One Train May Hide Another

“Your work is puerile and under-dramatized. You lack any sense of structure, character, and the Aristotelian unities.” — Wednesday Addams 

Soaking in the bath, Bjork serenading me courtesy of the Bezos HiFi Streaming Service.  Jenny is on the couch, grumpy.  If I had to guess, and I do have to guess, she is mad I haven't packed a single box in two days. She packed a box yesterday and one today.  I woke up yesterday in excruciating pain.  The injury I got from that fall in the bathtub I suffered some weeks ago when someone had not rinsed the bathtub after an Epsom salt soak, reawakened after I stacked box after box on Sunday.  I wasn't expecting that.  But it hurts like someone dropped an anvil on my back, just adjacent to my left shoulder blade. The anvil must have bounced because my shoulder hurts too, and when I'm a really lucky fella, the pain radiates down my arm.  I slept sitting up on the sectional last night, a gazillion pillows propping me up. The pain, despite taking a pain reliever, kept me up until 3, and Willow made sure I was up by 6.  Also, I love her.

Jenny has taken an interest in basketball, and is watching the finals, something that hasn't happened in the 30.5 years we have been together.  I stopped watching when the Sonics were sold away.  The nice thing is, if Jenny is confused about what is happening in the court, she has a go-to consultant.  I retreated to the bath after about the 6th time I turned to her and she hid her phone from me.  El pinché is a basketball coach.  Betrayal has its benefits.

"You are someone else, I am still right here."

What have I become?  I have mispent years of my life, thinking I was living a different life. I say this, not woefully, not even sadly. I feel more like I am looking at a beetle specimen under glass at the Museum of Natural History. How did I get here? Stuck. Useless. Devoid of hopes and dreams for myself.   I have had a spate of bad luck over the last few years, too boring to dwell upon or write down.  But, it knocked me down a couple notches, to be sure.  Its hard to feel sorry for yourself when your spouse is dying. One would


think it's hard not to feel guilty, moreover, for feeling so alienated from her, because she is dying.  But, I don't feel guilt about the disconnection. If anything, I feel like a mark, every time I let my guard down, and she betrays me.  The betrayal isn't episodic, it is ceaseless. So why I so foolishly at times let my guard down, allowing myself to believe her kindness means more than she is in a good mood, I can't say.  I may be a glass half-full guy more than I thought.  Strange, because I always imagined myself more like Glum from Gulliver's Travels on The Banana Splits.  "It'll never work, we're all gonna die," that Glum.

Tomorrow is chemo 48.  48.  48.  I am, as always, dreading the CA 19-9 number.  Jenny's friend Amelia is coming up from Olympia to take her, for which I am very grateful.

We miss what is in plain sight, so often. It is an essence of being, I suppose. Kenneth Koch, in his 1994 poem from which this journal entry gets its title, wrote what has become one of my favorite over the years.  He says,

The poem itself, linked above, is more worth your time than this silly journal entry. You really should go read it.

Comments

  1. Cheryl RSJuly 14, 2021 at 8:41 PM

    If dying excused all bad behavior, all bad behavior would be excused. We’re all dying. It’s just that some of us have a head start.

    ReplyDelete
  2. nigelJuly 28, 2021 at 12:21 AM

    Bet you can't say that fast 3x in a row. Oh, nevermind.

    ReplyDelete

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