If This Was

If this was a real blog...
If I weres a real person...
If I knew how to string a narrative together, "you" that are reading this would have a more distinct time-line of my last 12, 9, 6, 2 months. (Those are about the important increments give or take a month.)
I do not remember if I have made this joke here already, (part of the reason will be apparent in the joke) and as a joke it has only made one person laugh out loud (which is how I knew she was right for me), but here goes (again): "In the last 12 months I might have lost my health, my father, a bunch of friends, my job and my mind, but I gained a stutter and short term memory loss."
Inanycase now you are caught up on months 12, 9 and 6. You also know I am not a real comedian, because someone like Gabe Kaplan would have Groucho Marx'd it and said, "...a stutter, memory loss, and a pickle dressed up as a herring."
But enough about my wife. I still don't have my health, father or job, but starting back 2 months ago I began to get my mind back. Slowly.
If I was a real writer, someone who had the confidence necessary to take solace in the loneliness of the task, I would already have the basis of a nice and informative memoir. I do not believe in memoir, there is to much editing between the head, the fingers, and the page. And I think I know instinctively that the pages I turned out would be solely for me, my edification, and the construction of a brick wall that I could point to instead of the mush that actually happened. The facts by themselves are not interesting, I was sad and I.
When I first began to collapse back in March, I thought, all these 5 years of work and I am knocked back to where I started. I was mostly mad that I had to re-climb but positive that the trip up would be faster then it had been the first time. *
Come May the mountain building was extreme and rather than regaining a plateau or two I was sunk into absolute wilderness. In September I had meaningful tasks put in front of me and I was able to do them and enjoy them.** In the difference between action and inaction I was able to recalibrate my mental health, I was still worse than I was 5 years ago, but I was also occasionally out of the abyss enough to be able to recognize when something caused me to fall back in.
 You only know where you are if you can place it in relation to something. Losing my health, losing my job, these were inexorable occurrences. They made no sense (in logical/polite society) : I had no symptoms leading up to my illness, what I thought was asthma, and it did not respond to the treatment like it should have (because it wasn't asthma, but a chest infection that apparently didn't have other symptoms), and although there were symptoms and signs for my job, they did not match up with words or actions***
My task of finding and buying a house ended in mid September and I had a month of "packing" to fall back into the sloth of despair. Still I knew that I could be engaged and competent in the completion of a task. I had a success by which I could gauge my well-being. And recently, moving, I built on that success in a new shadow free environment where I could come home and not already feel the years of gordon-molder-and-decay.
I felt free leaving Roland. Free moving to a place no one knew me. Even my furniture, my same old shit, had the chance to be reduced, revitalized, reorganized, repaired. (My sloth and stink has crept into this house now partly, but we made some good decision getting rid of the TV is primary, cutting out space for an office, and deciding to bring my books back into the house and put them in one location.
This last thing I dreaded the most. 4 years ago we packed them up thinking they'd stay in storage for a few months while we sold our house and had our baby. and they sat there with mice and poop and 100% humidity and 2feets of snow, and in my mind they became dusty and decayed. And in the crazyness of 2 dogs and 2 babies I convinced myself I no longer deserved them--really no longer deserved the space they took up in our house (same with an office).
I know I am rambling.
I was afraid to go get the boxes, and I was afraid to bring them into the house, and afraid to open them. So far I have only found 1 ruined book out of 10 boxes. And I think there is only maybe one box that might be damaged. That is pretty sweet!
I had a nice time tonight remembering all of these books, seeing the "collections" I had. I thought I would be negative towards all the useless textbooks and crap i never read, but even books i wont ever read again, I wanted to hang onto because they represented a specific time-texture-moment-enjoyment, and I realized those moments will hold value for me down the line.
And I opened them at an odd time, the same week that I found reading again. The past few years I have read, if at all, jealous and angry****. I have pitted myself against books and found myself a failure even within their inadequacies. But this week I have read one book and started another and one is important (Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie) and one might turn out to be (the 24th Parallel by John Dos Passos) but just the consumption of words, turning of pages, and embrace of time spent ticking, has been rewarding.
That is it. That was the point I was trying to get at, through loss and death I have begun to find rebirth in activities I had set aside long before and not as symptoms of my decay.

-G$

*An interesting side note: Around last summer so even before and definitely after I lost my health I was not on firm ideological ground. Choices and ideas that I embraced in my teens and twenties were seeming to no longer have a grounded base holding them up. "Do I still believe that?" "How did I get to that belief" and the reason I asked was, "how do these steadfast ideas mesh,mingle,mix with my new and improving self?" It was not a crisis of confidence, but when that crisis came along with the others I was more ripe for collapse.
**Ironically one task I sought to accomplish right here, the listening to problems and giving of advice. But none of the help I offered (and accepted) was an acceptable topic for a blog.
*** This is inanely imprecise, but knowing the signs and messages in light of the ending, I still can not wrap my firing into a cozy sentence or two. Except perhaps to say, "The shit that used to work, it don't work now." Which makes it more fitting that I got the can 2 weeks after my dad died.
****I have even shopped for books angry, which I am not sure has changed.