#291

The emotional landscape I find myself traversing, brought about by the work on the final post of Album Week 2022 in relation to the content of said post, is hampering production in general, so the thing to do, I deem, is to continue work without a set drop date. The seventh and final post of Album Week 2022 will be posted when it is finished, however many posts down the line that may be! Bam. There. Decided and declared.

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Dear reader, as Ezra has recovered from his top surgery--or, the careful and intentional removal of his tits--we have watched so many movies and cartoons and documentaries. I mean for real, the number is so silly I daren't even attempt a list. Forcing myself to keep fit amongst all this reclining media consumption and sympathetic convalescence has been a true effort, a test of discipline to which I have not always risen to my own satisfaction! His compression wrap is off today, though, signaling a pretty much complete recovery, and we can now enter into renovated and refreshed life patterns. 

We are going to move into a house, which my parents bought and shall rent to us until we can buy it off them. Since my brothers got college and cars off 'em and I never did (largely by my own choice), I have decided not to feel guilty or ashamed about this situation, though it is my personal inclination to feel both of these things and also to wonder perpetually if we are not all of us making a mistake we will live to regret. But! Forward, forward, ever forward! Gonna concentrate on being able to paint the walls how we like and put nails into 'em so we can hang pictures properly, and to be able to do whatever we want with the backyard. That is all I can do. In addition, after we buy it, which is another thing to concentrate hard on and expedite, everything will be square.

Passed the commercial driver's license stuff, got my learner's permit, and have fully completed my classroom requirements, so Tuesday I begin learn how to drive a bus! What a trip. A fucking school bus, yo. I mean damn. Had very bad times on school buses as a kid; hope to provide a very, very different experience to the young people placed in my care. 

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When I was in kindergarten, or kindergarten-aged, I wet myself on the bus. I mean I pissed my pants, but like, hugely. Remember it as a kind of seizure. Held it pretty much from the moment the bus left the school to being dropped off at my apartment building, and about halfway down the aisle, dreaming of blessed relief, either the waterworks must have come to an internal realization that it was down to letting loose in emergency vent mode or busting a gasket, or the mental impetus holding back the flood relaxed prematurely at the sight of the finish line. Whichever, the result was I twisted, twitched, and jerked my upper body, hands scrabbling uselessly at my lower body, feet rigidly planted and breath locked in my breast, face an agonized rictus as I urinated into my short pants with such force and reserves as to soak through them entirely on both sides, the bottom of my shirt, and create a puddle which ran up and down the little trenches in the flooring of the bus's aisle. Too stunned to feel the force of shame, but desperately sorry for the bus driver, I squelched off the bus, socks spongy and warm with runoff.

Took a huge shit in my pants around that age, too. Just one of those situations where I didn't want to go, at psychic odds with the needs of my body, and suddenly, without warning, holding back was no longer an option. Wars of attrition with biological functions are doomed from the outset, but children don't know that yet. At least, children whose arrogance and mania drives them to read in bed for as long as humanly possible without even the smallest of pauses, shitting be damned.

Boy! Life is certainly a phenomenon rich with experience. Things just happen, and we keep on truckin' along. 

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Celebrate your bodily functions today, everybody! And as always, walk away from this blog with the ineradicable sense that control is a pernicious illusion.

Peace!

--JL

p.s. Finally realized that my basis for changing the blog's font in the gap year from whatever the default is to Verdana--which was that I had thought I was using a different font, before, and maybe I was? And then blogger took it away? Maybe? It's so hard to know things for sure without reliable and durable reference points. Anyway, the whole blog is now set to the default font, which is better. I don't know why I was using Verdana. For some reason, I thought I had to. That's over. Praise the Lord.