planning

Fall fell again, fast. I made my burnt offering to Huitzilopotchli and drank Leo's birthday peach hooch with friends, though most of it ended on the floor. I brewed this year's hops, presented about Ambler history, and decorated for Halloween. And I finally got COVID. Life was moving so quickly that the sudden stop sent me back in time to 2020. I've had other ailments in the meantime, I even had to cut my Memorial Day short this year, but the mental impact of this feels stronger, amplified by the history and memory associated with the virus. At the very least it's been a moment to reflect on what's changed and on how any amount of time can be both a long time and a short time.

I started serotonin supplementation this month. I felt like I made it pretty far with weed, walking, and freedom from work but for all my self-awareness, denial, and backwoods home therapy I can still get stuck. For the most part depressions feel normal and cyclical. I'll slow down a bit, turn inwards, then outwards, then rearrange some furniture or decorate, and begin the next season. Sometimes I don't notice the slow down until I'm stalled entirely or nearly out of gas. I started journaling awhile back to capture a few lines about what I got up to throughout each day, and that evolved into a way to monitor for my overall activity level. The meta-monitor is losing interest in the journal itself.

I also began capturing maintenance like weekly cleaning tasks and yearly inspection reminders in calendars alongside appointments, etc. I'd load all those on my phone so I could see a rough checklist for the day, but I didn't have actual checklist interactivity. So I wrote a set of tools that includes one to transform those calendars into a printable checklist format. I thought I'd share a screenshot but they looked pretty awful, which is apparently how I advertise my graphical products. They look fine on paper! I should print and photograph samples but in the meantime the code itself has a complete working example to build. Now I only show appointments on my phone so that view is less cluttered. The checklist printout includes appointments plus all my routine tasks. I print a few days at a time and mark things off as I get to them. The code is reasonably stable now and it's pretty easy to make each new sheet so with few barriers to producing them it becomes obvious when they start going missing, usually preceded by a few days of a lot of unmarked boxes.

Last fall I fell for broadcast TV and wrote about Antonio getting addicted to cable on Wings. This fall I sacrificed a few nights entirely scrolling through reels for the first time. The majority of what I saw was ironic Christian male sexuality followed in a close second by unironic sexuality. I also found people who've experienced the tragic loss of friends or loved ones to death and divorce sharing a line or two about their sorrow backed by the sad Barbie song. I relinquished my license to criticize grief art by making my own, but these videos stirred something critical in me. I wondered if I felt insecure because my encoding takes 10,000 words about vibing on the Wissahickon when a more compact representation might only need a three second video of me green screen dancing over a shot of the creek with a caption that says something like "deeply despairing, miss you more everyday".

I actually feel a renewed sense of purpose and commitment lately. Beyond the change in the air and the pointy proteins stunting my social life I sense a change also in my own perception, though that might be the escitalopram kicking in. I feel social, and now that I can't share air I want to and now that the leaves are falling I miss the green. I wound up down the creek twice this week, once with the dogs and once with a group. Somebody told me that if you follow the water downstream all the way to the end of the earth you can find the asbestos and emotional baggage we tossed into it pooling outside the cottage of the Tree Witch, pleading for its next identity. The pond where it gathers forms a magic mirror that shows whoever looks at it what they want to see in the world. Some see lonely people, some see friends and family loving each other, some see them hurting. One day Some Guy rolls his ankle on some rocks, slipping and skadooing through the looking glass into a world full of mirrors. Everywhere he looks he finds an infinity of himself as the exit fades further in the reflection. The more he tries to see the more mirror he becomes, inch by inch transformed into glass like all the others in the room wondering what he was made for.