep quiet about my own beliefs, and I don't feel sorry for people who don't believe in an afterlife. Sometimes I think it would be nice to carry on in a brand new life after death, and sometimes I think, Oh give me a break, I'm done! Nighty-night.

She said she was pretty much reconciled with quitting this life except for one thing, she can't seem to get rid of her negative feelings about Trump. He really upsets her and she can get into quite a rant every time Trump says something obnoxious. I on the other hand think he is behaving according to expectation and only once did he upset me, after the Ukrainian flight was shot down over Iran and he said no American lives were lost. But that was personal (for me, not for him) and he didn't say anything unexpected.

In some ways he is a very stupid person and in other ways he is incredibly smart. I think that's what irritates people. I think a lot of what he says is deliberately done to keep folks off guard and he is wildly successful at that. Being ignored or treated as though he was inconsequential is the worst thing for him, so I try to maintain that attitude. He is consequential alright, but only because of his position, not because of any innate qualities. I try to explain my position to my friend but I don't think it helps, she still struggles with her perceived negativity. She wants to die in a state of benign acceptance and right now she can't do that.

Isolation does that to me too sometimes. I can spend days feeling benign acceptance and then suddenly descend into paranoia and upset. It's tough to claw your way back up again all by yourself. We're not really built for that.