Alright for Now

This blog doesn't look right. It's not the way I made it to be. I never made the center so narrow, the margins so huge or so bright.

Everything on my computer looks wrong. The type is too small, too unclear. None of this is the way it was three weeks ago.

I don't know if it looks wrong because my computer has died and been resurrected three times now since Ms. Johnson died, or because the world has changed; or if I've just noticed that the world has changed because I'd been denying how bad things were getting. In four or five days after Ms. Johnson died, my computer died, then my phone died. Then I spent ten or twelve days battling an old demon, and I was held down by the throat til the end. I'm still fighting in fact, though I seem to be winning for now.

Right at the end of all that insanity, my young neighbor turned full blown paranoid schizophrenic, decided I (talking through the wall) was the source of the voices in his head. He assaulted me -- with an egg. He got diagnosed and sent away for awhile, but I feel he'll be back all too soon.

Too often I, too, have heard voices in this house that weren't there, heard music that came from nowhere, even when I went outside and searched. Maybe he's really not insane. Maybe the house is just haunted.

I was away from my job for seven days. They let me come back, smiled at me and stabbed me. I'm still there, bleeding, for now.

But there was consolation in this sadness, this insanity. I have a lot of friends, it seems. Two of the best came by near the end, house looking like a gorilla cage in Baghdad. One fixed this computer, twice. Everyone emailed; some of them got through. No one could call.

And Zen saved my life. The Nashville Zen Center has cooked itself down to a core group that are all people I care about. The chaff has been cast out from the center. The Board meeting on Saturday morning was the first thing I'd truly enjoyed in almost two weeks. But the peak came Sunday morning when Ana and I repeated our performance at the "Zen Meditation" segment of the Middle Tennessee Anime Convention. To see that there are people that age, in this doomed world, who can still be like that, is sweet light to me.

And then, when I came home, after I'd picked up Ms. Johnson's sweet cremated remains, a card from the Murphy Road Animal Hospita, consoling me for her loss. Yes it's a business practice. But it still warmed my heart.

A lot of things are going to change, soon. The look of this blog will change, but it still won't be right. I'm going to change, too; I've become harder and softer in ways that will never let me live as shallow. I know what's important to me, now; I am, and you are, you as you never knew you were.

And it still won't be right; it never will be. But it's alright for now.