Corporal Fizzlesticks

Today I was reading over this blog post I’ve been working on. It’s actually kinda good but it needs some work and I have reached a couple temporary dead ends on it so I put it down for the weekend. It’s not ready yet, it needs more time in the oven and besides, Depression and Anxiety came a knockin’ and demanded I spar a few rounds with both of them. And since I started this blog as my chosen means to share what’s got me running freakin’terrified this week …

So I broke up with my last fling thing a couple months back and that in itself is not noteworthy. But the funniest thing happened in the next couple days and hasn’t changed since and that is a tiny but thick, charcoal black, mushroom cloud of dread reversed the usual course of a mushroom cloud and instead descended onto my shoulders where it currently sits and shows no sign of moving.

Side note: It occurs to me that since Depression and Anxiety have muscled their way into my life on a conscious level since I owned them a little more than a year ago, I should come up with catchy names for them since what usually happens with me is if I give harsh realities nicknames, it takes away some of their pop. Therefore, I will now address Depression by the far less intimidating nickname Corporal FizzleSticks. Anxiety, instead of being the ominous sounding, soul-crushing, motivation-dissolving gargantuan wet wool blanket that it is will now bear the far more innocuous sounding nickname The Bumps. In fact, while I’m at it, I should come up with nicknames for my traumatic brain injury and my alcoholism too, take away some of their mojo.

Let’s see, The TBI has to have an intimidating nickname, one that throws the fear of God in you, y’know?

I got it. When I refer to the TBI I sustained as a result of the near fatal bacterial meningitis infection that sought to destroy my brain, I will do so using the nickname my Powdered Sugar Sparkly Star Nightscape.

Or Sug Night for short.

Ominous, right? Plus, now it also shares a name with an allegedly violent gangsta thug. Fear of God indeed.

Back to the mushroom cloud of dread. I haven’t had a clue as to what I could do to break this cloud up because the cloud is my fear of the future. It’s the fear of what I’m going to do when 3 or 5 or 10 or 20 years from now I’m staring down the barrel of being the sole provider for my sister, who is autistic and requires daily monitoring, and my financial prospects have not improved significantly from what they are now.

Now, to address a few truths that make this ominous doomsday hellscape extremely unlikely:

Omaha, where my immediate family sans one brother all reside, is enough of a tight knit community that my sister knows people all over town. Pretty much the only way I would be totally alone with my charge is if I were to leave town.

But I’m starting to think I’m going to need to leave town if I’m ever gonna find a woman that has packed the gear necessary to tolerate me and my eccentricities. For all the benefits of living here, Omaha and outlying areas aren’t real fertile grounds for middle-aged, single, sober Buddhists to find much purchase in the strawberry fields of romance.

Plus, my brother who lives on the east coast and will be in charge of her finances after my parents move on from this life is financially quite comfortable and besides both of my parents are still alive and so there is no immediate danger of any of this happening any time soon.

If fact, I’m starting to think I sound like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally when she is bawling her eyes out over the fact that she’s gonna be 40 in like 9 years.

It certainly bears at least some consideration that the COVID-19 pandemic is barely over. And I have sworn off dating apps until I have a bit more to bring to the table than brain damage and the persistent self-perception (that enjoys questionable credibility in reality but still lingers) that I’m a dumpy single, middle-aged white guy in a town full of a shitload more married middle-aged people than single middle-aged people. And I haven’t put myself out there in really any social situation until very recently in more than a year. And the central point of starting the podcast is to show the world that I do indeed bring some game despite having spent the last 16 years pretty much sitting out this life altogether.

Time has come to lift my head up and apply my nose firmly to the grindstone of trying to savor the goodness in this life and just ignore the black clouds for a minute.

They’ll be there when I come back.