A Brief Update

I'd meant to write a longer update today, but that isn't going to happen. In addition to the larger issues that have kept me from blogging for so long, I am fighting a nasty sinus infection that wants to (or perhaps already has) become bronchitis. I never get sick in the summer, I wasn't sick all last winter, but where I live, a lot of people seem to have been hit with this, and it is nasty. I've been getting much more exercise, and regaining much of the energy I thought I'd lost in the past decade or so, but this illness has just exhausted me and tired me out.

I did win NaNo last year, even if I failed to update my readers here. I had about sixty thousand words before the end of November, when I got stuck on a conflict between my plot and the realities of history. I'm still trying to work that out, and I may need to go back and rewrite much of what I have, but I think it is an interesting story.

Various troubles have interfered, and I've written about many of them. But late last year, I finally began to understand all the odd things about myself that have never made sense. One relatively simple explanation put my own struggles, and a number of bizarre experiences throughout my life, into perspective. It also dug up and exposed memories reaching all the way back to my earliest childhood, many of them painful. I've actually considered writing a memoir, in the hope it might be helpful to someone else.

And, at the same time I was going through this total reassessment of my entire life, my father developed severe dementia. I suspect he has always heard voices; "somebody" told me was a common excuse for odd pronouncements. And he has claimed in the past to hear from God and from angels, and to have some secret source of knowledge. But last fall, he began to wake us up in the middle of the night, shouting "Nobody move! The police are outside and they're shooting everyone!" And he got the idea that the house had been moved to Boston, right next to the Park Street Church. When he went outside and saw it was on the same lot it has always been on, he started yelling that the police were going to arrest whoever had moved it back "and take them straight to hell!"

Those are just a few of the incidents that spring to mind, but there have been a lot more. There was one stretch of several weeks when we didn't get a single night of uninterrupted sleep. At one point, while he was in a rehab facility, he grew so violent they had to call the police to have him taken out of there. The police took him to the hospital, where they promptly sent him right back to us. And the medications the doctors have been giving him to make him calmer seem to have actually had the opposite effect.

Caught between a major reassessment of my life, and a crisis that would test the limits and the sanity of those with more to spare than I have, I haven't even thought of posting here until Miss Kitty stopped by to say hello and ask how I was. I promised her an update, and felt in case there was any other loyal reader out there who might come by one day and wonder, that would best be posted here.

I may try to post, sporadically, to explain more about the new understanding of myself that has caused me to examine everything in my life differently. I may try to post a few other things, here and there. But the way my life is at the moment, I dare not promise any particular schedule for posting. I'm trying, whenever I can fit it in, to go through all the writing I've accumulated over the years, to finish the incomplete fragments, to revise stories that have promise, and to generally get everything I've written in some sort of order. That project has priority for the moment, and simply working out strategies to keep writing, to make my life a bit easier.