Overdoing It

I should get a theme song one of these days so I can just play it instead of explaining how my mind got ahead of my body once again. I have an author's page on Facebook now where you can get three of my favorite recent works of fiction if I know you and trust you to not distribute it. It was easy to set up and I actually copy and pasted the catalog to the new page. Of course, I've been trying to clean some in advance of the house repair that should be happening soon. That involved backing up a phone call to the insurance adjustor in case I was mistaken and the contractor was not supposed to inform him. It also helps to offer friendly reminders when you need a favor from someone somewhere. I'm not sure whether this would count as a favor or an ADA requirement but I'm not going to be able to live here while people are banging hammers, etc.

In any case, I've been frustrated by how long it has been taking me to write the new novel. I have no idea when I'll be ready to declare the first draft of "Professor Pruitt" finished if I don't decide that the whole idea was terrible anyway. The gears in my head threatened to strip on me. I have people who have "liked" my author page mostly because they are my friends. A couple of people have drafts out from the Adobe Acrobat server but they do not want me sitting behind them looking over their shoulders and flinching every time I think they might be frowning. At least two of these victims...err....volunteers are fellow chronic pain patients and have perfectly awful yet understandable reasons of their own to flinch.

Maybe something in my unfinished folders would generate a new idea for me but they ended up being discouraging. I stopped writing those drafts for good reasons. What about the old standby novels? No. Melissa came as close as she will come to asking me to drop that project and seemed very relieved when I spoke of it in the past tense. Those novels can be seen as my first investment of serious time and energy in writing.

The adrenaline rush wore off and the arthritis kicked in. Before I could reach a full scale panic attack, I remembered that I was overdue for my nice calming medicine. I was hit with a brief case of title envy when I saw a link to something on Facebook called "The Klonopin Diaries" or something very close to that. Unfortunately, it could very well have been a non-fiction account of someone living with a panic disorder. I take my Klonopin for sleep since my mind refuses to shut down at bedtime yet it never has done much of anything that I've noticed. Melissa says she can tell the difference and I made her my coach in such matters for one of the million or so reasons why I married her. I trust her to look out for me.

My beloved is a very good coach. I was sitting here fretting because I don't have a reasonably professional looking picture of me taken in the last decade to use on my author's page. I know. It's a bit too ballsy of me to call it an author's page based on a lot of unpublished work so I listed this as my official site. I also threw an age restriction on there because I don't want Facebook to sue me for dropping the f-bomb every so delicately the way I do. Obviously, I've been posting links to these posts on my main FB page and my Twitter feed so making the author page 18+ won't affect anyone who wants me relax and not give a shit about my fucking language.

It's almost 4:30 AM and I'm having serious thoughts about my fourth cup of coffee in the last 24 hours. I could drink some herbal tea instead and I really should get away from my keyboard. If I start a major writing project at 4:30 AM while my arthritis is bad, I'm asking to a 10+ Chiari headache. This career thing will take time. Managing agonizing pain is my full-time job as much as I'd prefer writing. I need to go use my nice PS3 in my comfy chair where I will fall asleep if the need strikes. Up here at my desk, I will start pacing when the need hits. I haven't fallen down the stairs in a while. Yes, go sit in the comfy chair and be a good cat daddy.

I think I'm experiencing a case of what fellow Chiari blogger, Brian Murphy, wrote about recently. He is upset that so many Chiarians he knows aren't making it. The fact that you know you will experience agonizing pain for a significant part of the day is a bit of a downer. I deal with this in a number of ways. First of all, I have my beloved's support. Melissa is a treat to be around on a daily basis. She understands that pain control is a full time job except that it doesn't stop at 40 hours/week and the pay... Okay. The the disability pay is something to be thankful for though it is not a gift. I paid into the SSDI system with everyone else and then I bought extra private disability insurance because it seemed like the smart thing to do. Treating it as a gift is one of those traps that can lead to the ultimate disability trap. "Have I earned my oxygen today?"

In my case, I go on absurdly difficult mental quests. Get my fiction published not just once but on an ongoing basis. Find people who mattered in the past so that I can tell them how much mattered. There has been someone on top of that list for a long time. I ran into her accidentally in the Summer of 1993 and then she disappeared. I went into total brain lock back then before it was one of my symptoms and so I never told her and I've been trying to make up for it ever since. Of course, saying that I spent the last 20 years doing anything would be an exaggeration. Since 1999, my life has been about Melissa and pain management more than anything else. Every once in a while, I found myself looking for a short list of people for an hour or two. I found one of them about a decade ago but she asked me to not tell anyone where she was so I found it easier to pretend that she was still missing.

I found another one this morning. I hadn't seen her or heard anything from her since the Summer of 1993. How could someone avoid running into me even accidentally over all that time? Well, it probably starts with moving somewhere outside the Small World boundaries and ended with getting your own life. She might or might not contact me but I told someone that I would be happy enough just to know that she is alive, healthy and happy somewhere. Another impossible quest has succeeded so it would probably be smart to take a day or two off.

After all, the last thing I want to do is embark on another quest without getting a decent day of sleep first. Must remember that a watched inbox never fills.