Sometimes it’s really been a year.

Like right now. Right now, it’s really been a year.

I took tomorrow off from work, so the holiday season officially begins for me again tomorrow. How are we going in?

I’m ill and have been for most of the week. Cough, sore throat, fever, congestion, dizziness, aches, all the seasonal stuff. My son is ill, too, only he’s really ill, as in twice to the emergency room, batteries of tests, miserable and in pain ill, and we’re heading into week three of that situation.

Work feels unstable, and also I feel desperately behind at it. There are a million things I should do on the car. And the house. Oh, the house. The house is a mess. I’ve just spent four hours stumbling around the house trying to clean while hacking my lungs out and wincing at the throat pain before reminding myself that my son has it much worse right how and I ought to just be thankful.

Everything is amiss, and that’s how we’re going in. Happy holidays.

— § —

The year blew by. As in—blew by.

The entire year was adrenaline. We went into it trying to recover from COVID. Everyone got it. Even the dog. And there were significant effects and injuries. And now there is no dog. So last Thanksgiving was a mess as well.

Christmas was still about recovery, January and February were about trying to catch back up in school and in extracurriculars that essentially were ignored for three months.

Then we immediately headed into tournament season and for the first time ever, daughter wanted to seriously travel and train, as in hotels in convention towns and what seemed like endless 5:00 am training mornings.

That went the entirety of the summer and was exhausting and financially draining and then, just as we thought we’d get some relief, son got injured at school right at the beginning of school doing a school-sponsored activity and we entered three months of physical therapy, from which we only recently emerged.

And we emerged into middle school dances and holiday activities, big work changes, birthday parties, and of course, illness.

— § —

The year really has felt like it passed in a few minutes.

A few stressful, panicked, how-are-we-going-to-manage and oh-no-will-this-be-okay minutes.

We’ve just been racing through the whole thing trying not to lose our balance or our composure. And now here it is, a year later. A year after the COVID disaster.

Everything has happened, and yet I have so much trouble hanging on to or remembering it all, I almost want to say that nothing has happened because I didn’t get a chance to live any of it, not really.

— § —

But whatever.

That’s all the cleaning I’m going to do for the night, it’s time to go and lay down and cough my lungs out before we plunge headlong into the holidays tomrrow.

Just after 8:00 pm.

Just finished adding my own heavy cream from the fridge to a coffee because they don’t have heavy cream at convenience stories. Which are one-fourth of my life. The other three quarters of my life are this chair that I’m sitting in, where I work and have done since 2011 (two quarters) and the taekwondo studio where my kids do martial arts (final quarter).

Why am I drinking coffee at 8:something in the evening?

I don’t know.

Because what else is there to do?

I watched the politics people on television for a moment but I didn’t care what they were saying even though I’m traditionally interested in politics. Not now.

It’s been a brutal couple of days. Long. Busy. No breaks. I won’t bother with details, as it’s all the stuff that life consists of. Sick kids, work trouble, unexpected circumstances, revised plans, tight timelines, tight money, blah, blah.

I turned off three of the four monitors and here I sit with one in this OmmWriter thing that I downloaded a million years ago and still sit here every now and then and bang on.

— § —

I feel like a warzone commander who is twenty years into his tour of duty in the same long, endless war on the same battlefront that I’ve been on since I was a “young guy.”

People have come, people have gone.

New initiatives and attacks and movements and tactics have come, and they have gone.

There have been casualties.

Many losses. Some wins.

It’s just another night on the front. Coffee.

— § —

Sometimes I get this bee in my bonnet and think that I need a counterpart, a comrade-in-arms, a partner of some kind. And then I look around me and I realize that this sort of thing isn’t what’s available to the commander.

It’s all enlisted people and when it’s not it’s other commanders barking back at me, a matter of “professional” differences of opinion that, on the battlefield, can either end up in wary silence or gunfire.

It’s just not a good idea. Hold the line. Hold the hill. Hold the post. Focus on the duty, forget the rest.

— § —

“But why commander?” says the amateur psychologist.

“If you would just stop thinking that way—“

I think the amateur psychologists don’t have bills to pay. When they were handing out boons and assignments in heaven, some got the former and some got the latter.

Those who got the former dissect what people think and say and tell them that solving problems is easy, all you have to do is think about life properly and have a winning attitude and things will be amazingly cool.

— § —

Three pumpkins and a fog machine are on the driveway, rotting.

You’d think I’d have had time to clean that stuff up and put that stuff away and so on in the time that’s elapsed since Hallowe’en.

You’d think.

Maybe I am thinking about everything improperly.

But when you get determined to sit down and figure out properly once and for all so that you can finally be wealthy and famous and sail on a yacht and eat small portions of unpronounceable things from square plates, you give yourself a headache thinking and then eventually you chide yourself for wasting six hours trying to think your way out of what are practical problems.

— § —

So what are the problems?

There is this genre of problems that does like this:

It’s problems, yes, but none of them are things that are problems unless you are actively in the middle of them, which is just when you don’t have time to think about or define them well, and they are all somehow really facets of the same problem which is complex and relatively difficult to define, and ultimately when you climb the entire beanstalk, it simplifes to one single overarching problem that can’t actually be named or conceived of at all, but that you recognize as well as you recognize your own face nonetheless.

What’s the strategy that suggests itself for solving them? Or it?

Coffee at 8:something while staring at another pointless screen doing a lot more pointless typing while you don’t sail on a yacht and you don’t eat small portions of unpronounceable things from square plates.