String theory

I am knitting up my days, loosely.

Maybe it's ok just to exist like a piece of string that blew in from a ball of yarn. A piece of red and blue twisted yarn, twisted together to make a sort of purple hue from a few feet away, but up close you see the red fuzz splitting into many fine strings that spread prettily against the midnight blue of the background fatter cable of yarn. Maybe someone was knitting a blanket for their friend's large milky baby, or a hat for their small roasted squash husbandly, or just knitting away mindlessly or mindfully. 

And a piece of the yarn that got cut when she was trimming the end of a particularly troublesome row got stuck to her pilly pant-leg. Later the knitter went outside and brushed up against an untrimmed (not even noticed) sage bush. The yarn bit rubbed off and was left hanging there, blowing in a way that was attractive to a grackle, who swooped down to get it, but didn't get a good beak-grip, and halfway back to her nest she inadvertently dropped it when she opened her mouth absentmindedly, gracklishly, mindlessly, never missing it for even a micro nanosecond. Maybe it drifted and blew down and across and across and around and came to rest, after minutes and minutes above us, on a flat birdshat slat of my front porch, and through physics and chance, blew in at just the right angle to become impaled grabbed upon a useless forgotten nail that is stuck there, in a way that allowed it to remain, just so, obscure, unknown, stuck, on my porch. For a long time. As time goes by it becomes more fuzzed out and bleached but remains exactly as it was in one way: obscurity. Obscureness. Obscure.

 

I feel like this. A blown-in stuck fuzz.

 

Just existing in my state of nothing. I am in between things in terms of my medical miracle mess mud mystery mass miasma. I thought I was writing a blog.  I thought maybe it could be made into an essay I could publish or an article or a book. I thought I signed up to join the Writer's League of Austin. That I may attend their summer conference. I thought that the writing I thought I was doing might help me get better or get out of this state. I thought I was advancing one step further in my maze, into radiation, and that I was done with surgery.

In fact, I am doing all of these things and yet really none of them. Nothing much is happening to speak of, much less write.

"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

I write some things. I read a lot of things. I read without seeking things like "must read: Austin's top 10 bloggers to follow" or articles about new books on breast cancer (The ABC's of Breast Cancer in The New York Times Book Review today). I read things on Facebook about people I know with their new book or poem or article. Things are passing me by. I feel. I read about somebody's student who published a new collection of words written. I missed a deadline I meant not to, to submit a synopsis of my blog to a nonfiction contest for a writer's conference in Austin in a few months. The deadline was ironically the day I last had surgery and I had a nightmare the night before surgery that I'd missed the deadline, and the nightmare picked back up as I swam to consciousness after my propofol sleep, and I awoke to find it was true.

If I were to write a blog that is what I have to write about.