I've had a lot of long nights this past month. Not the long nights of working, but the long nights of radio silence where you can't move forward without more information, and there's no information until morning. The last two weeks of the year are a little worse for these long nights, since I'm off work until the new year, and there's not an absolute morning alarm needed. I can't force myself to sleep like I can at other times.
The night of the 28th was just the first of the long nights. The night between the last practice and the taping was miserable. The feeling of flying blind through the night on a trajectory you chose but could not guarantee. I flashed back to my favorite de-motivational poster, https://despair.com/products/ambition?variant=2457295747 and kept thinking I was leading the salmon into the grizzly's jaws. There was nothing left to do, nothing possible to do. The team would wake up in the morning, have normal classes, and we'd tape the episode after school, with no chance for me to give them one more thing that might come up. I miss the old ways, a Saturday morning taping had so many more opportunities to improve.
Just after the taping my dad started having issues. Not just stroke issues, but new issues, the vertebra in his back seemed to be acting like a pinched nerve, which made it hard for him to transfer from the bed to a walker. After a couple of days, he had stopped trying to move, and was just staying in bed all day. Last Friday he was sent to the hospital again, and they diagnosed his general weakness as RSV. While this explained the situation, gave him no opportunity to regain his strength. It was then we found out that they had mistakenly canceled his physical therapy sessions because someone complained, which turned out to be a different patient. Just once I'd like a relative of mine to not be undermined by bureaucratic mistakes, this is five for five since 2009.
They sent him to a new rehab facility on Friday, and by Sunday he had a rash across half his forehead, that they diagnosed as "probably shingles." Each one of these steps has been a long night in itself.
So I was expecting the worst when I went in Monday. My mother and I were surprised to see he had just done physical therapy for the first time in a week, and he had managed his first steps in 17 days. And with that he had confounded our expectations. He may not listen to us anymore, but he listened to somebody. He's still a little lost, to which I am applying the 'misplaced' definition, even if you want to apply a more permanent definition. I've watched him come back from too many things thus far to believe there's not another trick in the act.
Today was the day we were expecting for weeks, they took down the house on 11 East Pike. Even though the family doesn't own the property any more, it's hard to convince the town that it's out of our control. All the people coming back for Christmas have been sounding the alarm, and bemoaning the corner not being there any more. At this point the news of the corner being demolished is just reopening the old wounds for the family.
I've gotten myself to stress in ways I hadn't seen in years. I spent the weekend lying on an air mattress with a spot of pain that could be the ulcer I haven't seen since high school. It kept me up, firing off occasional bursts that felt like I was sucker punched.
But even with all of that, I'm probably not having as long a series of nights as my mother, who has been closer on all of these stressors, to whom I'm just trying to get through as stress-free a Christmas as possible.
2023 has been a long series of bad events, but in the first 11 months I had something to sink the nervous energy into. Something to get me to exhaustion to keep the sleep coming, and shorten the night. This month, that creative tension is slack and it's dragging on the ground, catching my leg and tripping me up.
I need something to tension that line up again.
I'd better start typing, this book isn’t going to happen otherwise.
These are the last things I'll be writing here in 2023. I've got the item for next week written, and because it's a recap of what happened in KD Quiz from off stage, I'm going to move it up and make it available around noon Eastern Saturday. Assuming it’s not pre-empted, you’ll be able to watch it live at 11am KDKA TV2 in Pittsburgh, and it will hopefully be put up on their website about noon that same day. https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/kd-quiz/ I would ask you watch it before going into my recap. The episode stands on its own, and is worth watching to see all the teams play. Having me in the background is not something you will want for your first viewing.