a really sad day

I’m planning to hire someone to finish a small digging project that I can’t complete due to the pain. I’m hurting so much that I called Mark (my orthopedist) today about the possibility of a partial shoulder replacement on the right side. The one he did on the left 37-months ago has just recently reached what I suspect to be its full potential for improvement, and I would anticipate just as slow a recovery on the right side, but my condition certainly won’t get any better if I don’t have the surgery. A full replacement would be more likely to alleviate more of the pain (I have no thought that I will ever be pain free), but it would also restrict the kinds of work I could do, and I had rather be in pain and able to work than to not be in pain and not be able to work. My problem now is that the pain is so great that work is out of the question, and I am also concerned that I have now worked myself into this level of pain a few times, and I am beginning to worry that I will eventually do so much damage that the increased pain level will become permanent and maybe even unbearable. I’m also concerned that Mark either won’t operate at the hospital my insurance will send me to, or else he will pronounce the joint too far gone for a partial replacement—and maybe even for a full one (joints can deteriorate to the point that the only option is to either do nothing or else to fuse the bones). Then again, I might feel better in a few days, and say no to another such nightmare.

Today is a lovely day, and as I look out the window at a project which I can’t finish, I am practically in hysterics. If it was work I hated, I could live with hiring someone, but how do I live with giving up things I love, one after the other? Depending upon one's perspective, there are many valid ways to interpret life, but certainly one of those ways is to regard it as a slow—or sometimes fast—fall into ruin succeeded by death, and that’s the one that is before me at the moment.

Sidney, the baby that I call my grandchild, was here yesterday. As I reflected upon the growth she has experienced in her first two months, and the growth that she will continue to experience for nearly three decades, I envisioned her as a flower that I will never see completely open, but I also remembered that her growth will someday turn to decay, and she too will increasingly fail until her life finally comes to an end. I then recalled a song that goes, “he not busy being born, is being dying," and since it's from my favorite movie, I put it up top. 

What to do? I ate some pot, but it made things worse. Pot quite often does that. I never know what it will do from day to day or even from morning to afternoon, but when it’s bad, it can take whatever is bothering me, multiply it by a factor of ten, and rub my face in it as if into fresh shit. Getting high on pot should not be taken to imply that the user will necessarily have an enjoyable experience.

The picture is of my Grandpa holding me in 1950. While holding Sidney, I remembered that picture, and I knew that, despite his dour expression, he must have felt with me somewhat as I was feeling with her, for I know he loved me. There is something so hopeful about new life that I can't imagine anyone not loving it, although my cat, Brewsky, certainly gives an excellent imitation.

Atheistic mysticism

The more remote the past, the less real it seems, and this includes my own past. I was looking for another picture just now when I came across this one of Dad and me. The year was 1980, and we had been tearing a plaster ceiling out of a hundred year old house in Brookhaven, Mississippi, in 102-degree weather. Dad wouldn’t have worn a dust mask for the work, but I might or I might not, my awareness of such things increasing with time. Twice a day, Mrs. Nations would invite us into the kitchen for a cup or two of strong coffee. I rarely drank coffee, so I stayed ripped on caffeine for days. I found that I liked the feeling, a lot. I also liked Mrs. Nations a lot because she was both cultured and oblivious to the class prejudice that would have kept most upper class women from befriending their carpenters. I thought she represented Southern womanhood at its noblest, and I wish I had told her. It was on this same job that two theatrically slutty women started making eyes at me as I was buying chicken dinners for Dad and me at Winn-Dixie. When the three of us got to the parking lot, they said they had to pick their kids up from school in a couple of hours, but would have time to hang-out for a while at McCall Creek. I said, “Are you ladies telling me you want to fuck?” and they giggled. I figured they wanted money, but I didn’t ask. I did ask if Dad could come. They asked how old he was. I said 70, and they declined. I told Dad about them, and he said I should go if I wanted to, but I considered it all too weird, and, besides, I was never one to pay for sex.

I hastened to look away from that picture just now, not due to any negativity regarding my memories but because it was so long ago that it seems like an event out of someone else’s life. For the past to feel this way un-centers me. I imagine myself floating in space. I feel as if I’m floating in space, and it makes me nauseous, but it also makes me feel high and free.

“There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.” Graham Greene (from The Power and the Glory)

Floating without purpose. No center. No foundation. The past and the future a fiction to the present, and the present replaced by the future even as I try to grasp it.