I should be doing about a million things, including reading a stack of titles like "Spirituality and the End of Life", but it keeps making me afraid I'm dying. me me me, it's all about me.  every horrible story, 'omygodthatcouldhappentome', until I'm utterly bored of myself.

...after struggling every day for the better part of a month just to meet my standing work obligations, including trying to adjudicate a college-wide facult-on-faculty slap down (think West Side Story, but no songs or snapping, and I can't pull of Carmen Miranda), I remember at the last minute I'm to be interviewed today about how narrative forms... I have no idea how narrative forms. I realize that when we get to the part of my life when my friend Danniel and I spend a good portion of every day writing to each other in spiral notebooks that we fill and fill and fill. Why?, asks the interviewer. I don't know. What were you accomplishing by narrating your lives to each other in that way, writing it down? I don't know. Do you have any theories? Nope. Maybe if I can get a minute to think a thought about narrative at the end of life, I'll get a theory that will apply to my own adolescence. Maybe we were dying.

So, I got named to lead faculty on this big grant...palliative care and spirituality and the humanities....the local nursing care organization expanding to mindfully cover the end of the life as its own discrete stage...with its own soundtrack typa deal, which is where I come in....

I think I can safely say I'm dangerously out of my depth....

(loving this)

http://youtu.be/IJNR2EpS0jw

I almost bought this.  It went on and on.  The lady who had owned it was named Hope Well, no I'm not kidding.  She had o what I would guess to be two dozen feral cats, a semi surreal colony of slinking sneaking fur out the corner of your eye everywhere.  The bank has the house now, but no it doesn't.  Nobody has it, it has itself, or the cats have it.  Whenever I'd get close to be able to buy it, no again.  No survey to be had, no insurance possible without it, no mortgage possible without that, and on and on with it consuming my mind like spells do, I couldn't get the damn thing to stop, even in my sleep I dreamt of it alive and reaching.  In the end, the realtor deemed it unsellable, un-have-able, and left it to itself on its hill. 

At work meanwhile, I put in 14 hours days, one after another, one crisis after another, with the only explanation for that being this weird energy AT me - like, am I about to get fired?  promoted?  is the school going to burn down?  It feels like it.  I wasn't surprised when the biggest tree out front of my building blew over and crushed two cars earlier today.

Then I took a walk.  I went up and down village streets all abandoned mid workday, trying to feel what there would be to feel on this day of the year when the living and the dead are separated by the thinnest degree.  And on a dead end street I cut into from its dead end side, up an embankment I never scale but I figured never doing it normally was a good reason to do it, I passed the little driveway of another house spookily sitting on its hill with a get off me vibe, the kind I like.  I caught a glimpse of one of those zombie dolls people toss into their yard for Halloween, face covered in blood, a big mop of white blond curly hair.  Then it moved.  And I realized I had just found a half dead woman, still very much alive. Gretchen, she said slurrily - she seemed to have knocked out a tooth, she really didn't want the ambulance I called (not at ALL, no no, no help, fuck that, fuck everything no no no), and I could relate of course, I don't want anybody to help me either.  So we sat and commiserated, with her begging me to call off the ambulance and me having to remind her that she was unable to get up and bleeding to death on the ground.  O right, that.  Right.  So, might as well chit chat to keep her mind off the ambulance.  What else is on your mind Gretchen?  Her husband Jack.  He's dead.  He died three years ago.  She met him when she was 40 and he was 61 and they lived together 30 years and he died at 91 right there too, fell down just outside the pretty house that she wants desperately just to get inside of again.  She likes only the house, she lives WITH it not just in it, it keeps her.  Finally, the emt's show up and take her, and she gives me her banking to do, the errand she was going to run this morning when she fatefully left the safety of the house.  I went back after with the receipts to put them in her mailbox, and I looked through the windows and thought "wow, your lace filtered light".