is the recurring self-moralizing litany that repeats itself if i feel i’m losing my grip for lack of sleep, having moved house directly after getting off the plane from the funeral in Moline, Illinois; or having left my wallet on a train the day i got the news about Eddie; or if i feel worried about the future; or if i get a papercut.

There is much to be said in the wake (no pun intended) of last week’s event. I’ve scribbled a lot, and i’d like to put it up here, but …

and above is a prime example of the reprioritization (that word, though functional, definitely needs to go) that has occured. I wanted to say eventS, plural, but really, what qualifies as an event?

i could talk about the dual components of grief -loss and sadness- and the fact that horrid as it may seem, if you feel mainly the latter, and are faced with those suffering the former, you feel some strange form of exclusion and necessarily self-censoring envy.

i could talk about moving into an apartment on the second floor (i.e. the first floor for those of you on the old continent) with a direct view of the street and the debris strewn construction site directly beneath your living room window and sleeping with the bedroom door locked, though you know that statistics and awareness of your own paranoia dictate that you are safe.

I could talk about the fact that exhaustion apparently leads to dyslexia, loss of vocabulary, loss of spelling. I feel dumb.

I could talk about the fact that when i travelled to Moline, i was for the first time in my life afraid of flying. And read every safety instruction card in each of the tiny planes i took. And located the emergency exits, and made sure to know how to open them. And wandered around the terminal in Memphis like someone who’d never been on a plane, never been in an airport, and all the drawling ohsosweet ladies that tried to give me directions looked at me like some mildly helpless cretin.

But i won’t, because mentioning these things is not me whining or feeling sorry for myself. It is a cataloging of symptoms, the surface manifestations of what i am going through, not in any way related to or indicative of the actual emotional and intellectual process of adapting your worldview so as to allow for this new state of things. They are of not the slightest importance at all, simply because I’m alive, and so, before i segue into grandiosly simplistic statements on carping the diem i will end this nonpost, and return when i have valid -within the context of this blog- content to provide.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7, 2006 at 3:25 pm and is filed under sadness, yes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.