Feeling Human Again
536 words.
This is an experiment.
I’m thinking about Blaugust coming up, and what I can do for Blaugust, and how I might honor Belghast during Blaugust. The best I can come up with is to try to emulate his style: That is, get up in the morning, write for a short, fixed amount of time, and publish it. I always thought of what he was doing as a variation of Morning Pages as described in The Artist’s Way, a book I read in the early 2000s.
I don’t usually blog that way, because it’s a very raw and vulnerable way for me to write. I prefer for there to be an impenetrable wall between me the author and you the reader. I’m more of a pre-social media type of writer, where you wrote for books or magazines or newspapers without any expectation of seeing much of anything in the way of reader responses. The modern expectation of writing in a “parasocial” way is fairly gross to me. See also: How I never respond to YouTube comments or talk to that audience.
Anyway, here goes.
It’s Tuesday, so it’s been a week since my last chemo infusion, and right on schedule, today’s the first day I feel human again, after a weekend of feeling sick.
The pattern is like this: Tuesday and Wednesday I feel fine. Thursday I start going downhill. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I feel sick, can’t eat, can’t hydrate. Monday I start feeling better. Tuesday I feel like nothing happened. Give or take a day or two.
It’s my first day back at work after a 4-day weekend. Don’t really remember what I was doing before. I checked in and was quickly reminded there was a high-pressure urgent task that needed to be done. I’m not personally responsible for it, but I’m following along and consulting on it where needed.
For my morning entertainment I watched a bit of Glass Cannon’s Under An Iron Sky actual play. I’m on Season 3. I went to Chaosium.com and bought a couple of books with the appropriate code in the hope that they will make another season, because it’s pretty fun to watch. (They play Pendragon, a TTRPG set in Arthurian Legend.)
I’m making some hard-boiled eggs for breakfast. I bought a new saucepan just for boiling eggs, one that is taller than it is wide so that the water actually covers the eggs, which was shockingly hard to find.
Last night I started re-watching Band of Brothers for some reason. I think it was because I saw it referenced in some random YouTube “tank expert rates tank scenes in movies” video and thought, “Huh, that was a really good show and I’m looking for something to watch while I continue to rest up.” It is, in fact, a really good show. However, there’s a lot of shaky cam nonsense that I don’t particularly care for.
Thus concludes this morning page. I actually spent way more time editing and revising this than I should have, because it’s such a foreign way of writing for me.
P.S. Because I’m lazy and hate doing these things, I used AI to help create the title and the summary for this post.
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