Before yesterday, the last I wrote was on September 25--which is to say, it's been a lot longer than that since I sent anything, but I tried to write that day and decided I'd rather watch Perry Mason. Yep--that's what I've been doing for the past two months--watching Perry Mason (all seasons on Amazon Prime).

I've got my reasons. Just this one last time (and I mean it, because I'm getting rather tired of myself, myself), I will bring up the EVENT. I was pretty much lost to anxiety all September, as though at the end of the month, on the anniversary of my operation, I would have to go through it all again. This time knowing what was going to happen.

Months and months and months ago, I was turning in my head how to turn random surreal moments into writing: Nurses fussing over me, and when they saw I was awake, telling me how lovely my skin was and wasn't I lucky (nice, but...?????). Being ferried in a mobile heart unit to the hospital where I'd be operated on, with six attendants (not bad, princess!), and not knowing whom to stare at more: the clearly on-the-spectrum tech doing a robot-voice play-by-play of the protocols she was following, or the tech who was clearly not a tech at all but the Village People's Ambulance Guy (OMG--and I say this not with lust in my heart, but just OMG). And the nurse who attended me the night before the operation, who had been a minor league ballplayer and had a captive audience. That moment when I realized, "I'm fucking dying here, and yet somehow I'm being forced to talk about the lineup of the '69 Orioles." Dante never thought of that one.

I suppose I never got to that subject matter because it was not possible to do the complete breezy thing as though it was, um, breezy. So. This past September was full of those memories of waking up not to absurdity but to fear. When the anaesthesia wore off too early and I woke up flailing with a tube down my throat, drowning, trying to write, Helen Keller-like, into a nurse's hand that I needed Nick, being held down and yelled at that I would hurt myself, but who cares about hurting yourself when you're drowning? Or begging for my prescription Klonopin before they took out the central line (taking out the heart line the day before had caused an insane electrical shock, so I was terrified); finally, finally getting the pill, but they had a schedule--so them taking the water away to hold me down and yank the line out (resulting in both the flashbacks AND the Dr. Evil pulse in my throat).

And thus Perry Mason (more on him later). But September went and October 5 went, and nothing happened, and I've just been sleepy. Good and bad, it seems settled now. On October 5th, the platonic ideal of a fall day, I drove down to Purgatory Chasm in Middletown and sat on the rocks, looking over the sea toward Africa.

So. I can get on with the writing now. I don't think I'm very good at the less breezy. But it had to be done.

PS--I actually can recite by heart the lineup of the '69 Orioles.

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