cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This Fog of Pain and Isolation A reporter wants to sit in on some of my classes and do a story about it. Again, the mixed feelings. I mean, a big part of me is just kicking back against all of this. Like everyone is making too big a thing out of it. On the other hand, I'm working on a book on the topic of the class and this kind of thing is free publicity. This is the exactly the shit I'm going to need to be encouraging once the book comes out. I think that my big problem is that I'm still not nearly so sold on my own competency and expertise as everyone else is. I digest massive amounts of information in a given week. And I really do make an effort to memorize most of it. Like I have this awesome new book on cervid evolution and I've only gotten through the first 2 chapters because I keep re-reading them. Or today while I was walking back to the office from lunch I realized that I'd forgotten most of the history of 'booty bass,' a genre of music that I don't even really give a shit about and don't listen to. Yet I spent 30 minutes reading up (again) on the origins and influences of the Miami bass scene in the 1980's and early '90s. WHY? At no point do I ever really feel like an 'expert' on anything. I never feel like I know enough. And regarding the topics that I am writing and teaching about, there are other people who write about hunting and rifles who know 10 times more than I ever will. So it feels like, 'what the fuck business do I have doing this?' Yet none of those other experts are writing for the audience that I am. Right now I am sort of obsessed with the orchestral interlude in the 3rd act of Alban Berg's early 20th century opera, 'Wozzeck.' The whole opera is just absolutely fucking weird. The weirdest opera I have ever heard. I also just have a thing for early twentieth century string arrangements. There is a sort of uncertain, hesitant violin emerging from a swelling orchestral backdrop that I find again and again in orchestral music from around 1910-1950. In soundtracks especially. My arm is still healing following my surgery. Tomorrow I get the stitches out. I can do some simple things now like open a door with my left arm, but I still can't bend it enough to hold a phone to my ear or adjust a pair of headphones. I really, really hope that this surgery proves ultimately successful. I have been through so much pain for so long now. I have felt like a part of myself is missing for much of this past year, being unable to do most forms of physical labor with these twin tendon injuries. Building things and fixing things has been so much a part of my identity for so long. Meanwhile, the un-operated-on right elbow hurts terribly as well. Last night I tried absinthe for the first time. I smuggled a bottle back that I'd bought in Austria last month. It is an odd sort of stuff. I suppose that it could grow on one. Trish took one whiff and decided she couldn't drink it, on account of anything with anise in it gives her a migrane. I made a glass up in the Bohemian style where one sets the sugar on fire, since it was a Bohemian absinthe in the first place. I would rather like to get a bottle of champagne and mix up a 'Death in the Afternoon' cocktail according to Hemingway's recipe. I'm having trouble with re-emerging into the world right now. I dropped out of sight when I was traveling in the Germanies without internet access in September, then a few days after returning I had surgery and lay in bed for a long time afterward, dosed to the gills on narcotic pain relievers. I'm not even quite sure how many days that lasted. Consequently, I was out of communication with a lot of people for the better part of a month and I just don't know how to re-enter the world. I'm still catching up on news that happened while I was out of order. Like apparently there was some horrific quadruple murder a town or 2 over from me that was national news and I had no idea. Lately I spend a lot of time playing poker with Ida. I taught her to play and now she's obsessed. Literally, the minute I walk through the door she's handing me the deck of cards and will play until bed time if nothing interrupts her. And she's actually pretty good. We started out with simplified rules, letting her discard as many cards as she wants, etc. But now the only simplification that we use versus regular 5 card draw is that aside form the ante there is only one round of betting, after everyone has drawn any additional cards and seen for sure what their hand is going to be. I don't even go easy on her. Like, I'm playing ruthlessly every single time and she still walks away from the table with as many or more chips than me sometimes. She usually beats Trish, but I don't think that Trish's heart is really in it. Yesterday I looked at my elbow, post-surgery, for the first time. It was worse than I thought. Its all shaped wrong now. I don't recognize it as a part of my own body with the bandage off. Like, the very first part of my forearm under it has a sort of depression like it has atrophied slightly. Contrasted against the swollen elbow, it just doesn't look like me. I want this to all get better. I went through the gauntlet. You know, like I wrote about here just before the surgery. I went through the gauntlet and I was cut open and had something fairly brutal done to the inside of my arm. Maybe I expected it to be something like that scene in the movie, 'The Mission,' where Mendoza has carried a net filled with his armor and weapons up a waterfall as his penance and then the bundle is cut away, falling down to the bottom of the falls. Well, it hasn't been like that. But the surgery was truthfully a doorway into another chapter of life that I am still struggling to understand. Because things *are* different now. Ok, I have suffered and I have bled and then I suffered some more. What I want now is mercy. Trish seems to be angry at me for something but I don't understand what it is. I have felt utterly alone for a long time now. Since my business trip to the Eastern Shore right before leaving the country last month. I was alone driving the 500 miles there and back. Then I was totally alone for the most part in Europe. I didn't even understand what the people around me were saying. Every time I decided to walk into a store to buy something, I had to steel myself for a difficult situation since I didn't speak the language (which was good - because this gives me a whole new level of empathy for recent immigrants to the US). Then I came back home and was operated on and was alone in my pain, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling or walls. Day after day. This fog of pain and isolation. I've got to get out of it. The funny thing is that I'm not exactly depressed. Just trapped. And meanwhile I should be helping more than I am with this murder investigation now that the guy who killed my grandmother and aunts and uncles turned up out of the blue. I just... I'm just too reluctant right now to put myself into the head of a murderer. Which is what would have to happen for me to contribute much. 2:47 p.m. - 2009-10-07 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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