I’ve Never Been To Me
Check that: I’ve been to me far too much.
Up way too early again this morning, courtesy of Marty the Tuxedo Cat. I’m not sure if it’s hunger driving him but he’s taken to waking me up between 5:30 and 6:30 AM. He’ll position himself to the left side of my head and mewl. If I don’t get out of bed he cries. If I still don’t move he becomes louder, more insistent. If I brazenly continue to lay there he soft-paws my face. If THAT doesn’t rouse me he bites my nose, just enough to get my attention. Sometimes I can persuade Marty to settle down. He’ll flop along my right side until hunger beckons once more. I told Sweet T., “Maybe we need one of those automatic dry food feeders.” Set it to open at 5:30 or when the sun rises (if we leave crunchies out overnight Marty or Baby Billy finishes them before dawn). Something has to be done. Five or six hours of sleep is not enough. Last night I had an excuse for getting to bed late: Saturday Night Live. I parked my head on the pillow around 1:15 AM but didn’t fall asleep until 1:35. At 6:30 AM I finally gave up on sleeping after Marty pulled his party trick: he reared up on the open door, stretched his paws and slammed it shut, leaving Baby Billy crying on the other side. I found myself admonishing a cat.
“Marty, what the hell?! He’s just a little boy.”
Downstairs, I unlocked the sun porch and both cats barreled past me into the cold air. The temperatures are dropping and it feels like we should be putting up Christmas decorations. We’re giving it a pass this year. My left shoulder is fucked up from my fall down the stairs in 2016 and the subsequent dislocations. The orthopedist says an intervention is needed. Pulling a bunch of storage containers down from above the work bench or reaching up to string lights on a Christmas tree is a non-starter. Then there’s the kitten Baby Billy, not yet six months old and likely to wreak havoc on any shiny thing within reach. We also decided not to throw a party this year after the disaster of multiple last-minute cancellations last year. It’s making me sad there won’t be a tree and all the trimmings and we won’t eat, drink and make merry at home with friends. But 2023 has been a fucked year, mostly. Today we’d probably give this place a Christmas makeover but Sweet T.’s doing art out in Sussex County and I’m home writing. I’m finding it difficult getting any NIHILISTIC work done after reading the recent Arthur C. Brooks article in The Atlantic titled Why You Maybe Shouldn’t Write A Memoir, It stung. Brooks is a “Happiness Expert” and argues the more we use the word “I” the likelier it is we’re depressed. Apparently, focusing too much on yourself and your past is not mentally healthy. Duh. Is this why I’m avoided working on NIHILISTIC? I thought it was my fear I don’t know how to tell the story in a universally-relatable way. Maybe it’s because I’ve been going up my own ass almost fifty years and it’s exhausting. First, I kept a diary (I never know whether to use that word–with its “1950s pony-tailed teenage girl” connotations–or the more official and anodyne “journal”). Then, to “prime the pump” on Aerial View via my “Is it me?” theory of talk radio, I’d begin the hour with a confessional piece about something cringe in my life. This plumbing-of-the-personal culminated with my long-running newsletter See You Next Tuesday. When it generated too much friction, friends and family taking me to task for including them, I reluctantly concluded I could no longer pay the newsletter’s toll on my relationships.
I first publicly shared all the thoughts swirling through my head back in the mid-80s and was an exception. Now everyone talks about their shit online or in a podcast and I find I want to do so less. Too much leads to rumination and that’s too close to “ruination.” I’ve carved so many negative neural pathways in my brain the only cure is to get away from me more often. Losing myself in non navel-gazing activities–fixing something on the workbench; completing projects around the house; finding and listing items to sell on EBay, Marketplace or Reverb; working on audio or graphics in the office–is a holiday away my usual doom-loop. Avoiding screens entirely scores extra points (I’m happiest now when the phone’s charging in another room). It occurs to me my solution, when things got to me as a kid, was to remove myself. This technique was also handy if I smelled rejection: “I’ll go before you tell me to.” Maybe I’m leaving myself today, spending time doing anything but introspection. Like this.
The work resumes tomorrow. Good night.