Struggling against the almighty tides of eventuality

If life were like a yarn twisted about, what kind of clothing would your existence make? It seems like one of those stupid questions that stupid people ask to get stupid responses that people think are deep. There’s nothing really to it. Your life isn’t cloth, it’s flesh and blood and bone and pain and misery. That’s what I’ve always thought, what I’ll always think. Sometimes people get fooled by the shadow of their fathers and mothers, and think there’s someone watching over their shoulder, but it’s just a tree scraping against the window, nothing more.

We’re all just empty little hobgoblins pressing up against the roof of our world, with most ignorant of the quiet vacuum lying just beyond. It’s big, and it’s cold, and it’s empty. Our lives, they’re just a fraction of a blink to a universe that’s only now waking up. Even the people who “matter” are just insects crawling next to us. They found a tiny little crumb to make them seem important, but they all died too, when the ever-impending flood rose up and washed them away. Maybe the stupid and the lazy have it right; you’re going to die, you’re going to end up not mattering in the slightest, and you’re going to be alone; why bother making anything bigger out of it than it is?

I want to matter, I want to be important. But a flash in the pan is nothing to write home about, and the soup will still be cold. Even if I could turn this world into a burning star with my passion, the stars themselves die long before the space that birthed them could be considered young. Why am I fighting, then?

I don’t know.

I should get that printed on a shirt.

Last night, I decided to try a little literary experiment. And, actually, it turned out pretty well! Just see for yourself. I asked several people to write me one sentence of a fictional nature. It could be any valid sentence, like you’d read out of a novel. The rules evolved as I went along, and eventually people asked for an example. As I didn’t want anyone to see anyone else’s, I came up with my own: “The single most important thing I was ever told was not to cry in front of witnesses.” As I didn’t necessarily care to embark upon the story until after I’d collected everyone else’s statements, I didn’t use that line. However, it’s at least here for posterity.

My original intent was to get five people’s sentences. I had picked the people out carefully based on what I figured was either a guaranteed willingness to help with literary excursions or importance to my life or some combination of both. However, I started late at night and most people had gone to sleep, and I wanted to strike while the iron was hot, so I shotgunned a request to a number of people. As it turns out, I got almost everyone I was going for initially, plus a couple extra, and wound up with seven sentences to use.

One of the things I liked was how each sentence completely rearranged what I thought was going to happen based on everything I thought might happen beforehand. As I said, I didn’t really start writing until after I collected everything, but ideas were coalescing with each puzzle piece everyone gave me. Here’s what people gave me, in the order I got it:

• Larry Saunders – My partner gave me the simple and straightforward line “I went to work today.” I eventually added on the clause that it couldn’t simply be something that was an inverted true statement, i.e. “the sky is not blue.” Given how short and straightforward it was I thought his sentence would be easy to work in and wouldn’t have an impact, but given the nature of the last paragraph, and the way it showcases Mildred’s escapist desires, I think it added some nice depth.
• Eric Will – Eric, who has contributed to this blog and works with me, gave me the statement “When I was young, I met this beautiful girl by a lake.” His was particularly interesting in that he started a trend that would be shared later where he gave me something from an abandoned story he had started himself. This beautiful girl turns out to be a pretty pivotal point in one of the narrators’ lives.
• Jason House – Another coworker, after giving me a bit of grief, as he is prone to do, gave me the most difficult sentence to work in: “Unicorns are primarily found in warm tropical climates but have been known to travel as far north as new hampshire in november to enjoy the changing colors of the evergreens.” I’ll admit that I cheated and used it as a quotation from a non-existent book. However, like the girl, this book turned out to be a key component in altering the first narrator’s life.
• Jessica Hughes – From an old character biography, I got “She stood tall and boldly faced the east with the burning remnants of her house and former treasure behind her.” Jessica has been a long-time friend of Larry’s and now we converse regularly on Twitter about music and many other things. Her statement contrasts with Eric’s pretty well, with the fire and water dichotomy, and features prominently at the point where the two narratives intersect, which I didn’t even realize until I was almost finished.
• William West – A friend made entirely through the power of social media (read: we are Twitter buds) gave me “I never did find out if she was a stripper or a bank teller.” He apologized for it, which he said himself he should stop doing, so shame on him. The character he gave me turned out to be more of an indication of the kind of life the first narrator led, free-wheeling and womanizing. That made me re-think the love interest with the girl at the lake, because I still wasn’t sure what was going to happen there.
• Molly – Another Twitter user, interesting in that I think she lives at most 500 yards away, I’ve probably seen her without realizing it, and I don’t know her full name, told me yet another line from a story she had started herself: “Mildred made weekly trips to the farmer’s market for social interaction and intrigue.” Strangely, this seemed to fit into the kind of lifestyle that the narrator would find interesting, per William’s entry earlier. It was also curious in that she finally used a proper name. I had considered restricting to pronouns in my request at first, but finally decided I wanted people to have as much freedom as possible. She was the only one who picked up on that open-ended promise. And it turned out to be the key to the hook that I came upon with the next and final sentence.
• Mykl Levi – A recently-made good friend gave me the final sentence I would collect: “He was institutionalized when I met him, but that didn’t make me want him any less.” At first I thought I’d turn my narrator into a bisexual or something, but then I realized I could simply make him crazy all along. Of course, after flipping that switch, I had to decide if all the women he was after were fantasies, or reflections of the same woman, or any number of other things. I eventually settled on his mother, who it turned out would be Mildred. Naturally, she couldn’t say she wanted her son unless I wanted to make this a really twisted story (which I did not want to do), and she definitely wouldn’t have just met him anyway.

From this point out, I created the whole story. A lot of what I said in the comments happened anachronistically from how it’s presented here. Clearly, the second narrator didn’t even come into play until after Levi gave me his sentence, but I mentioned both of them as early as the first as though they were a given. At this point, it’s sort of difficult to remember at what points which portions came into being. What really matters is that I really love the end result. It turned out amazingly well, better even than I had hoped it would be.

I know there is probably some medical fallacy in the son’s insanity, Eric or Molly (who I think is a doctor or a researcher, I’m not sure which) could probably set me straight on that. This story was not really about doing tons of research, though. Usually I pop open Wikipedia and Google and go to town researching everything, but for this I just had the quotes at the top of a text file and just streamed it through the fingers. I edited two sections after the fact, adding one or two sentences a the top and taking out a couple at the bottom, but ultimately it just flowed.

So, after all that has been said, I’d like to issue a big thank you to everyone who helped me out with this. It sounds like I’m making a big huge deal out of such a short story, but I think it’s pretty good and I have some good people to thank for that. I hope none of you are offended at how I used (abused?) your creative contributions.

Lest it seem too much like self-congratulatory fawning over my own work, let me say this: I do not really think my last blog post was particularly great. I do think it was good, though I see some cracks, and clearly can see where someone might come across with a “bad” verdict. Still, I wanted to write a bit about what I meant by the whole thing, in spite of a distinct lack of comments on it (I honestly was expecting at least one or two).

To lead off: this story is decidedly fiction. It had a few elements to it that were inspired by real events, but for the most part it is fictitious. I wrote it while depressed, as that seems to be the only time remaining wherein I’m distinctly creative. I walled myself off and had Sigur Rós’s ( ) playing. Sigur Rós, like Massive Attack, has been a must-buy for me for years, all based on watching this haunting video at 4AM one night a long time ago.

I wasn’t really sure what I was planning on writing, at first. Actually, the first part I wrote was the bit in the third paragraph, at the well. As I was writing, I was taking periodic breaks to find quotes that were floating around in my head, and to either integrate them, use them as inspiration, or both. My initial search was for “The time has come to put away childish things.” It seems, based on my initial search, that I mashed up two quotes: one from Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter around the 11th stanza, and one from the Bible, specifically 1 Corinthians 13:11. Interestingly, I chose neither of those quotes, but ones relating to the 3rd stanza and 1 Corinthians 13:2.

I knew I had heard the quote from Corinthians before, but it didn’t occur to me until later where it was: wedding ceremonies. Strangely, I thought of it and immediately jumped to how appropriate it would be at a funeral (strangely I say, because I’ve been to many wedding where they’ve used it). I’ve got a friend who says weddings and funerals are the same thing. Of course he’s being incredibly sardonic, but it has some grain of truth (for the more religious/spiritual among us): in a way, it’s an ending of one life, and a beginning of another (presuming the presence of an afterlife, as one listening to scripture might do). And of course, for the humanist in me, being faithful is all well and good, but living and dying without love is pretty damn terrible.

The third and fourth quotes were somewhat more deliberate, as I put them in after writing at least half of the story, rather than at the beginning like the first two. I had just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” vol. 5, “A Game of You,” and the quote about wishing came from there. From what I could tell, it actually is an old saying, and most of the time isn’t quite as vulgar, but I liked the vulgarity because it seemed more like you’d expect a phrase like that to come. The last quote I looked for specifically as something to do with silence, cause that’s where I wanted to go with the last portion of the story. After passing up a quote from Shusaku Endo’s “Silence” because it hammered too heavily on the Christian aesthetic for my tastes, I settled on a quote from John Cage in reference to his piece 4’33″, which felt better as it had to do with the nature of silence (his idea was actually built into the narrative), and isn’t just something from a work titled “Silence.”

I said I wanted to critique my work a bit, so I’ll get to that, but I also realized another reason I was doing this was for attribution. Footnotes in the text seemed like they’d be gaudy, and so I didn’t include them. However, in fear of people not searching for these quotes and realizing who the original authors were, I felt compelled to discuss it, at some length. At any rate, onward:

As I said, I wrote the third paragraph first. The first I wrote specifically after the inclusion of the Lewis Carroll reference, and honestly it feels a bit forced, like I was leading into the quote and never quite delivered. The idea was that the person who died was just dead, and all the moping was pointless cause they were crying over an empty vessel. Unfortunately, that could not have been more obscured by the text and I think that ultimately the atheistic, cynical, and nihilistic existentialism in the first paragraph really jars when set against the more spiritual context of the scripture quotation later. Although, the narrator’s opinion could be argued to be changing by the time he’s at the bus stop, hence going to the well in the first place.

The other part that’s consistently bothered or delighted me, depending on my mood at the time, is the change in tense. For the first half, it’s in present tense. The second half is in past tense, and takes place over a longer span of time. The change in tense itself doesn’t bother me insomuch as the fact that it felt backwards: the first half occurs historically first, so if anything is past tense, it should be that. However, I keep waffling. It’s all after-the-fact reasoning, though. The real truth is that I just had tense trouble (going back and forth with present and past) throughout and it was easiest to resolve it the way I did, although…

I mention in the last paragraph a scene that didn’t occur anywhere else, with the drifting off in the first bus ride. The whole first half could just be a memory, and like all memory it’s faulty and only the parts that are important to you at the time tend to surface. When the narrator was cynical, all he could remember was his cynicism and the cause of it. When he was hopeful, he remembered something more positive. And, as the entire thing was a memory, he was narrating it like he was there. In that respect, the verb tense issue could be resolved, and I can pat myself on the back for something so deep that I didn’t necessarily mean to do in the first place.

Speaking of tense: I changed “could make it” to “can make it” to sound more hopeful. I’m not sure if it didn’t just sound like I’d forgotten the way I started the sentence. Instead of saying “could” like it’s past tense and has been proven wrong, I say “can” to show it’s still going on, thus: so far, so good. Whatever. The final word problem I had was in the first paragraph again, “tinnitus.” It’s a chronic ear-ringing condition that runs in my family, and it’s maddening. But, more than that, it broke up the narrative because someone might go “what the hell is that?” That would be a dead stop in the story right there as they pulled up Wikipedia, and would be kind of terrible.

Speaking of Wikipedia, I wanted it to be a timeless sort of story, set anywhere, so I avoided mentioning technology as much as possible. I’m not sure what I could have done about the bus stop, it just seemed like the right location, but clearly that places it sometime since the turn of the last century or so, and as such reduces the “timeless” quality (and not nearly every place has bus stops). Ah well.

At any rate, like I said, it wasn’t my best work to date, but I like it. I originally intended to post a follow-up as a comment on the post, but as you can see from the length of this post, that wasn’t particularly feasible, as it’s longer than the story itself. Hopefully it’s given you more clarity as to what I was thinking, or that it’ll help me to write better in the future. I’d really like to know what people think of these things, so if you’re reading, please do comment (either here or on the original post). I’ve got to approve posts when you do it the first time, but you’re “trusted” after that.

Update: I’ve set up my own blog for pain purposes.

In the past, I’ve written extensively on the subject of chronic pain, and opioid therapy to treat that pain. In those writings, I’ve mentioned as an aside that these things apply to me, being that I am a chronic pain patient. What I haven’t done is write extensively on my specific pain, my specific treatment, and how my pain changes my life. There are reasons for this.

The main reason is because–until recently–I didn’t want to believe that my pain affected my life at large. I didn’t want to believe that this can not only affect my life, but it in fact dictates the majority of my day. I wanted to believe that I could take medications and ignore it and continue on the path I’ve chosen without modifying anything. To my disdain, this is painfully untrue.

In high school, I participated in running sports like Cross Country and the long distance division of Track & Field. I ran 6-8 miles every night, and I was in fantastic shape. I continued to run after high school until I was around 19. At this age I started having a dull ache at my tailbone. It was intermittent and mild, so I’d take over-the-counter (OTC) analgesics like acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and naproxen. As time passed and my age grew, so did my pain. The pain spread to my entire lower back and started taking over my life. By the time I was 21 OTC analgesics weren’t working anymore, and I had no health insurance. After being turned away at free clinics under suspicion of drug-seeking, I started going to an ER on a regular basis. They’d occasionally give me a shot of hydromorphone or prescriptions for a few day’s worth of muscle relaxants and opioid analgesics, but 90% of the time they’d also turn me away under suspicion of drug-seeking. At this point, the pain was nearly constant and unbearable. The clinic the ER sent me to for follow-up had a lazy doctor who never treated anything but crotch-rot and runny noses. He sent me to Physical Therapy, and a litany of other specialists within the charity hospital. I had x-rays and MRIs and no one ever saw anything. So, again, I was ignored for what was presumed to be drug-seeking behavior. Then, the aforementioned clinic was aquired by new management, and with this came a new doctor. I gave him a shot, and gave him my history, and he decided to give me a chance. I went through two-week trials of every NSAID you can think of, until he finally agreed to give me opioid analgesics, under the condition that I would continue to try to figure out what was wrong with me, and that he would stop prescribing them when I did. Around the time I turned 22 I moved 900 miles from that clinic, to Baltimore.

In Baltimore I spent about a year making my way through an orthopedist, rheumatologist, gastroenterologist, and a cardiologist. The original orthopedist discontinued the opioids and gave me injections, which worked at first but quickly faded. He gave me a few month’s worth of opioids and referred me to a pain management doctor. This doctor diagnosed me with lateral facet joint hypertrophy, or more plainly, a severe form of arthritis in the joints of my spinal vertebrae. He continued the opioids and gave me a multitude of injections, which didn’t help much. I was still miserable despite the narcotics and one day I broke down crying and he decided to pull out all the stops and put me on some real opioid therapy. I started taking extended release morphine along with the hydrocodone I was already receiving. In the time since I’ve been on methadone, and now transdermal fentanyl fills the role of my 24/7 medication, and the hydrocodone has been replaced with oxycodone. I also have adjuvant medications like muscle relaxants and sedative/hypnotics. All in all, it took nearly four years to get my pain under control.

Now that I see a good doctor–who does his best to help me manage my pain–I thought my fight might be over. It took day after day of good days and bad days before it dawned on me that I only won a small battle, and while I’ll spend the rest of my life at war, I’ll never win. I’ll continue to have good days where the pain is balled up into a corner of my mind, and I’ll continue to have bad days where I’m balled up into a corner of my bed. I’ve always known this, but only recently has it really fully elucidated itself: I will be in gut-wrenching pain for the rest of my life.

Knowing that, it begins to dawn on me that I will be unable to live the life I want to live. A given activity may be restricted or even impossible for me to endure. Walks in the park are now a test of my pain threshold rather than a harmless stroll. Going out with my girlfriend to places like malls is now not only mind-blowingly boring, but back-breakingly painful (one might think this is a good thing, but any time together is good time together). Not only are these things difficult now, but my condition is degenerative; it will continue to get worse every single day, as will my pain. While a walk through the mall may seem hard now, walking at all may be an arduous task in the not-too-distant future.

So where do I go from there? Will I become legally disabled and unable to work? What of my plan to go to medical school? What of all the hard work I’ve already put into school? Medical disability programs in this country are pitiful, and a mere pittance compared to my current income, let alone the future income I could achieve with a medical license. Being a physician is physical work, and carries the longest hours of any profession. I’m not implying that I couldn’t get a degree, but what am I to do with it if my physical limitations continue unabated? Will I be seeing patients or will I be relegated to boring research?

The degeneration could be curbed by strong back muscles, but in order to get stronger I have to exercise, and that is quite difficult when mere walking is a test of pure will. I don’t believe any amount of medication in the world can change this. My medication barely allows me to function in the world. I’m lucky when I get out of bed and get back into it without some horrifying pain in-between, let alone adding purposeful physical exertion into every day. Perhaps if I take a morphine shower afterwards.

As things are I take quite a bit of strong, dangerous medication and it barely manages an uneventful day. I frequently employ the aid of a cane. If I so much as play with my little nieces or wrestle around with my girlfriend, I pay for it dearly. I used to think that bill would stop coming, but I really do realize now that bill controls my life. It controls what I can and can’t do. I can think “don’t let this control me, don’t let this be who I am,” and yet it is anyway. My pain is my life, and my life is pain.

I bought this house two months ago.  Two months ago, we were sitting in a small room with not nearly enough ventiation; across from us: three people with whom we could barely communiate.  They spoke Korean and a little bit of English.  I knew how to say “no” in Korean, a vestige from a party with me and a guy who had a crush on my sister in high school.  I barely knew it, actually, and I think it might have sounded something like “no.”   It’s weird, but “no” almost always sounds the same in all languages.

Ever since then I’ve meant to fix the lights in our bedroom.  I meant to take those two cords, swinging merrily in the breeze, and unify them so they weren’t low enough to hit our heads.  I’ve never gotten around to it.  Tonight, I’m looking at them yet again.  They’re just another in a long line of projects I’ve never finished.  I’ve yet to fix the kitchen.  I haven’t called the radon remediation company.  I am miles away from sending out a slew of E-mails my boss has been on my ass for since three weeks ago.  But I’m staring at these light fixture pullchains, with my partner’s head in the nook of my arm.

The chains are two different sizes.  I just now noticed.

I’d never be able to unify those two chains, it just plain couldn’t happen.  It’s a stupid little thought, but for some reason it’s sticking with me.  After all these things that happen during the day, just one thought sticks out.  It’s because it’s so useless, so pointless, that I can’t get it out of my head.  We, as human beings, have about 10,000 useless thoughts run through our heads every day.  Some, they’re just temptations and easily forgotten; others, they’re desires never to be fulfilled.  What happens to them?  Like us, they are ephemeral: fleeting electrical impulses soon thrust out of our brains and never existing again.

I’m still thinking about those chains though.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll make a special trip to Home Depot, or Lowe’s because they’ve been caught less often trying to put a value on customers’ lives in court cases about safety.  Maybe sometimes, our thoughts, like us, can be held on to, made important.  There are six billion people, we’ve each thought more thoughts in a year.  Thoughts can cling to you, can make themselves heard.  Will you be heard?  Will I?  Time will tell, and time will make fools or heroes of all of us.