Round Like An Orange

The toenails of the decades click on the oak wood floor:

they patter past the post, mortality set on "stun";

they'll eventually get the zoomies

and then your race is run.

The other day I learned of a new procedure:

they peel your prostate like an orange, removing it whole

rather than slicing it. I don't know how they get it out,

or if it leaves a hole.

The yellow leaves are brilliant in the sun,

the birch bark's white puts cadmium to shame,

the sky gets pale closer to the ground,

the tide runs back the way it came.

Flailing

Something very large and indistinct is moving slowly into alignment with me, so I'm sighting down its length. Or into its barrel. I'm not sure this thing will not blow up. I don't know what it is.

Still sick, perpetually sick, these days. My old ways of recovery won't do: I need to get rid of this visceral fat without doing a whole lot of exercise, and that means letting a lot of muscle go. Maybe I'll get to build the muscle back, and maybe I won't; but nothing good is going to happen until this systemic inflammation drops. If the muscle has to go it has to go. I need to get rid of this fat, as quick as I can.

It is an achingly beautiful Fall, this year, and I have barely seen it.

Why have I been so fretful and self-absorbed? Being sick does that to you, I guess. For one thing. But also I am more cut off from the world than I have ever been. Flailing in space like an untethered astronaut; every action its own equal and opposite reaction, summing to zero.

I fumble towards an idea of how I am in the world that includes the notion that understanding things may do some good even though it remains implicit and uncommunicated, but my materialism is so ingrained that there's not much traction there. What good does it do? I mean, there are side-glimmers, mistakes I don't make, injuries I don't inflict. Maybe. But the steamroller of Dickensian liberalism keeps bearing down on me: what good does it do? Where are the children saved from poverty, the tigers from extinction, the libraries from demolition? I'm just a black-robed priest muttering to himself in a dark place, grudging the virgins their sunlight.

Thus Dickens. Blake has another point of view: but then Blake was visited by the Christ in the morning, and drank God with his morning tea. I am a spirit of another sort.

Checking In

So I guess the three times I check in would be morning, afternoon (meaning not long after I get home, whether that's 10:00 or 4:00), and evening (meaning not long after dinner), and the idea of the afternoon and evening check-ins is to not get lost in the mindless repetitions for hours at a time -- not, anyway, until the constructive things are done. I don't tend to get lost in the morning, so that's more just a matter of getting out into the light of day and the air of the world.

I can invoke the divine double, if he'll show up. What would the angel bearing my semblance do? What would he feel and think? I don't need to do this alone, and I don't need to know what I'm doing. I can ask for help.

They can be very short walks: at this stage of my recovery, they should not be long ones. Hell, they can even just be standing out under the sky.

I do not need to know what should be done. My job is to find that out. I am groping my way: I don't know who I am or what my surroundings are: I'm blind. My light is spent. Pretending that it's otherwise is not going to help at all.

"And that one talent which is death to hide / Lodged with me useless..."

The constructive things might be almost anything. Don't close that circuit prematurely.

Health

On an abbreviated evening walk -- all my exercise is abbreviated nowadays -- I took a leaf from OCD exposure therapy, and said, okay, let's just run with it. What if I never fully regain my health? What changes in my life? What adaptations do I make? 

And the answer was -- really not much changes at all. I can still do most of the things I do now, maybe less often, less strenuously. My life isn't predicated on robust health. And I'm not particularly invested in living twenty-five more years: having watched my father's extreme old age, I'm not all that enthused about spending a long time playing defense and waiting to see which system gives out first. I don't want my highest priority to be "keep this individual animal breathing." 

Not that I "believe in" an afterlife, or would find anything reassuring about the prospect if I did. Death as a candle going out has always struck me as something a little too good to be believed: a little too much of wish-fulfillment. Mebbe, mebbe not. But given that I'm going through that door eventually, willy-nilly, I do have some curiosity about it. I don't number, among my numerous faults, putting off the inevitable. What might one wake up to? If it's a clearer understanding of what one is, then -- bring it! 

So enough of all the histrionics. Most likely I just have a cold, and my lungs are a little damaged from Covid still, and I'll bounce back, just slower than I'm used to. 

September

So September, dearest of months, when the sweet rain returns and hope lifts its brindled nose! The sun slews round to shine straight down Burnside: driving away west from my house in the morning, I see a huge red orb in my rear view mirror (the fires aren't out yet), directly behind me. The promise and threat of the One, I suppose. How do I picture God? As that bloody orb: too bright to look at directly for long, but that by which everything else is seen. There, that's my theology, as far as it goes. I welcome the cloudy days and cooler weather, the veiling of the sun, as more suited to my weakness; but I don't entertain the delusion that I could do without it, or that my eyes make their own light. 

A scattering of airborne seeds, like baby dandelion fluffs, float over me when I'm coming home and walk back up the drive. And early in the evening Vega is still right overhead, still presiding. Yes. This remains my favorite month. I don't hate the summer any more, and I look forward to the cold and the rain less than I used to, but it's still, to me, the month of promise. It's the month I used to look over my new school books, and anticipate understanding new things and meeting new people (living and dead: new to me.) Mysterious names will fill with meaning; eyes will fill with light.

I go a little less in fear of saying what I've said before, I guess. I'll bang the drum I have, for the time given to me. Lots of love, you.