bullet points of overwhelm

• There is actually a fair bit of heavy shit going on in my life just at the moment.
• Mom got her hip replaced last Friday, which is the biggest thing.  She's doing quite well and is expected to come home tomorrow.  I changed my plane to be here for one more day to help Dad get her settled in, but am still full of worry and guilt that I can't be here for the six weeks until she gets fully better, staying with them every day, running out to the store to get things, cooking meals and helping her get around.  But I'm glad I'm staying the extra day to get her settled in.
• Hospitals are hard places to hang around in.  There's so much emotion - the most in the Surgery Waiting Room, a million little groups of family members, sitting, waiting, hoping for the best, trying not to think about what might happen.  But then also on the 2nd floor, one floor down from the orthopedic floor where Mom is, are all the new babies.  You see people arriving and getting security stickers, you see people leaving and putting impossibly small babies in authorized car carriers and taking them home.  You see people with faces drawn with worry, you see people who give gracious, friendly smiles.  Hospitals are full of emotion, and each morning as we head down there, actually it's when I walk in, I have to gird myself for one more day around it.
• My sister showed me the first two episodes of a show called Freaks and Geeks, by the guys who did 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up and all sorts of wonderful finger-on-the-zeitgeist movies, and it's set exactly precisely when I was at High School.  And they absolutely nailed everything about it - the clothes, the music, the language, but also the preoccupations, the period in history, the way parents and teachers and guidance counsellors all talked.  I winced and had to look away many times because it was just too perfect.  And who wants to vividly relive their High School years?  Seriously?  But it's a wonderful show, and I fully intend to watch the rest of them.
• Today we skived off hospital duty and met a friend of my sister's at the Mercury Cafe.  It said on the menu that the original one was started in 1975, and then "after moving to a few locations around Denver," they came to the current location in 1990.  I went to one of the "few locations around Denver", it was the key venue for punk bands, back in the day.  It was somewhere up off Colfax, in the neighborhood of Wax Trax which I'm not sure is there any more (how long has it been since music has been recorded on wax?), it was all black on the inside, there was a nice bar, I think they had nice breakfasts there even back then, but I went to see the Dead Kennedys, I think it was, in probably 1980 or 1982ish, a bit late for the peak but still, enough in the midst of it that it was still cool, and still pretty relevant - although I was there with people who had moved to their New Romantic phases, with slicked back hair and long wool overcoats, very Brian Ferry, and I remember Robert saying, dismissively, "These people are all dressed like it's still 1977."  The Mercury Cafe now is in a building that stands all by itself in fields of scrub and yukka, up north of downtown, with nothing around it - you'd think it would have attracted other hipster businesses and formed a scene, but no.  It's all red inside, with lots of Christmas lights and photos of political protesters and wood benches and stuffed animals, a bathtub sitting by the restrooms for no good reason, an accordian player serenading us during brunch.  The menu has lots of vegan stuff, lots of spicy Mexican sorts of stuff, but also one dish featuring eggs on Elk.  I love that it still exists.  I wonder if I would hang out there often if I still lived here, or if I would just go every 5-6 years, as I seem to now, and marvel at it as a time capsule of my youth, but not make it a key central part of my life?
• Work is undergoing a restructure, and last Tuesday they outlined the vision for our part of the business, and sort of outlined what our jobs might become, and I'm not sure I want to do either of the jobs my job might evolve into.  So I got on the phone with an agency I work with in Milwaukee, and as luck would have it they are looking for exactly one of me just at the moment, and were hoping to hire someone before the end of the year, which is just when our restructure is supposed to be complete.  I was meeting with them anyway, just taking advantage of the fact that I was flying out of Milwaukee to come to Denver for my Mom's hip surgery, but it turned out to be more or less a job interview.  So, I might actually move, just about the time I've done 12 months in this town and job.  Or I might not.  Since I haven't put roots down very far, it wouldn't be that hard, and since Milwaukee is a bigger and much cooler city it could be really good, but it's still unsettling.  And makes me very unmotivated to do any work - instead I've been...
• spending lots of time standing around talking about guitars.  Because I have a new guitar!  I always thought I wasted my youth by learning cello instead, but I guess I'd written it off as an avenue no longer open to me.  I think I believed that if you don't start when you're 17 and spend 13 hours a day practicing, you'll never be any good, and I think I also thought you had to start on acoustic, learn Bob Dylan and John Denver songs, then do a few years of Classical, and only then would they let you plug in and actually play something good.  But all of that is wrong.  In fact, they tell me, in some ways it's easier to learn on an electric.  And the kind of music I like to listen to is rock, not Bob Dylan or John Denver or folk songs or even Classical.  I wandered into a guitar shop just over two weeks ago, and I remember the feeling crossing the threshold, the feeling of stepping over all those false beliefs.  And, more on this later because it's more than a bullet point, but I'm now the owner of a Standard Stratocaster, and a leather strap that belonged to a colleague at work who is working as a mentor to me, and I have a lead on a teacher and might even start next Friday.  I also have a number of offers to jam, which I didn't expect.  The fellowship of guitar enthusiasts is welcoming me warmly, and I'm very excited to reclaim this lost dream and realize that it's not too late.
• In some ways I have nothing to lose.  My narrative ran out just over three years ago, maybe even longer, maybe as far back as when I was retrenched.  I have no plan, no goals, no specific desires, no unrealized ambitions.  I was feeling like that after the Milwaukee sort-of-job-interview meeting, on the plane.  There are some scripts in my head that you shouldn't leave a job after less than 12 months, you shouldn't leave a company who moved you across the world, you shouldn't leave a job that you're good at and they like you perfectly fine, you shouldn't move cities all the time, you should buy a house, you should settle somewhere.  But I thought, I'm basically dead now.  I basically died a few years ago, and now it doesn't matter what the heck I do, so why not?  It's hard to explain this feeling, because it's not a suicidal feeling, but it is an absurd feeling.  Maybe I'm living more in the truth of life, that in fact there's no real story or structure or meaning to it, it's just one damned thing after another.  I'm improvising, rather than following a planned path.  But I'm also going back and picking up things in this post-dead life that I didn't do in the first one, like become a rock goddess.  And who cares?  What does it matter?  What difference does it make that I'm way too old for this?  I'm already dead, I'm beyond the boundary, I'm no age, there's nothing appropriate or inappropriate for me because I'm in a goal-less void.  So, why not?  It's hard to explain this feeling without making it sound like I'm depressed and still have some bad grief things to work through.  I might.  But right now, I feel somewhat fearless and very creative.  And alive.  In the now.  So, we'll keep going and see how all this turns out.
• Tonight at the hospital we were watching The Sound of Music on ABC Family, and it was fine, but when it got to the point where Maria had run away from the Von Trapp household back to the abbey because she couldn't handle her feelings for Baron Von Trapp and the idea that they might be reciprocated, and the Mother Superior told her she had to go back and face it and see how it would work out, and told her that the love between a man and a woman is also sacred and maybe God had another plan for her, and then turned to the window and sang "Climb Every Mountain", it made me weepy.  It's okay to be weepy in a hospital, fortunately, and I could sort of blame it on tiredness and hitting the wall of hospital-sitting, but I think what made me weepy was something about love and truth that I don't really know what to do about.  Again, like with the guitar and the job situation, I will just keep going, living this absurd life, and try to feel alive and creative and have fun, and whatever.  See what happens.