“And what does a pretty lady need with this much olive oil?” he asked, sliding the giant jugs to the counter.

The cash register beeped.  $33.99 (1), (2).

I’m making soap, I told him, and smiled a little, choosing to ignore the pretty lady comment, since I’d just watched him flirt with the ancient woman who’d checked out before me.  He’d called her pretty, too, and I know a schtick when I see one.

“Soap!” It was more of a bellow than an exclamation.  Maybe a little of both.  “Soap with this oil?  This is good oil, for the eating, not for the cleaning!”

I told him that it’d make better soap then.  The kind I could give to only the people I like a lot, instead of the regular stuff that was from inferior oil.

He laughed.  Got a box for the three-gallon-jugs, and told me stories of Palestine.  Of places where they make Nabulsi in the traditional way, with only olive oil and water and lye, cured on slabs of concrete that have been worn smooth by the curing soap.  Slabs as big as a house. Cut, by hand, into rough-looking bars that are so mild and natural that you can use them on your hair.

I watched his eyes while he spoke.  The way they softened and shone with pride.  It’s the best soap in the world, he said, and touched my hand.   You make that kind of soap?

I shook my head.  I fancy mine up with avocado oil and cocoa butter and colors and scented oils.

He patted my hand.  Whatever you make, it’s keeping you beautiful.  Don’t change a thing.

The young man behind the deli counter rolled his eyes.  I laughed and followed him to the car, as he insisted carrying the sixteen pounds of extra virgin olive oil for me.

And all the way back, I thought of seas of white, uncut soap on concrete, and tradition, and the tiny connections that make a place home.

The sunsets here are beautiful.  Orange, pink.  Fading with an inexorable, unbearable slowness to blue and black.

Another day.

Gone.

*  *  *

A while ago, I screwed something up.

We’re not talking some little thing that’s easily fixed.  We’re talking something big, something involving other people and a couple core parts of myself, too.  Something easily fixed, sure (most things are, really), but the fading of it, the moving from the orange-pink glow of day to the enveloping blackness — it’s hard.

Really, really hard.

The kind of hard where you wonder if you’re the same person.  The kind of hard where you know that not only are things going to be the same, but they’re going to be irritatingly the same.  You know better; you know different.  You are different.

Different, but wrapped in the dusk of Really Bad Choices.

Lessons learned.

*  *  *

Is it wrong to wish we’d never met?

Don’t answer that; I know.

*  *  *

There’s a scene in Lilo and Stitch, as ridiculous as it is to be thinking about Disney movies at a time like this, where Stitch is in a small wooded clearing, trying to read a book about a lost duckling, and he looks up at the sky and says, in the saddest little monster-voice, “I’m lost.”

I cry every time I watch that movie, at that scene.  Even though I know it all turns out for the best — that this little blue imaginary monster finds his family and all is well — I still cry.  Every. single. time.

I get it.

And I’m starting to wonder if there’s a me to be found.

Just over six months ago, I sat here, in frigid temperatures, coffee in hand, talking to a friend until my phone nearly died on me from all the time spent caffeinating in the dark.  There were piles of dirty snow and wet December streets, and my hair smelled like mangoes and pink grapefruit.

I remember thinking this was a strange olfactory dichotomy.

Nothing about me was healthy then.

I remember also thinking that if I could just give it a year, it would all sort itself out, as it all tends to do.

Faith, I thought.  Have faith.  In what you feel, in what you know to be true.

Three days later, I strapped on the high heels and loaded the office into a bag and took off for parts unknown, for reasons unknown.

I took the drugs that poisoned the cells that made me all yellow and tired, printed a boarding pass, took a deep breath.

I jumped.

I always do.

To be honest, it was about time.

I don’t even know where “home” is anymore.  Does it exist? Is it where your heart is?  Is it where you grew up, have roots, have connections to things larger and more deep than your Self?

Or is it where you’re planted, where you grow out instead of up?  Where you put your heart, where it’s cared for, where it’s needed?

All I know is that I sat here, just over six months later, wondering how it had ever been half of the time I allotted.  Amazed that the lack of snow and streets was replaced by puddles and steam from the day’s heat, drinking the same coffee, and looking at the phone, thinking that maybe a little reaching out was needed.

Six months, a day.

It seems like forever, and no time at all.

So much has gone on, so much is going on, so much is coming down the pike.

Another year.

Can I be happy now?

Life.  In motion.

I took this the other day (Tuesday?  Wednesday?  Last week sometime.) on accident, on my way out the door.  I was checking the backside of the phone for lens grime before shoving it in my bag, and managed to click the dealie while walking out of the bathroom.

I kept it, though, because it looks like motion.  Like there’s a story waiting to be told.  Like I’m in action.  (Which, of course, I was.)

Like I told some friends the other day, sometimes it feels like I’m made of stories.  Some haven’t been written yet, some have started and faded to inconclusion, and some are long since complete.

I’m hoping for a happily ever after instead of a stark the end.

* * * *

There are people who live in my head.

Some would say this is a sign of Impending Crazy(tm), which it probably is.  (Don’t most writers end up going nuts and walking into the sea with rocks in every pocket?)  Entire towns of people, each with a Story, each with a past and a future and a little normal life, all going about the day-to-days of living until one of them has a story to be told.

Outside of my head, I’ve lived a lot of life.  Like, all caps LOT OF LIFE, even.  More life than a lot of people ever venture out into.

It’s that living that’s always kept me from writing fiction, but kept me moving forward.  Trying to experience just a little more, understand a little more, figure out what makes people tick so I can know enough to write something worth reading, or, to bastardize Wilde, have a life worth writing about.

For the past three days, when it’s quiet and my arms are moving and my back’s aching and I’m schlepping giant thirty-pound pans of brightly-dyed yarn from one table to another, my mind’s been telling me a story.  It’s not my story.  But one of those people, born in my head, won’t be quiet.

I keep living tiny little fragments of someone else’s story.

(And if that came out of the mouth of anyone other than a writer, I’d totally call the guys in white.  Other writers’ll get it, though.)

What’s bothering me about it is that I’m not getting the whole story.  I’m not getting the why or the how, just the big The End, and I’m empathizing too much.  I twist up skeins in my life and feel this other, imaginary woman’s ending.

One day, it’ll all make sense.

*  *  *

I feel like, at some point not long ago, I was standing at the end of a very long hallway.  At the end was an alternate ending, cellphone in one hand, his head in the other.  And despite my knocking knees and a heart that was threatening to beat its way out of my chest with the nerves, I looked back over my shoulder at the life I’d built for myself and weighed it against the very narrow prospect of building something entirely new…and took a step forward down the interminable hallway toward what Could Be, versus what Was.

I knew, as I took the steps and waited for him to look up at me, to see I was coming, how it would end.  I knew even then that it wouldn’t be pretty.  At least, not for a while.

You take the hand of Fate, and sometimes, he makes you stand in the fire until all the other, old chains burn away.

And in the end, you have your own story.  Fate has other places to be.  He only promises you your own story; everything else is up to you.

Is five minutes worth a lifetime, even if they’re a really, really good five minutes?

Or is it better not to know what you don’t have?

The unexamined life may be worth nothing, but I’m thinking now that the knowledge of what I don’t know can make a crack in me that’s so wide it might never seal back shut.  I’m bigger now; I don’t fit back in the skin I had before, in the life I had before.

My knees are just too wobbly and new.

And Fate, having finished his coffee and having pushed me into this new place with the Vision Of What Could Be, has moved on.

I’m not sure why I didn’t turn and run.

*  *  *

(And no, I haven’t been drinking.)

*  *  *

Less figuratively, I’m six designs in on The Project That Must Not Be Named.  Both my pinkies are numb from all the knitting, but if this Project comes together the way I think it’s going to, it’s going to rock.

In addition, the new solar ovens I built last week are working like a freakin’ charm on the Intention Yarns.  All of a sudden, I went from being capped at about a 200-skein-a-day capacity to being able to easily do five times that by myself.  When there are minions helpers, and when I get some more counterspace, so to speak, we could probably double even that.

And it’s green.  Like, way green.  Like, uses no external power for anything during the whole process, green.

I may be all smooshy and questioning a bunch of things, but at least I’m doing my part to help the stewardship of the planet.

I’m kinda excited, can you tell?

*  *  *

The other day, at the Big Omaha conference here in, well, Omaha…Jason Fried was one of the guest speakers.  (Jason Fried, by the way, is the 37Signals guy — the people behind Basecamp and such, for those who don’t know.)  He said something that made my eyeballs quiver.

Inspiration, he said, has a shelf life.  When you get an idea, act on it, and act on it now, before it’s past its expiration date.

(Paraphrased.  But you get the point.)

I have four billion ideas every day.  I’m exaggerating.  But ask poor Adminnie — I have a *lot* of ideas.  All the time.  In the shower, on the bike, petting the dog, squirting dye on white yarn…doesn’t matter.  They just happen.

It’s frustrating, then, to be one person, with one set of 24 hours in a day, and only two hands.

People constantly tell me that they don’t know how I do so much.  And the fact is, I don’t do any more than anybody else in this world does.  I just tend to act before the expiration date of the original inspiration,  get other people involved, and hand it all off so I can act on the next one.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere for me.  I’m just not sure yet what it is.

Maybe that’s a story I’m still writing.

Slowly, I’m learning.

I’m learning that there’s truth in the statement Life is not a race to be won. That Life, capital L, is an often-meandering journey, made for us to notice, observe, and learn from.  It’s work, but it’s also slow, sunny afternoons with budding trees and a persistent wind from the South, and warm dogs that lay on your feet until they boil.

It’s more than a to-do list.

*  *  *

Things continue falling in place for The Project this summer.  I need to clean up some things here first, but the prospect of six weeks Away has given it all a purpose again.

I’ve talked to so many people already in the area where The Project is taking place that I already feel like I know it a little bit.  I listen to the music, watch the travel movies they send, read books and historical accounts, and generally find context for things I haven’t seen yet, but will.

I can’t wait.

*  * *

This weekend, I have four days by myself.  This house seems a little bigger without the endless parade of stiltwalkers and Crazy, but I think I can handle that.  A break from the Crazy isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Time to take a breath, evict some dust bunnies, clean out the refrigerator.

Or just sit in the back yard, under the waving trees with their green-swollen branches, and enjoy the wind.

I’d bet on the latter.

For a while now, the focus word for my whole entire life has been synthesis.  (Well, that and change and omgmovetoNCnowplzkthxbai, but we’ll narrow it down to just the one word for today’s bloggy purposes.)

Synthesis, or rather, the lack thereof, has been a recurrent theme in my life.  Not so much from a negative connotation of such, but as a constant, nagging thought — why am I constantly attracted to/obsessed with such seemingly disparate things?  I’ve said it before, but I have this deep envy of people who have One Single Thing they love more than everything else in the world, and know exactly what it is that they’re supposed to do with that great love.  I don’t have that.  I have a ton of things I’m reasonably good at/versed in/knowledgeable about, but no one, overriding passion, per se.

By the same token, I’ve been a little frustrated with that fact sometimes.  I fight this propensity with undue effort and energy.  (Which, I’ve found, often has the effect of screaming at the sun for being so sunny.  This screaming has what purpose exactly? Oh, right.  Venting.  That’s about it.)  I think, wistfully, about giving everything up and moving to a mountain cabin somewhere and never having another interest again.   (Which, by the way, would last for about four seconds, until I started collecting wildflowers or rocks or something and turning them into tourist-gift earrings or writing serialized sonnets about flora and fauna.  I’m constitutionally incapable of being still for too long.)

So I was sitting here on Friday night, up later than I’d intended thanks to some ill-advised Starbucks earlier in the evening, and making a list of all the weird stuff I’m obsessed with.  Not just passing obsessions or interests, but the things that I’ve followed for some time, or are core beliefs, or that I’m  relatively competant with (which don’t drive me batshit insane to do for extended periods of time).  The short list looked kind of like this:

• Writing – blogs and articles and books and crazy emails at two a.m. and stories about perfumes and imaginary people.  I’m probably forgetting a type or two.  But I write.  A lot.
• The yarn thing.  Making it.  Knitting it.  Dyeing it all purdy so that other people can have a yarn thing, too.
• Media.  Old, new, doesn’t matter.  I’m obsessed with the medium being part of the message.
• Travel.  Like, road trip travel.  I did not name this site moderngypsy, back in 1996 (!!!),  without a reason.  The lure of and desire for the open road, despite my simultaneous need for roots, is strong within me, Luke.
• Related:  The concept of Place as a character in our stories, be that fiction or real life.  It’s what spawned and developed the next one.
• Community, and the way it’s formed, nourished, and interacts with itself, whether from an infrastructure point of view or a societal one.
• Journal-keeping/art stuff/the recording of days.  Which probably falls under “media”, above, but is out there enough on its own that it bears a separate bullet point.
• Faith, and the belief that none of any of this is by accident.  Call it grand design or call it being called or call it leaping without looking and hoping there’s a net somewhere before the big splat.  Whatever.  Concept’s the same.

I’d found a book I wrote back in 2001 that I never did publish as a book.  (I separated it out chapter-by-chapter and gave classes online and off instead.)  While flipping through it on Friday, I remember having the thought, Wow…this isn’t half-bad….I should totally write another book.

Because, you know, I have so much free time.  Ahem.

Synchronicitally (my word — made it up.  Tell Webster.), I found my travel journals from the Every Fifth Rest Stop project of 2005 –when I drove from Iowa to Baja to Seattle and back to Iowa, stopping at every fifth rest stop, rain or shine, day or night, and drew something from the area and wrote commentary — and had the same thought.

AT THE SAME TIME (wow…this is beginning to sound like neck and armhole shaping on a knitting pattern, isn’t it?), I was looking at a friend’s site, who happens to be an amazing knitwear designer.  She does these series things — patterns that are all related and serialized and follow a nice little theme for the month/year/whatever.  And I was thinking that something like that would be really, really fun to do.  Restrain the creativity just a tad, within a certain context, and let it all fly.  Because, again, I have EverSoMuch free time to even knit, much less do a series, right?

AND (I know, bear with me here), right about THAT SAME MOMENT….I get an email from Travelocity that mentions a particular destination for cheap-ass airfare, with one of the “Related Attractions” being a road trip I’ve been wanting to take since the minute I heard about it.  A destination with a ton of history, steeped in Americana (which I’m also totally into — kitsch and history tend to overlap, and I love that.), and accessible all of a sudden.  There’s a whole community aspect to it, too, and that whole sense of Place thing that I mentioned, and and and….

Okay, seriously folks.  Do I need a divinely-inspired Clue-By-Four, or what?  There were more little “coincidences” over the next few minutes.  Maybe I was just seeing them because I had that filter on the ol’ blinders, or maybe I just finally had my eyes open to what was going on around me.  Something.  It doesn’t matter, really.  The fact is:  it was all just too convenient, too coincidental, too perfect to be an accident.  As things usually are when they’re the Right Thing To Do.

Over the next several hours, everything started coalescing in my head.  Congealing, even, despite the fact that the word congeal makes me squick on about a thousand levels.  But that’s exactly what it did — it congealed into this Project.  This small-but-huge Project that brings in just about every single aspect of what’s interesting to me, which I now have to hope will not only remain accessible, but also be interesting to any other human that doesn’t live inside my head.  And that I’ll be able to get it OUT of my head when the time comes.

I have faith.  (Or, as one friend put it, God doesn’t ask you to the prom if he doesn’t think you’ll look good in the dress.  I love my friends.)

Today’s been all about the research.  I need to know, not IF it’s going to happen, but WHEN it’s best to make it happen.  I’ve been reading the histories and scrawling out ideas.  That picture up there is the mindmap at seven a.m. — it’s four pages now, not including notes.

(just as a sidenote?  Just now, while writing this?  Another email from Travelocity with an even lower price for airfare to my destination.  I kid you not.  I called Adminnie in here to look, because I thought maybe I was losing my mind and hallucinating, or someone had laced the starbucks with hallucinogens.  But no, it’s right there in the inbox, staring back at me and laughing in a faintly-divine-sounding voice.)

What started as a random collection of ideas, thoughts, and competencies have all been thrown into this giant melting pot, and have indicated a desire to come out the other side.  To synthesize, and finally work together.

It’s about time I could finally see what’s in front of me.

A few days ago, I stood here in the rain, head thrown back.

Tiny pinprick raindrops were curling my hair and washing the day from my face.  I could smell the green in the air; the smoke from a distant fire.  One of the last cool days before Spring shrugged in from that place Spring goes when it’s not here.

And I thought, maybe this is what home feels like.

*  *  *

“Death jogs our minds about what’s most important.  It separates wheat from chaff.  Life isn’t about money and big hourses or fancy cars and titles.  It’s about family and friends and our relationship with God and whether we love.  We can’t fit all that on a tombstone, so we carve our names and our dates of birth and death and hope that, somewhere between those two dates, life was well lived.”

For Everything a Season
Phillip Gulley

It’s become clear to me that the seasons are changing.  The metaphorical season and the physical season, chapter and verse.

There’s so much I don’t talk about, which, I’m sure, seems a little surprising, given that an entire internet’s-worth of people knows all about the intimate workings (or non-workings, as the case may be) of my boobs.

Someone, in an interview, asked me how I decide what to keep public and what to hold private, and at the time, I answered that I told my stories, unless it was someone else’s to tell.  Which is true, in a way — but I’m becoming more and more aware of a line, and the things I keep behind that line are the ones that tend to bother me the most.

When you talk to the world about everything, who do you talk to about the world?

*  *  *

I’m heading to Charlotte today for some goodbyes.  I’ve stayed longer than I meant to in North Carolina.  There are sites to administer and products to develop and markets to explore and search engines to optimize.  (heh.)  I’ve been here long enough to have taken some time in the planning of things, so I can execute what will amount to a tactical strike when I get back to the farm.

I didn’t plan for a period of downtime, and I’m thinking I should have.

This one, this season, may require a little grieving.  A little thought, a litle processing, a little balance.

Someday, I’ll tell the story of how the sun shone and the winds blew and the silence broke everything wide open.

Until then, I just fly home.

Until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky
Until the ocean covers every mountain high
Until the dolphin flies and parrots live at sea
Until we dream of life and life becomes a dream

I have so much to say.

I just don’t have the words.

*  *  *  *

Did you know that true love asks for nothing
Her acceptance is the way we pay
Did you know that life has given love a guarantee
To last through forever and another day

I’m back in North Carolina, in the world’s weirdest hotel room (and by “weird”, I mean, “really crappy in a near-the-airport-kinda-way”), by myself.

Again, I was looking forward to the alone time.  Preparation time.  Thinking time.  Time to look for houses and figure out what’s going on in my life and in my head.

I need that time.  I don’t get that time at home — there are dogs and Adminnies and friends and boys and a host of craziness that parades in and out of my space.  I’m scheduled to the gills, barely stopping to breathe.

Here, I breathe.

And in between those breaths, I find a lot of empty space.  And not in the good way one thinks of empty space, either.  I find empty. Big empty.  Big, scary empty.

And I look at it. Stare it in the face, and wonder:  am I really such bad company that without distraction, there’s nothing left?

*  *  *

As today I know I’m living but tomorrow
Could make me the past, but that I mustn’t fear
For I’ll know deep in my mind
The love of me I’ve left behind, because I’ll be loving you
always

I’ve known for some time now that I’m in a Seeking phase.

A friend told me tonight on the phone that I have a typical MO — things fall apart, and I finish the job, so to speak.  I raze and burn what’s left of my life, probably from figuring that starting from scratch is easier than trying to work around the messes I’ve made.  (I added that last part.  His assessment was more of a “be kind to yourself”, but the razing-and-burning is probably more accurate than platitudes.)  I get rid of everything I own, extract (and distract) myself from whatever’s going on, and I move, geographically.

He told me that there’s probably more to it than I’m aware of, which is probably true (though, I have to say, that I’m not a huge fan of psychology.  I think a lot of the whole shebang we call therapy’s just common sense, and if we weren’t all so freakin’ disconnected from each other and the world around us, we would probably be a lot better equipped to handle our own minds.  No offense intended toward the people who study this kind of thing — it’s fascinating and admirable to want to help people.  I just have a different religion than that of the absoluteness of the mind.)

Ack.  Digression.  Go figure.

What I was saying before I went off into left field somewhere is that yes, there’s probably more to it than just what I think it is, but here ’tis:  I go through cycles.  I’ve been noticing them more for the past year or so.  Some of them are short cycles (moods and such), and some of them are longer-reaching, lasting months or years or decades.  (Like the one I talked about in a recent podcast, actually — the whole acquisition/release cycle with my current obsessions.  That’s a longer cycle.  A year or two of amassing everything I think I need for a particular thing, and another year of ditching it all, which I think I’ve talked about here before…)

Sometimes these cycles are from internal things and other times, there’s an external stimulus that kicks one of these things into a new rotation.  This time, I think, it’s the move.

I need to get out of Iowa.  I know this.  And I was so sure, for the last five years, that I wanted to be back in Seattle.  Then I wasn’t so sure.  Then I changed my mind and fell in love with something — somewhere — else, and my brain went into one of those Other Cycles.

I’m questioning everything now.  I’m butting up against parts of me that I didn’t question before.

And, frankly, it kind of sucks.

*  *  *

We all know sometimes lifes hates and troubles
Can make you wish you were born in another time and space
But you can bet you life times that and twice its double
That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed

Thus, the Big Empty.

The spaces between breaths, the quiet seconds before I fall asleep, the times I pause to look up at the sky and wonder what’s next?

I feel, honestly, like a shell sometimes, just waiting for the What Next to tell me what I’m supposed to be doing.  I go through all these motions, follow the formulas, answer the emails — but I’m looking for it.  For meaning, maybe.  For the next step.  For the reason I’ve been led here through a thousand little coincidences to a place (metaphorically and literally speaking) where I’m tied to a life that fits and doesn’t, all at once.

And when I’m really quiet, I know what I need to do.

I just complicate it all with I don’t knows and emotional smoke.  But really, if I’m honest with everyone involved, I may need to just own up to my own commitments and give up the seeking.

Forget the thousand little coincidences and the thousand little decisions that brought me here.

Cowboy up.

*  *  *

Until the day is night and night becomes the day
Until the trees and seas just up and fly away
Until the day that 8×8x8 is 4
Until the day that is the day that are no more
I’ll be loving you always.

Someone close to us passed away today.

It’s cost-prohibitive to go home early, which isn’t helping the…well, honestly… guilt I’m having about being here.

It’s just one more reason.

Facing this loss of someone I liked very much, I’m reminded again that everything is so, so temporary.

I wish I could see tomorrow.  Read the last page of this novel.  Know where I’ll be and how it’ll end.

Maybe I need to just stop whining about what I want, and write the ending the way it should be.

It just breaks my heart a little more than I can bear yet.

(lyrics are, of course, Stevie Wonder’s “As”)

My life for two days now, in black and white to avoid giving many spoilers.

It’s all the yarn for the IY club’s first shipment (well, a portion of it.  The whole room is filled with columns of wool, all dyed the same.  And no, it’s not black and/or white. :>), and just a peek of some soap that’s curing on the table, waiting to be put on the drying shelves.

It’s been a good couple days of completion around here.  Things are, in fact, getting done.

I really like that.

*  *  *

There’s a ton of things swirling around the brainpan.  This is what happens when I’m forced to physically be still for any length of time — my brain takes up the slack and ends up wearing me out more than if I’d run a marathon.

They probably make a pill for that, don’t they?

Kidding, kidding.

* * *

There’s too much negativity in this world.

(This, coming from the woman who can complain about anything on a dime.  I admit my own contribution to this problem.  Just sayin’.)

When complaining and snark are seen as “funny”, I’m not sure there’s all that much keeping me from throwing out the television and living on a mountain somewhere with my happy sheep and even happier dogs. And it’s everywhere.  Gossip and tearing each other down and obsessions with lives of people we don’t know and, thus, can’t change.  I don’t get it.

Are we all really that unhappy?

Sometimes, it’s confusing being a part of this world.

I went to bed early.  The dogs were going all Sominex on me, laying on my legs and feet, and snoring and emitting some kind of crazy sleep-enhancing drugs from their unconscious pores, and who am I to resist the lure of Dog Sleep?

It’s powerful stuff, that Dog Sleep.  Resistance, futile, you know the drill.

I almost made it, too.

*  *  *

The past few days have been challenging in a whole lot of ways.  Rewarding.  Happy.  But challenging.

I know I talked a little about the evil infection of evil in my chest last week.  They gave me horse pills and told me to rest (hush, Minnie.), and after a few days, they said, the infection would go away.

A few days later, when my fever was 102 and climbing, they said that perhaps we just needed some heavier guns.  Gave me bigger antibiotics.  (Which were, ironically enough, smaller than the first ones in size.  Go figure.)

A couple days after that, when my fever broke through again, and I was exhausted, I went back to the office (to which, incidentally, I can now drive in my sleep), where they took a look, poked at the weird red places, pronounced it Not Good, and X-rayed me until I thought I might actually glow.

Turns out the infection isn’t just a staph infection.  It’s a streptococcus and staph infection.  Like, the Dastardly Duo of infectionworld.

And, even better, it had moved into my actual chest cavity, where it’d made a cyst-like mass near my left lung, which was, presumably, compromising my ability to process oxygen.  (Go figure.)  I’d noticed the Big Tired, but no shortness of breath or blueness of lips (which I would have totally taken as A BIG FAT SIGN, mind you), so I had no idea.  I knew that my chest hurt.  I knew that (avert your eyes now if you’re squeamish, by the way)…it was draining all ickylike.  But I didn’t think it was all that serious.  Kinda thought it was just part of getting better from the Big Evil Infection Of Doom, actually.

I’ll spare the goriest of the gory details.  But they sent me to a place with very big needles and a guy with very cold hands and a lot of lidocaine, who jabbed a Very Big Needle through my chest.  Drained a bunch of really disgusting stuff that was living on my body’s figurative couch, eating my food, and leaving dirty socks on the floor.  He essentially evicted a really bad roommate, with a giant needle and a “Oh, this might pinch a little.”

(Lie, by the way.  It did not pinch.  It felt like someone was stabbing me.  Which they were, really.)

I started feeling better pretty much right away, however.  Part of that might have been the drugs they injected in my hip after the fact.  I claim ignorance of the way the body works.

Either way, the new-found oxygen was fabulous today.  I had more energy today than I’ve had in at least a week, but didn’t know that I didn’t have.  (I knew the coffee wasn’t working.  Kinda thought I’d built up an immunity to Starbucks, actually.  But nope — was that whole not breathing right thing.  Go figure.  Who knew oxygen was good for you?)

*  *  *

I bought tickets to fly away at the end of this month.

I was trying to make it through until at least mid-April, but I couldn’t do it.

I’m strong.  I’m just not that strong.

*  *  *

The clock was ticking in time with my heart earlier.

I was laying in bed.  Early, like I mentioned.  And the clock next to me kept time with my heart, which is, despite being irradiated and drugged and infected and poked/prodded, still beating.  Thankfully.

For half an hour, I lay there, looking up at the godawful acoustic ceiling and trying to will my eyes to shut.  (I blame oxygen.)  The wind has been picking up all night, after what passes for a near-Spring day, and I just could not make the brain stop.

I’m surrounded with the most amazing people.  People so amazing, in fact, that I wonder what in the hell they need with the likes of me.

Sure, I can be amusing.  I bake a wicked pie.  I’m smarter than your average turnip.  But compared to some of these people I’ve been around lately, I’m like the dorky kid in every bad teenage movie from the ’80’s.  Flolloping along behind the hero/ine and acting as a combination of comic relief and confidante, until finally finding some equally-dorky cohort to ride off into the sunset with.

Or maybe we all feel that way, and inside, we’re all the dorky kid with a pocket protector, playing heroine in everyone else’s perception.

Some smart person said once that we’re all the hero of our own stories.  But I think she got it wrong.  I think that we may be heroes, but only in everyone else’s stories.  To ourselves, we’re just us:  bumbling along and making it up as we go.

*  *  *

I should sleep.  Or at least go stare at some more acoustic ceiling and listen to the rhythms of dogs-breath and clocks.

I just wanted to check in.  Tell you what was up.  Babble incoherent philosophy from the Land of Dorks ‘r’ Us.

Someday, I’ll have it all figured out.