Less Than Half, More Than A Third
I'm going to try an experiment...
Man, has it been a long time since my last post! I've got to check it out... --Jan 31, State of the Union. Wow, I didn't even remember doing that... I wonder if that's right? I'm only looking at some notes as I stand here writing at the kitchen counter. I'll check the blog later... I can't believe I've been busy in misery for seven weeks.
'Course, my life is only three days a week. I suppose it's possible to experience misery in three day bites and after three weeks of normal-person-time put those three bites together and have it seem only a little over a week, and after seven weeks have it seem only three... Which is what it seems to me; three weeks since my last post.
I imagine it's possible the mind can do this. If I slipped into a coma four days every week, and didn't know it, and in my alert state had no exterior markers by which I could know of those lost four days, why then, clearly, nine days would seem just a little over a week, because in fact my life, at least as time experienced, would have been just that, the duration of just over a week.
This is my life taking care of my ma. Of course I'm conscious, and in pain in fact those four days, and the time at times passes with unbearable slowness. But when it's done there's nothing. No time has passed, nothing has happened, no development, no involvement, no memories, just repetition again and again of the same same same nonsense. This is my ma, her conversation, her action, her mind. And you have to concentrate on it! At the end of a full hard day you've mastered a string of nonsense sounds and acts you knew the day before and the month before and the year before. And at the end of those four days those four days haven't happened because nothing can happen in nothing and you go back to your own place to resume your own life...and you're exhausted. Nothing is more exhausting than nothing, especially when you have to work at it. The mind is not made to have nothing in it. Nothing is the hardest work in the world. --I've done production line work, stacking boxes. I thought that got boring after a while... Man, it was wit and science and society compared to talking all day to a woman with Alzheimer's.
I overstate somewhat. I can make a clarification, dividing the matter into two aspects:
--Emotionally this is not a small deal. After all, you are watching your mother die. And she had been an extraordinary mother and woman, and now there's violence and stupidity and crude language... and sometimes touches of the old ma. It is emotional.
--But the mind dies. It just does. Because none of that topsy-turvy up-and-down emotion makes any sense. It's just chaos. Repetitive, repetitive chaos. Mentally it's as stimulating as watching water go down a toilet, and watching it and watching it and watching it go down the toilet all day long.
So this is my life now. Four days a week, mentally, simply don't exist and aren't remembered. Three days a week, mentally, is what I live --and I've spent those days fighting with the damn gas company!
What an utter pain. This is a property dispute. It's a lot like fighting with the government, you don't know just how much power they have to take your land, so there is stress... But my God, what a terrible way to spend the few days of mental life that I've got.
So anyway, this is why nothing has gone into the blog. There has been a considerable amount of "intellect" expended --if you want to call it that-- but nothing appropriate for the blog, and the three weeks I thought I had missed I now find are seven.
Just after Christmas I said I was going to change my blog concept somewhat. Instead of trying to pattern it after other blogs I read and respect I was gong to make it more like my notebook, just let it flow, and in time find out what it's all about, the only proviso being that the expression had to be publicly complete, that is, something somebody not knowing me could understand if they felt the interest and took the time, --and that of course was the other proviso, that it had to be something that could conceivably be of interest to someone else. No one could possibly care about my fight with the gas company, --so no entry.
Two things:
--The fight with the gas company could be a matter of general interest...if I could look at it with some disinterest and see some patterns and do some analysis,
--And it could be of some interest if I had a more fluid idea of my reader, and wasn't thinking in terms of formal presentation but yet wasn't merely talking to myself...
And thus my experiment. Some minutes ago I just started writing. But not to myself, and not to some formal concept of exposition, but still, to somebody...?
I think it's worked. I think what I've written is effective. It certainly says more than "Man, am I sick of going home", which is what I would have written if I were writing to myself. And I did get something down, which probably wouldn't have happened if I'd thought in more formal terms because when a man is formal he ought, really, to be dispositive (or so I feel) and one thing I do know for sure about my mind is that my mind is never dispositive.
So this "writing to somebody" seems to work. I just have no idea who that "somebody" is though. I have no image. This is strange.
Man, has it been a long time since my last post! I've got to check it out... --Jan 31, State of the Union. Wow, I didn't even remember doing that... I wonder if that's right? I'm only looking at some notes as I stand here writing at the kitchen counter. I'll check the blog later... I can't believe I've been busy in misery for seven weeks.
'Course, my life is only three days a week. I suppose it's possible to experience misery in three day bites and after three weeks of normal-person-time put those three bites together and have it seem only a little over a week, and after seven weeks have it seem only three... Which is what it seems to me; three weeks since my last post.
I imagine it's possible the mind can do this. If I slipped into a coma four days every week, and didn't know it, and in my alert state had no exterior markers by which I could know of those lost four days, why then, clearly, nine days would seem just a little over a week, because in fact my life, at least as time experienced, would have been just that, the duration of just over a week.
This is my life taking care of my ma. Of course I'm conscious, and in pain in fact those four days, and the time at times passes with unbearable slowness. But when it's done there's nothing. No time has passed, nothing has happened, no development, no involvement, no memories, just repetition again and again of the same same same nonsense. This is my ma, her conversation, her action, her mind. And you have to concentrate on it! At the end of a full hard day you've mastered a string of nonsense sounds and acts you knew the day before and the month before and the year before. And at the end of those four days those four days haven't happened because nothing can happen in nothing and you go back to your own place to resume your own life...and you're exhausted. Nothing is more exhausting than nothing, especially when you have to work at it. The mind is not made to have nothing in it. Nothing is the hardest work in the world. --I've done production line work, stacking boxes. I thought that got boring after a while... Man, it was wit and science and society compared to talking all day to a woman with Alzheimer's.
I overstate somewhat. I can make a clarification, dividing the matter into two aspects:
--Emotionally this is not a small deal. After all, you are watching your mother die. And she had been an extraordinary mother and woman, and now there's violence and stupidity and crude language... and sometimes touches of the old ma. It is emotional.
--But the mind dies. It just does. Because none of that topsy-turvy up-and-down emotion makes any sense. It's just chaos. Repetitive, repetitive chaos. Mentally it's as stimulating as watching water go down a toilet, and watching it and watching it and watching it go down the toilet all day long.
So this is my life now. Four days a week, mentally, simply don't exist and aren't remembered. Three days a week, mentally, is what I live --and I've spent those days fighting with the damn gas company!
What an utter pain. This is a property dispute. It's a lot like fighting with the government, you don't know just how much power they have to take your land, so there is stress... But my God, what a terrible way to spend the few days of mental life that I've got.
So anyway, this is why nothing has gone into the blog. There has been a considerable amount of "intellect" expended --if you want to call it that-- but nothing appropriate for the blog, and the three weeks I thought I had missed I now find are seven.
Just after Christmas I said I was going to change my blog concept somewhat. Instead of trying to pattern it after other blogs I read and respect I was gong to make it more like my notebook, just let it flow, and in time find out what it's all about, the only proviso being that the expression had to be publicly complete, that is, something somebody not knowing me could understand if they felt the interest and took the time, --and that of course was the other proviso, that it had to be something that could conceivably be of interest to someone else. No one could possibly care about my fight with the gas company, --so no entry.
Two things:
--The fight with the gas company could be a matter of general interest...if I could look at it with some disinterest and see some patterns and do some analysis,
--And it could be of some interest if I had a more fluid idea of my reader, and wasn't thinking in terms of formal presentation but yet wasn't merely talking to myself...
And thus my experiment. Some minutes ago I just started writing. But not to myself, and not to some formal concept of exposition, but still, to somebody...?
I think it's worked. I think what I've written is effective. It certainly says more than "Man, am I sick of going home", which is what I would have written if I were writing to myself. And I did get something down, which probably wouldn't have happened if I'd thought in more formal terms because when a man is formal he ought, really, to be dispositive (or so I feel) and one thing I do know for sure about my mind is that my mind is never dispositive.
So this "writing to somebody" seems to work. I just have no idea who that "somebody" is though. I have no image. This is strange.
posted by mouse at 1:18 AM
3 Comments:
This suffering and dying goes on silently but is all around us. Even in the act of dying, we feel powerless to try to stop it, even if like anything worthwhile is not completed alone or in a single generation. This is the middle of the battle.
This suffering and dying goes on silently but is all around us. Even in the act of dying, we feel powerless to try to stop it, even if like anything worthwhile is not completed alone or in a single generation. This is the middle of the battle.
This suffering and dying goes on silently but is all around us. Even in the act of dying, we feel powerless to try to stop it, even if like anything worthwhile is not completed alone or in a single generation. This is the middle of the battle.
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