Writing consumes writers. No end of ones better than I am have said as much. The passion hurts relationships. I think off and on about people I love, but I think about writing all the time.
Writing is hard, or everyone would do it.*
I am feeling Quiltly (ha ha ha) Quitty (another 3 ha ha has) all slips in my patterns of three to avoid the word Quilty. Which seems to come out of my new computer with a capital Q. Maybe because it’s spelled with a g. I forgot. I spell guilty with a Q more often than not.
This is my good foot
Schjeldahl gave up drugs first, drinking next, possibly smoking last, but he never gave up on his family and they never gave up on him at least the ones in the picture of his article on his diagnosis in 2019. Never mistake what’s written for the action it represents. He was a writer and an art critic, most regularly for The New Yorker where he was on the staff. He was 80 when he died in 2022.
*A little too easy and flippant, but please don’t present yourself to a writer and say “I think I have a book in me,” if you’ve never written more than a paragraph, even if you’ve lived an interesting life.
Yesterday when I was bitchy to a nurse when I arrived, and 3 hours later when I was missing my evening medication and brought out my crying towel when pain started beating my brains out I told Amanda, our care aide, “Sometimes I am hard to live with.” I’m the kind of guy who forgets his prosthetic leg but remembers a crying towel while rushing to get going to ER over a swollen foot and a bash into a wall with a power wheelchair leading with my toes. I uncrossed the third from the fourth and set it right according to the x-rays.
Amanda offered consolation instead of judgment. Thanks to all of our assistants. Jared is here now and has moved some stuff in addition to cleaning. Davina who plans our meals and shops for us, and Jayden who is coming tomorrow to make dinner and to help me clean up my office now that the cat palace has been moved into the blue room in the basement. I can’t be sure I will never want a cat again, but for now and the foreseeable future our dog Leo is plenty enough for me and my amazing wife, disability activist Michelle Hewitt.