#Cooks Up a Wrong is Heuksa Chorong thank you Google Voice

[woonietune]

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, for I was only wiping countertops with my left hand and weeping into my collagen supplements, not being dissected by first-years at the medical school

Lots of catching up to do. I haven’t posted in a while. I got sick. I mean, I know I’m always getting sick, but this time I got so sick that I lost a lot of the use of my right hand. I couldn’t pick up one of my fluffy chickens without the owies--and I have a high pain threshold. I thought maybe I was having a stroke--or a bad case of hypochodria but once those things were ruled out, no one knew what it was. It wasn’t Covid. It wasn’t some weird autoimmune thingie (as of yet--I suspected that--but it wouldn’t be that). Maybe my allergies had evolved into some Godzilla version? I couldn’t sweep a broom across the porch. The inflammation was so bad I couldn’t wear my rings, and worst of all, I couldn’t type. 

I couldn’t get an appt with my PCP for three months (because this is the way things are in the USA in a state where Bobby Fuck U Jindal let five private insurers compete for Medicaid clients and basically set into motion the now standard Republican model of Let Disabled People Die Who Needs Them). Anyway, I did see a nurse practitioner who sent me to get x-rays in one hospital and to get bloodwork in another--and the results came back that there was nothing wrong with me. I was reporting pain 8/10 but was told to take Tylenol and that the doctor would see me in three months.

That was back in December? I don’t think I’ve gone ever without writing for 3 months. I paid out of pocket for some acupuncture (never had it before--it was cool beans) and got some relief; I adjusted my diet, already vegetarian to as sanctimonious a vegan, anti-inflammatory diet as I could manage, and I felt a little better. I used Google Voice to chat with fandom friends. Google Voice told of the adventures of Dog Food, the great warrior, and Wound, the former assassin of Cooks Up a Wrong, and I was miserable. I wanted to write. Writing was my only real down time. Without it, my brain was in the wilderness.

During my no-writing period, I had two ear infections, my therapist gave leave, the family got mild Covid infections (during which time my arm felt oddly better), and I knew instinctively I had to rest. I picked up a heavy detergent bottle and got the owies bad the next day, so I let the house go to hell. I spent a lot of time lying in a dusty room I couldn’t clean (this was before the maid from Hell--I’d never hired a maid before in my life, but when I did, whoever hexed me made it so I got one that made already made beds and put the flat sheets under the fitted sheets, didn’t wash the cleaning foam out of the bath-tub, left large swaths of rug unvacuumed, broke several little minatures--I superglued them back but STILL--and left the kitchen floors grimy and put an envelope marked IMPORTANT on the kitchen in a super secret place among a bunch of bookshelves), and I let my mind wander the way it had when I was twelve or so....

Why am I trapped in this consciousness? Why can’t I be in the mind of that person or that other person? Or why can’t assume the presence of a tree or a cloud? Why am I me? And did I choose to be me? And where am I going? 

Agnosticism on any issue was the default, and if I wasn’t writing, it wasn’t only my right hand that was hurting, it was my brain. It hurt from awareness.

The maid from Hell cleared away some of the dust in the house (not much), but mostly she kicked my head out of its dusty sophomoric philosophizing. I was so mad over her bad house-keeping that I got up and started to clean my own house with one hand. I didn’t do a bad job, and my disabled family helped, even if they did turn some white clothes pink in the wash. Nobody died. The house never had a chance to grow black mold. 

When the PCP appt finally rolled around, the doctor examined my arm this way and that and guess what? I had a torn bicep! She recommended physical therapy but there was a waiting list (of course). I went on YouTube to get some practice videos, and there were all these muscle guys who lifted weights there who’d torn their biceps. I don’t know how I’d injured myself, but I’m always doing things I’m not supposed to. I mean, besides picking up 40 lbs dogs. I overestimate my strength and think I’m stretchier and younger than I am. I haven’t done yoga since before the Pandemic, so I must’ve just thought my arm was a squeegee pole or something and strained to clean a cobweb in ceiling corner, who knows.

I was prescribed super antihistamines for my allergies, given meloxicam for pain (lol), and told to rest (lol lol lol). Eventually I could type a little; then I could type a little more; before I knew it I had written more than 100K words in less than a month in a little fandom mini-arc, and my fandom wife was busy whipping my crazy manuscripts into shape because my writing was as out of shape as I was. I’d lost 10 lbs when I’d caught that nasty stomach flu everyone was getting (and I mask and take hazmat-like protocols nearly everywhere because my greatest fear is infecting someone high risk--I’m only moderate-high--and killing that person--I know all kinds of very sick people). My wife was sick too, and I don’t know how she does it, but apparently she can find a backwards quotation mark with a fever 101 and point out a paragraph that needs “more” even if she’s been puking for days and can’t stand up in the shower.

Fandom people are crazy. But we love what we love.

And we love writing for our historically inaccurate historical dramas.

I’ve actually been typing too long already.

This was supposed to be a master post of fics I haven’t uploaded in the past few months.

I’m back in bed, not sick so much this time as overwhelmed by all things overwhelming, and I want to write, but at the same time I want to just lie here and cry.

This world is a terrible place. It’s been blasted with meteors and nuked several times over, and the blood of a million wars have seeped into it, and the Ice Age has come and gone, and here I am, wondering if I’ll get a chance to swim in the ocean again before I die or maybe catch a coffee with a friend or see my dad who can’t fly here because of his bad lungs. Does it matter if I have words? Or are words the greatest illusion of meaningfulness--they’re just blabbity, and they disintegrate into cyberspace just like that stuff--remember paper?--paper used to fall apart when we picked up hundred-year-old books that had gone untouched. 

Actions matter. What we model for our children matters. Decency and kindness, compassion and persistence. Charity and hope, all those things that sound like dull bells until they are live faces with stories in front on your own.

But I don’t get out much anymore. I’m scared of the outside. I don’t march anymore, and my family needs me at home. The animals need me to refresh their water, and the old cat needs me to cut his pills twice a day, and oh, some people need to get over this “don’t enable disabled people.” It’s not enabling a disabled person who has broken legs if you hold his crutches while he sits in a car to go to a doctor’s appointment. You don’t know all the circumstances. Parents of disabled children--well, many of them, research hard and try many things, advocate hard, make phonecalls every day and we thank you for your judgement very much. We live in fear every day that our children will die in the system when we’re gone. 

Some days I feel all I have are my words. These words that are nothing. These words that are my playing around. I was diagnosed with cataracts not long ago. I am afraid of going blind now. But some surgery in a few years, they say--I’ll be fine. I hope so. I may not be fine in other ways. I knew there was something wrong with my eyes. I have optical migraines. My fingers don’t move they way they used to. My brain feels young--younger than ever, maybe twelve, the age I was wondering why I couldn’t share consciousness with a fish in a pond. Later, maybe when the bipolar was kicking in, I felt that I did share consciousness with it. And who will tell me I am wrong? The world’s great religions--not just my own with it’s Sh’ma Yisrael, the World is One, but so many others, speak of the great inter-connectedness of things.

Are the words in the way, or are they little stepping stones? Or are they both?

I don’t like to touch or hug people very much because of childhood traumas. I save my hugs for my dearest ones and my animal companions, but I throw words around freely, like chicken feed. C’mon and get it... or let it settle and rot in the earth, along with the blood and paper and other forgotten things.

My time isn’t over. This blog will last until... there are new technologies. I thought Tik Tokers would be the new talkers, but it doesn’t seem to be the place. Novelists haven’t disappeared; neither have poets. And despite Elon, Disabled Twitter is still going strong. There’s no telling.

So I’ll keep telling. I still have secrets and untold things. And many pockets full of untold stories. More later. The little fictions (oh this last one is 12k... sorry. Whoever reads it gets a cookie. A pretty Korean one from the palace).