Just so You Know

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date.

– Margaret Atwood
   The Blind Assassin

I haven't gone anyplace, and I haven't given up on this blog. Or my other one, for that matter. I just made the mistake of going back and reading some of the stuff I wrote. I should know better. Really. By now, I should know better.

I'll get over it. Eventually.

Just so you know.

Surprise Yourself

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself."

– Neil Gaiman

I hope all my blogger buddies are looking forward to a fine year. I know I am.

I suppose there are people who would say they wouldn't want to live the way I do. There might even have been a time when I would've said the same thing myself. But here I am, looking forward to another year.

I guess I think about it the same way I used to think about playing music in public. Since I was never very good at it, I tried to assuage my performance guilt by thinking that even if most people in the audience wished I would go back to playing in my basement, there was probably someone out there thinking, "God, I wish I could do that!"

There are people better off than I am, but there are also people who face challenges greater than mine. The year I just had was better than no year at all. Way better.

I'm looking forward to some good madness and fine books. I'm looking forward to books that challenge me, and some that don't. I don't know about making art, but I might finally finish that post about Harry Spevak on Out on a Limb. It could happen.

I could surprise myself.

I'm looking forward to it.

Branching Out

Can't do it. My relatively-recently-developed obsession with family history feels like a different thing, and leaving it here, tossed in with everything else, just seems wrong, somehow. Besides, it offends my compulsion to have things neatly organized. This blog is already messy enough.

Mostly I'm learning to recognize the glazed look people get when I start off on a family-related tear.

So, henceforth, I'll be Stalking Dead People in a place I've set aside for the purpose. I call it Out on a Limb, and there's a link to it above. You can check it out if you're interested, or skip it if you're not. If you find it as engaging and fascinating as a textbook on advanced particle physics, well, you've been warned.

Everything else will go here. Dogs and books and living relatives and MS and whingeing about anything that strikes me as worthy of complaint. It will be as engaging and fascinating as it's ever been.

Well, you've been warned.

It's Not That Big a Deal

I've been keeping a blog for a while now, but I'm still trying to figure out this whole blogging thing.

I started it because it was a cool techie thing. I wanted to try it out; mess around with it a bit, you know, just for grins. The mechanics of entering some words on my computer, then uploading them to some mysterious place, where they're magically available to anyone on the Interwebz. Look at that, will ya? OK, that was fun. Now what?

Some years later, when I had to give up my day job, I thought I'd use the blog to document my adventures applying for Social Security disability. Since I anticipated this lengthy drama would generate a potentially overwhelming number of notes, forms, phone conversations, office visits, appeals, and possibly litigation, a write-as-you-go blog would be a good way to keep track of everything that happened. My expectations (some, in retrospect, inaccurate) were formed from reading other people's accounts of this process, so putting my experience online for whoever might stumble across it seemed like a way to pay it forward. Or back. Whatever. Besides, it would give me something to do. Then, three weeks later, it was a done deal. A great relief; also, a bit of an anti-climax. Now what?

Since then, I've been nattering on, off and on, to no particular purpose. Does a blog need to have a purpose? There are blogs that do; people who have something to say, or something to sell. I don't. Unlike the paper journal I used to keep, I know blogs aren't private. This is the Internet, after all. Seriously. Thinking you're anonymous on the 'net is like thinking you're invisible because you've got your eyes shut. Still, most of the visits to this site are from web crawlers, and that's probably just as well. I've made the acquaintance of a few truly fine Blogger Buddies who tolerate my Internet ADHD. Speaking of which, there's a lovely Steller's jay on the fence outside my window. I like reading about what my Blogger Buddies have been up to, and I don't mind if they read what I put up here. If I thought I had a significant number of real Readers, well, I just don't think I could stand the pressure.

So why is it, I wonder, that I feel like I should always have something to blog about? A blog post should have a topic. It should be like an essay, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Well thought out. There should be some point to it. Looking back over random previous posts I see these elements may not always be discernible – in fact, they may not always exist – but I always feel like they should.

Can't I just scribble down some random observations about the weather, or about the annoying guy who lives next door, and call it good? That's what I did in my old paper journal. I wrote every day. Sometimes it was two lines, sometimes two pages. Whatever. Why does it have to be such a big deal?

Maybe it's a blog thing. I'm still trying to figure it out.

A Year in Japan

One year ago today we were up early in the morning to take Tuffy to the airport, where she met up with other Seattle JETs, and boarded a flight to Tokyo.

Doesn't seem like it's been that long.

Seems like it's been forever.

She loves Japan. She loves her job (teaching English to Japanese high school students). She took part in some Japanese festivals, attended a couple of k-pop concerts, and did a little traveling around Japan. She had an ATM machine eat her bank book, and managed to do what was required to get it back. She had her bicycle stolen, found, turned in to the police, and eventually returned. Instead of MMA, which absorbed pretty much all her free time when she was here, she's doing judo. She found a dojo where she feels accepted and welcome, even though she's gaijin, and a girl.

Her sensei speaks no English, so she says they communicate using a patchwork of rudimentary Japanese, their common understanding of wrestling, and, when necessary, 'point and grunt'.

She extended her contract for a second year.

I had hoped her blog posts would motivate me to post here more often. That didn't happen. Apparently I can enjoy reading about her life in Japan, without feeling obliged to find something interesting enough about my very ordinary routine to reciprocate. If something exciting happens, I'll blog about it. Or if I feel like it. Whatever.

I'm looking forward to reading about another year in Japan.

Too Many Choices

My usual problem with blogging is coming up with something to write about. Recently, however, my problem has been quite the opposite. I have a list of a dozen or so topics that I thought might be fun. I even scratched together some notes for a couple of them. Since I can't decide which one to do first, I haven't done any at all.

No, it doesn't make sense to me, either, but there it is.

Tuffy just added a couple of posts to her blog, too, so I feel like I need to get off my sorry butt. Not that we're competitive, or anything. In fact, the competition, such as it is, is totally one-sided. I don't think Tuffy is even aware of it. But still.

So I'm going to make up my mind. I'm just going to pick one, and do it. This doesn't count.

It's Working

If a picture is worth 1000 words, Tuffy’s latest photo essay put her 17,000 words ahead of me, blog-wise, so I guess I’d better get cracking. Not that we’re competitive or anything.

Nothing much going on around here lately, as far as I know. Not that anyone would tell me if there was.

I’ve been using some really cool online utilities to tidy up my family history database, a long-term project which is both extremely tedious, and very satisfying, in an OCD kind of way. And last weekend Scarecrow helped me scan some of the documents my brother unearthed in my mom and dad’s house, so I finally get to look at them. A few answers, and a lot of new questions.

I saw the video the library put together from the stuff they recorded the other day. It’s not as horrible as I had feared. Scarecrow looks presentable, and the whippets are pretty darned cute.

A Marmot Moment

Talk about What I Should've Said… I stewed for ridiculous length of time, trying to think of a title for my groundhog's day post. I didn't come up with what I was after until this morning, a day late and a dollar short, as usual. I guess I could've gone back and changed it, but that seems like cheating, somehow.

I do that a lot. I don't mean cheating; I mean not being able to find a word when I want to use it. Long before I had any other symptoms that were clearly MS-related, I had trouble coming up with words. I'd mentally construct a sentence intending to use a particular word, but when I got there, the word was nowhere to be found. It was the weirdest thing.

When I mentioned it to various neurologists, they'd look at me like I'd grown two heads. I've since learned that it's a fairly common cognitive problem among people with MS. So it's not just me.

You'd think it would've really cramped my style as a writer, but fortunately technical documentation for network software uses a pretty limited vocabulary. For anything else, I could usually come up with the word I was after eventually. It just may not happen until the next day. You skip that bit and come back to it later. It could be a bit awkward in conversation, but manageable otherwise. Not a huge problem, as problems go.

But it still pisses me off.

Not Today

Sometimes I open up a text editor to start on a blog post without having any idea what I might write about; just hoping inspiration will happen. Sometimes it does. Usually not.

I feel like whatever I write here ought to tie into MS, somehow. That was, after all, my original excuse for starting this blog. But lately, I haven't much wanted to read about MS, and I sure has heck don't want to write about it. If that's denial, so be it. (Really? Gimme a break!)

I feel kind of bad about turning this into a blog about my family history, although I don't know why that should be. I don't expect my family to be of interest to anybody besides me (and a second cousin of Scarecrow's who shares my obsession with stalking dead people), but nobody is compelled to read about it. If I'm worried about boring my adoring readers, I really need to get over myself.

Tuffy's blog is not turning out to be the source of inspiration I had hoped it might be. Her most recent post went up before I resurrected this blog from oblivion, so it hasn't been the source of much competition, friendly or otherwise. Not that motivating me to run off at the keyboard should be her top priority.

What does that leave? The whippets usually become blog fodder when they've done something odious. They haven't lately, as far as I'm aware, besides inflicting a bit more damage on Scarecrow's left slipper, which was already pretty well chewed. On balance, that's probably good.

When I used to write in a paper journal, with a really nice fountain pen, the excuse to pick up a really nice pen was reason enough to come up with something to write. Sometimes it was a note about the weather, and any birds I might have seen during the day. Sometimes that got me started on other things. Sometimes not. Tuffy has my pens now. They don't seem to be working for her.

Maybe something will happen tomorrow.

Set Me a Good Example

Somehow, I expected Tuffy to be diligent about posting on her blog, and somehow I expected that would motivate me to post on my own. (Not that I'm competitive or anything.)

It's not working.

I suppose I should be glad that she's too busy having real life adventures to sit down and write about them, and I am glad. I am. I don't want to be the needy, nosy parent, and I know she's busy and she has a lot of stuff going on and all that, and that's all good, really. Really really. Neither of us have ever been much for chatting on the phone. There is Skype and it's a fine thing and we've done that a couple of times but I should probably let her know that if she ever wants to, you know, talk, that would be OK. In the meantime, I have to admit that Facebook status updates and photos are a lot more than my parents ever got from me when I was her age.

Scarecrow went out and got a mess of Indian food for my birthday. Not much else planned by way of celebration. But birthdays? Sure, I'll take as many of 'em as the powers-that-be see fit to send my way, and happy to do it.

Catching Up

It's fall, and the leaves are doing that. With the shift back to standard time and the typically gloomy November weather, it starts looking like it's getting dark right after lunch. Scarecrow went out to scoop the dog yard and get the current batch of leaves off the deck. It appears he got carried away, and is raking leaves off the roof and removing a season's worth of compost from the gutters. He'll just have to do it again when the rest of the leaves come down, but he knows that. Won't hurt to do it twice.

I've been reading about what my Blogger Buddies have been doing while I wasn't looking. Honestly, for plot twists, and suspense, and cliff-hangers, authors of fiction have nothing on you folks! Being lazy, I'd always rather read about your adventures than write about my own, and your combined output for the past year or so will keep me in reading matter for a while yet.

Hang Time

It's almost a straight shot from the kitchen, through the living room, and down the hall. At first you just hear the thunder of whippet feet as they rip through the kitchen, then the frantic skratchel of their nails (whippets are hell on hardwood floors) as they accelerate towards the bedroom and gather themselves to leap…
…
……
………

After an improbably long silence they fly from the middle of the hall, through the door, across the bedroom, and 70-some pounds of whippets thump onto the bed. (For whippets, gravity isn't really a law. It's more of a guideline.) If you happen to be in the bed when they do this, particularly if you're asleep, it can be very exciting.

Where was I going with this?

I last posted not quite a year ago. In some ways, it's been a very eventful time. My mom died last January, in June Tuffy graduated from University of Washington, in July she left for Japan, to teach English to high school students, and Scarecrow and I became empty-nesters. In other ways, it seems like nothing much has changed at all. We still have two whippets. They are still thieving, cowardly, and disrespectful (as much as I would like to take credit for this wonderful if painfully accurate description, I got it from Terry Darlington, from whom I also appropriated the term "narrow dog". I am not clever. I admit it. I just steal from clever people). I still have MS. I still have an unhealthy obsession with stalking dead people.

So why now? Tuffy started a blog to record her adventures in Japan. I thought that would be motivation for me to start Howling again (not that we're competitive or anything), but it wasn't. Why now? Beats heck out of me. Really. It does.

Maybe it was because I came across an interesting article, and the only way I could think of to share it was to resurrect my blog. Who knows? An awful lot of bloggers don't have a reason, or seem to need one. Why should I be any different?

Where was I going with this?

Hang Time

It's almost a straight shot from the kitchen, through the living room, and down the hall. At first you just hear the thunder of whippet feet as they race through the kitchen, then the skratchel of their nails (whippets are hell on hardwood floors) as they accelerate towards the bedroom and gather themselves to leap…
…
……
………

I've had this post partly written, in my head, since about the time I put up my last post. I just didn't want to write it. The longer I waited, the more I felt I should write something. I started to feel kind of bad about it. My initial intention of having a blog where I could scribble down the casual observation du jour had become an obligation where I felt compelled to submit a tidily packaged essay. An obligation!

Well, that does it. Time for a blog sabbatical.

I don't know how long it will be. Setting a date for my next post feels kind of obligation-y, so I'm not going to do that. If I'm not back before the holidays, whatever you celebrate this time of year, have a wonderful, festive season.

I'll be back.

Questions I Should Have Asked

I ran across a list of questions I've been meaning to ask my dad the next time we spoke. Nothing of world-shaking importance, no grand questions about life-lessons learned. Truth be told, my dad and I did not often agree on the message to be taken from those life lessons. I didn't expect him to impart great wisdom from the perspective of one who has lived  a long and eventful life. They were mostly just questions that came up when I was rustling around in the family shrub. Why did your dad never tell you what his name was before he came to the United States? What year did you buy the house you live in now? What was the first car you ever bought? I kept putting it off.

Dad died August 26.

It wasn't a tragic sendoff, as these things go. It was not unexpected. He was almost 91 years old. He finally accepted some drugs, so he wasn't in pain. He was home, with his family, the way he wanted. It was time. He was ready. Everybody should be so lucky.

Like most of us, I suppose, he didn't finish everything he meant to do. He was always going to write down what he remembered about his family, but he kept putting it off. He'd get distracted by trying to pin down exactly when the family moved from one house to another, when plus or minus 5 years would have been plenty close enough. He'd go chasing off after details, or get frustrated because he was such a crummy typist, and he never got around to telling the whole story.

Family history is all about the stories, isn't it? I'm not much interested in genealogy. My lineage is not so illustrious that proving it beyond all shadow of a doubt makes any difference to anybody. I don't need three original sources to confirm every detail. I don't agonize over getting every source citation exactly right. I don't really care all that much. I'm just in it for the stories. It's all about stories. It's history, the way it happened to one family. It's getting a sense of ordinary lives, the way ordinary people lived them.

Knowing that Louis Badaillac dit Laplante was born in Sorel, Québec in March of 1680 and died in Detroit in 1703 doesn't really say much about who this guy was, except that he was only 23 when he died. Finding that he accompanied Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, when he went off to found the city of Detroit, one might be tempted to imagine a rather heroic figure. Finding that between that convoy and his eventual demise he was busted a couple of times for "fait la traite de l'eau de vie avec les iroquois" and for "causé un bruit public", he starts to look a little grubbier. Not pretty, maybe, but more like a real person. (Did you know, by the way, that Cadillac had a really big nose? He was nicknamed the Falcon, and often compared — presumably behind his back – to Cyrano de Bergerac. Hey, I read it on the web, so it must be true.) See what I mean? It's all about the stories.

I need to write down what I remember about my dad. As best I can, I need to tell his story. I'm not religious. In the metaphysical sense, I have no idea where he went, or what he's doing now, besides a literal, obvious fact – he donated his body to science. He made arrangements for that years ago. Some med students at UCLA will get a skinny old white male cadaver. They will get to know my dad in considerable detail. In a different sense, he's here as long as someone remembers him. Those stories he told over and over? I should know them well enough by now to be able to inflict them on someone who never got a chance to hear them from the source.

I've been wondering whether this blog is the right place to do that. I initially set it up as a place to dump MS-related stuff. Going off on a family history tangent seems pretty seriously off-topic. I even got as far as setting up a template for a new blog, called "Out on a Limb" (get it? Am I witty, or what?). Then I decided it was a pretty stupid idea. If I had two blogs, I would post even less often on either of them than I do on this one now. Besides, the topic of this blog is whatever I want it to be. Whippets don't have anything to do with MS, as far as I know, and I write about them all the time. So I'll be stalking dead people, and I'll be doing it here. It's too bad, though. The new blog was looking pretty cool.

There's a barbecue/potluck/celebration of my dad's life/excuse to put away large amounts of tequila planned for this weekend at the old home place. I won't be able to make it down for the festivities, but here's the story I would tell if I were there:

So many times when I was a kid we'd ask, "Dad, do you have a ____ <fill in the blank with the most bizarre item you can possibly imagine>?" He'd think for a minute, disappear into his garage, rustle around for a while, and reappear holding said bizarre item.

I thought everybody's dad could do that.

A Moment of Silence

Dad 

27 November 1920 — 26 August 2011

I'm not sure how a moment of silence would work on the Internet, but my dad was not a religious guy and I'm not sure how else one might mark his passing. I'm also not sure how long a moment would last, on the Internet, but I guess we'll find out!

Time Passing

I published the first post on this blog two years ago today. Having recently retired from my day job, my intent was to document the process of applying for SSDI, which I expected to be a long drawn out and frustrating experience. Six weeks later my claim was approved, and I was officially out of stuff to write about. Not having anything to write about does not appear to have held me up much.

I started out posting every day. That lasted about a week. Then it was every other day. Then a couple of times a week. For the last couple of months, posting once a week or thereabouts seems to be a comfortable compromise between feeling obligated to write something, and not having anything to say.

As if to mark the anniversary of the blog by reminding me of its initial purpose, I got an envelope from the Social Security Administration the other day full of stuff about applying for Medicare. I haven't been able to work myself up to look at it yet. It's sitting on the corner of my desk, looking ominous and threatening. I tell myself that applying for SSDI was a lot easier than I expected it to be. Maybe signing up for Medicare won't be that bad. Maybe.

Several times over the last couple of years, we thought my dad was dying. Each time, he defied the odds and confounded the authorities, stubbornly refusing to relinquish the place on the planet he has occupied for almost 91 years. He wasn't ready to go. Now, I think he is.

Spending so much time lately climbing out on limbs of the family shrub, I find myself thinking about all this birthing and dying stuff. I mean, duh? Although I may well think about it differently when I'm confronted with my own imminent demise, at least from this vantage point, dying doesn't seem all that scary. Pain, now, pain is scary. But if you can die without pain, you know, you've got to go sometime. I don't remember being afraid wherever I was before I was born, why should being dead be any worse? Dying is just part of the deal. It's inevitable, and while I guess it's always a little painful for the people you leave behind (at least you'd hope somebody is sorry to see you go), it's not always bad.

Stalking dead people in the parish register of Sainte Genevieve de Pierrefonds from 1782, so many of the burials are for babies only a few days, or months, or years old. Early census records note the number of children each woman bore, and the number currently living. The two numbers were rarely the same. And the record of a baby's baptism sometimes preceded that of the burial of a young mother. That's a different kind of death altogether. Those deaths are tragic. Although I don't know those people, reading about what happened to them makes me sad. And then there's what looks like a hastily-scribbled note stuck in the pages of the register that records nine names, "tué par les Iroquois." That doesn't sound exactly like a peaceful sendoff to me.

For my dad, dying is a process. He's getting ready to go, but in his own time, on his own terms. At home, with family and friends around him. He's not eating or drinking much. He refuses pain meds. He seems to be aware, at some level, of what's going on around him, but doesn't respond much (other than to spit out the pain meds). He likes sitting in the sun in the afternoons. Last weekend, his grandson's new bride brought her viola and played for him. He liked that. He is dying. We will miss him, but this death is not a bad thing.

My dad always said he wanted to live to be 100, and be killed by a jealous husband. I don't think he's going to make it to 100, but who knows? I guess it's still possible that a jealous husband will show up and send him on his way. He would like that, although I'm not sure my mom would be so crazy about it.

Three O'clocks

Must be a good day for bugs. Or maybe a bad day, I guess, if you're a bug. A brown creeper and a red-breasted sapsucker have been working over the tree trunk in front of my window. There were showers last night and it's still damp outside. Bareit's head was all wet when he came in from the yard. I wonder what he was doing out there.

What is it about three o'clock, anyway? At three o'clock in the afternoon, I can barely keep my eyes open. Not that it matters – one of the few cool things about not having a day job is that if I fall asleep at my desk, nobody cares. It's more of a problem at three o'clock in the morning, when I'm wide awake. And thinking about, you know, stuff.

Getting up is not an option. I'd have to wake Scarecrow up to do that, and he does have a day job. It's bad enough that I wake him up a couple of times a night to turn me over; let's not make it any worse. Since I can't toss and turn, I'm not going to wake him up doing that. So I'll just think about stuff.

I didn't have anything monumental, or even all that interesting, to think about. I usually don't. We recently watched The Triplets of Belleville, which is a French animated feature. No subtitles required, even for those of us whose French aspires to inadequacy – there's no dialogue. A synopsis of the plot sounds pretty wacky: a woman helps her grandson grow up to be a bicycle racer. When he is kidnapped, she rescues him with the help of his dog and three women she meets. It's about family and friendship, and what people will do for those they love, and all that stuff. And it has the coolest soundtrack ever! We watched it twice before we returned it, but I want to watch it again. Maybe I'll get it for Scarecrow for Father's Day.

I'm bad that way. I admit it. On festive occasions, Scarecrow usually gets gifts that I want myself. I was going to get him a coffee roaster, but decided that was a little obvious since he doesn't really drink coffee. Ditto the birdfeeder, since he's not much into birds. The DVD I think I can get away with.

I could think about something to scribble on my blog. I could write about waking up at three o'clock in the morning; the implications of having my circadian rhythm reversed, because I'm asleep at the one in the afternoon and wide-awake at the one in the morning. That's the kind of idea that seems pretty clever at three o'clock in the morning.

Later in the day I find it doesn't seem nearly so promising.

Sharing the Pain

Many of the websites I visit and the blogs I read are MS-related. Most of the time, I don't find them all that depressing. For one thing, a lot of the time they're not about MS. These people do have lives, after all. But even when they're writing about MS, reading them doesn't usually make me feel depressed. Yeah, having MS is crummy and I'm sorry that anyone has it. I wish I didn't have it myself, truth be told. I don't like reading that anyone's having a flareup or that their symptoms are getting worse. It might make me feel sad, but not depressed. The other day, however, I ran across a blog that I found profoundly depressing.

It's written by a 19-year-old girl who takes care of her mother. The mother has MS, and is apparently pretty seriously disabled. The girl is torn between loving her mother, and hating having to take care of her. It was not easy reading. It left me feeling really depressed.

You see, everything she has to do for her mother, Scarecrow has to do for me, and more. How could he not hate it?

Thinking about it, I realized I mostly avoid reading caregiver blogs. It's so hard for me to put myself in caregiver shoes, to imagine doing that job. I don't know how they do it. It's just too hard, and it never stops. It's easier for me to deal with having MS myself than it is to think about what it does to my family. I have no choice, after all. They could walk away, but they don't.

I've tried to avoid having Tuffy take on caregiver chores, to the point of hurting her feelings sometimes, I think. I don't want her to feel that she has to stay here and take care of me, instead of living her own life. It's a luxury we have because Scarecrow takes care of me instead. If it weren't for him, my daughter might be the angry young woman writing that blog. Hating herself, for hating her mother.

So, there's that. It took a serious dose of old-timey music, a couple of books with absolutely no edifying content, and some really stupid movies to restore my normal grumpy, cynical outlook on life. Sometimes it helps to share pain. Sometimes shared pain just makes more people hurt, and what's the point of that?

Tomorrow is Scarecrow's first day at Gloria's Books and Adult Day Care. The adventure begins…

You Could Be a Dog on the Internet

There was a piece on NPR the other morning about the difference between your Internet persona and the person you really are. In addition to places like Second Life, where you consciously create an avatar who may or may not be kind of like the real you, there are the tracks you can't help but leave behind in e-mail, IM, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other kinds of e-communication that people use to form an image of what you must be like.

That got me thinking about what I must seem like to people who only know the e-me. What do you reckon? Dour? Sarcastic? Cynical? Not misleading, I'm afraid. That's the real me. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

I've had people tell me I seem shy. I am, a little, but I don't think that's what they're seeing. It's just that my mom always said, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." I frequently don't have anything nice to say. Similarly, I'm frequently rude, although that's not my intention. At least not usually. I'm just oblivious to the finer points of social interaction. I'm not great fun at a party.

So the e-me is pretty much the same as the real me, as unpleasant as that may sound. Or rather, it's the same as the real me used to be. On the Internet, my arms and legs work as well now as they ever did.

Although this blog is all about MS and disability (more than I would like, truth be told), elsewhere on the 'net I probably look pretty normal. Corresponding with people I haven't seen in person since before MS really started to kick my butt, it usually doesn't come up. In most contexts, having MS shouldn't matter. I wouldn't say I'm hiding behind my able-bodied Internet persona, exactly. It just doesn't come up.

As much as I like being able to preserve a part of my life where MS just doesn't come up, it can make meeting people in person kind of awkward.

There is a plan in the works to get together, real life in person, with a couple of people I used to work with. In fact, they were the reason I moved from Michigan to Seattle in 1995. They're both smart, talented, funny, well-read and widely-traveled. They make me feel kind of ignorant and hopelessly provincial. I like them a lot. They have both known I have MS for about as long as I have, but I haven't seen either of them in person for several years. When last we met, I was a lot more capable than I am now. Although we've kept in e-touch from time to time, my physical abilities, or lack of same, just didn't come up.

So when we meet, acknowledging the differences between my Internet persona and the real me will be kind of awkward, but we'll get past it, then Scarecrow will conduct a guided tour of our remodeling project. We'll catch up on the gossip at the places I used to work. Our dogs will convince them that whippets are unmannerly and disrespectful. We'll resolve to meet up again, which may or may not happen. It'll be fun.

Then I'll go back to being the e-me.

Good Enough

Sometimes I read something that just stops me in my tracks. It might be prose so perfect, so beautiful, it's like music. It might be an essay that is so insightful and elegant, so well-written, so much better than anything I could ever do even if I worked at it for a million years, which of course, being a lazy slime weasel, I wouldn't do, that I'm embarrassed to be caught trying.

After I read something really good, I am not inspired to write anything myself. Quite the opposite. It takes a while before I feel like howling again. I can't come up with anything good enough. I don't really have anything much to say, and I'm not that good at saying it. I can't offer knowledgeable comments on events of global import, or pithy observations on the human condition, or erudite analysis of, well, anything. I rarely have exciting events to recount, even setting the bar for 'exciting' pretty low. Nothing momentous or noteworthy. I'm tired of writing about MS (actually, I'm always tired of writing about MS and MS-related stuff; it is, however, a regrettably abundant source of topic material), the dogs haven't done anything despicable (another regrettably abundant source of topic material), and there's nothing much else going on. Just life.

But, you know, it's my life. And I can write about it better than anybody else.

It's good enough.

As usual, somebody else already said what I think I'm trying to say better than I could.

A BETTER VOICE
©1990 Joel Mabus
originally on the album Firelake

Sometimes I wish I had a better voice
to sing my song for you -
A voice so brilliant, rich and clear -
Soaring and gliding through the air,
Hanging the melody in your ear
The way good singers do.
But my voice cracks like a back porch chair,
Growls and groans like a big black bear,
Full of whispers, kinks and snares
And I sometimes miss the key -
But nobody sings my song like me.

(Joel Mabus is an amazing musician, singer, and songwriter from Michigan. If you ever get a chance to go hear him, do yourself a favor…)