Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
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Finally, a reason to smile.
I was with several other people cowering in a building’s wreckage. Trying to rest.
The building was in a disaster area. It’d been storming. A dark day was ending. Night was arriving. The storm was beginning another act. It wasn’t the storm which caused the wreckage.
Talking to one another, we knew it was time. The creature was regular and consistent. It would be returning. The creature caused all the destruction.
We also knew that it knew about three of us. We’d been fighting the creature, as others had done. One by one, the creature had found and killed the others. Through conversation, we agreed, the thing knew where it was. We discussed who would fight it next. A young woman said that it would be her.
Noises told of the thing’s approach. Peering out through broken walls, we looked for the thing. Dusk was giving up its last hold. In it, we saw the unmistakeable profile of the towering fictional lizard monster, Godzilla.
Godzilla came right for us in our building. Scrambling for cover, we went in three different directions as the building was ripped apart. Cement walls flew past my head. Ducking into a dark safe room, I caught my breath and got ready to go fight.
Jumping up, I ran back out to confront Godzilla. The mechanism of how any of us were expected to defeat the creature was unclear but I was sure that I could do it.
Breaking out onto an office building’s flat rooftop, I spied the young woman raising across rooftops, jumping from building to building. Tearing buildings down, Godzilla thundered after her.
Then his tail swept around and took out the building I was in.
I saw it coming but didn’t react in time. As the building went over with cascading thunderous crashes, I drew my body into a ball and fell through the building and into a street.
I wasn’t hurt.
Godzilla was visible over a mile away. The sky was growing lighter, like dawn was coming. Then Godzilla disappeared.
I watched for him to reappear. Word arrived: Godzilla was dead. Gone. The young woman had defeated him but died in the process.
I was amazed and overjoyed. With the sun rising, we could see the city flattened in every direction. People were crawling out of the wreckage.
Gazing across the wreckage toward blue sky, I saw another creature emerging. I knew I’d need to fight it, too. As I prepared to go, I wondered if there would ever be an end to monsters.
Dream end.
Note: I’m aware that I referred to PINO Trump as Trumpzilla recently. My mind apparently worked that into a dream for me. I’ll let you decide what it all means.
Arias ring through the room’s air. These originate in my wife’s digestive system. She’s on day 3 of a fast. A lacto-ovo-pescatarian for over 30 years, all that she’s permitted herself during these days is green tea and water. Plenty of both have been consumed.
Fasting is her go-to response to matters. First time that she fasted was while I was in the Philippines on military assignment. Living with her parents, she decided to fast and did so for ten days. In this case, she’s dealing with two fronts: RA flares afflicting her shoulder, and being dispirited about the current political clime in the United States. She’d taken to long days of doom scrolling. Friends finally told her, “You need to stop.”
So stop she did. She stopped eating and doom scrolling. How long will she continue, is the question put to her. She’s not certain. She’ll reach some point where she’ll decide she’s clean enough and will resume eating.
While she isn’t eating, she’s still treating herself to warm epson salts baths and near infrared red-light therapy in our home pod. She’s also staying in the house, limiting social contact and physical activity. She’s reading a lot of fiction.
I hope it all works. I hope she recovers and is eating again soon.
I regularly endure negative feelings, but weirdly, I consider myself an optimist.
Dealing with negative feelings, though, had to be, um, dealt with. By the time that I was in my teens, I knew that I tended to be negative. I’ve always felt like an imposter, less capable, less intelligent, less talented, than others give me credit for being. It’s difficult for me to accept praise. I literally cringe from it.
I found answers in books. From them, I evolved some coping mechanisms.
One, I write down the worse that I think can happen from a given situation. Somehow, writing that down like that lays bare my concerns. It helps me visualize that the likelihood of many of my fears are not as great as they loom in my mind. Secondly, writing them down helps me develop insights into how to counter these fears and make them less likely to come about. It also helps me perceive the emotional side, where my negative feelings reside, and the intellectual side, where the wherewithal to learn, try, and succeed, actually resides.
Next, I learned to grit my teeth and accept that I will not succeed at everything I attempt. I will often fail. But if I don’t give up and try again, then I can learn from my mistakes, keep trying, and maybe, just possibly, succeed.
Third, I let myself rail at myself. I do this alone and I’m pretty hard on myself. But after railing, I feel an emotional release. I’m ready to take a deep breath and try again.
Lastly, I let myself procrastinate. I know that probably sounds flimsy as hell, but giving myself time to find the right energy to take things on has proven to help me overcome my fears and worries. Along the way, hand in glove with that, it gives me time to think back on similar situations where I thought I would fail or something bad would happen, but then ended up with a good outcome. That fosters encouragement that maybe this isn’t as bad as I’m making it out to be.
And now, really, lastly, I learned to laugh at myself. To not take myself and my failures or my successes too seriously. I learned how to have fun while trying these things, to admit that I screwed up, to mock myself for screwing up.
That always made it easier to try one…more…time.
Just a pause to say that I’m grateful.
I’m grateful that the medical profession has developed the knowledge, insights, and treatment for what ailed me.
I’m grateful for a medical team who guided me safely through weeks of pain through surgery and recovery.
I’m grateful that I have a house where I can take a shower, and I’m grateful for the society, civilization, and people that built the systems which enabled me to take a hot, long shower this morning.
I’m grateful that I can walk normally again, free of pain.
There’s a lot to be grateful for in my life. I’ve always been pretty fortunate. I’ve taken a lot of it for granted. So, I thought this needed to be noted. I am grateful. I may not always sound like I am, but that’s just my nature.
I’m one of those people who believe and practice, you must be willing to take risks and face failure if you want to succeed. The classic example is learning to walk: we all must accept trying to take those first steps and risk falling in order to stay upright and put one foot in front of the other to cross a room and get where we want to go.
In my case, I’ve succeeded many times when I’ve tried. My failures have been as a sales person. I’m talking about goin’ door to door. Selling vacuum cleaners. Knife sets. Cookware. Hey, I was desperate to improve our situation and increase our income.
But I learned that I’m not a person who wants to pressure people into buying things like that. First, the products were overpriced. Second, they weren’t the greatest invention in the world, which was basically the line I was to spin. I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t accept it, and I couldn’t say it. I felt like a hypocrite and a fraud when I did.
I later learned, yes, I can sell things. I’m pretty successful at selling ideas. And I’ve sold tangible products, like coronary angioplasty products. But to succeed in that arena, I had to believe in what I was saying. And to believe, I couldn’t ignore my principles.
Understanding grew from those failures and setbacks. I learned: don’t ignore your principles. And I became known as a dependable person, trustworthy, responsible, reliable. I probably would have learned those lessons without my salesman failures but going through it helped me cement my understanding of who I am, who I’m willing to be, and what I will do to make a dollar.
In the end, I believe I’m a better person because of my failures.
Michael Seidel, writer 