Distraction Action

Just as I need to experience, really feel my grief and sorrow in real time – repression’s a sucker’s game – I DO need distraction. Ya know, all woe and no joy makes Donna a psycho kind of gal. Can’t have that, mon ami.

So then, I’m working again. The simple layout and small design jobs help. My mind is completely focused when I’m Creative Clouding away. It’s a balm.

I went to see another movie – The Secret Life of Pets. Very cute but it may still be too soon for me to be able to enjoy a movie in a theater surrounded by, ya know, PEOPLE. I found, in this one and in Ghostbusters,  that I wanted to get up and go home almost immediately. Yes, I wanted to see the flicks (and I did stay) but I yearn to be home surrounded by Bob things, Bob smells, Bob-ness. What to do? Get my DVD player fixed and watch sci fi, animation and such here at home.Workin' on it.

I’m planning a trip to see Daddy in late August.  This one’ll be slightly more leisurely since I don’t need to race back to Valhalla and The Amazing Bob (*sniff*). Jen and I will stay overnight in a town close-ish to where my father lives so that we can have lunch with him on two consecutive days. Two shorter, less taxing visits.

Sadie, Trixie and Giselle Cumulus

Brother, George Cumulus

Jen, Oni and I are making a plan for my upcoming birthday, the first without my TAB and I’m dreading it. The idea is to do something completely different from past years.  We’ll drive out to Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA. I’ve never been and I hear tell the place is fabola. As long as we’re at the far western edge of Massachusetts, we’ll zip up to Hoosick Falls – just an hour further north – visit Helen and fam, have a little dinner party and stay the night.

I’m starting to have longer stretches where the grief’s not dialed up to eleventy-billion. What this means is that I think mebbe I can trust myself on the trike again. In the past, when consumed with worry or anxiety, I’ve been less than careful and observant. I've rolled the trike… twice. Yeah, fucking, ouch! So then, I’ve been off my beloved three wheeler for almost a month now. Time to get back on. I’ll take it easy at first. Short rides, just around the neighborhood.

The weather report says that the next four or five days will be in the 90s. *Oof City* What this means is that I’ll get out mega early to trike or walk the beach and then I’ll be home to hibernate in the ACed boudoir. I can get back to cleaning, sorting, organizing and discovering forgotten bits from my long shared life with TAB OR I’ll indulge in trashy mystery novels, hippy dippy sci fi (rereading Stranger in a Strange Land) and Vonnegut. Probably both.

Cousin Trinnie Stratocumulus

I’m trying to enter this new TAB-less life. I don’t want to. I want to stay in my cozy home with him here. So much of the time I find myself still stunned that he’s gone. I just don’t get how we could be happily hangin’ at home one day and the next we’re on a horror ride. The Mantle Cell Lymphoma was supposed to be just a piffle and then all of a sudden it was Godzilla stomping through his body like it was a cardboard Tokyo. Pneumonia piled on and then his heart decided to get into the action. My man was ganged up on! NO FAIRS!

Hell’s bells, I get it – his body passed its expiration date. Check. Did it have to flame out so fast and spectacularly though? Could we not have had something a little slower, more peaceful or, at the very least, just ONE damn disease at a time?

Sometime in the past year, TAB was in pain from a crushed disk in his spine. He just couldn’t get comfortable. Sitting in his recliner with a heating pad on his back and Coco on his lap, he pronounced that, in a better universe, we wouldn’t occupy these meat sacks. We’d be Free Floating Sentient Cloud Beings.

Yup.