Friday, October 15, 2004
Third Gear (It's all right)
Ever noticed when you get a taste of your own medicine, it seems like it was previously tried as a suppository? Don't ya just HATE that brown taste on your tongue?
My friends have been SCREAMING it at me, in all their various loving ways. Some have waited in patient silence, knowing I always crawl back from whatever dark space I crawled into to heal or die, whichever came first. Some have got in my face, some have sat me down and tried reasoning.
What, you're asking yourself, is he babbling about?
I've had a bad half decade. A stepfamily I was prepared to dedicate the rest of my life to maintaining fell apart. My mother died. I got laid off from yet another job. I bought a 1984 Pontiac Firebird Formula, one of the cars I'd dreamed of owning, and not only smashed the front end into a Toyota, but ripped the transmission apart.
I moved my father, Senior Packrat of the family, into my house, where we became partners in packratting. He is old, was going blind (just had one eye repaired, the other soon to follow! I'll have a SIGHTED father soon, which means we'll be watching the babes on the Spanish channel non-stop. I'd better get him some Spanish language tutor CDs for his computer.)
What I'm babbling about is, I went into a major deep depression, attempting to maintain my online persona, but in my personal life, sliding down a slick mud shaft into a deep dark place. Could be my own colon, who knows? And in this place, I let myself fall apart to the point where my legs, once engines of destruction from 25 years of karate training, hurt every time I stand, where a body that's fought off most forms of sickness without even bothering with a doctor suddenly is being pumped full of antibiotics and various medications just to get it somewhere close to normal again.
I gave in to a lifetime penchant for corpulence. Instead of a hard, strong body, I became a slug-creature, a Jabba-like THING. I didn't lean on the love others offered; I crawled into my little cave-space and stayed there.
That was a Wrong Thing; I wasn't given this life to piss it away in self-indulgent self-pity. Now, finally, it has to stop. I have to get back to someplace where I like living, where I like other people, where I like ME again.
Somewhere in this mess, I have to be a pretty good person. How do I know? Mainly because some of the finest, most decent people I know care very deeply about me, and aren't afraid to show it.
One of those friends told me I'd become so dark, being around me was an energy drain. He just flat told me to stop, to quit declining before my body decided to die, and get myself right. Considering he'd come over after a 10-hour workday roofing new houses, cut off a few hundred pounds of oak branches threatening my roof, took measurements and laid out a basic design for a ramp in front of my house for Dad and his walker, I was inclined to listen. He's also the half-Chinese son of a Tai Chi master, and we call ourselves Zen Bastards. If he says I'm too dark, well, I'm too dark.
If you read the rant before this one, you'll see what I told that kid. Now it's time to take my own advice. It's just life. You'll take it seriously sometimes whether you mean to or not. Just quit doing it ALL the time. Instead of looking in the mirror and despairing, I can meet those tired brown eyes with a smile, and say, "Look, you silly ass...we did this. We can fix it." Or, as Rick, my old Karate School Partner used to say, "Suck it up, Buttsauce."
Y'know, some of us have been really, really worried about you. Remember when you said that you wouldn't die if i wouldn't? Well, i'm not. Not unless someone's wife kills me. And someone's wife could kill you too, but not unless you married her first.
Anyway, you don't get to, is what. Take care of your damn self or i will make good on my threat to come down there and bring your father a pug and turn him insufferable and clean your damn house.
Yeah, i'm a mean bitch. So? You like me.
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