on making a mess

this first entry will mark the crossing of a milestone that i've had lording over my head for about 2 years now. i've hemmed, and i've hawed, and it seems like i finally got tired of both. i expect to be massively embarrassed by the time i spit it all out, and then it's going up anyway.

i've put this kind of thing off for a very long time. there's the pressing reasons-- the material, the survival aspect. this is where i'd chuck healthcare, day-to-day living with chronic illness, anything that demands upfront attention in the way of sheer bodily maintenance. the contents of this folder amount to a pile both higher and denser than a lot of the folks i know, so i won't fault myself for that.

but then there's a second jumble of reasons, too, and that one's just plain stupid. if you've ever been pigeonholed as "artist" or "writer" or any other of those "sing-for-your-supper" types -- god forbid, if youve done it to yourself -- you probably already know what's in that pocket. the "what's it worth", the "it's not good enough", the "not until i'm better at this whole damn thing". everybody has this pile of whatsit somewhere in their brain's filing cabinet, including the people who swear up and down that they don't. especially them, actually. my father used to call these "limiting beliefs". i usually just call it ego. i understand why people would disagree-- self-deprecation sounds like it would be at odds with the ego, if your definition of ego has more to do with self confidence.

but ego isn't confidence. confidence doesn't need constant checking and protection, it just is. confidence requires neither buffing up nor fully discrediting the ego. ego is the antithesis of self assurance-- the "i" that only exists in contrast to "you", and must constantly check on You in order to define Me.

the things we say to puff out our chests serve the exact same function as the stuff we say to take ourselves out at the shins. both just about as unhelpful in the end, too. ego, all of it. useless, all of it!

it doesn't mean our brains are stupid for doing it. self preservation is survival, in that instrinsic, hard-coded way. years of living with, for, and in spite of each other have enshrined that "don't rock the boat" sensation deep into our guts, almost unreachable to the heart and the head. we're beautifully social critters.

it's not so much that these thoughts have gone anywhere, or that i've cracked the code on keeping them at bay. nothing short of complete and total ego death really does. the thing that's possessed me to finally bite the bullet and carve out a webspace is not something i'm comfortable boiling down to a single phrase or idea. i've tried-- for what reason, i'm not sure-- and i've always failed to do so to my own satisfaction. what i CAN say: it has a lot to do with the understanding of all living as borrowed time, and a mounting frustration in myself for sitting so idly in spite of that knowledge. very few are privileged to understand the sheer luck on which all life depends on the somatic level, to recall the bodily feeling of that knowledge which rarely imparts itself to us outside of death, and then go on living.

on the factor of luck

back in 2022, i got pretty close to dying. hell, listen to that-- i'm not editing that. "i got pretty close to dying", where "i almost died" would suffice. when you get that close and get the privilege to come back, you begin to doubt yourself at every turn. "i almost died" sounds too confident, too concrete. still, it was what was going to happen. and now, being spat out onto the other side of the street, back into a world where death and illness are not permitted topics of candid discussion among the living, i know not to rock the boat. i am a social critter.

every day, i think i understand the y2k debacle more and more. i wonder if the compsci types that kept disaster at bay felt the same sense of rueful self consciousness-- shame, even, just from shouldering knowledge of what would have been, knowing it was to become a fairytale in the minds of their brothers and neighbors, only because they worked to prevent it. i imagine everyone who works in public health and disaster prevention must walk that tightrope on the daily. i'm grateful to them, and i hurt for them.

so: i almost died. phew! there, on the page, as is. don't let me touch it.

there was a lot of metal in my spine. two rods, and a lot of screws, in an elaborate, nasty little set named for a man who is today one of the most revered orthopedic surgeons in american history. in his experiments leading up to that shining breakthrough, he killed at least 2 people.

the hardware wasn't put in right. over the period of about a decade, it got so antsy and wiggled itself so loose that it was about to kill me. couldn't walk, couldn't eat anymore. my liver started getting real sick, stopped being able to process things.

sidenote: this is also how i learned most titanium implants are actually titanium alloy, and most of them have trace amounts of nickel. i'm allergic to nickel.

we got everything out in time, when we finally found a neurosurgeon willing to do it. he told me, when i woke up, that 6 of the screws hammered into my spine had gone loose. two of them were SO loose, he pulled them out by hand, no tools necessary.

one of the screws had never even been hammered into the pedicle in the first place. you know what a pedicle is? they're these little nubbins on the sides of your vertebrae, right between the vertebral body-- that's the big disc part that you're probably envisioning already-- and the transverse process. that's the guy on the side of the spine that branches out to the side, and has the courtesy to look like a funny little finger while he does it.

pedicles are important for a lot of non-surgical reasons. for our purposes, though, they're important because that's where a pedicle screw is supposed to go, when a surgeon is installing spinal hardware. that's probably why they're called pedicle screws, and not "well, you're the doctor!" screws.

i figure it's also why the face of every other doctor i've had has suddenly drained to a ghostly white when i told them my pedicle screw was not inside of my pedicle at all, and was instead jammed into my body at such an angle as to look like a dagger at the ready. specifically, i tell them the first part. i don't have to tell them the second part, but i trust it's what they're envisioning when all their bloodflow exits neckward. in that moment, we share a brotherhood in nausea that only bodily understanding can grant, and language can only prod at with middling success.

i don't impart this to you with the intent of a horror story, or a success story, or really any kind of story at all. all of this is simply stuff that has happened, in a long line of stuff that has happened. lives are not stories. regularly, i find myself disinterested and disgusted by the people who would spin them into such. not disgusted in the way you would be with someone cruel, or "evil", or hateful, but disgusted in the way you'd be to see someone in the act of pissing on the toilet seat and leaving it as is.

all time is borrowed. all living is luck.

i won't say that anyone who sees the world through the lens of winners and losers, heroes and villains, has inherently made an enemy of me. too many ideological camps at present have wasted energy making enemies of the naïve and childish, rather than the hatefully-driven. but in the interest of my sanity, i have no option but to draw the shades and look the other way.

when i was dying, i knew it was happening. my wife and i did not talk about it, and we should have. when death is not fast, it is very slow. just like the body gears up for labor and birth, in a process taking months and months before the moment-of, the body has to prepare for death. it is a vulnerable, isolating, often humiliating process. it is also very sleepy, and sometimes very peaceful. there's a reason that fascists glorify a quick death in early life, you know-- the politics of action, any action, for action's sake alone, can't have room for the sick and dying. we don't like that sort of thing here. it's unflattering, and inconvenient, and it makes for a real bad story.

the "cleaning house" instinct

the "nesting instinct" in pregnancy is well documented. something similar and inversely proportional happens in the pre-dying stage of life, though i have yet to see a widespread terminology for the thing. i hope it exists somewhere, and i just haven't stumbled on it. for our purposes, i'll call it the "cleaning house" phase.

as your body prepares to die, you make your world smaller. as small as you can manage. you endeavor, for reasons beyond your conscious understanding, to pick up after yourself, to clean up your mess. whereas the nesting instinct is largely additive in its preparations for new life, the cleaning-house instinct is subtractive. in both, your body aims to ease the pains of transition for those around you, and provide the room necessary for a new stage of life that will be outside of you.

i didn't understand why i was doing it, but i still couldn't stop myself. i scrubbed as much of my art from the internet as i could manage. it wasn't shame, it wasn't distaste for my own work, and it wasn't fear. i just needed my world to be small. i needed everyone to go away, to stop checking on me, to stop looking at me and everything that had ever come spilling out of my hands.

our bodies work hard to protect us. they do a really, really good job of the thing. that doesn't mean they always work in our best interest. i would consider our egos to be one of the best examples of this. the cleaning house phase is another. it does not really serve you, and it does not serve the people around you, as much as it tries.

should my second brush with death be as slow as the first, i will know the cleaning-house instinct when i feel it. fighting against it on my own will be nearly impossible. i will need to be transparent about what is happening in my body, and i will need the help of my loved ones to buck against it. in the talks i've had with my wife, we've resolved that it will probably look to her the way it looked to odysseus' crew when he struggled at the mast. maybe not as muscular or neoclassical.

on what's in front of me

i am still sick, and i am still disabled. i know the current administration will have no qualms about extracting every last cent of value from my body before they throw it into the gears. i have no way of knowing, but i don't really think i'm going to live through the next decade.

there are a lot of things i'd like to do. i have a lot of dreams that i don't really think i will see to fruition. i would love to be a parent. i'd love to be a teacher. i have a comic i want to see through to completion. working on it makes me very happy. i plug away at it for that reason alone.

many of my dreams so far HAVE come true, though. i'm happily married, and to the most wonderful woman in the world. i've been on testosterone for years now. i have incredible friends all over the states and beyond. i have a cat i love to pieces, 15 years old now, and i am blessed every day to see him running around and yowling as though he was no older than 3.

i don't know what the future looks like, and i am too scared to take a stab at it anymore. what i do know is that what i have lived up to now is worth sharing. i do not serve anyone by keeping it inside my head. i have lived a very lucky and wonderful life so far, and i pray that i get to continue living it for as long as i possibly can. in the meantime, i do not want to clean house anymore.

i want to make a mess, and i want to let it sit. you and i could both be gone tomorrow, with zero warning. i would rather leave behind a mess, because that mess will someday be what remains of me. i must leave the people who love me with something. it isn't likely to be money, and it isn't likely to be much in the way of stuff. but i can leave them my thoughts, and i can leave them the things with which i've occupied my time. i cannot rob them of my mess. they're going to want it later.

whenever that time finally comes, whether it's tomorrow or a big chunk of decades from now or anywhere in between, my ghost won't be able to grab the keyboard to say all the things he wanted to say. i better start doing it for him now so that he doesn't go nuts.

so: roy was here. he mattered. he drew a lot of funny pictures, and made his friends laugh, and made a lot of people very happy. as of writing, he's actually still here, and that's a miraculous thing. someday he won't be, and that's when the first sentence in this paragraph will make a little more sense.

in the meantime, he resolves to keep making a mess.