April 19, 2005

• Where is it?
  new snow on spruce trees
  
  Mama always said, “Look on the bright side.”  The clear
  implication there is that there always IS a bright side, a rose to go
  with that thorn, some punch in that bowl where the turd’s floating –
  not that I’d particularly want to drink any of that punch, but the
  implication is just that the punch is THERE.  Every ill-seeming
  situation, no matter how dark and gloomy, according to my mother’s
  philosophy, is supposed to have some hidden bright spot of benefit or
  joy.  This morning, I’m still looking for it.

  I don’t doubt that I’ll find it.  It’ll probably jump up and
  blindside me, and startle me so severely that I fall on my ass. 
  Even if that happens, if my sudden realization of the “bright side” of
  my current situation causes me to injure myself, the point is, there IS
  a bright side.  I sorta more or less expect to find it,
  somehow.  It has always been there before, so why not now,
  eh?  The bright and pleasant aspects of my life have been just as
  prevalent as have been the thorns and turds.  I’m nothing if not
  balanced.

  new snow on willows

  
  I call myself the bastard child of Pollyanna and Candide. 
  Everything works out for the best, because we live in the best of all
  possible worlds.  Sometimes such blissful idealistic optimism is
  difficult to sustain, especially with an intellect that insists on
  discarding all unsupported beliefs and standing firmly in observable
  reality.  When driven into a corner (and mind you it’s always I
  myself who thus gets me cornered — nobody else has the guts to argue
  with me for more than a few superficial rounds) my final argument is
  that optimism is simply more comfortable, easier to live with, than the
  alternative, and since nobody can prove that there isn’t a “bright
  side” I’ll reserve judgement on that and keep looking.  One
  “bright” aspect of that philosophy is that it has carried me through a
  few suicidal depressions with my veins unopened and my brains
  unsplattered.
  new snow on my new woodpile
  So,
  you may ask (and you know I’m gonna tell you even if you don’t ask),
  what’s got me searching for the elusive bright side today.  The
  quick and easy answer to that one is, a whole string of
  yesterdays.  One particular yesterday, the one immediately
  preceding today, was a tough one.  I woke with a worse than usual
  case of brain fog, and it never went away throughout the
  day.    This isn’t particularly alarming.  It comes
  with the territory.  It’s on all the symptom lists of this damned
  disease.  I can usually expect it when I have missed a lot of
  sleep — sleep disturbances are on those same lists — or when I have
  been particularly active or under stress.  Often it takes little
  more than a full night’s sleep and some extra vitamins and cognitive
  enhancers to clear up my perceptions and cognition.

  Koji standing up to see over new snow on the old Eagle

  
  I took my meds yesterday, and slept all night last night and today I’m
  still dragging around here with the Winnie-the-Pooh syndrome, head
  stuffed with fluff.  Today there’s some interesting sensorimotor
  stuff going on, too.  Some burny sensations in my eyes are making me
  blink a lot, and on some of those blinks one of the lids doesn’t come
  back up automatically.   I have to pry the right eye open,
  sometimes with a fingertip.  It’s weird, a new one.  Maybe
  that could be my bright side for the day, a bit of amusing novelty.

  Those burning sensations in my eyes could be related to this new old
  monitor.  At maximum brightness and contrast it’s neither bright
  nor particularly contrasty.  It is better than nothing when I’m
  dealing with black text on a white background, as long as I can zoom
  the text up to about 14-16 point type.  Small print or
  low-contrast backgrounds are impossible.  It is very
  limiting.  One bright spot is that I can see what I type in
  xTools.  That’s balanced by the fact that I can’t figure out how
  to zoom up the text in outgoing emails.  Only the recipients know
  how many typos I’m typing.  Spell check?  Who, me?  Not
  hardly.  What does spell check know about to, two, too and who?
  Koji on top of Old Blue
  I
  used some guesswork on these images as I was resizing them for
  Xanga.  I made them look about as murky and dark as the images
  I’ve been seeing here the last few days.  If I lightened them
  enough to look right to me on this screen, I suppose they’d be too
  washed out.  It’ll be nice if we can get a new monitor so I can
  see how my pictures look.  I guess the practical thing would be to
  get my business license first to improve my earning potential, but I’m
  tempted to get a monitor first to preserve our eyesight. 
  Decisions, decisions.

  I’ve been regretting my decision to reveal the licensing snafu and go
  begging.  It brought me a few donations, but not half of what I
  need to pay for one license.  I don’t know yet whether I gave any
  satisfaction to the drama queen who reported me for my lapse.  If
  I’m lucky, I’ll never find out.  That’s one area where I’d prefer
  to remain ignorant.  I don’t want to deal with her one-on-one, and
  I’m vindictive enough to want to deny her the pleasure of knowing how
  much she has embarrassed and inconvenienced me.

  Since
  I have already revealed my negligence, I might as well pull the covers
  all the way off.  It’s embarrassing, but maybe it’s better to have
  the whole thing in the open than to leave it to your imagination. 
  I was very negligent. 
  When the investigator wrote to me it was one of those head-slapping
  “D’oh!” moments.  I’d been dealing with Greyfox’s business
  licenses, one from the state and another from the borough.  He had
  changed the location of his business, so he needed new paper.  I
  was still here in the same old place doing the same old thing, I
  thought, and if I gave any thought at all to my license, I just thought
  I’d get a renewal form in the mail when the state renewal was
  due.  I had recently renewed my borough license routinely, when I
  got the notice.

  It embarrasses me to think about this.  I’d rather get caught
  trying to get away with something than have the depth of my
  incompetence revealed — rather be shifty than stupid.  I suppose
  that’s not a “normal” sort of preference.  I have been greeted
  with incredulity before this, when I’d say I was giving some politician
  or other miscreant the benefit of the doubt when I assumed he was
  corrupt rather than oblivious.  I have been told that most people
  would rather be viewed as incompetent than as dishonest.  If I had
  my druthers, I’d be totally on top of all the details and completely
  without guile, and I’d be recognized for my perfection.  Since I
  haven’t achieved that, I have to settle for what I’ve got, which is
  probably more honesty than competence, less cleverness than
  candor.  In my dreams I’m slick.

  In
  the reality of here and now, I learned from the state investigator that
  my license had gone unrenewed since 2001.  That initially came as
  a shock, until I stopped to think about it.  In 2001, I was barely
  alive.  I wasn’t taking care of paperwork, housework or
  yardwork.  I had no garden that year.  I stopped working at
  fairs and music festivals, just couldn’t handle the physical part of
  it.  I don’t think I did any readings in 2000 or 2001. 
  That’s when I got my handicap parking permit.  Apparently, the
  state had sent me a renewal notice on schedule and it got lost in the
  clutter.  I don’t know.  I haven’t found it.  I learned
  from the investigator that my old license wouldn’t cover everything I’m
  doing, anyway.  Thus the need for the new one and the need to
  redefine exactly what it is I do.

  I
  think I may be getting a little glimmer of what the bright side of this
  whole issue is.  I am being compelled to reexamine my
  livelihood.  It’s not pleasant, but the self-examination is
  revealing.  I know that a garden is more work than it is
  worth.  I’ve had that hanging over me for years now, thinking,
  “maybe next year I’ll be up to gardening again.”  Maybe not. 
  Maybe not ever.  Not this year, anyway.

  Likewise with the fairs and festivals.  I used to think it would
  be fun and profitable to do a food booth along with the one where I did
  readings and sold jewelry.  I thought that if I got to feeling
  better (this was when I was still well enough to do the readings booth)
  that I could do set-up work in the morning and Doug and Greyfox could
  run the food booth while I did readings all day.  What a fuckin’
  fantasy!  It was never feasible, and I doubt if it will ever be
  feasible for me to do even the readings booth again.  I don’t
  know, of course.  I could have a full remission and get in shape
  to climb Denali.  Someone could find a cure and it would be some
  herbal thing I could grow myself or a cheap treatment I could
  afford.  None of that is very likely, of course, but possible –
  maybe.

  There’s
  my bright side:  disillusionment — the clear light of reason
  revealing the falsitude of my fantasies, and some forceful reminders
  from the state investigator that I hadn’t been paying enough attention
  to business if I’m going to be in business.  I suppose I am
  going to be in business, just as soon as I get enough money saved to
  pay for the business license.  I have already decided that my
  earning potential is small enough that it would be a wasteful luxury to
  insist upon labeling my readings as I perceive them, a counseling
  service.  I’ll be a little slick, I’ll put one over on the system
  in a small way and pretend that the readings are for entertainment
  only.  The investigator told me that was entirely up to me. 
  If he doesn’t care, why should I?  It’ll save me a hundred bucks a
  year on that extra biennial license and get me licensed two hundred
  dollars sooner.

  BTW, the purple hat is a PayPal link, and I’m still begging for your
  gifts.  I wonder if beggars need a license… naah, I don’t wanna
  know.
  

  • 4:22 pm
  • 12 Comments