If I Coulda I Woulda

I made the above image yesterday (I think). I can’t remember what inspired me, although I’ve thought about through the looking glass as a metaphor for my experience many times.

I told my grandson this was the cover to a graphic novel about my experiences with long Covid. I also told him someone else would have to do the rest, lol.

It’s like the virtual trips around the world I make in VR. Most of these places I’d never see in a couple of lifetimes, but there are assumed trips that now won’t happen. So this is the best I can do.

See? I can do a little bit. It’s really not that I can’t finish anything — although it really is, kinda. I can’t see the end. I can’t figure out how to keep up enthusiasm when it takes me so long now and I don’t know the point, anyway.

But I have a fun story. I texted it to my grandson, and he wrote back, “How does beetlejuice and a rabbit fit into this?”

He was actually a little sheepish that he hadn’t heard of the sequel to Alice, and so couldn’t get the metaphor immediately. There was no reason he should, being 12 years old in 2025, but he knows pretty much everything and knows that he knows. He’ll pop up during an adult conversation with a cool comment, and when asked he’ll just shrug and say he watched a documentary on YouTube. He’s absorbent that way. I expect him to save the planet.

My friend Liz, who has some health issues far more acute than mine, wrote a nice mini-essay on what she needs from her friends at this point, but mostly what she doesn’t, and I nodded all the way through.

At some point here, we all get to the same place in terms of bodily entropy. If you’ve breached 75, let’s say, the landscape probably looks a little different than mine. You’re lucky if you don’t have something going on health-wise, and you surely know a lot of fellow travelers.

So what Liz (nearly a decade younger than I am) and I are noticing is familiar to many people, chronically ill and/or disabled in some way. They may not even notice anymore.

But we do and we write about stuff like this, both of us. And these are almost all well-meaning people, and I’m sure I would do some of the same things in their position. We want to be supportive to those we care about. Sometimes we can’t zoom out and see what we sound like.

Commiserating sounds like minimizing. Platitudes and aphorisms somehow sound like the smell of rotten food, I can’t explain it.

And advice? OMG. We have doctors, folks, and also brains. Doctors are only human and I’m sure your personal experience is relevant in your own mind, but this is just freaking obnoxious to us. We smile and murmur polite things, but if we felt up to it we might say mean things.

Really though? It’s just clueless people, and they shall always be with us. The Dim Ones. Most people, even if they might overstep a little at first, figure it out quickly. Sometimes it helps if we can just bitch a little.

Once again, if you’re new to reading my stuff for the past few years, I’m well past expecting to eventually get better. I’m trying to maximize my functionality, while maintaining social ties as best I can, exploring creative outlets that fit well with my limitations, and staying sane.

All of this revolves around relevance, unfortunately. I don’t wish to change the world, but I’ve never felt that anything I do creatively is about self-expression — it’s about conversation. When I was acting as a young man, that’s what excited me, the awareness that people were watching and thinking and experiencing, all at the same time and in unique ways. I had my part, they had theirs.

Same with writing all those years for invisible readers. I had to know they were out there, reading and thinking. I had to visualize them before I could talk with them.

A lot of what I do now is for pleasure. I‘ve made so many animations and images and audio recordings that I just like. I don’t need to share, or else just showing it to a couple of people is enough. I live with a couple of people. You get it.

There’s an obvious analogy I don’t need to make. Pleasure gets stale if you can’t share it with others. I need to know someone is smiling or nodding, or rolling their eyes, crying, laughing, sneezing, something.

It’s an ongoing project, then. Is it writing, something so natural to me but now so draining? Am I going to find it now that I have new storytelling skills, or will that eventually become too much? I experimented with making a little amusing video, only a few seconds, every day for a week and it exhausted me. On day #8 I couldn’t think of a damn thing.

So if you’re going to continue to read, fair warning — anything could pop up here. Poetry. Plays. Podcasts. Essays on evolutionary biology, clocks, the Beatles. Richard the Lionheart. Neandertals. Every single show on AppleTV+. Anything, really.