Somehow things worked out over the last two days that I have been awake for almost 48 hours. Sometimes in life these circumstances occur and you aren’t exactly sure how you ended up there until you have a chance to look back. It wasn’t disaster, or malice, it was just a trickle of tiny things building up and all moving in one direction. It’s kind of like when you’re standing in a stream just before flood waters arrive. At first the flow increases a bit and it looks murky, then there’s branches and stuff in the water. The current increases, and you need your brain to put things together before it’s too late. Sometimes your brain doesn’t do the math in time. I’m glad I wasn’t standing in a real stream or I’d be dead. In any event I’m writing this post many hours before I would normally. My intention is to get dad fed when he gets home and then finally go to sleep. My brain has many what I call “power saving” modes from years of trauma being inflicted upon it by various things. A lot of the time now I walk around with my left eye open and my right one shut. It puts my consciousness behind the open eye and the rest of my head powers down. Whatever part of my brain still functions when I do this is the stripped down version that maintains more focus than I usually do. My right eye is always my sleepy eye and when it’s the one I’m using while the other one rests I’m not as sharp. My mind wanders, I pause a lot to think, it takes longer to answer questions. It’s the meandering part of my brain. I’m not sure if it has any effect on this strange process but my left eye can see far, but not close and the other is the opposite. Maybe my left eye just works better as a general purpose eye and the right is better for tasks that I’m closer to and that’s how they now divide up my world.
When I sit in the kitchen I often lean my head on the cabinet such that it holds my right eye shut. It reduces the effort of keeping it closed even more and I can pay more attention out of the other side. It seems very natural until I take notice of it. Then I can’t stop noticing the reduction of depth perception. If I don’t notice it doesn’t bother me at all, but it I accidentally do then I get screwed up for a few minutes until it resets. Kind of like when you notice your breathing.

Anyway, the silent panel is meant to illustrate the long pause that’s supposed to happen after the previous page. A lot of times I will forget that the pause that comes after a new page won’t exist for a reader that comes along later. When I reread things I sometimes notice that things read slightly faster than I intended since when I made the page there was a pause of not having another page. Most of the time it doesn’t matter all that much, but with this series of pages I really wanted to drive it home how much John has gotten into his head over things. It’s been building up more and more over time. At first he barely reacted at all, then he got a little pressed over things, and now he’s fully slid into wallowing. Usually in his life when things went awry he just walked away, or moved away in some cases, but now he has things he doesn’t want to give up. It’s easier to be a rolling stone when you don’t love anything. Having no attachments is very freeing, but it may not always be the best way to live. Despite what some people might tell you. Being bound to family, even if you made it out of random parts, is often how we start repairing our lives and our world.

At the moment my world is very tired though so I’m going to make sure I get Precious fed before I’m too tired to navigate a dog food bag. I hope you have a nice Wednesday. I’ll see you on Friday. Until then, collect all 80!

Posts authored by Jackie

2975 That’s Rough, Bud.