Finding All New Bottoms
My original title for this was My Fraught Relationship With Pain, because I had a couple of jaunts to the emergency room and they were both pain-related. I’ll elaborate in a minute, but I ditched that title because I realized that nobody has a good relationship with pain. The title I settled on is high-school-writing-class-awful, and I know that. I’m sorry. It fits my mood too well to change it now.
I Have a Blog Now, Again
I used to blog. I had that blog for years. Before other internet-based methods of communicating like Twitter, I blogged a lot. It’s gone, now. I have no idea where I put it.
I shuffled it around from domain to domain, a big shambling mess of personal anecdotes, song lyrics and Star Wars memories. The last place I remember putting it is empty. The Tumblr blog I had for almost as long is still there, for as long as Tumblr is still around. I’m annoyed at myself for not saving it but I’m also arsed if I can figure out what I was ever going to do with it.
I’ve lost all of my writing before. Before cloud storage put everything that matters in redundant server racks accessible on a dozen devices I don’t even use anymore, we had hard drive crashes, clicks of death, power surges, and botched back-ups. I’ve lost more writing than I’ll ever publish.
I go back and look at my Tumblr and I don’t remember writing most of those things. Part of me thinks it would be nice to have all that writing, but the larger part of me asks “why?” I don’t have an answer.
Here’s the Blog
My blog is at jameshazlettforeman.com which I have finally settled on as my writer name. Yes, I was influenced by my brother Robert Long Foreman, because he had the right idea from an early period in his writing career, which was to use all three of his names. I am only now realizing that this was the correct move, and you can add it to the list (ever growing) of things I have learned from my siblings in general and Rob in specific.
When I feel more like writing it, I’ll be adding shorter form items to it. This newsletter is the delivery mechanism for longer content that tends to be more personal. The blog will have other content more focused on science fiction and fantasy and writing and things like that, but for now you can read this post about my name.
I said I would get personal, and I will not let you down.
There are three body-related things happening to me, or have happened recently. If you have been following my writing, you know why I might be particularly attuned to what my body does.
This is My First Body Crisis
Anyway, we were visited recently by the neighborhood outdoor cat, whose name I mention in this video, and whose attention Emmitt is absolutely deranged by. I did not expect Emmitt to do what he did in this video, because he has never so much as scratched me, and only hissed at me a couple of times when I cornered him in order to put him in his cat transporter.
He bit me, I did not take it very seriously, and I was rewarded for this with a trip to the urgent care, where I was given a powerful antibiotic that handily eradicated the infection.
This is my Second Body Crisis
Shortly after this event, my shoulder started hurting a lot. Here’s a photo of me showing my brother in law and extremely capable physical therapist where, exactly, it was hurting. He did his best, but when I have a lot of inexplicable pain, I take myself to an emergency room.
I went to the emergency room despite being pretty sure that the pain was from my very bad posture. I stopped sitting in the chair that was causing my pain and it stopped, which was enough to convince me that Derek was right, that it was, actually, not something to be worried about. A simple change in lifestyle was enough to eliminate the pain entirely. Mischief managed.
This is my Third Body Crisis
I used to think my memory problems were because of my brain surgeries, but I’m no longer so certain. I stopped drinking recreationally because I realized I was doing it as a way of marking time, which is one of the many reasons not to drink.
I occasionally will have a drink or two after work, and I am angry at myself the next day every time, because it interrupts my sleep, which is the number one contributor to me having a more difficult day than I would have had before. Alcohol also contributes to my memory erasure. It can make things fuzzy that weren’t fuzzy before, and I don’t remember having those issues before the pandemic.
I don’t know what causes it, but I do know that imbibing certain substances, including some of the drugs I’ve been prescribed to help mitigate my anxiety, may have been blurring my memory. When you watch a loved one go through the rigors of dementia (more than once, though they were different people), you develop a different relationship with your memory.
Of all the unpleasant things to experience during the treatment of brain cancer, an overzealous application of general anesthesia is one of the worst. I don’t remember any of the day preceding the first surgery. My only memory is waking up after it.
Did that first experience with general anesthesia have a permanent effect on my memory? It’s not unheard of. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that certain chemicals can make my memory worse, and it’s best to avoid those. Also, I am less prone to bouts of Goose-ish behavior:
I will be blogging more, but I will also be using this newsletter to talk to you, dear reader. Please read both, if that would delight you. If you derive no delight from either this newsletter or my blog, do not read them. I won’t be offended.
Please be kind, and forgive yourself. Please give yourself permission to be flawed and human and imperfect. You’re a thermodynamic miracle. Treat yourself like one.
But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget… I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take our breath away. Come…dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.