the dimming of the day

this evening i just laid and watched a red sunset play across the sky; it reminded me of a day long ago when we were camping on mt. abe and we went up to the summit to watch the red sunset before making our way down in the darkness to our camp.

it was a beautiful night and everything was perfect and i was excruciatingly sad. i could not understand it. now, of course, i understand when it happens, although i still am not protected from it.

last night i was with the crashcos in bethlehem NH and we were going to do just one more cache on our way to the last cache of the day; it turned out we did them in the opposite order and we were walking up the trail (an old closed, gated road) in the last of the crepuscular light. being sick has taken a lot out of me. i get winded more easily. i can't keep up on the trail. i can't manage as many hills as i used to.

later on the way home we see a sign that proclaims bethlehem the poetry capital of NH. huh? i'm ot sure i even want that explained.

anyway.

but we're almost to the top and i hear this huge and persistent noise and i cannot figure out what it is. it is loud and it is definately machine in nature. and mrs. crashco points it out to me and all the hair on the back of my neck stands to.

we have been walking up the outside boundary of a landfill and we are very close to the huge jet where they are burning off the methane. i have a great phobia of pipes and such and it extends to landfill flares.

it casts a light of its own. this makes the hunting of the ammo can extra exciting for me. we finish off the day far from home, but we have found ten caches and hunted some others. crashco says it would take a lot of the sport out of it if you knew you were going to find every one.

i came home just after midnight, but for most of the day i got to live the way i used to, before i was sick. it was like being me again.

lately i'm starting to feel as if the key to recovery is to simply start living the way i used to when i was well. maybe i can take my life back and not spend so much time waiting for treatments to work.

and then i had to get up early to meet rumblestrip at the church to practice a little thing we'd put together. rumblestrip is an excellent collaborator. i am usually not good about sharing; i'm fussy about word stress and i'm too much of a perfectionist with my own material to be able to share creative work. but it's good with rumblestrip.

and the thing goes over really well. people like it and they get rumblestrip's jokes a lot quicker than i did when we were working on it.

skipper wasn't in church this morning, so i missed her. and i had to offload her loaf of bread.

we're coming up on the first week of july, which would be a year from when i first had the courtesy to notice the presence of God in the universe. and the second week of july would be the anniversary of my last breakup. and the anniversary of some other, older breakups. what is it about july?

nevermind the breakups, though. they make good stories to tell, but i'm better off and the important thing is that the Creator Of All Things took a moment to tell me to call Him bob.

"might as well call me something you're comfortable with."

it's evidence that God is a comedian: up until that moment "bob" had been my generic name for anything about which i did not care or did not feel i needed.

if you're looking to read the whole story of how that happened, you can find the beginning of it here.

so i'm going back to that same campground next week, for the third year in a row, which will be interesting especially since that's where i was at the time. it will be a good time to practice gratitude.

there's been a lot in the last week that hasn't been pretty. and d, i'm sorry you were having a bad week as well. i kept checking back in the middle of everything to see if you'd written anything anywhere and then i started to worry about you and yes, there was a candle for you as well.

me, i've been struggling. or i had been struggling until wednesday. it's hard to tell you the story without impinging on parts of the story that aren't mine to tell, but i tink i can quote you just a little from what i wrote to rumblestrip:

"i cried all the way around that course tonight. and i prayed:

i have not been your best or smartest or most obedient child, but if ever i did love you, if ever i did honor you, if ever my work was acceptable to you, let me go. let my suffering come to an end. let me say goodbye and let me go."

what happened eventually was that i did not go. i will not tell you how it came about.

i'm going to toss in here a bit of information only because you had something to say about the unavailability of Barbara and Flyingfisher; dr. n and my mom were both on vacation as well, although probably not together.

so rumblestrip and the crashcos got extra duty.

a thing happened in me wednesday night, difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to explain, but i may have turned a corner. that's a scary thing to say. it is frightening to allow myself to rely on a thing like that. you know.

but bob sez: "have faith."

thursday i had a pretty good day. but thursday night i had a hard time sleeping. i'm not allowed benzos the night before a treatment, so that's already working against me, but i kept hearing a noise. and i started to realize: that noise is here, in my room.

so it was about 0300 and finally i got it figured out; there was a mouse in my wastebasket. crashco came at 0600 to wake me up and take me to treatment, and because treatments are wrecking my memory and because i'd been having a hard time, they increased the amount of caffeine they put in the IV to 500 mg.

one day very long ago i drank fourteen cups of coffee in one day. this wasn't that bad, but i was WIDE AWAKE. i was supposed to sleep for a while and then rumblestrip was going to come over so we could work on our project, but the best i could do was lie quietly in bed and let the maelstrom of suddenly un-forgotten things wash over me.

i sent this to rumblestrip:

here's an idea: why don't you decide when you'd like to arrive and just go for it? if for some reason i have managed to fall asleep, just wake me. otherwise, i'll just be resting quietly, but sleep is looking kind of doubtful.

when rumblestrip arrived, i was not only awake, but i was baking bread. i love to bake bread. it is a lovely, life-affirming activity.

lately i have only been having treatment on fridays. we are now thinking of moving to once every other week. we are not sure the treatments help at all, but by the same token, we are not sure that they're not helping. here's a horrible thought: maybe things would be a lot worse without the treatments.

so, to recap my week:

monday: not so good.
tuesday: bad. ran my race anyway.
wednesday: very bad. rode my race, begged God to be allowed to die.
thursday: reasonably good, but only three hours of sleep.
friday: treatment, way too much caffeine, still no sleep. bellyache at night, don't get much sleep.
saturday: meet the crashcos at 0830 (way too early) stay out until midnight. almost like being my old self again. still not enough sleep.
sunday: meet rumblestrip at church at 0915 (still too early) come home after church and sleep until 1530. had bad dreams. feel sad.

tomorrow i'm going to try to catch up on more of my geocaching logs. tonight i hope to sleep. during the week i hope to organize and pack my gear the way i used to. i'm trying to remember how to be me.