Wednesday, January 20 Morning Pages

Here’s my daily progress photo for the High Vibe 55. The sketchbook has morphed into weird birds. I should write about that tomorrow…

This post got really long and annoying. It’s morning pages but I look down on my own “stream of consciousness” writing because most people think it’s an adolescent style of writing and plain bad, the way artists sometimes think people doing Cy Twombly type stuff are pathetic. I’m still in the midst of trying to add to this new site and make my “About” page. Most people don’t post until they’ve sort of “created” the site and made sure about all the pages and the format and the menu and how it looks on the Home page and all that.

However, as my regular readers know, I’ve always dove into things that are not finished and sleek and prepared. I don’t know what this site looks like. I’m writing posts and tagging them and throwing them into the stratosphere of the blogosphere or whatever it is these days. I am doing daily Tik Tok videos on the weekdays, getting in my teeanage years that I didn’t get to do Tik Tok and would have loved it. I’m not much on Instagram, and Facebook time to time. Writing this blog is on the old people old school corner of the internet. At least that’s what I thought until I noticed lately that many sites have a blog corner. However, their blog corner is a part of their website for their business. This blog is my writing corner and not business. That’s why I spend time warning away clients from reading it. I’m still careful about certain aspects of my life, some of which I’m tempted to write about but just too scared to trust to the internet or to readers. You have no control over who finds you. I take comfort in being small. I don’t get a lot of followers, friends, etc. on any platform. I don’t have lots of people seeing my art on Instagram. I don’t have the success gene or the formula. Sometimes I’m annoyed and self pitying about it: what is it that I can’t seem to have that thing these other people have where there are so many other people seeing their “content”. In high school I was a freak/outisder but there were only 46 girls in our class so you couldn’t completely hide in a corner. I suppose I could write some password protected posts if I wanted to spill all the beans about my checkered past and the dark side of my moon these days.

Anyway I hope you have seen the link from the other blog to get to this blog. I should test it out and make sure it works. I don’t want to lose people who’ve been loyally reading my ridiculous meandering posts that are disorganized such that the only continuity in this blog is that I am writing all the posts, and I guess being out about ADHD: the topic of ADHD often comes up or is illustrated in whatever post it is.

Today I read the essay my 14 year old wrote about the time in first grade she found out that on Father’s Day her classmate/friend of two years was dead. They used to have the same people and teachers for two consecutive years, so she had Kindergarten and First Grade with the same kids and teachers. There were probably around 4 separate classes of each grade with about 30 kids in them.

Anyway it was interesting reading it from her point of view and her memory from today back to June of 2013. I’m sure I wrote about it during the days and weeks that followed on this blog. I could look it up and find the posts. I won’t do that.

I remember going into that school yard for at least a year, whether for drop off, pick up, special celebrations, anything, and I would not be able to avoid thinking about the girl and having an eerie sense of these invisible signs above every kid’s head, their “expiration date”. I would wonder, who is next? There is no catcher in the rye to save kids from all kinds of horror and to save them from running around and falling off the cliff that the catcher would have stopped from happening. I have sometimes thought, even from the beginning, that it can be dangerous to have one child. Life is so precarious. Do people unconsciously have a desire for two or more children as an insurance policy? It sounds morbid, but for sure many years ago when people had lots of kids and lots of kids who died at birth or of scarlet fever or whatever, this was true. People were prepared that if there were eight, it would quickly be six as two of the youngest wouldn’t make it past infancy or toddler years or whatever. People used to be accustomed to children dying as part of life. And of people giving birth and then dying. Now of course we do not feel that way at all. A very sick kid can be taken to special doctors and often get well and live past the 20 years or two years that were predicted. I have a friend whose son is running around free to be a kid but for years was not. He wrote a book about the most precarious year called, “More than You Can Handle”. He is a close friend of mine from Harvard. What he went through was a kind of unique hell but he is on the other side of it now and I smile when I think about it.

I have a friend who was the “replacement” sibling. Her older sister died before she was born. She does research on this phenomenon and the unconscious and conscious burden of being the savior child, the one that is there partly to end the constancy of mourning a child, the one born to keep the parents and family together to move on from tragedy.

A few years ago, I found out someone bumped into the girl’s parents who were pushing a baby carriage with a new baby in it. This was more than a few years later. A happy new life to accompany the other left behind siblings who had known the girl in my child’s class. It was so weird to hear about. There is something eerie about it because it is so long after the loss. Of course I was happy for them, this new life to love and take care of and get to watch grow up.

On every one of her birthdays I wonder who she would be now and my child still thinks about that and about how arbitrary that that unique and wonderful child who seemed to have read every book a six year old could possibly read is always going to be dead and never older than six. Writing about it now, it’s hard to wrap my head around. The not knowing any more than those brief six years. It’s very different from the death of my close friend in the fall of that year just a few months later. With her I was obsessed with why she was dead, why did she kill herself? That obscured any other mystery about what else would her life had looked like because she had a life that led to her going to medical school and becoming a psychiatrist and all the many relationships she was in and all the time I had with her and our special silly things. There are many mysteries about her and questions but she is not a tiny kid that didn’t get to grow up, didn’t get to be 14 and doing the teenage things my kid does.

These are morning pages in that you just write and see what happens. . If I go on and on I usually end up talking about death. I guess especially now that we’re actually mourning someone.

We watched some movies when we were up there. Mary Poppins was one. He hated when people talked in the middle of the movie. I have that thing where I want to just watch the movie and feel like I’m in the movie theater but I end up talking anyway. Oh that’s the same guy in the movie with… and all the other comments. I fly between being completely quiet and drowning out any comments to just giving in to the fun of bantering during the movie. I’m guilty of saying things around what’s going to happen next and always hearing, “Can’t you just watch and see what happens?” This coming from the great predictor of the whole plot or the predictor of some important mystery.

We all now have a thing with movies as we see them at home even more due to the pandemic. Do you eat and munch stuff? Do you sit on the couch with other people. Do you watch movies alone on your phone? I actually sometimes stay up late and instead of watching the movie on the TV or my computer or someone’s iPad. I love watching things on my phone, that I can watch something on a huge screen and instead I can watch it on this tiny screen for one, like the beginning of Fight Club when he talks about single servings of everything, that’s the phone movie single serving.