A new day

I had a phone interview yesterday and another one this morning for two different jobs here in Omaha. Full-time jobs, one for online customer support for an employment website and the other a writing/editing position for an online retailer.

I think both interviews went well, but I always think that. I'm very personable.

There are some next steps for one job that I have to do today, a writing exercise, and they'd like to see other examples of my writing. I don't know what examples to send. My most recent professional writing was maybe four years ago? So I'll dig through the ol' archives and try to find something vaguely interesting.

I had a med check yesterday with my drug dealer and we decided to bump up the dosage of my antidepressant. I recently switched to a low dosage of Prozac after years of being on Effexor, and I definitely feel better than I did, but still pretty down. So we'll see how well more of the 'zac makes me feel. Today is obviously the first day of the new dosage, so I don't really feel any different yet. A slight headache, maybe, but that could be caused by any number of things.

The weather is still frigid and I don't plan on leaving the house today. Temps are in the single digits, but at least it's not windy. A friend in Illinois posted an Instagram story about having to evacuate her apartment yesterday morning because of the fire alarm and the temp was something like minus 42 degrees. Let me repeat that: MINUS FORTY-TWO DEGREES. Ridiculous. And yet somehow the temp is supposed to rise into the mid 50s this weekend. Around here, anyway. A fifty-degree swing in temperature within a few days is not normal.

Why do news organizations insist on having their poor reporters standing outside while reporting on weather? It's FREEZING out there. Like Trevor Noah said last night on The Daily Show, you can just tell us it's cold outside. We'll believe you.

I'm going to make some lunch, then work on that writing exercise for that job opportunity. I keep thinking ahead, asking myself what I'd do if I was offered both jobs, when in reality I'm just lucky I was given the chance to interview for them. I need to slow my role.

About last night...

Last night I wrote about 850 words of a thing. Not really a story. A scene, maybe. Mostly dialogue. Some descriptions of the speakers. Nothing special.

But.

I can't remember the last time I had written any fiction at all. It's been years. It felt good. As does this. It's weird trying to hold a thought together for more than 280 characters for a tweet. Like I said, it's been a while.

The past two nights I've written mainly between midnight and, say, 1:30am. The house is still and quiet. I'm not distracted, maybe half asleep, and that seems to work well for me. So far, anyway. At least I haven't turned back to booze yet.

I bought a bottle of whiskey when I left my last full-time job. I told myself I wasn't going to open the bottle until I had a new job. It's been a year and a half and I still haven't opened it, which is frustrating. But I'm glad to know that I have the willpower not to open the bottle regardless, despite often being depressed enough to want to.

I watched Annihilation yesterday, Alex Garland's adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's novel. The book left me a little cold and unsteady, like I was unsure of what I had just read. The movie has flashes of that, but it's so bright and colorful and lush with gorgeous scenery, the story being told almost didn't matter. It was mesmerizing. I should have seen it in a theater when it came out, but I think I was still recovering from my foot surgery at the time, and I didn't want to hobble my way to the movies. Still, I bet it was gorgeous on the big screen.

I'm also about 80 percent of the way through Bruce Springsteen's autobiography. Last night, after I wrote, I read about his kids and his father, which succeeded in making me think about my father, as if I needed any prompting to do so. Our fathers were very different, though similar in some ways. Mental health issues being the biggest. What I most enjoyed about that section was Bruce trying to come to terms with who his father was and how that was different from who his father wanted to be. Part of growing up is realizing that your parents are people, too, with the same faults and problems that everyone else has. Parents had dreams of what their lives would be like and those dreams didn't always pan out. And I think about my father and all the things he maybe had wanted to do, but didn't, for whatever reasons.

I'm not sure what I'm going to read next.

Here I go again

I was in the room when my father died. He had been unconscious most of the day, doped to the gills on pain meds. So it was almost like he was already gone, even though his body was still breathing. I had said my goodbyes a couple days earlier, we all had, after he had received a blood transfusion, which perked him up, if only for a little while. He had been alert and lucid, smiling and cracking jokes and telling stories about his kids and grandkids. Those were a magical few days, before the end.

I wasn’t alone when his body finally gave out. My mother was there, along with my brother and sister and their respective spouses. The grandkids, my nieces and nephews, were at home. It was late, almost midnight, and they didn’t need to see this. I don’t know if anyone needed to see it, but we were there anyway, counting down the minutes.

My mother was a retired nurse and she had worked in this very same nursing home where we were waiting. For thirty years my mother cared for the elderly as they lived their last years, often sick, either mentally or physically. She had seen this before, many, many times, which is how she was able to tell when it was time. She noticed a hitch in my father’s breathing and then his breathing slowed, agonizingly, achingly slow, until it finally stopped for good. His body, ravaged by cancer and god knows what else, shut down.

We took turns holding each other as we cried, or as they cried, as I didn’t partake. I was numb, emotionless, hugging my mother and trying to make sense of the past few weeks. My father had gone into the hospital for a relatively routine procedure, but in many ways he never left, as complication upon complication wreaked havoc with his organs, a cascading shutdown that he never recovered from.

After a few minutes we filed out of the room to let an attending nurse pronounce time of death. An ambulance was called and the paramedics zipped my father into a bodybag and wheeled him out of the room on a gurney. I wouldn’t see him again, because at the funeral he would be in a closed casket, wrapped in a white sheet, as he was lowered into the ground.

I was numb then and in many ways I’m numb still. I still haven’t shed tears for my father, which has led me to wonder if something was wrong with me. Why haven’t I cried? What kind of a person, what kind of a son, can’t shed tears for his father?

For a minute I thought I was a sociopath, incapable of feeling anything, but I didn’t think that was right. I had felt feelings before, the whole gamut, from rage to love to indifference. So I realized I was actually full of feelings, anger and disbelief among them, but what I felt the most was loneliness. My father had been my best friend and now he was gone. And I didn’t know what to do with that situation. I still don’t. To this day my overwhelming emotional state is loneliness. Despite being around family, despite seeing friends every once in a while, I just feel suffocatingly alone.

It’s as if my life stopped when his did. Not physically, obviously, but in every other way it feels as though time has stood still and I’ve been sitting in that room ever since. I have no drive, no ambition. For as long as I can remember I’ve said that I was going to be a writer and yet I haven’t written anything for more than two years. All I’ve wanted was for my father to be proud of me and now that’s been taken away. He’ll never read this, or anything else I might write. He’ll never see me write a book or a screenplay, or the dedication to him.

I still want a family of my own someday, though, like everything else, it feels as though time has run out on that. And even if I ever do get married, my wife will most likely never have known my father, and my kids will never know their grandfather. And this pains me. I feel such a great wave of sadness and grief when I think about what my father would be missing out on that I’m frozen, locked in place, unable to move forward on my own. If my father isn’t there to be proud of me, what is the point of anything?

The last time I wrote something, it was about my father, and then I haven’t written anything until now. And nothing has changed. Or, it feels as though nothing has changed. But, I’m writing again, and that’s something new.

I always think about writing something. Always. My brain is constantly throwing ideas and characters and situations out into the ether. Every interaction I have, every person I meet, becomes potential fodder for my imagination. But it stays there, stuck in my brain, and every time I think that I’m finally going to sit down and actually write something, the faucet is turned off and nothing flows. I end up reading something, or playing a video game, or watching television, and the writing never comes.

I opened up Google Docs earlier today and read something I wrote a few years ago, just a page or so, maybe a little more, the beginnings of something. I read it and I thought about adding to it and I froze. My heart began to beat faster in my chest and all I could do was stare at the little blinking cursor at the beginning of a blank line. It was like a panic attack. I turned off the computer and played video games for most of the rest of the day so I wouldn’t have to think about it.

And then I watched a movie and dicked around on Twitter and then said “fuck it” and picked up the laptop and here we are.

I don’t know what this means, if anything. I’ve been writing for about an hour and my eyes are starting to get tired. Part of me is afraid, though, that if I stop writing this then I won’t start again. It took a long time for me to get to this point and what if this is it? What if I turn on the computer tomorrow and nothing comes?

I have to admit, it feels good to type again. Something more than a tweet, I mean. I can feel the old rhythm returning, slowly but surely. My fingertips are practically itching to hit the keys. I don’t know what I have to say, though. Other than this random flailing. What if tomorrow I sit down and all I can think about is my father still? So then I write something very similar to this and then what? Nothing but sound and fury, signifying nothing.

My eyes hurt, so I’m going to call it a night. Maybe I’ll be back here again tomorrow, maybe I won’t. But I’ll definitely be thinking about it.