The Uniball Vision Elite, teachin’, feelin’ feelings.
Today was weird.
Virtually all of my colleagues and a good portion of my students
were back on campus. Kids in my room, but I am down here
with my broken eyeball (which is almost-sort-of-notably-better today).
I have no fucking idea what the universe is teaching me and I’m still
on “Step 2” and about to say “fuck off” to whatever Higher Power
is making me stay down here when my whole heart is up in Flagstaff
with my colleagues and my kids. Maybe someday I will understand.
Today is not this day.
Today is a day for allowing myself to have a feeling
and feel the feeling and let it pass through me
without anesthetizing the feeling with a brimming glass
of merlot. (Yes, I will be going to a meeting later.
I go every day.)
I am hurting and I am just feeling the hurt.
We do this weird thing with feelings — at least I and a lot of recovering alcoholics I know do this thing with feelings — that we don’t do with other pain.
Like when I stub my toe, I don’t go “FUCK! WHY DOES MY FUCKING TOE HURT?” I don’t go running for a painkiller or even ice for that matter.
I’m just like “Fuck. Toe hurts. This will pass, but, damn, that HURT.”
And yet when it comes to painful emotional experiences — be they “now” or “remembered” — I don’t know why the FUCK they are showing up and I want them to go away. That’s why I used to like a drink (or eight).
Drinking makes feelings go away for me. Bad feelings, good feelings — feelings gone. I can “perform feelings” when I’m drinking, b
ut I can’t feel them the way I can, say, now.
Anyway, I didn’t even want to write about my drinking,
but it always comes back to my drinking.
This blog, my cowboy hat, lots of Grateful Dead
have been my coping mechanism
(and yes jellybeans and those mini cones from Joseph’s
and sometimes edible cannabis of a weekend or evening
but I’m doing my fucking level best as a cancer patient in a pandemic
with wobbly healthcare because we’re between insurance companies).
I’m nervous today because I’m sad today.
When my brain feels sadness, it produces anxiety.
It’s sort of like how when my body gets overwhelmed with estrogen,
it makes cancer.
And I don’t want to feel anxiety.
Anxiety is worse than sadness because anxiety is this crazy,
out-of-control fear that just doesn’t know how to chill out a little
so it trashes the place (the place being my precious little brain). Anxiety comes in with its bullshit and flips all the tables and grinds dirt in your new couch and shits in the hallways just because it has the right.
When I started this, I intended to write about PENS.
I intended to write about my current favorite pen:
the Uniball Vision Elite. I am trying to handwrite/journal
(just for me!) every day and today before I wrote in my journal
I had to hunt down my Uniball Vision Elite because I simply could not write in said journal without said pen.
I also made a new rule for myself when journaling:
you know that “bent page” — the back page of the first page — and how much it sucks to write on those because you have to twist your wrist
and reposition shit — well, fuck that.
I don’t have a product to solve this problem
but I do have an idea: use those shitty bent back pages for drawing your dog.
Or doodling.
Or maybe this is just a weird hangup of mine
in which case, forget this entire portion of the text.
So yeah. My intention is to handwrite a bunch of shit every day.
And maybe some of it will not be shit.
Typing is lazy. My thoughts are sharper at the end of a UNIBALL VISION ELITE (I have no corporate sponsors — I just really like certain shit produced by corporate America: pens, seltzer waters, edible cannabis, and Spotify — principally).
I haven’t even checked the news today.
Should I?
I shouldn’t.
But I likely will.
