…that has no Denny’s.
Felicity took a home Covid test and tested positive, so she had to bail on Denny’s. She obviously did not want to expose us to it.
So she stayed home to spend time exposing her elderly parents to it instead.
Sorry, that was uncalled for. It’s just my disappointment talking.
Like I have mentioned here before, I do not handle disappointment well. It always wrecks my mood for a while because it gives me that deflated feeling that comes from when my enthusiasm and anticipation for something good gets punctured.
And that leaves me sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon.
Now, that’s totally a “me” thing. I don’t blame anyone else for it. Especially not in a circumstance like this, where it’s something totally beyond anyone’s control.
Felicity missing wouldn’t be so bad, but quite predictably, Joe seized this opportunity to say he wasn’t feeling well EITHER and so he wouldn’t be going to Denny’s EITHER.
And I can easily imagine the giddy relief in his voice when he told Julian that. I don’t know if he knows that I can hear that kind of thing quite clearly, and how much it hurts me when he sounds so relieved to not “have to” spend time with us.
I mean, I get it. I’m an introvert too, although perhaps less of one, because one thing on the introvert list I don’t identify with is feeling profound relief when plans to go out fall thought and you “get to” just stay home instead.
No, fuck that. That wrinkles my balloon. Sure, there is an element of relief, but it’s overshadowed by the disappointment by a country mile.
Even if it was something I wasn’t really looking forward to doing, like something I expect to be boring or painful or whatever, I am still disappointed when it falls through.
Partly is that like any Taurus, I hate surprises. There I was, with all the mental and emotional resources I would need to go out allocated and ready, and in my mind earmarked for going out exclusively, and then suddenly I have to release those resources and have them go back into general allocation instead.
But the real issue is that whole balloon thing. When something I am really looking forward to is coming, I get all pumped up with joy and when that thing is taken away it all gets released with a loud, wet, flatulent sound.
And I don’t expect anyone who is not like that to understand why that makes me so sad. It would be easy (and hurtful) for someone to say, “Well everybody faces disappointment. Get over it!”
Then again, people like that are assholes who just want to avoid caring about you. That kind of person will go to great lengths to avoid empathic entanglement with others.
After all, why should they be sad just because someone else is sad, right?
The answer, of course, is that it helps. As Spider Robinson said many times in his Callahan books, pain shared is divided, joy shared is multiplied.
And it can help a lot to know that someone else cares about you enough to share your pain and be with you in your time of need.
Sometimes all it takes is a squeeze of your hand and sitting in silence with you while you process your pain.
Everything is better when you don’t have to face it alone.
I will, of course, get over being bummed out about not doing Denny’s this week. And when I do, that will give me more time to spend being worried about Felicity.
Letting my truly gushingly emotional self shine through is getting… complicated.
More after the break.
Let it flow
I am embracing the slow destruction of my self-consciousness.
The whole idea of being self-conscious is to control how we are perceived so we can stop ourselves from doing embarrassing things.
But this is a painful and unnatural thing to do, which is why it’s such a negative thing to feel “self-conscious”. And why when we are in a flow state, all self-consciousness disappears and we experience what some mystics call “pure consciousness”.
For them, it’s a spiritually desirable state because in it, the false self, the one that is just our idea of who we are, disappears and the real self, the one that is the person we have been since we were babies, can emerge.
On this blog, I have spoken about the real me that has been hiding inside me and doing anything it can to avoid being perceived. And it eventually occurred to me that this inner critter of mine was a lot like a certain little red fox.
Hence my writing those Fruvous stories where he’s someone’s pet. It was a metaphorical way of depicting and then fixing my busted childhood.
We writers have weird ways to cope.
The destruction of my own self-consciousness follows a similar spiritual path. In an Avoidant like me, self-consciousness metastasizes wildly out of control and becomes a massive psychological complex that dominates and distorts your life.
In my case, it has a lot to do with trying to control outcomes, which is a fool’s game if you take it too far – and I most certainly have.
I will learn to accept that shit happens. That no matter how hard I try to control outcomes, factors impossible to predict and beyond my control will always be able to come and fuck up my shit.
So Plan B always has to be learn to cope with things like that.
Because I am extremely tired of leading such a cramped and tiny life just to keep from being surprised and/or overstimulated by things.
If I just hang in there, I will adjust to new things. I am perfectly capable of changing plans on the fly if the situation dictates it. I can open my world to the world at large and suffer through the freak waves and tidal surges of outrageous fortune and be just fine.
I’m open to anything, life. Surprise me.
(But please don’t make things worse!)
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.