Out of Order

I don't think I have dementia, or incipient dementia, or eventual or any other adjective you like. I don't have sour dementia, etc,

I'm not flailing here, or pushing back on the obvious with all the horsepower of denial I can muster up. I don't know what's going on, true. I suspect I have a brain injury from all of this, but the mechanism is unclear to me, and it's not like I'm at the height of my intellectual powers anyway.

But I am aware, and I do pay attention as I can, and it seems clear to me that most of my cognitive problems are related to short-term memory/distractibility, and the biggest consequence (or cause, maybe; it's a mystery to me) is I seem to have lost all of my default behaviors.

Computer analogies work well for brain things, so here it is: everything has been reset, it seems. After years of making coffee in the morning, suddenly I have to figure it out all over again, and usually every morning.

I swear in the past six months or so since we bought a new car, I've spent more time in it moving it in and out of the garage for all the workers here than actually driving it. I leave the house and the yard maybe once every three weeks, for a few minutes, a quick trip to the store on a whim.

But even so, after 50 years of driving I should have some muscle memory at least, and while I still do (or I'd never get in the car, trust me) I've lost a lot. I get confused. I've sat in the car for a minute or so trying to remember how to turn it off. Like that.

All of this to say, this is all upsetting but not the horror show I imagined. And it feels obvious to me that living this particular life, stuck at home, mostly staying in one room, seeing nearly no one, will mess with anyone's brain. I had only a notion that today was Saturday until I checked, but that seems more a function of lack of routine than anything else. The days are all the same. I live in them and rarely think about tomorrow. That'll confuse anyone.

So maybe it's easier to see how these past weeks, and particularly the past few days, have added a layer of disorientation. Our kitchen appliances are all in the garage. Our family room furniture is crammed into the living room and guest room. I can walk from the back of the house to the kitchen unimpeded (as long as I watch for stray nails), but usually there's no reason to. Sometimes I heat something in the microwave.

And Lorenzo, our cat for 11 years, passed away just when all this began. I'm still at the point where I see him out of the corner of my eye, or get a moment of alarm when I see a wide-open front door (which we have a lot lately). Most of you know all about this. Our dog, Strider, who left us 14 years ago, still wanders this house in ghost form from time to time.

So I walk through a stripped-down house with a phantom pet, toward a missing refrigerator until I remember where it is. That'll mess with you.

Yesterday they were installing molding and new interior doors, which are really tiny things in the big picture but they were here over 12 hours, with that big saw set up on the subfloor that will eventually get new carpet. It was a loud saw, and they used it often, along with drills and a nail gun five feet away from me.

But noise-cancelling headphones and a lot of time in the virtual reality headset got me through it. The molding looks fancy and the doors completely change the hallway, completely. It's very cool, and disorienting but not confusing at all. Just new, and I'm getting used to that feeling.