The last twenty-four hours have been an absolute study in constrasts – professional, personal, emotional, psychological, physical.  Blacks and whites thrown together violently against the canvas, Pollock-like, creating a blast sequence of muddy opaque grays, waves of indecipherable maybes, decisions made and unmade, promises kept and unkept, notions held and then abandoned, nothing certain, nothing transparent, nothing predictable…

Let me start off with the good part of the story.  As many of my regular readers know, I’ve been exercising like a maniac on meth, having recently completed a 100-day-in-a-row personal challenge.  One of my goals (developed late in the cycle) was to attend my company’s Halloween party in a toga.  This would be a neat milestone to hit – to be able to show off my hard-won physical improvements with a little bared-shoulder action.  The Halloween party was last night, and up until Wednesday I didn’t even know for sure that I would be going (long story).  But Wednesday evening, I went to Jo-Ann’s Fabrics, bought several yards of red gabardine and white muslin, and spent a terrified few minutes Thursday afternoon furiously safety-pinning everything together before the short drive up the hill to the Shaffer-Ballie Mansion where the party was held.

I walked in. I held my breath.  Could I pull this off?  Being overweight plays hell with your confidence, and even though I’ve lost well over sixty pounds this year, I’m still not thin by any means.  Thinner, yes.  Not thin.  Could I possibly be toga-thin?

Somewhat surprisingly, things went well.  I felt comfortable.  I felt- dare I say it? – Attractive?  Confident?  I received quite a few compliments on the costume and on my physique.  I actually enjoyed participating in the costume contest (think of the Zoolander “walk-off” scene, except no one pulled their underwear off with one hand).  I even got a few “best costume” votes, but was nowhere near winning – there were a couple AMAZING costumes that people had put lots of time and thought into.

I would love to end this blog post now, with me in a toga feeling pretty good about myself, except the story doesn’t end with a successful Halloween party.  I can’t say much in the way of details, but, as John Nash might have said in A Beautful Mind, I got “nuclearfied” after the party – as in, a bomb got dropped, and I was the Hiroshima in the equation.

I then spent the rest of an anxious evening watching wistful tumbleweeds blow by in my imagination, aimless, purposeless, feeling like an outsider in my own person, uncomfortable, distant, distanced, pressing my nose up against the window in my mind, viewing a foreign cityscape filled with people I didn’t know doing things I couldn’t see, observing contented burghers conduct business in a language I couldn’t understand, and thinking how complex and awesome and wonderful and occasionally painful-as-shit the human experience can be.

I woke at 3:30.  Yes, my insomnia has returned in the last month.  A couple times lately I’ve thrown my hands up and said “fuck it” and went into work, since the gym isn’t open that early.  Lucky for me, Will woke up and crawled in next to me right at that time, so I had a reason to stay in bed until 4:45, when I went to the gym and ran my ass off.  Lately, quite often, I’ve tried to beat back the blahs with intense exercise, with just so-so success.  This was the case this morning – I felt tired, but still bombed-out, a hollow shell, filled with insubstantial confusion and angst and feeling tremendously un-prescient.

Work today was slow and I spent an ineffectual day fixing a bug here, responding to a request there, writing some code, but never getting in the flow.  My stomach started to get upset just before lunchtime, and I thought I was going all mental and making myself ill, but then I got a text that said my son Will had puked all over the back of the car, so the physical symptoms were probably real and indicative of some incipient flu.  I went home early and napped for a few hours with my sick boy.  I woke up not feeling pukey, but not very hungry either, but, having eaten very little earlier in the day, I ate a salmon sandwich at Zoka, where I’ve been camped out for the last few hours.

What did I learn?  What can I learn?  It seems to me that quite often, we learn all the lessons we need way earlier than we actually decide to apply them.  I think we have an innate ability to see truth, but a pretty crappy capacity to follow down the path that truth would lead us.  We’re victims – we’re our own victims – of inertia, distraction, and denial.

Again, another novel has proceeded, Athena-like, from my keyboard.  I apologize.   Sometimes, the words just flow, and I’ve felt better for having vomited my day out on the page.  You, dear reader, are probably feeling very put upon for having had to read through said vomit, but forgive me and we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow…