November 10, 2023

Non Provocative Title

Part of the problem of not writing in a long time is that you feel full, to bursting, of things you want to talk about, to the point where it seems too difficult to sit down and push things out, because, much like being constipated, although you are loaded with shit that needs to come out, you know it’s going to take forever and require some amount of effort and pain.

I haven’t written in months. I have another journal, too — one that I keep on my PC and don’t post to the internets — and that one gives me the score as well. October: 31, Me: 1. November has been winless until today.

Today my wife J is out with her girlfriends and I took the opportunity to play Spiderman: Miles Morales on the Playstation 5 for a while — a game I’ve been wanting to start for over a year — but after an hour and a half I felt anxious and depressed, a forty six year old man playing video games alone on a Friday night. I realized, playing games is a way to waste time, sure. But it’s not a great way to get needs met.

Now I can be a forty six year old man alone writing on a Friday night. Much better.

The last time I wrote in Open Diary was about a failed In Vitro Fertilization round. The pain, the money, the emotions, the strain on the relationship, the weight on life.

We are trying again. Last week we drove from Massachusetts to New York City to get PRP treatment for my wife. This is a procedure wherein, as my stunted man-brain best understands it, blood is extracted from my wife’s veins and re-injected into her ovaries. It is supposed to simulate the internal egg clutches and improve fertility chances. I took two vacation days off of work, drove through hellish traffic both ways, reassured J that things were going to be fine, had nightmares about her getting sick, and for this privilege forked out about 4K. In another couple of weeks we’ll go to New York again, repeating the trip: spending more money, taking more vacation days, worrying more about J’s health. I will jerk off into a cup, eggs will be retrieved from J, and they will be combined in a lab in an attempt to produce a science baby.

If this fails we are going to try something different. Just fucking like crazy 3 days a month when she is most fertile. I like this idea a lot more. I was worried we would be doing IVF forever. I don’t worry that we will have sex forever. One of these things is fun and the other is not.

We were supposed to be in Paris this week. My friends G and K are there right now, going to a postmodern Punk show, Protomartyr. I would be there if it weren’t for IVF. A week in Paris, flight included, hotel included, food included, would have cost pretty close to the same amount of money as this IVF cycle. After this cycle we have now blown about 25K in IVF costs that have not been covered by insurance. J sometimes laments that we are not taking the same kinds of trips as our peers — our peers are going to Europe and sailing down the Danube on fancy cruises, visiting 4 countries over 2 weeks, eating 4 course meals imagined by internationally renowned chefs and posting to Facebook about it. I tell her it’s hard to do both — to do IVF and to do that kind of travel at the same time. She tells me she is not jealous but at the same time I feel the jealousy pulse outward from her body as if it is a physical thing. The most jealous people of all claim that they are not jealous.

And so we hang around here, the western suburbs of Boston. Today I took her to a donut place we’d never been to before today. Last Sunday we went walking down the asphalt of the town rail trail and let the late autumn leaves blow around us, hues of red and yellow and orange swirling, fat squirrels eating nuts, helmeted kids riding scooters, people in athletic gear and expensive sneakers running, probably training for one race or another. There’s this musky smell this time of year when things hit just right: Leaves falling, some rain, then an overcast, low humidity, blustery day. It smells like the difficult beginnings of renewal.

It felt perfect to me. It felt like I didn’t need to be in Paris, or anywhere else at all. I held J’s hand and talked to myself in my head, talked to myself underneath our own conversational chatter, underneath the rustling of the world around us, underneath the occasional exclamations of people around us, riders passing on the left, mothers scolding children, dogs barking, phones audibly playing music.

I am not jealous. I am not jealous. I am not jealous.

On My Aging Mother

My seventy six year old mom’s been really sick since June. Went to the hospital for back issues, released two weeks later, never been the same since.

She lives with my forty nine year old brother M, who is unemployed, a deadbeat, living off of her. M is three years older than me. I talk to her. She threatens suicide. She doesn’t know why she is alive. I’ve spent the last four months working to help wean her off of various pharmaceuticals. Then she was struck with Covid and the flu at the same time.

In the past eight weeks she has been to the emergency room eleven times. On four of these occasions she was not admitted — she sat in the waiting room for five or six hours and witnessed countless people sicker than herself get checked in. She’d sit there, growing in discomfort, before finally throwing in the towel and returning home.

Seven times she was admitted. Of these seven, four she was deemed to be “dehydrated.” An IV was administered and she was sent home.

Another was documented as a “hysteretic” episode. Xanax was prescribed, the doctor seemingly unaware that my mother was already taking fairly serious quantities of this particular drug.

The other two were related to covid and the flu. Both were last week. On Monday she felt that since she was covid positive for two straight weeks, she must be dying. So she called 911 and an ambulance arrived, drove her to the hospital. What did they find? That she had covid and the flu. Which she already knew. On Thursday she was going to sleep and decided she couldn’t breathe, so she hopped in her car — the first time she’s driven in months, mind you — and drove herself to the local emergency room. She parked the car in the critical lane, the lane where honest-to-god emergency vehicles arrive, got out, and ran into the hospital full speed shouting “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!”

Please tell me the last time someone who couldn’t breathe was able to run from their car toward a building.

This is my mother now. A paranoid, mentally unstable, aging wreck of a person.

I have been trying to convince her to be checked into a psych ward for the past four weeks. She says no, no, no, and because I do not have power of attorney, I can’t do anything to force her. I can only talk to her — only hope to convince her.

Last Monday I call her and she announces she is going to move.

MOVE?? I say, incredulously.

Yes, there is a two bedroom that opened in my building. I’ve been on a waiting list.

You are going to move in your state? You can’t drive, you can’t walk to the laundry room without breathing hard.

Yes, I need a change.

You aren’t well enough to move, I said. You can barely do the dishes. I can’t support this.

I hardly need my son telling me what to do, she said.

I can’t have this conversation, I told her. I’m not telling you what to do, I’m just saying you are really unwell and I can’t support this decision and I won’t be helping you move.

I always knew you didn’t love me, she said.

She’s never said this to me before. My mom and I — we often disagree — I consider myself to be a rational type of person and she’s closer to a feelings-are-important hippe type — but we have always had common ground on knowing that I love her and she loves me.

This is new, I thought. My mom is so disconnected from everything — so unhappy — that she doesn’t feel connected to anyone anymore.

She doesn’t check her email much anymore — since the June event with her back that put her in the hospital and started this downward spiral, I would estimate maybe once or twice a week — but I decided to send her one anyway. I sent it tonight. I said please please please for the love of fuck don’t agree to move. Please stay put and try to get healthy. I don’t know how you are going to move and I don’t know how it’s going to make anything better and it sounds like the plan of a crazy person.

When I was younger — in my teenage years — my mom and dad got divorced when I was eleven — my mom moved every year.

EVERY YEAR.

For a decade.

I went through these moves with her. I didn’t want to live with my abusive father so I had no choice.

Every time we moved she said the same thing. This new place is going to be so much better. Our lives will be so much better.

It was never any better — we moved from one shabby apartment to the next — but she’d parrot the same line the following year and we’d move again.

Moving is a source of optimism for my mother, I realized.

And now that she’s old and getting crazy, she’s on autopilot. Trying to move again in a desperate act of affecting positive personal change through locational upheaval. This is fucking crazy.

I told her twice on the phone that she shouldn’t move, and I sent her an email earlier today stating the same thing: I cannot support this move and I will not help you, this is a terrible decision.

She has not responded to me.

So that’s my mom.

On dumb house projects and emergencies

One of the things I do as a coping mechanism to deal with the struggle of my life is to immerse myself in home improvements that I can obsess on when I am not working, or stressing about J, or worrying about my family, or doing basic property upkeep.

I’ve been working on this sort of forever-project of turning a big unfinished space in my basement into an exercise room.

It’s almost done. The walls are semi-finished, the electric work is done, and I finished putting up the ceiling and painting it last week. I ordered rubber flooring that will arrive after Thanksgiving and after that we’ll get an elliptical machine and some other equipment TBD and that will be that.

In the meantime our dryer broke and we have new appliances coming next week to replace the washer and dryer. But it’s never that simple is it? No. Our old dryer had a bottom vent. This is non-standard. Most go out through the back. There’s an option to knock out a plate on the bottom and install a bottom-vent kit but of course this is not covered by “standard install” procedures by any major retailers (best buy, costco etc.) So I’m left scouring youtube videos and internet documentation on the best ways to proceed.

Even writing about this makes me exhausted so I will stop. But this is the life of a male adult. 90% of women refuse to deal with this kind of shit. It is a man-problem. Fix it. So even though I didn’t cause this problem (dryer broken) it somehow feels like my fault.

Two days after the dryer breaking, we also get a leak in our main bathroom’s shower system. Leak around the main tub-faucet. I call someone: They have to knock the wall of tile down and replace the valve. They can’t find a good replacement tile so we end up picking new tile and re-doing the entire space. Five thousand dollars — wall reconstruction, plumbing shit, valve, fixtures, tile, everything. Looks better. But the money is crushing.

I wonder when it will end.

I am reaching the end of my writing stamina.

Life is OK. J and I are OK. I wish I could drill down into this. It’s an incredible mix of good-day, bad-day, blah blah blah bullshit. I swing from being grateful to having her in my life to feeling like I’d be happier single and then back to feeling like I’m the luckiest person in the world, sometimes in the span of a day. I suspect the same is true for her. I suspect the same is true for most middle aged couples.

I wish I had more time to write. I wish I could write about some of the stuff J and I watch together — Schitt’s Creek and Ator the Invincible (a terrible Conan the Barbarian ripoff) and the Ed Wood movies we’ve been recently viewing. I wish I could talk about the constant stress of work — the stultifying, inescapable pressure of it. I want to talk about the emails I get from people urging me to blog again — I haven’t written a single post since 2020 but I still get requests to provide updates. And, most of all, I want to talk about this feeling that I have that I absolutely have to do something else in my life in order to maintain something resembling personal sanity. What is this thing? I don’t know yet. Join a men’s group, form a band, take classes, resume my blog — something. To assert that I have my own identity, personality, and interests, beyond just being an IT nerd husband, a work-from-home software bitch that supports his wife in everything and everything she needs and wants to do.

But, given time and energy constraints, what I’ve already written represents the basis of what I am able to shit out today.

The rest of it will have to stay inside for a while.