Delete Button - Reboot

Curveballs

New chapter, same day, same s***, different angle, let’s get started. Curveballs, every life is full of them. Few of them qualify as polite conversation. I have come to find that they usually come with much swearing on my part. Even death and taxes can hit me like curveballs and they can be expected. You can expect death your whole life, but are you ever prepared for it? Even if it is someone else’s death, it comes as a shock. Not even the words hospice or terminal prepare you for it. You know it is coming as a midnight phone call, but when it arrives… devastation. For me, the death of my mother was a personal apocalypse. Even with my beloved propping me up it was almost too much for me. It wasn’t my beloved’s fault. We were still learning each other. She didn’t have as practiced a hand at offering me support as she does now. Apocalypse, the end of the world, it comes as a prepper’s wet dream. They spend much of their energy, money and time gathering what they think they will need. If the apocalypse happens, they will be as unprepared as the rest of us.

Unprepared, I am sitting in the middle of a situation. The possible outcomes are beyond preparation. Next week I go in for a diagnostic mammogram, followed by an ultrasound of my breast. They want a better look at a nonsymmetrical mass. Then next Friday I have to go in for a thyroid biopsy. I won’t say cancer until they do, but… There, we are back on polite terms. I am very politely terrified. I want to laugh, but I am not quite that sarcastic. How can you not be afraid when things like this happen? Is it cancer? I have two tries at that jackpot. If I win on both of them does it mean they are connected? Has it metastasized? Do I have it throughout my body? Am I already beyond help? It may be polite, but I physically cannot contemplate the situation any more right now. My beloved would cry if she read this page. She is in no state to face me cracking up like this. Too bad, I am in no state for it either. Let’s table this talk until next Friday.

How do you prepare for the inevitable? Tears? Screaming? Armageddon might be upon me and I have no earthly idea what I am supposed to do about it. I will fight of course. I can’t not fight. Editor hated that sentence. It worked for muse though. Muse sweeps the current situation into the fiction dustpan. It is so wrong it can’t be real. Editor taps her foot and checks the time. Still enough time to edit this book into oblivion.

My dogs offer me kisses. They don’t know our happy life could be swirling around the toilet drain. The cats don’t particularly care. But they only give a s*** about catnip treats, especially Malachi. He is an addict. One time he got so high all he could do was stare at the ceiling fan yowling “Mam, Mam, MAAAM.” I think it might have been a bad trip. We tried to get him to quit cold-turkey, but he kept waiting for the turkey… Then he broke into the treat drawer and ate every last crumb of catnip.

The weather is cold. October is almost over. That means November is days away. Happy birthday mom. The fourth is hers, the fifth is mine and my father claimed the sixth before either of us. I dread November. My parents’ divorce became final on the second many years ago.

Well howdy, it is December now. Yep skipped a whole month! Not really, I wrote a book of fiction last month. I already edited it and self-published. My first reader loved it better than any of my other books. I almost think I am ready to send something to a real publisher again. Yea, more rejection in my life…

I had a bad day today. I got through November with very few tears. Today I have been a waterfall. I don’t know. I just broke down and cried. No, I sobbed. I was wracked with grief, defeated and a failure. It all started with a word search puzzle.

My beloved’s mother asked me to type up and print out a word search puzzle she had been working on for my beloved for christmas. I tried three different programs and the damn things just wouldn’t line up the letters on the different lines. Okay so no big, not Armageddon, except I just cracked. The tears came and would not stop. I cried about everything and nothing. Of course it wasn’t about the puzzle. I am still not clear on what it was about.

The day went downhill from there. I spent forty-five minutes waiting in the checkout line at the dollar store for six foil pans to make Christmas food in. It is the twenty-second by the way. The shelves of the store were nearly bare. Then I needed to go to Walmart. I know it is a joy to shop there on a good day when nobody is cramming everything in reach into their carts. It is the twenty-second of December by the way. Yeah, good times…not!

I just love shopping, especially during the Christmas rush, the only thing better is Black Friday. I went Black Friday shopping, once. Never again! I don’t care if they are offering Samsung Galaxy 40s for twelve dollars! Never again.

That was almost polite conversation. New thought on a superpower, the ability to hurt other people. We as a species are incredibly self-destructive. We will injure or incapacitate each other even when it is detrimental to our own wellbeing, just to say we won. Example? Let’s go with the big one, war. We will shake sharpened sticks at one another over stupid things like which side of the impassible river our territory ends at. Everybody wants to own the river even when they can’t use it. Who cares how far our borders extend out into the ocean? It isn’t like we live there… Oh boy, I have an attitude problem today.