Present Tense

As I sit here plotting my escape once again, I have a paradoxical “on hold” feeling.  I don’t feel like I’m doing anything at all but spinning and scheming.  I

have to remind myself of everything I actually am doing.  Why does what you’re doing get subsumed by what you’re not doing?  Everything you have eclipsed by everything you desire. 

Why is it so damn hard to live in the present – the ever-elusive present?  We seem to prefer the tinted, air brushed past, or the fantasy of a golden “someday” future.  Where does that propensity come from, what evolutionary survival need could possibly have created this common dynamic upon which

advertising companies feast?  Living in the present moment is a concept so radical, so elusive, that only “Masters”, those specially trained in isolative remote mountain peaks can even approach.
 
We are slaves to the future.  We are taught we must be properly prepared; build a nest egg, get our 401k’s, retirement accounts, college funds, Christmas clubs.  Save it up, save it all up for “someday.”  In the midst of that mad drive, we are allowed, encouraged even, to pause and revel in the past, look at home movies, pictures of frozen

moments that weren’t even enjoyed, appreciated, in those moments.  Now that they are the idealized “past” however, we are permitted to remember them oh so fondly, paint them in misty, romantic tints and hues, air brushed corrections carefully applied. 

Our movies, modern day harbingers of the gestalt, reinforce and dictate our

culture to this predilection.  Grand, fantastical futures are glorified; the past recreated and packaged.  The present?  Well, that can only be allowed in little “indie” films, depictions of a slice of life, quirky and quaint, hidden away in rapidly diminishing art houses.  A dinner and a conversation – the epitome of everyday life – is a wildly rash and bold concept for a movie.  Fantasy and action or history and nostalgia.  Any place but here, any time but now.  We have to move, forward or backward, just don’t linger here.

The same holds true for writing.  A firm and fast tenet of writing is action.  If a single sentence isn’t moving the action forward, off with its subject, object and verb agreement head.  The characters must be “doing” something.  The action must progress.  Dialogue can’t be like actual conversation.  It too

must be a mechanism for action and movement.  And why?  Because the reader will get bored, lose interest.  The story will lose momentum.  Does that mimic the way we actually live our lives?  Why the present tense is so uncomfortable that we’re constantly bolting away to the future or wallowing in the past?  What is it about the present tense that we can’t abide, that we must escape? 

I live this dynamic every day.  Is my present really so unbearable that planning, the incessant running, becomes my default life?  If you’re running, they can’t

catch you.  If you’re planning for a magnificent future where all your dreams will be realized, then the drudgery of the present where boring, torturous steps that must be taken to get what you long for, can be justified.  Understandable.  But what then becomes of life?  What would that headstone read?  “Here lie all her dreams.  Here all the running finally stopped.”  Enough already.

All we can do is remind ourselves, remind each other, of this day, each day.  Today I will finish this post.  I will work on a new short story I began.  I will

paint one wall.  I will cook a meal and savor it.  I will pick my ripe and bursting blueberries, wresting them back from the sparrows’ assault.  I will take my lunch in the garden with Ray Bradbury, where the sun finally emerging, will warm and soothe my restless yearning.

What are you doing today?

Until

I’ve spent my life waiting “until” – I can’t write until my son is raised, until I divorce, until I retire and have time, until I move, until I live in the ideal locale and house, until I join a writer’s group, until I take necessary classes and

workshops, until I’ve had a blog for a year, until I’ve published in magazines, until I get that perfect writing table, until I redo my room into an office, until I refinish another writing retreat room, until I change my schedule at work, until I’m financially solvent, until my heart heals – or until it explodes again.  This list and devastating pervasive pattern could go on forever.  It already has, and I am so weary, exhausted, from running – away from my life, to the infinite distractions, spun up in the flurry that masquerades as life. 

I live life in deference to planning.  Planning becomes life.  Making plans, setting and working toward goals is obviously necessary but I paradoxically end up

sabotaging my goals and purported dreams by abandoning them in service of planning for them.  That’s a nice piece of work there.  When the real work should begin I panic and run, on to the next plan.  It’s always a different tune, but the same dance.

This lifelong dynamic is ingrained, a part of me, burned into me.  How to change that now?  I’m aware of it at least and that has to come first.  I’ve likely been aware for some time.  So what, what can I do?  Can I change?  That’s really the question that scares me.  Can I actually stop the madness? 

  Intellectually, I know what I need to do.  I need to stay still, sit with it, face it, follow through.  It’s never as monstrous as the avoidance makes it out to be.  I have to engage in the here and now, not “until.”  I am doing things, things that are helping.  The writing groups are giving me confidence and practice.  The writing schedule I’m barely clinging to by my fingertips provides the structure and

actual results.  I have to fight through the miasma to see the real steps I’m taking and the effects they’re having.  I have to concretely recognize the differences, the changes, the growth and progress.  Otherwise I assume I’m just still doing the same old dance.   

I recently saw Dave Congalton’s movie “Author’s Anonymous.”  I enjoyed it so much, felt a part of it, knew the insider’s secret behind the scenes details, which made it an interactive type of experience. 

The story follows a writers’ group, and their varying choices, successes and failures.  There’s a character, Hannah, who’s quirky and an anomaly for the

group, and she’s been simmering in my brain ever since I saw her.  She isn’t the stereotype of a “writer.”  She struggles for words in conversation, doesn’t know squat about classics, masterpieces, other authors.  She’s heard of them perhaps, but anything more than that, not so much.  She has no training or experience at all.  I don’t think she even went to college.  She lives with her mom, and I think she works too.  But she just “writes from her heart”, whatever’s there, and the rest of the angst just doesn’t register with her.  There’s a scene where she’s in her bedroom on her bed, snacking, her laptop by her side.  Something occurs to her, and she simply reaches out for the computer and begins writing.  She’s just ‘in it’ that simply, right there in the moment, without any preparation, a special designated place or environment.  Whatever strikes, whenever it strikes, she just engages – she just writes; without any planning, researching how to write, without all the accoutrements.  

In contrast, the angst filled protagonist is the writer stereotype.  Henry is obsessed with Fitzgerald and while he is infatuated with Hannah, he is also

slightly snobbish and judgmental that she doesn’t even know Fitzgerald and other famous authors, that she doesn’t follow the “proper” path writers are supposed to.  He has writer’s block, as is to be expected.  After all, if you have “writer’s block", then that proves you’re a “writer”, right?  He has his battle scars of rejection letters plastered on the wall of his writing space – all the proper angst.  But it’s Hannah who succeeds, in a huge way.  The message I squirrel away is she succeeds because she writes.  As Dave loves to say, she “does the work.”  I love that.  It is immensely

validating and reassuring.  With her development, he drove right into the very heart of writers – well, mine anyway.  I’m not a real writer unless I do x, y, z to infinity, until I have it all set up just right, until the stars are perfectly aligned.  But all I really need to do is write.  Can it really be that simple?

There is no “until”.  It’s all right here, right now – everything I need.  There are

no rules and I get to do this any way I need to, any way I want to.  I merely have to put down the lists, pack away the plans, and write.  A spark is not fire, and it never will be on its own.  It must be captured, cultivated and nurtured, until it actualizes as a flame, its potential realized only through work.  Sparks on the wind are beautiful to watch, to make, for just that brief moment of existence.  But then they’re gone in a

blink of an eye and we’re looking for the next one.  Unless that spark is bound to all the other components necessary for it to be what it can be, a
roaring fire, it is nothing at all, disappearing into the night, expired potential with no more “until” left.

Follow Your Heart

I’ve been bitching and moaning about my job, having to work, not being able to write, wanting to retire.  As I’ve been obsessively writing up budgets with

multiple scenarios, trying to find a feasible, doable, plan of action, a tornado suddenly kicked up from my running incessantly in circles and in its wake a clearing, an obvious point, has unexpectedly emerged – I want it all.  I want everything I have now; my house, the ability to maintain at least my paycheck to paycheck lifestyle as I have forever, and to not have to work.  All my plans were to keep everything the same and to still add even more. 

But it can’t be the same.  I’m saying what I want to do, my singular, angst-filled path I desire, to not work, devote myself entirely to writing, but my plans haven’t realistically accounted for that goal.  They’ve instead focused on how I can write and still have what I have now.  I have assumed everything has to remain the same, which led me right

back to the impossibility of all my schemes.  So I just gave up and decided something will have to inevitably emerge, reveal itself to me before I ended up in the gutter, because I sure wasn’t having any luck making the numbers add up.  And that strategy may have actually worked.  If my true goal is to write, then everything else has to be negotiable.  I have to downsize, give up what I have, sacrifice for my aspirations. 

This means giving up my home.  Selling it and moving somewhere, into something that I can afford on a retirement budget.  It’s my primary financial burden that doesn’t have a realistic end in sight.  I can’t afford to keep my

home and do what I say I want to do – quit my job, not work, and write exclusively.  I was contorting every which way to try to keep the status quo.  The only plan I came up with was a tactic wherein I would still quit, get out of the god-awful job, but work somewhere part time to make up the difference.  So – let me get this straight – I would quit a secure job that pays decently enough, where every day I stay I’m more vested in my retirement benefits, to then go get another job that won’t pay as well and won’t do a damn thing for me except keep me afloat?  Why would I quit a job to just then go get another job with less payoff?  Huh? 

I didn’t want to sacrifice anything.  I always assumed I can have it all, no, must

have it all, or the plan isn’t worth working for.  I can get out of loan and credit card debt in about 12 months if I maintain my amended payment schedule I came up with.  That’s pretty good.  Well, except for one loan I’ll clearly end up dying with.  I have about $120k still left in student loans that I just keep waiting for Obama to come through and pay off for me.  But he hasn’t stepped up yet and isn’t returning my phone calls. 

I can’t have it all.  Not if I am crushingly honest, and actually follow my goal, my dream, instead of just giving it lip service.  I have to give up my home that I

love; where I finally hung pictures on the wall, planted trees I’ve waited years to watch grow up, established gardens, buried my cat.  Where I stood and made a vow I would never run away again – that I would stay and commit, once and for all. 

Am I running away?  Or am I finally being realistic, logical, true to my coveted course?  I am leery, suspicious.  I have a fairly impressive track record after all.  Is my heart scaring me into bolting again, to keep running so that “it” can’t catch me – or …

 
Maybe that tiny little stent has opened my heart, to not only adequate blood flow and oxygen, but also to reality.  A realistic assessment of what my goals really are and what it will actually take to achieve them.  What if it’s suddenly open to previously unconsidered possibilities?  Open.  Everything pulsing in with boundless options, infinite opportunities, showing me I really can live this life the way I want.  If I just pick and choose, keep my goal in mind, adjust whatever needs adjusted to be able to keep on that course.  Can I listen

to and follow my heart as it struggles, still convulsing, trying so hard to recover – to set me on my right path?
 
If this possibility is true, and I fervently hope that it is, then I think I finally got the memo.

My Broken Heart

Since my heart attack two weeks ago I’ve struggled with ‘why?’ and ‘how in the world?’  I’ve attempted to conceptualize the incident as a simple detour, playing with downgrading it even to a mere “speed bump,” the initial title and premise

of this week’s post.  Most notably, I’ve focused on getting back on my path, continuing my life as before, with this bizarre nonsense behind me.  It’s what I want; it’s what my friends and family certainly want and wish for me.  Our collective capacity to remain sorting through the aftermath of this ‘heartbreak’ appears to have a shelf life of about a week and a half.  I find myself now saying what’s expected, what’s on the cue cards.  I’m fine, it’s all over, nothing is wrong now at all.  Nothing to see here, keep moving.

But two weeks later and I’m still stumbling around in circles, confused as ever.  I’m beginning to suspect this new territory isn’t just a detour at all.  The

proverbial Kansas is gone and I fear there are no ruby slippers to find, to get me back to where I was.  I’m in some dark, unrelenting, director’s cut foreign release version of my life, and there is no way out.

While I was drugged, I was clearly lifted off-planet and deposited on alien turf that is unrecognizable, utterly foreign.  I watch the natives here closely and mimic their behavior carefully. I

try to do what’s expected of me, whatever I can think of that might help, whatever I can to ingratiate myself into this frightening and alien existence.  I’m trying to learn the language; nonsensical syllables haphazardly thrown together, pulled from ancient languages, each word requiring its own specialized dictionary for translation, phrases like severe ostial stenosis, percutaneous coronary intervention, premature ventricular contractions, ventricular ectopy.  That one means heart death.  Part of my heart has died.

So no – I’m not fully navigating, not back on my course.  And now another wave has knocked me over before I can even crawl to my knees.

New information is divulged to me during my first follow up appointment with my cardiologist. 


My first impression as I walk through the doors of the hospital’s cardiac suite is “I don’t belong here.”  This is the land of the old, the feeble, whose bodies are winding down and giving notice.  I don’t belong here.  But it is warm, comforting, a concerted effort made towards diminishing the sterile hospital feel, and I appreciate it.  The staff is efficient, professional.  The nurse seemed so disappointed in me that I didn’t bring the dosages of my medications with me.  I didn’t know.  I felt quite accomplished just memorizing their names.  This is a bit new to me.  Her ‘mom look’ of disappointment, the pause, the non-audible sigh as she retrieved the information herself.  I vow to myself I’ll do better, hating to be a bother.

I’m taken to my new leader, the Chief of this land, my cardiologist.  Some imprinting has apparently already occurred and she is my new BFF.  I recall how she immediately took and held my hand in the hospital before we were even
introduced and didn’t let go.  We hug, joke, bitch about our jobs, the insurance company that has denied me my rehabilitation program I desperately need and want.  I am outraged.  She just laughs and tells about another insurance company she is dealing with who is disputing another patient’s claim of an office visit prior to his heart procedure, where he actually died and was resuscitated in the office.  Rogue that she is, she seems to believe the claim should be valid, but is compelled to justify it to the insurance claims department.

Then she tells me my whole story, what they didn’t reveal in the hospital. 

I was even more “atypical” then I realized.  There were many consultations,
debates about how to proceed.  My doctor spoke with the surgeon numerous times.  She convinced him to get me in to the front of the line that morning.  He

had 11 procedures to do that day.  I bumped somebody.  When he performed the catheterization, injected the dye, the right side of my heart was “beautiful”, working perfectly.  On the left, towards the center where the left descending artery comes round from the back, meets up in the middle, it was cloudy, unclear.  They redid it until eventually they were able to see the picture.  Towards the center of my heart, hidden in that juncture was a section of artery in which the plaque had suddenly and randomly detached from the wall and ruptured, causing all of the

platelets to then rush in, do their dog pile on top of the perceived wound.  It’s their task to stop blood from spilling out, but in doing so they filled the artery completely, closing it up, killing part of their own host.  This tiny piece of plaque had simply and mysteriously, without apparent cause or reason, detached and exploded.  A time bomb implanted since when? 

This discovery resulted in more backroom discussions, other experts were called and consulted.  Because of the location of the rupture, placing a stent was very difficult.  The consensus of the team and consultants was to perform open heart bypass surgery.  It had the best odds for a successful outcome and seemed the

only way to actually be able to repair the rupture and damage.  My surgeon though, thought he could do the stent placement – he is a “cowboy” surgeon I was later told.  He did do it.  It worked.  I guess I can say my heart got to bypass a bypass.  For now, it remains unmolested from the horror of being laid out open.

A ruptured plaque is not a common occurrence.  They have no idea what causes it, why it happens.  Research is just now beginning into the phenomenon.  It will

be a very long time until they even have a chance of figuring this out.  For me, all they could do was try to repair it.  The rupture hurt my heart, caused damage – an actual heart attach diagnostically.  It ‘should’ recover.

I was healthy, relatively in shape, going into this and I am healthy now.  The medications I take are all for conditions I don’t have – high blood pressure, high cholesterol, platelet regulation.  My cardiologist has already decreased the dosage of one, speculates I’ll eventually come off all of them.  There’s nothing these medications can do for me.

When I leave the doctor’s office and check out, the staff are excited to learn I can navigate a computer, that I have a smart phone.  There are portals, even

an app, with so much information laying in wait for somebody who can access it.  But so what?  All my research, hell, all their copious research, doesn’t do a damn thing for me other than what it does for the general population – admonishments for healthy living.  I’m provided my hospital discharge summary and read it – my presenting condition is misrepresented, I can see the pull towards painting me in familiar colors.  The entirety of my ordeal is neatly summarized in two small paragraphs.  I am stable and discharged.  Moving on.

I don’t know if my broken heart will explode again, nobody knows if I am more
susceptible now.  There is no prevalence data, no research.  There isn’t any ship

coming for me, to rescue me from this foreign land.  I’m here for the duration.  There is no going back.  My home world has been annihilated – there is nothing left to return to.  I have to adapt, again and again, learn to navigate this landscape that just won’t seem to stay still beneath my timid tread.
 
There’s this little nagging feeling like I’m supposed to now be doing something profoundly different; that I’ve been given a sign, a message.  I fear I’m missing the memo.  Can something like this even happen and there not be a reason?  Finding meaning in life, insisting upon it, needing it for our very survival, defines us as a species.  What if there just doesn’t seem to be any?  Will there be even worse retribution if I don’t get it, figure it out?  Should I make something up to appease the gods of fate?

 
I can only exist day by day in the uncertainty, strive for normalcy.  Night by night I lie awake listening to the ticking of my heart, wondering if it’s attached to a fuse, if it will ever feel normal again.