I'm on my way.

Everything is off kilter. Everything. It's all knocked around like crazy shit gets knocked around.

I hate it.

Let's see. The list of everything that's akilter is boring, so I'll spare you. It's nothing that sounds that terrible even in the aggregate. It's just a bunch of...

Like, wait. See? Just there? I had to stop writing this because I was overcome with a sudden urge to purchase "Goodbye Stranger" as performed by the almost-elderly group Supertramp and so I stopped and bought it and then got further distracted by the opportunity to acquire a Skid Row EP. Problems. No focus. 

GOODBYE STRANGER, IT'S BEEN NICE. HOPE YOU'LL FIND YOUR PARADISE.

Also? PARK AVENUE leads to SKID ROW. FYI.

Well, that little problem's solved, but I still can't write for shit. I feel stupid all the time. If I've interacted with you in any way in the past two months, I probably feel like an idiot for some reason related to something I said or did or wrote. I can't finish e-mails. I can't make decisions. I am deleting this post in my head right the hell now.

I don't know what happens to my brain. I do know though that after much internal whatever over a whole bunch of different whatevers since the end of August, the other day I was so humiliated in a meeting by someone I generally trust that something further snapped. I admitted to a chorus of agreement that I sucked at something I do routinely in my job, and what it meant when I finally could think again was that (brace for this quantum leap) I am bad at everything. I have no aptitude for what I do. I am a terrible person with no skill whatsoever at interacting with the people I need to interact with daily to accomplish what I am charged with accomplishing.

I wanted to walk out the door and never come back and make good on that continued threat that I really only make to myself to drop out and rent beach chairs in coastal Carolina.

AND I WILL GO ON SHINING SHINING LIKE BRAND NEW. I'LL NEVER LOOK BEHIND ME MY TROUBLES WILL BE FEW.

Cue ironic Supertramp interjection.

If I could sum up this period photographically it would be thus:

Hi, that's my last New York hotel room when I was there a couple of weeks ago. 22nd floor, no screen, and a weird compulsion to jump - I'm Super Girl. I can fly - in spite of zero desire to end my life decimated on the sidewalk.

I know. It's horrible. It's not good. What it is is the truth, and after weeks of not showing up here to dump my thoughts and feelings into this little white box, I feel it's the least I can do.

Good news? I have a little bit. The Washington Capitals bring me joy. I'm spending money I ought not to spend on tickets to home games therefore because it's actually fun to go (Except for when they lose to New YORK, the lowest ranked team in the Southeast, that was AWESOME.) and if there is something I believe is underrated it's fun. I mean, I'm on Twitter, and I read the litany of activities, some of it family/kid-related, some of it personal, and mostly it just sounds like...a litany, which in the Catholic church is basically the repetition of something over and over and over and over until you feel you've reached the end of the list of the saints or the popes or the rosary, whatever it is you're litanying. Fun? Probably not. And no I'm not saying these daily activities can't be, I'm just saying a lot of times it feels more like a list to check off than something genuinely fun. 

I don't like where this is going now. I don't like preaching about fun because if you want the opposite of fun that's probably up there.

THE WRITING'S ON THE WALL.

Anyway, it's not all bad, I guess that's the point. I had what might count as a minor breakthrough yesterday. I have some ideas of things that will make things better. And what's more important is that I had the crystallized idea that I could make things better, that I could change them intentionally and mindfully just by resetting the dials, by rebooting - like my blog friend Leah is doing, but not exactly. I don't have to do what I'm doing. I don't have to stay in the same ill-advised place. That was the old way. It doesn't have to be that way anymore. And my incessant feeling of disconnection to anything - a family of my own, a home, a community - is not so much a destiny as it is a current state of affairs that I don't particularly care for and that in the next chapter I have some say over whether it remains the same or completely, positively changes.

And that's really the heart of the matter, gentle reader. It's not as bad as it sounds. It's actually the best possible outcome of this year of transition and change and pervasive, underlying grief.

Maybe that's why I'm buying the Skid Row ep. Maybe that's why my Thanksgiving plan this year includes a roadtrip and the beach with my family for my uncle's milestone birthday and a week with my college best friend in a southern coastal city. And I'm so counting the days, counting them over and over in my hands. I will be in the sun and the warmth on your birthday, that also happens to be the birthday of two little girls I'll be visiting, who will be high on a trip to Disney and will be all the promise in the world that everyone needs to see. I will not be in the space I'm in that is currently a space of biding time, of not feeling good about where I go at the end of the day.

Maybe that's why I have this and a couple of other numbers on repeat.

Oh, what the hell. Bonus!

Points if you guess which one contains part of my high school yearbook quote. And at which erstwhile lead singer's concert I broke my dress this summer while making a completely overaged fool of myself but having such a good time I didn't give a DAMN. Lord, will live and die a closet groupie.

I think sometimes I have to go back to go forward, and right now in my mind a lot of the time I'm in a concert parking lot with a pint of Jack Daniels in my jean jacket pocket, looking over the next 20 years, looking at a few forks in the road where although I went left now I have new ones and a chance to go in a different direction.

It can be worse than that, is all I'm saying.

Comments

[Stimey]

It sounds like you've been doing a lot of good thinking, which is important. It's really difficult when you're stuck in that bog. I hope you're able to make the changes you need to and find the happy and the good. And the fun.

[Sarah, Goon Squad Sarah]

That settles it.

We will go to more hockey games.

It might not actually solve any problems but it sound really fun.

[Zandria]

You need changes, my friend. Big changes. Life is too comfortable and it's too much the same and it's making you crazy.

(I'm totally up for more hockey games, too, by the way.)