I have been ignoring the world outside this week trying to teach myself how to win a game of Empire: Total War, which I bought on Steam's Summer Sale for 5$. It's an interesting game to be certain, I'm just not sure it's endorsed for such uses as ignoring society and alleviating weather based angst.
This is the real problem with summer rain of such glaring proportions: it forces out the little lizards of ugliness that live in everyone's crevices. It has exposed my iguana, desperate for a patch of sun, of hermetism....my Garbo moment, my desire to be alone. It's true, I don't want to see people right now. I don't want to type, I don't want to be brave, or not brave, or admired or complimented for my warrior attitude. I'm sick of it, I'm tired of how I look, how I have to live, and I'm tired of people not knowing that about me.
I say that knowing that some people who read statements like mine--all perfectly true--then go to the other extreme and believe I'm depressed or that I've given up on the fight, neither of which are true. Rain is an obscuring event when it comes fast and hard, and so is just being so damned tired of being who you are.
I'm a bit stuck in a flash flood here--just by writing it out I can feel the wheels grip a bit better, the car moving back out of the water, but I'm not there yet. The rain continues tonight a bit, and even though I'm dry, typing this on my iPad on the bed with two fingers (there may be typos), I still shudder at the thought of actual real human interaction.
I suppose the only exception to this is my weekly chemo visit, always enjoyable. Otherwise, I loathe the every other day dressing changes with home healthcare, the weekly physical therapy for my shoulder, the doctor's appointments--I feel caged, a parrot who says "I'm fine, I'm fine, pretty bird" in response to everything. A gimp bird with a pre-recorded message for a voice.
The little frustrations keep falling down upon me, rain of their own. My insurance suddenly thinks a chemo drug that I use isn't working, probably because it costs 6200$ a week. I've sent the same appeal letter twice and received no response. The student loan company gives me a repayment amount based upon income which I have to renew--I don't have all the documentation they require so they raise my payment--modestly--but I'm now a fixed income guy. I write them six times begging them to email or text me. The only way I've gotten a response is to pay my old payment amount instead of the new one. Finally a message: you are in danger of default.
I begin to wonder why I had to have the cancer that took away functions that I can't operate well without having available. Everyone has a 1-800 number but I can't use it. I can't do everything through Charles' voice--he has need of it too. Tonight as he ate one of my favorite dinners, Zatarain's Dirty Rice Mix (seriously, don't judge, I love it), I wondered why I couldn't have had some manageable prostate problem instead of no tongue, no jaw bone, and a mouth that hangs open with skin that has no feeling, all freakishly hidden by a stupid mask I wear every damn rainy day and every damn sunny one too.
At night, I try to direct my dreams to what will happen in the afterlife for me, but they end up elsewhere, muddy, indistinguishable from what the backyard is like these days. I want to see myself, as I sleep, with Shake Shak followed by Dairy Queen, but I only achieve that in twilight, and only in a Plato's Cave sort of way. Not cone not Blizzard quality, as I wish it to be.
My recovery from surgery continues, it creaks along like a six legged spider compensating by lumbering sideways. I finally seem to have a grip on my hemoglobin, or at least the hint that I have some control. My graft wound is healing beautifully the nurses tell me, the one ray of sun that no cloud is obscuring. Yet I have a yard full off gardening I thought I'd do and I'm too damn tired to even push a vacuum over the carpet. I thought I'd die cleaning the toilet. I'm just not there yet.
So this is what happens in summer rain, when the lizard needs its sun but makes do with lamps. When guys who try too hard realize there's no one watching the tap dance. When you have to face the truly boring notion that every day in your life now requires your best effort just to live it, forget improvement. That's a word I don't use in quite the same way as I did before. Sometimes I'm not certain where that word went.
