So it’s been a while again since I last posted, and a lot has happened since. It’s almost fall now.
(Jan 12 3:37 p.m.)
Last time, there was still snow on the bay waters let alone the streets.
(Jan 14 4:08 p.m.)
…And a Beetle?
(Mar 6 4:20 p.m.)
That isn’t to say I haven’t tried to write. I wrote a post months ago about learning lessons, but it was a bit much and too incomplete to publish. If anything, I hadn’t learned my lessons, and pissed away too much time on YouTube. Again.
And time goes on. Things change even more, which can make it harder to get back to writing about what’s going on because the list of things to write about pile up.
And then another monkey wrench gets thrown in, so to speak.
Well, it’s the last day of the year. I’ve had plenty of time to look back, and reflect, and… mostly I can only think of the problems I’m facing today. The whole year has gone by too fast. Progress is slow, and I’ve been sick lately. Thankfully, it’s not CovID.
Cole Road Café. (Oct 30 9:52 a.m.)
Things moved faster when aunt J visited.
(Oct 29 3:00 p.m.)
Decent restaurants were involved.
Surfer. (Oct 31 2:05 p.m.)
But that visit was only because things needed to be moved out of my mother’s storage unit. (My mother and J. are okay by the way.)
Remember to wear a mask in the pool! (Oct 29 3:42 p.m.)
It’s harder to get a grip on things when it seems like everything is decaying too quickly, and you can’t catch up. One of my teeth is really in bad shape, so I’m definitely going to have to move faster, and work harder next year.
And then I hear we all lost Betty White. The legend. Just 18 days shy of 100. It takes the wind out of your sails, at least for a moment, when you see stars fall, lose role models, and hear about your friends losing loved ones. There have been a lot of funerals this year. My friend in Kentucky lost two… an awful year.
Addendum: It wasn’t just deaths either. I all but lost my mother to mental illness and/or mold-dementia earlier in the year. She’s alive but not at all the same person she was months prior—fragile, skin and bones, and can barely function or recall events. She may have lost her sense of taste or smell from CovID but doesn’t remember.
(Dec 18 2:55 p.m.)
This pandemic isn’t endemic yet.
Dizzy Birds Rotisserie. (Oct 21 6:34 p.m.)
But to do nothing isn’t an option. Living in denial is not living at all. You must exercise or you start losing function. Continue reading A look back→
Well. Summer is here. Almost. Okay, so it’s Maine, and 80 F feels hot to me and others used to shoveling snow. And someone like me is also used to wearing a knit hat. Now my exposed, balding head (with early-Fraiser hair, kind of) can’t take the direct sun without risk of sunburn.
(Jun 15 2:52 p.m.)
Likewise, this very tree has gone a bit… “bald.” Or maybe it’s just me. …Okay, so this tree is not the one at the top, so it very well was just me lol. The cherry blossom trees have all gone green too.
(Jun 6 6:06 p.m.)
The sun can be intense at times, but— like rain— the plants and overall life on Earth need the sun. And the COVID mask will only prevent sunburn on the lower parts of my face.
Thistle or aster. (Jun 1 1:04 p.m.)
At night, people can appreciate the cooler side… and hopefully not sleep in sweat. But it is also the season where kids can be heard in the streets on skateboards… even at midnight.
(May 27 12:13 p.m.)
It’s past mud season… and so it appears to be a season of road construction.
(Jun 3 1:09 p.m.)
That sidewalk damaged by a fallen tree last year (that also took down a power line our house depended on) was fixed earlier this month.
Oh, the places you’ll go after moving to a city with so many stores within walking distance. And so many firsts. And not just the Firsts of the day program I attended, such as visiting a fire department and a police department, or the Firsts of the new residence, such as the first snowstorm, or first long power outage.
We’ve had quite a few dumps of snow here. It’s Maine, after all. (Jan 19 3:08 p.m.)
Or first frozen hard-boiled egg because I put a salad too far back in the fridge; or other more trivial things like first nosebleed, or first ant; it was no April Fools joke to see that a-hole ant in my room the first of this month.
(Mar 5 7:25 p.m.)
But firsts like restaurants I’ve never visited before, from greasy burger joints (sometimes those hit the spot), to a Chinese buffet of many types of food, to a native-Spanish-speaking Mexican restaurant. My mother and I had gone out less and less over time until it was rare that we ever did, but ever since I moved out, we’ve gone out twice a week, for lunch or a movie. I’ve now had more pizza and lasagna in months than I had in years. And on one part of my desk sits a pile of tickets. 🙂
(Jan 14 3:59 p.m.)
Often, we’d walk thru the Mall, and eat at the food court, even if the food we got didn’t come from the court.
(Jan 28 3:26 p.m.)
And… then the economic struggles hit home. Across the country, stores and whole malls have been struggling for years.
The lights are on, and the room is loud, but the place is nearly empty. (Jan 28 3:31 p.m.)
But never would we guess what would come next.
(Mar 19 2:41 p.m.)
The coronavirus SARS-2 pandemic was the second punch that shuttered the rest and a great deal of U.S. commerce in general. Continue reading Growth in isolation→
Well. I’ve been gone long enough that you may be wondering what happened to me. What can I say? I’ve been busy and distracted. I’ve settled in the group home, and for months it’s been one change after the next, in staff, and loud laughter, and spontaneous clapping by a roommate who revolves around the living room TV, most often channel surfing music videos. (It didn’t take long for him to wear out the batteries in the Roku remote.)
(Nov 22 12:07 p.m.)
And then you count the chores we’re all used to—e.g., doing dishes… but then cleaning up others’ messes, which is not something I signed up for. And that includes staff leaving plates and utensils in the sink. Sometimes people don’t learn to not put utensils in the garbage disposal sink; they fall in. To top it off, some areas are never cleaned despite the obvious warning of mold and ants come summer unless I bother. Can you sense my frustration?
(Dec 6 3:35 p.m.)
Oh, and now the staff knock on my bedroom door to “check up on me” at times, even if it means waking me. And on program days, I’m awake anyway for the unpredictable Logisticare service that’s so awful one of its drivers, who was already late, pushed his hybrid car so hard it broke down on the highway, Friday, with fumes entering the car. Other out-of-the-ordinary things have been happening in the last few days; I lost a receipt as if it disappeared out of thin air.
So I’ve been pushed and pulled around in many little different ways that add up, and it becomes not only frustrating but time-consuming on top of that day program I’ve been too timid to end. (Still, what do I do if I end it? Always out of the loop, I don’t have ideas.)
(Dec 5 8:13 p.m.)
One plus: I’ve learned to cook pasta pretty well.
Nevertheless, peace and quiet is harder to find. And without good ideas and new ideas, or fulfilling relationships, I’m not satisfied enough to rest. So after a share of social media and informative videos, I don’t get enough sleep and can’t find my voice or be bothered to write a string of words longer than a tweet or two. But surely I could have posted here, right?
Cabela’s! (Dec 13 2:20 p.m.)
I blame Twitter. Again.
It’s addictive or seemingly welcoming but to the point of being oversaturated, and in a way apathetic towards thoughtful blogging, even though the platform was intended for micro-blogging. Today, you can find endless retweeting of one-offs that serve the warning that quality is not appreciated nearly as much as retweeting among tribes. Like any social media, the more you stand out in the “wrong” way, the less you will be heard. And it all happens in real-time, further manipulated by Twitter’s popularity algorithm.
(Nov 20 3:08 p.m.)
But I digress.
The rush of the holiday seasons was rather pronounced at the Goodwill in Biddeford. Christmas trees and decorations were on sale over a week before Thanksgiving.
Sometimes we get too involved in our work (and/or get frustrated with it) that we miss out on life. We can miss out on the little things, and on ourselves too.
(Nov 25 4:17 p.m.)
There’s a whole world out there.
(Nov 22 3:58 p.m.)
But you’ll have to… you know, physically leave the house to see it. The “information superhighway” is just that— a means to transport information, not life!
Well, it’s one of those weekends. I got up early Saturday, and walked in the morning. My body said, maybe it’s best you go back to sleep. But I didn’t. I offered my support as someone to talk to… on twitter… and then the day went by, and I became the one who needed social engagement. I’m thinking about signing up on Reddit, but can’t think of a new screen name. There really isn’t anything I can do locally.
So. I might as well get into what happened Tuesday.
(Jul 25 1:01 p.m.)
The day’s notes and events included fallen branches in the driveway… and the Senate’s first day trying to “skinny-repeal” the Affordable Care Act. (I’ll note that the law, what many on the right call “socialism” is the conservative version of legislation that has been taken to the floor for decades to finally pass. The proposed healthcare reforms under Nixon was more “liberal.” But I digress.)
Tuesday was a day scheduled to see the counselor. We went over the report aimed at enabling access to services regarding my disabilities, and the fun paperwork that entails. However, I didn’t tell him how I felt that morning. He knows about my sleeplessness, my isolation, but he doesn’t quite know how I’ve changed.
The day began with a bit of a breakdown. There’s a big difference between “this sucks, I need to do something” (where I tend to fall back into complacency), and… “I am broken.” Crying entered the conversation this week with N., my practitioner friend; she said she cries almost every day, to cleanse the heart and reset the emotional state. I did, briefly. I got only one more hour of sleep before departing.
(Not my bike.) (Jul 25 2:09 p.m.)
About half of 3 p.m., my mother pulled into the parking lot for Crescent Beach. Troubles of the day aside, before me was the opportunity to get some summer photos.
Every now and then, we see the world catching up with itself in little ways, in turbulence and neglect, overwhelm and falling behind— a cycle of too fast and not fast enough until things meet up, in resolution or not. Because the world doesn’t live as one, and in my mind it’s not supposed to. (Sorry, John.)
Seedy underside. (Feb 23 6:02 p.m.)
Life will find a way. …Even if placed or seeded in a completely artificial environment.
Same plant at USM Portland, near the library’s theft detection scanners, alternate perspective. (Feb 23 6:01 p.m.)
So it’s now February. My brain, which won’t stop playing Beatles tunes, has turned to mush. It’s been a while since I’ve written, despite raising expectations of doing so. And it’s all because of denial.
That word, denial. There has never been a time without it in the world. There are always patches of darkness. The dark circles under our eyes show how tired we are in this modern age. The world population continues to grow, raising our need to raise each other. And the cost of growing too fast is taking its toll. The U.S. national debt is hovering around a hair below $20 trillion. (And I didn’t even notice that the debt-to-GDP had surpassed 100% in 2012.) And after a Presidential administration known for growing bureaucratic red tape, we find ourselves with one that has a habit of growing executive red tape, barring even those with dual citizenship from entering the country.
The Dependent Independent 