A.. slide show, if you will.
Like this one!
It was fun making one of those after all these decades. The last time I made a slideshow, we still lived back at Francis and One Road in the apartment we affectionately nicknamed “nerdvana”.
Ah, those were the days. Bigger apartment, more roomies, more energy, more excitement about life.
Also more depression, vastly worse health due to much, much worse diet (so much sugar and carbs), more health problems (like flesh eating infections) and in general life was, despite superficialities, a lot worse.
I’ve come a long way since then, even if it doesn’t always show.
I still remember being scared to walk along One Road because it’s a very busy street and it would be far too easy to, in a moment of weakness, walk into the traffic and end myself then and there.
I’m sure that’s part of why I started being afraid of heights, too.
I don’t worry about that sort of thing much any more. The void still calls to me every now and then but I know I will never listen.
Life is too much fun for me to want to leave the party early. And it’s only getting better. As I thaw out from the long Paxil winter that had me frozen in place for so long, I can feel myself reconnecting to those primal life forces that have lain dormant like roses in winter for all these years.
Oh, so many years.
Not that thawing out is easy. At times I feel like a glacier heaving and trembling as it melts, falling apart as it births its burden of ancient woes.
And I have to keep reminding myself that all that ice inside me is not a part of me. It’s merely the detritus of a dying disease taking its sweet time to pass out of me like toxins being filtered out by dialysis and as it goes out, health and vitality come in, and I open up inside a little bit more, and more health air and sunshine gets in, and the closer I get to being a true blue functional grownup.
Till them, I’m just this… thing. An odd, lumpen creature in the process of metamorphing from a far too aged larval form into something that might actually be viable in the world.
I used to think that could never happen. That things could only ever get worse for me and that I was going to have to, at some point, decide for myself when there was too little to look forward to for me to even bother living any more.
But I’m too stubborn to give up now. I am determined to spite the darkness that haunts me and push these god damned wet blankets off of me and rise up to face the world and let it see just what it’s been missing for oh so long.
Because I am fucking amazing. If I can get my ducks sufficiently aligned and my poop sufficiently grouped, I can show the world what a wild and wily wonder I am and make a very large splash in the world.
I just have to complete the process of convincing myself that it is safe to emerge from my own shadow into the warming light of day and that the resulting increase in stimulation will not, in fact, shatter my mind into a million pieces.
Just maybe knock some more of that god damned ice off of me.
Anything the light can kill is something I am far better off without.
More after the break.
A soft landing
After getting some of my harshness out with Part 1’s foray into poetry in paragraphs, I feel somewhat better now.
Like I said recently, the bottom of my cycle is where I deliver my payload of negativity before heading back out of range of the enemy’s anti aircraft guns.
I may have taken that metaphor too far. Even for me.
The fact that I was able to get myself some pizza has improved my mood a fair bit. I’d gone this whole month so far without being able to order in and it was really starting to bum me out.
Our little pleasures are so important to our sense of well-being.
But tonight I remembered that I had “points” in Pizza Hut’s reward system, so I checked on their website and sure enough, I had just enough for a medium two topping pizza.
Huzzah! I got myself my classic, sausage and pineapple, otherwise known as the Fruvous Hawaiian because I don’t like ham.
So maybe it’s a Fijian, or something.
I’m making it through this five week month business okay. The lack of those little pleasures of ordering in has been a drag, as has been knowing my budget has remarkably little wiggle room in it.
I could only get tonight’s pizza because I very carefully checked my finances to make sure I could spare the $8 it was going to cost me.
The “points” don’t cover the delivery cost or tip, you see.
And Pizza’s Hut’s cute little trick is to have all these great deals on their website to get you excited then at the end they hit you with the $7 delivery fee at the end.
It ends up being more or less exactly what you would pay if you went through DoorDash, but DoorDash doesn’t give you points, so I go through the website.
Plus I have to go through the website if I need to pay cash, DoorDash only takes payment via credit card.
It’s funny how the tinfoil hat brigade thought that we’d all need a “mark of the beast” chip implanted to buy things by now when it turns out credit cards do the job fine without the need for surgery at all.
To the point where I go through the hassle of buying a Visa gift card type thing every month just so I can participate in the modern economy.
Fingers crossed, they haven’t stopped accepting cash in person yet.
But I have my beady little Gen X eye on them!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.