We’re All Policemen
One of the stranger things about having been, essentially, continuously sick since the start of February is that I feel as if I feel as if I haven’t really managed to have any downtime, despite the fact that… well, basically the entire time I haven’t been working across the past eight or nine weeks has been downtime in a technical sense. I mean, what else would you call lying in bed, or on a couch, feeling dizzy and unable to do anything that requires focus and attention for more than a few minutes?
Of course, it’s downtime of one kind, but only one. The ability to do any of the many other things that, honestly, I very much would have liked to have managed by this point of the year — a list that includes anything from “doing my taxes” to “going for more walks,” or even simply “watching all of the movies I have on my ‘to watch’ list” — has been absent, and by this point of the calendar, I can feel the pressure of all those ambitions, from small to necessarily larger, weighing on me. It’s gone from, “man, it’s be nice to do something else” to “I really need to do those other things, before it’s too late.” And yet.
The entire experience is, in its own way, an unexpectedly renewing one. I feel appreciative of the small joys of time off (especially when it isn’t, you know, actually free time because tasks and other demands are looming) in a way I wasn’t months ago — mostly because, you know, I miss it — and I feel as if the trial-and-error of “maybe I can do this without feeling bad, oops” has also taught me the value of actually listening to my body and taking a break in a way I probably should have mastered decades earlier. Assuming that there is, at some point, an end to this phlegm-filled project I accidentally and unintentionally signed up for, I might end up looking back on it somewhat fondly in the future as a necessary reminder of my own limits that I’d been ignoring for too long.
Or maybe that’s the Stockholm Syndrome talking.
How Can It Recognize You If You Don’t Step Out Into The Light?
Neverending
It’s a strange thing to realize that, a quarter of the way into the year as we almost are at this point, I’ve spent two out of the last three months basically sick and/or recovering from being sick. As much as I’m tempted to make a joke about this being a sign of my old age and obviously fragile body due to same — an impulse born of the desire to make that joke before anyone else can, because that’s just how uncomfortable I am about being 50 years old — the sad truth is, more than anything, I’m learning the limits of what I can, and can’t tolerate these days and realizing with no small sense of sadness that I just can’t bounce back the way I used to.
To be fair, I was literally told by multiple medical professionals that the virus-that-was-probably-the-flu was something that everyone seemed to have a hard time getting over; when I was at the emergency room, I was given estimates of three weeks, maybe longer — a timescale that basically worked out, except it very much didn’t work out in that it ended just as I headed to Seattle for a week for work, running on longer-workdays-less-rest-and-less-food for that time and watching my health get knocked back as a result.
Things weren’t helped by the fact that there was, apparently, a second, entirely separate headcold running through the staff that probably dinged me as well; I can remember hearing about it from three different people within a five minute period on the second day of the show, each one giving me a different name of someone who’d mysteriously gotten sick the day before with exactly the same symptoms and thinking to myself, oh shit, I’m going to get sick again, aren’t I? (Spoilers: yes.)
There was a point just before I left Seattle where I was bent double over the bathroom sink, unable to stop coughing to the point where I coughed my throat raw and saw blood hit the sink where I thought, do I even remember what it feels like to be healthy anymore? Must be nice, and then immediately imagining myself still asking that question next month, or the month after that.
There has to be more to 2025 than being a plague year, I hope.
The Drawback of the Medical Profession
At the doctor’s office for my physical, I sit in the room and wonder to myself, what if the doctor is just making all this stuff up? Does anyone ever actually check his work?
There’s a reason I’m thinking this beyond simple paranoia, it’s worth pointing out. While doing all the traditional doctor-doing-a-physical things, my doctor was also chatting away, telling me his point of view on anything and everything I happened to ask about, and his views were… well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say “crackpot,” but certainly unconventional. He would happily tell me what supplements he believed were a scam, but also which fruits and vegetables he believed were essentially worthless and should be avoided in any sensible diet — or which diseases were actually great weight-loss tools, for that matter. All of this, delivered in a very friendly, conversational style that somewhat undercut the fact that none of it actually seemed that professional, and then he left the room to go check on something, leaving me to sit there and think, I’m sure this guy is on the level, but what if he’s not?
It left me fully aware of how utterly unknowable all this stuff really is — although, admittedly, I’d be thinking something similar since my maybe-flu brought me to the emergency room where I was all but told, yeah, we don’t know, we can’t help you I guess and sent home none the wiser. There’s a hope we all have with doctors maybe more than any other profession that they fully get it and understand and never make any mistakes but have all the answers, and it’s inexplicable and unfair. Why do they have to be infallible when we’re not? Why aren’t they able to not have the answers, or say the wrong thing, or have weird opinions about why apples are pointless when you really get down to it?
The answer is, of course, we don’t go see doctors when we’re feeling ready to be playful or challenged or have a good back-and-forth about random topics. We go when we want someone to tell us what’s wrong and just know it for sure, because we’re scared and we don’t like the unknown at that point in our lives. It’s got to be hard for the doctors in question, who (just like the rest of us) sometimes will just want to bullshit and say dumb shit and not have to be right all the time.
But when they try, they leave someone in the room thinking, what if the doctor is just making all this stuff up? Does anyone ever actually check his work?
We’ve Got Laser Eyes Focused on You
How Animal Man Changed My Life
I remember, as odd as this is, a point where I was noticing the names of the writers and artists of my favorite comics, but hadn’t quite gotten my head around it all just yet. Paying attention to names started, I think when I really got into the X-Men — a point when I was… maybe 10 or 11 years old, and had decided with the confidence and certainly that you feel at that age that I was collecting comics now, this was a thing I did — and it seemed like a sign of my newfound focus on comics as a thing that I was into. Yet, years later, all of these people whose names I recognized month in, month out (or week in, week out when it came to the British comics) seemed… unearthly. Unreal, somehow. They weren’t real, they were unattainable. They were as fictional to me as Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne themselves.
At some point, in what was apparently early 1988 from looking back at publication dates — I would’ve been 13 at the time — DC house ads started appearing, advertising the upcoming launch of Animal Man, written by Grant Morrison. I knew who Grant Morrison was, having enjoyed his Zenith in the pages of 2000 AD for awhile, but the concept of the same man managing to write both British and American comics broke my brain entirely. That, I decided in my unformed brain, was surely impossible. Far more likely, I deducted, was that there were two entirely separate men both called Grant Morrison who both wrote comics. What an unlikely coincidence, I told myself!
I can’t remember how long I held this impossibly dumb idea in my head; certainly, by the time Animal Man was actually coming out, I’d realized the error of my ways. (There was probably something in an early issue emphasizing that it was, in fact, the same man.) The dscovery that someone from Britain — from Scotland, not that far from where I lived, even! — could write for American comics was something that, in its own way, changed the way I saw the world. Somehow, everything seemed a little bigger, a little more possible. If you could come from where I did and do that, what else could you do, I asked myself?
Hypnotized by the Whirl
There’s a joke, it seems, about the first good weather in Portland after the winter; that it makes everyone in the city overreact, and respond as if they’ve never seen sun before. It’s a recurring bit because it’s true; this year, the first sunny day in weeks if not months — which was also accompanied by some genuine warmth, unusually but welcomely — was greeted by anecdotal reports of parents taking their kids out of school to enjoy it, of people taking time off work to escape to the countryside to take advantage of it, and firsthand experience of people walking past the house in t-shirts and grins, acting as if they’ve somehow escaped true horror and entered a utopia entirely unexpectedly.
I’m one to talk, though; I finished work and walked to the local park, determined to both clear my head of the static of the workday and take advantage of the good weather while it was around,. What I found there was thrilling in ways that I should have expected, but didn’t — the entire place, filled with the cast of characters I hadn’t seen there in months, every single one of us ready and eager to return to a warmer norm where we play our pre-determined roles with enthusiasm and, dare I say, gusto.
There were the dog walkers, with barely-constrained pups thrilled to see each other and be in the same space again; there were the stoners, and the goths, and the skaters, all assembling and quietly conferring amongst their own groups and suspiciously looking at everyone else. There were the dancers, those exuberant and confusing folk who just have to move even though there’s no music to hear, and then there were their opposites, the people who just sit silently and look at the ducks in the pond. There were the joggers, with a number looking dangerously red-faced, and the tree worshippers, and the people who might be having a picnic but there’s no food and so it’s unclear what they’re actually doing…
I’m part of my own group, of course; I’m a walker — one of those people who just like moving through the park at our own rate, watching everything, seemingly restless and purposeless. I do it alone, usually, listening to music and decompressing mentally. It’s a simple pleasure, but a sincere one, and I know I’m just as much a cliche and subsect as anyone else there. That was perhaps what made that particular walk such a joy: the feeling of fitting back into an eco-system I hadn’t even thought about in so long, and of belonging, once again.
More than the weather, that was what made the walk so special. The sense of once again rejoining a larger world outside my front door.
With You, A Dozen A Day
The End of An Era, Again
An unexpected result of the death of Gus is that, for the first time in a quarter century, my ex-wife and I have no reason to be in each others’ lives. It’s a simple fact that I’m sure both of us had considered at some point in the past few years since our divorce with differing levels of… excitement? Eagerness? Regret? Some combination of all three, and countless other emotions all tied into a bundle with twigs and twine? (I know that I was certainly aware it was going to happen, and it seems impossible she wasn’t, given who she is.) Nonetheless, now that the moment has actually arrived, it feels curiously anti-climactic.
There was almost no way it couldn’t, of course; we’d split six years earlier (six and a half, almost), and had worked through the emotions and motions of that separation in the years since — we went from anger and recrimination to something approaching amiable friendship, in large part because we were sharing custody of the dogs (and then, after Ernie died, of just the dog, singular. as if that had always been the case). All of the heavy lifting of what it meant to not be in each others’ lives was done at a time when we were, still, in each others’ lives but to a severely diminished extent; it was easier, that way, and felt kinder in some manner as well. We got to get over being mad of each other, scared of each other.
But now, we’re actually properly out of each others’ lives, after 25 years; half my life, and more than half of her’s. It’s a strange thought, that I probably will never hear from her or see her ever again, after everything we shared and once meant to each other, and a sad one, too, despite everything. It feels as if it’s something I’ll have to get used to, just as I get used to never seeing Gus again. A shift in the world that I’ll have to stumble around until I find my footing again.
When we said our final goodbyes, I walked away and almost felt as if I should look back, to see if she was doing the same. It felt silly, self-conscious and I didn’t do it; thinking back now, I wish I had, for reasons I can’t even start to understand or explain.