Howdy. It’s me. Again.

Lost in the ether, the mad shuffle between physicians’ offices, imaging labs, physical therapy and then back to another doc, where the cycle begins anew. An endless cycle, indeed. I’ve progressed from wheelchair to walker to, within the last few days, walking short distances with a cane. It is very painful, though I do my best to ignore the new reality this pain heralds. I don’t take painkillers as the complications that go along with their use are too severe for me, so right now pain is a near constant reminder that old people are often quite fragile. For someone that used to play football, that reality hits hard. Or as we used to say back in the day, it’s a real bummer. Surgery may still be required to fix this, but for now I’m just dealing with what comes in the next day or so. I can’t see past that.

But I am writing. Or trying to, anyway. I have found that pain compromises my ability to think clearly, and reading what I have managed to write quite often reads as a reflection of pain – and that’s not intentional. It may be, however, unavoidable. I’ve read and reread Hemingways Garden of Eden and his grasp of the meaning of death was becoming so inescapable it filtered into every sentence. Yet…that grasp is what gave, or gives, such force to the (unfinished) work. Oddly enough, Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) was one of his earliest works and that novel is suffused with death – in all its many forms.

So I’m struggling. Writing a sentence that isn’t a reflection of recent events is almost impossible, yet recent events are extremely uninteresting – at least from a literary perspective. So bear with me. In addition to heavy revisions of several stories I’m working on a new one:

And this will probably post first, before revisions to other stories. This new story comes from a dream while in the hospital and I started talking about it with one of the catholic priests that came by to talk every day or so, yet it’s not a religious story. I’m about 15 pages in, and I’d rather not post this incrementally. I think it will read better if you get the full scope of ideas in one sitting.

After that?

We’ll see. A few of you may remember Prism, the quasi-autobiographical cop story I posted a year or so ago, and took down a week later. Due to recent events that story has taken on a fresh urgency to me – as it is a story that needs to be told before that certain overtaking rush of impending change catches up to me.

Anyway. Music matters. Check out Arriving Somewhere But Not Here, by Porcupine Tree (2017) or A Forgotten Birthday, by Ulrich Schnauss. Daydreaming, by Radiohead (2016) might fit the mood, too. From the same album (A Moon Shaped Pool) you might give True Love Waits a listen.

Anyway. I’m still here, and still writing.

And thanks for hanging in there with me.