[editors note, yeah.. this was written a day or so before posting]
Laura Fitton, aka @pistachio, was having a small cook out today for Scott Stead, so he could meet Boston area media makers… I got to the area late, as seems to be my bad habit / curse… and then had a kind of heart breaking anxiety attack that lead me to… well driving back home.
It is heart breaking.. I spent about an hour in a parking lot, drove by the house about 5 times (though a few of those were just trying to figure out which house it was).. but wasn’t able to overcome…. and eventually drove home..
Next day sometime:
Anxiety has always been an issue for me. It seems to stem from my mom.. though I love(d) her very much, even all this time after her passing, my rage can run hot.
I’ve missed out on a lot of what life has had to offer thanks to anxiety… Indeed my life need not be as hard as it has been.. and I think, when in the heart of the of the anxiety related issues, about what life could look like if I could just overcome it.
Truth is.. I’ve been feeling like I have been over coming it.. The last 8 or so years of.. unemployment has been a great help.. finally able to take the path of self becoming… the becoming over comes.
Social Media has been a great help to.. So much talk about Social Media’s ROI seems to miss the point.. social media is saving me.. hell, its even helping me to develop some social skills. My point being that social media has more to it then is often understood in the land of “the experts.”
It used to be that I was too shy to comment on people’s blogs really.. but I forced myself. I felt a little bit like a drunk dialer.. like a phone call you’d get late some night from a drunk x lover.. me with my crazy comments!
Around this time I left a crazy comment on Laura’s blog.. at this point I don’t think she was yet the web celebrity she is today… The next time I saw her was at a Boston Social Media Club thing.. I wanted to cringe and hide.. but oh no.. apparently she REALLY liked my crazy mad comment.. and so she brought me into whatever conversation was going on.. which lead me into a conversation with Bryan Person about the New England Podcaster group.. but that’s nether her nor there… though still a thought on my mind.
I suppose the point is that Larua’s someone I have a lot of affection for… She’s someone whom I think, in a certain kind of way, embodies the spiritual core of what social media is really all about.. and I guess its a mix of her kindness and this feeling, that made last night an especially heart breaking sorta anxiety night.
When I got home.. I had this kind of defeated feeling.. I was just so sad.. which was a strange and mysterious sorta reaction..
It had taken me 3 or 4 months before I got up the courage to actually attend a New England Podcaster Meet Up… down in Quinsy. (The first social media group I started going to) The social media club was harder in the early days.. Boston Media makers wasn’t so hard.. but I still have a hard time telling them what “I really do.” I’ve only just started going to the Havard Berkman “blogger” group… that took a little while.
Yeah, so anxiety is killing me…
Found this video, thought I’d share:
I don’t think I have it that bad? Though I have had it pretty bad in the past.
I kinda liked this one to:
And how about we leave on a cover on of that great Ramones track:
It’s late at night.. super late actually.. sun’s starting to come up.. I should be in bed sleeping.. but it’s just one of those late night howling kind of moments.. a need to howl from this blog.. or via this blog.. out into that there internet.. and blah blah blah.
Seems like there’s a million things I want to say, and as time passes.. they slip through my fingers.. those sands of time I’ll tell you!
So I just wanted to write something random.. in the hopes that I might touch upon some of this stuff.
I’ll tell you a big thing I want to say.. Thank you.. you as in the universe.. you as in.. err… God, I do need to explain myself here, ha? And if I do that, I’ll never finish this damn post.. never get to much of anything I might like to touch on.
Well.. what the hell, who cares, it’ll be what it’ll be!
I feel a real need to thank social media….
I believe it was last night.. well, lets back up a little.. Yesterday I made my way to a book store.. aww, the temptations for Bad Matt! But Bad Matt was good, and didn’t give into any of said temptations.. but none the less.. I spent some time in that there magazine section, and in electronic musician monthly there was an article on vocal synthesis… which is to say using a computers to generate a vocal track. This particular article focused on how to do it for free.. It was rather avant guard in its aims… but it got me to thinking.. and reunited me with some old ideas..
I write poetry, or song lyrics or.. not sure how to describe them really. I haven’t written too many lately, but I’ve been keeping note books since highs school…. so I’ve amassed quite a bit of stuff… and one figures, just statistically speaking, there must be something in there, somewhere, of value.
I’m a crappy judge of myself and my work. I really am! I often need to take a good deal of time away from my stuff in order to come back to it, without emotional ties to it, in order to see what’s really there.
So I was having this conversation with someone online.. while trying to figure out what kind of sound synthesizers where out there.. and how much they are running these days.. and um.. well the person I was talking to is a fan, I guess you could say.. a fan of my music, a fan of this blog, a fan of me..
It’s so nice to have such people in our lives.. particularly when you’re struggling to believe.. well this wasn’t really a night of struggle.. but as I was showing said person some of what I was finding.. the subject came to these lyrics / poems / whatever.. that I had.. and could this person see.
Well it just so happens that I was on my pc lap top at the time.. which happens to have folder full of stuff.. dating back to when I got the lap top.. which I’m guessing was sometime in 2004.. simply because that was the date of my Indra’s Net Project… which was done on said laptop.
And um… So the deal is.. I tend to not like showing this stuff… mainly cause I figure it sucks, you know? Like who am I kidding? I’d be embarrassed to show that trash… but ok, what the hell, why not?
Well.. my fan friend was blown away buy it and I was like “you really like that stuff?” Before you know it.. I had sent something like 20 or more of them through the IM.. and I think we were both a little astonished.. this person had, after all, put me in the right mood to see the virtue of it..
Oh my God! This stuff was insane! I almost want to describe it as the words of “a bad boy saint.” It’s stuff that just screws with your head.. It has an intense kind of darkness to it, that almost kinda scares you.. and..
Oh my God, you know how I’m given to talking about Jesus and God and all that sorta thing in this blog? I always feel like.. when you bring up those kinds of subjects.. people kinda want to run away.. run from the Jesus freak.. like talking about religion is just not a safe topic.. its more dangerous then politics.. Well what was crazy about the treatment of the subject was.. it was mystical.. and it was like.. well it was twisted.. just in how it played with it. It was as if it was this crazy heretical sorta thing.. kinda like South Park playing with Jesus and all that stuff.. accept this was like.. way more dangerous. It was more dangerous because it seemed to be speaking truths.. speaking truths that most folks wouldn’t have the balls to say.. I mean it was just crazy.
It had this kind of earthy feel to it.. made me think of Muddy Waters.. but like crazy intellectual.. which is part of how it would mess with your head.. It’s as if there’s the prejudices of our modern time and of authority.. prejudices that produce the mental cages we are all living in.. and it’s tearing the hell out of them… to the point where it all most hurts..
Ok, how about another track from yours truly.. again from Indra’s Net:
The words called back to me the psychology I had at the time.. I was reminded of the darkness of those days.. of the struggle.. of the darkness. The struggle to just hold on to hope. The pain… The blood that was just dripping from me.. psychologically.. from the wounds of life.. all the ways life can be cruel.. and how it felt like that then.. and that deep struggle of not knowing if I’d ever make it in life to where I needed to make it. Feeling like… life could get worse then I could really handle.. and that it might not be too long till that reality would be confronting me..
This is the subtext… beneath how I was driven to make this work.. driving to try and make something of me.. get to where ever I needed to get to.
Funny thing is I haven’t gotten there yet! Funny thing is I’m still struggling… And though, in my current struggle.. though I do struggle with faith, in what I’m doing or trying to do, on a daily basis… I must say there are moments of overflowing hope. That over flowing hope comes through the vehicle of social media.
I’ve had this feeling in my head for sometime.. that in the end it will be social media that saves me. To really explain how this works.. well it would take more then I have to give tonight….
A couple things though.. You meet so many great people. I can’t really tell you how thankful I am. I don’t know how to tell you how moved I’ve been… I mean like when my mom died and people reached out to me via blog comments, twitter, emails.. At a moment I had anticipated as being the loneliest moment of my life.. I felt the least alone of any moment in my life.
So one of the things that’s giving me this need to Howl.. is just the want to give thanks.. which I am sometimes so bad at.. If you’re reading this.. and we’ve had some sorta social media type.. I don’t know.. we’ve met, had a conversation.. or maybe not even that much… you’re probably someone I feel somehow thankful about… So.. if I don’t get around to.. doing something that would properly express my gratitude.. I just want to tell you thanks here.
That’s actually one of the few Indra’s Net tracks that was done on my Mac.. With like Reaktor and Cubase SX.. maybe SX2? Maybe 3? I don’t remember.
So back to the story of vocal synthesis and these lyrics:
Well a few years ago there were a bunch of vocal synths that hit the market, and so immediately I was interested. I think people need lyrics to kinda.. “get it.” Or what I mean is.. instrumental music isn’t the most sorta commercially viable thing out there. So….
Well I can’t sing…. I don’t really have a vocalist I can easily call on any old time.. have yet to really invest in the proper microphones.. or learned the proper recording engineer stuff.. and not only that.. even if all that was a go.. It wouldn’t easily fit into my process. So, how to I get there from here?
As it turns out there’s a number of possible directions:
Vocal Synthesis
“Vocal Tuning software:” There’s lots of software out there that can make an out of tune vocal in tune.. if you just get the phrasing right…
Integration of found-ish elements.
Category 3 is where I would fit this track for Zar Matt A Thsutra’s Deep Space Adventures:
Here we have a field recording type thing, of Mark talking on a train with his then girl friend.. It’s rather crazy experimental.. but I still sorta like it.
Any who, so I’m over tired.. and should prolly post here..
Oh wait.. can post without posting this here clip!
My last blog post featured some of my best pictures so far.. given, I’ve only been at it since Monday.. and as someone who’s barely ever handled a camera before.. I’m feeling pretty proud about those pics.. Though at the same time my honest assessment of my photography is not so high.. and I think this series will sorta show this off a little bit.. I like how these pictures function as a series, but if you look at them individually.. they are less then red hot..
Ok.. moving right along….
I love taking pics of my dad “for some reason.” One of the things I’m learning about photography is that it’s “all about observation.” It’s in large measure a process of looking. You take once slice of time.. framed.. what have you.. and you can look at it for eons..
This amplifies that one moment beyond its significants in the flow of time.. to put it a certain sorta way. Significants, in this sense, meaning.. well what underlies… well how you remember things.. how things stick out in the mind. Another words.. I have an image of my father that is produced through a process of interactions.. let’s say.. and those interactions define the production of that image.. they define what stays in mind and what slips away.. which often might has more to do with my own interior.. whatever is driving me, then it has to do with my father. Taking pictures takes me out of that.. to one extent or another.. and now we are studying my father as a subject.
My relationship to my parents is a complex one.. psycho-socially speaking. Perhaps this is true for all of us? At this moment in my life.. shortly after my mom’s passing, in a situation of taking care of my father.. still feeling dependent on the money that is whatever wealth they managed to amass in there life times.. all this, along with other life issues.. puts me in a strange psychological situation.. which basically amounts to feeling like the challenges of trying to grow up.
A few latter:
I’ve been reading some essays by Carl Jung recently.. which have re-lead me into a certain way of thinking about my own psychology. A somewhat simple way of saying it is that beneath the surface of waking life, and all our “reasonableness,” lys a “psychological reality.” Reality is, after all, never experienced outside the context of consciousness or our “psychological reality.” The empiricism of science, among other things, has lead us into a spirit of missing this underlying psychological reality.
I’m not blaming science.. Its simply that the scientific age, to put it a certain way, has lead us into a kind of psychological makeup that’s.. somewhat one sided and materialistic. Materialistic in the sense that we search for answers in the material world.. and understanding psychology from a material perspective is.. at the very least complicated from the stand point of our current understanding.. which is to say neuroscience is in it’s very very early days.
Bug I digress…
So what of this underlying psychological reality? My sense is that it’s through a kind of dialectical relationship with this that I’ll make it through my current life challenges.. Though photography, at least as I’m exploring it at the moment, is slavishly tied to the material world, it has become a tool for exploring this sorta dialectical process.
So lets see if I can kind of wrap this up into a nice little bow: In a certain sense, photography is giving me an experience of reality that is out side the context of a certain psycho-social drama.. This is to say we are looking at the subject / object… err, how do I put this? Well in the case of the following series of photographs, I’m moving out side of “my idea” of my father, to my father. “Idea” here being a psychological idea that is out side of a purely conscious idea.. or one that is beyond conscious will. In so doing we shape the psycho-social drama in new ways.
I’ll conclude this part of the blog entry by telling you that what I’m saying is an over simplification of the matter.
Some background on these pictures:
There’s a couple things you might like to know.. #1 The cat in these pictures is named “Kitty.” Well actually he’s named Ginger.. or thats the name my mom and father use.. This would be our second cat to have a feminine name.. so that’s where I draw the line, and thus we shall refer to him as Kitty.
Kitty is an indoor cat who does not like being indoors.. All he wants in life is to go outside.. trouble is that our last cat probably got eaten by a coyote and thus… well my mom just couldn’t see letting Kitty go out after that. Personally, I believe in living dangerously.. so I side with letting kitty go out.. but at least for now.. the household continues to, kinda sorta, run as it did when my mom was living.
Anyway.. so Kitty is always trying to get out.. and no one accidently lets the cat out more then dad!
#2 My dad has dementia. His dementia has not lead him to being totally unfunctional.. and he still has some short term memory.. but for the most part he’s not very capable of remember much from 30 minutes ago, to put it a certain sorta way. So a lot of really basic things can be very difficult for him.. and I think you can kind of see this in the pictures.
#3 My dad has a habit of sleeping too late.. so its my job to wake him up.. and thus we begin.
On with the Pics!
Ok, so dad is more or less up.. but how can he start his day without getting the news paper or getting the mail? Hope he doesn’t let the cat out!
Aww, the taste of victory!
So making a series like this was surely a lot of fun… And you know.. each picture, on it’s own.. the quality varies.. but as a group.. it’s kinda cool.
A final note / what we can look forward to in the future.
These picts took about half of my monthly flickr upload allotment… they are, if you view them in flickr, about half the size of the originals.. So what I’m thinking of doing, in the future, is generally uploaded pictures that are a good deal smaller then this.. at least the ones for this blog..
I’m planning on releasing these kinda virtual photography books, in pdf form.. which will give you full the sized pics.. which you could even print out at full size if you liked..
I suppose the other thing worth mentioning is the pics are still not going through much of a digital work flow.. which is to say “photo post production” which involved working with them in Aperture and Photoshop.. which I of course hope to do for the books..
Finally, I’m hoping on putting Google Addsents in them.. so with any luck.. I could even make some money from the books! My ambition here being to pay for the cost of web hosting!
I wouldn’t say I have writers block.. I couldn’t say that really: I write soooo much shit. Trouble is I don’t post. Why? Well, it seems like.. to write something worth while, I feel I need to push on it hard enough to get it some place interesting. By the time I get there, it’s a long post, and with my writing as bad as it is, there’s a need for heavy editing. If a long post is poorly written, why in hell would you go to the trouble to read it?
This and there are certain subjects that are a little difficult, like lets say… race, politics, religion… subjects that… I suppose could get you in trouble, depending on how you write on them. Well not trouble exactly but.. I mean I want to be respectful of wherever a reader might be coming from, and sometimes I wonder if my positions might inherently not be, somehow, depending on where you’re coming from. Well, I suppose that’s what comments are for, so feel free to bitch slap me, should it be necessary.
A component of this problem is.. I have some strange ideas about things. Some of these strange ideas, at least on the surface, might look a little crazy. In some cases I’m not sure if they’re crazy myself. In my toy chest of ideas, there’s a set of ideas that.. well they are old.. from another time in my life. Ideas I haven’t picked up since.. well whenever. The result is, whatever certainty I had of them, back in the day, today they hold certain question marks, at least for me. Yet, at the same time, these ideas are not without a certain weight in how I live my life.
It’s sorta like.. what we do with our lives today, that builds the foundation for who we are tomorrow. So I suppose there’s a need for some foundation inspections, ha?
One set of ideas I call “the God concept.” These are ideas that could be shelved under “mysticism.” At one point in my life, I was searching for something akin to “a scientific proof of the existence of God.” The “experience” surrounding this, shall we call it an intellectual journey?, was one that defined the future direction of my life. Where I’m standing today, comes out of that.
The ground I’m standing on is not a certain ground. There are deep questions surrounding where I’m standing. Are these questions the force of damage sustained at earlier points in my life, or is there something real in them?
There is this force of socialization in our lives: There is this way that the world tries to define us. Seems like a bad idea to let it. So many of my questions seem to stem from this sort of thing. Perhaps this is a monster I should slay?
I remember as a small child, having almost like imaginary friends. Somewhere in here the idea of imaginary bands, or armies, or whatever. And I remember one idea was something like “monster slayers.” What is the relationship between the consciousness of children, and adult consciousness? What I mean is, being so little, wanting to kill the monsters of humanity, are those monsters not the anxieties of adult life? Anxieties that drive collective evolution? Anxieties that steer the life of our times?
It’s funny to look at it this way: like a childhood fear of the dark, or a monster in the closet, or under your bed, is a monster that grows up as you grow up.
I remember my parents seeming rather odd to me. I think much of this must come from being adopted. I still don’t really understand my parents.
Since my mom died, I have a lot more experience of my dad. In someways my mom’s passing actually makes things easier: My mom had a certain need to control, and in that need to control was a certain amount of anxiety. Anxiety often keeps us from seeing things as they are, and adversely effects our abilities to adapt. It seems like this must be a cause of my early life’s trauma, after all so much of a child’s psychology is the product of there parents.
But the monster slayers: it seems like this childhood idea has evolved into an adult idea. The idea that I should do battle with our collective anxieties, try to pass through the shadow worlds, and come out the other side, with all our lost gold.
Perhaps my trouble, when it comes to blogging, has to do with speaking from inside the shadow’s dark wood?
This is a story of what my life looks like after my mom died.
The day before last I was buying a Mac Pro on Apple’s website. When it came time to put in the credit card information, I figured it was time to go check the various credit card statements to see what sorta credit limit what cards had, after all Mac Pro’s are big chunks of change! Well, in that hasty process I discovered a $130,00o credit card bill.
A credit card bill like that means something like “time to think about selling the house and moving into a trailer home.” Not that I would really mind the trailer home shtick so much… as long as I’ve got a bitch’n computer and studio set up, and good internet, I’m a happy camper.. But my dad has dementia you understand.. and folks with his kind of dementia do much better in familiar settings… thus I’d like to hold onto the house as long as I can.
Not only that but I haven’t really acclimated to all the new responsibilities that my mom’s pass has brought to me… So everything can get very overwhelming fast. So as a result.. the idea of having to figure out things like “how do we sell our house” is just more then I’d want to deal with anytime soon.
Anyway, this morning I look at the credit card bill again and realize it’s not a credit card bill but a loan…. So the interest is like.. less then half what I feared, and isn’t compounded monthly.. its annual.. which makes it more like… well it’s what we call in the biz “good debt” as a pose to “bad debt” which is what credit card bills are.
This doesn’t mean I’m in a good financial situation.. after all I got a pretty big loan there.. but it’s as if I had a crazy weight over my head for a couple days, and now it just lifted… and now I can probably get that computer after all!
I’m just waking up, its about 10 35 am as I write these lines. Yesterday I went to a Boston Media Makers meeting, always a lot of fun, and a friend asked me how I was doing. As I described my efforts at trying to get back on my feet, the feed back I got was along the lines of “I don’t know how I could do that so soon.” As I thought about it I began to see my situation in a new light:
Mark lent me a book on grieving that I would dip into a little that night. What I then realized was… how kind of strange my way of dealing probably was compared to.. I don’t know, the norm?
My mom was first diagnosed with cancer, I’m not even sure but I think.. about 10 or so years ago? That news hit me hard in the gut and sorta woke me up to the mortality of lifet. To one extent or another I’ve probably been preparing to loose my mom since that day. I know “you can never be prepared to loose your mom,” but.. you can build a psychological attitude that might carry you through it.
So when I say preparing I’m not even talking, necessarily, about a conscious enterprize. I mean we could talk about something as simple as what you are attracted to as far as books, music, movies, or what sort of things start to occupy your mind. I mean look, you know she’s not going to be with you forever, you know that day is coming… and the question is, when that day comes, how are you going to cope with it?
So, when Beth knocked on the door to tell my father and I that my mom had died, when we drove to the hospital and I then saw my mom’s dead body…. my reaction was…. well how do you put that into words? Maybe listen to my last podcast recorded an hour or two after that hospital visit!
But what I was thinking in my head was like “Matt this is real, you’re going to have to accept this, your life will be forever very different and your job now is to cope with this.”
The first week was insanely difficult: sadness gripping your body, shaking your soul, feeling like you are somehow reaching beyond the world of the living with your sadness.. Like somehow your grief is transcending time and space and.. I don’t want to say you are renouncing life.. but you do see life in a different light. Normally we don’t think about this sorta thing but look: #1 We are all on this planet for a short time, and #2 Everyone whom we really bond with, really love, will one day loose us or we will lose them… and this is life!
Somehow that short window of life seems less important. Our lives, what meaning can you make out of them? They are our joyful participation in the sorrows of life? It’s a little dance we do with creation, for a time? When life seems so small in the scheme of things.. and your tears are still reaching out.. where at this order of magnitude for how you are thinking about anything.. nothing really matters anymore.. but way out here you’re mom still matters. You still love your mom, and you’re still crying out for her, to her, and of her.
This sorta thing lends perspective to life like nothing else I can think of. Here’s a question for you: “What’s really important?” The answer seems to be love.. I mean if your love for your mom matters beyond so much.. you see the love you have for any number of things.. people, whatever.. as sorta meaning more then anything else.
A couple hours latter:
So I mean isn’t that beautiful? To look at life and think that love is the most important thing? This way of thinking about life, this sorta psychological attitude, is not one that leads to waist lands.. this leads to lives worth living.
Creeping up on 3:30:
To bring this more down to earth there’s all this stuff I should be doing today, it’s late afternoon, and I still haven’t been able to bring myself to do that stuff. My reaction to this is to not be too terribly happy with myself… But when I think about what I’m going through, I guess I should be more forgiving of myself? I don’t know, but I do need to get to work.. At least posting this will be something.
My mom died Sunday, December 9th 2007, just shy of 1 AM. I, and my father, found out around 2AM when Beth, a close friend to my mom, woke us up and took us to the hospital to see my mom. When I got home I recorded this episode.
The approach I’ve been taking to podcasting has been a little bit on the experimental side.. I’m still sorta struggling to find my way to a mature vision so this episode is sorta exploring our way towards that:
I record stuff, put the stuff on my hard drive, and when I go to make a new episode, I take stuff from the growing collection of recordings on the hard drive.
From an aesthetic / philosophy of art sorta perspective I’m thinking in somewhat radical ways: There’s this old idea of a recording as “a record.” That is a recording as a record of an event, a recording having something to do with something that “actually happened.” Modern sound production is not about creating “a record,” what you hear is “something manufactured.” There’s a lot of implications to these two different ways of doing things.. which I’m always exploring..
Deep inside the subject of “a recording” is the idea that the microphone could be a kind of surrogate for Freud: In classic psychoanalysis Freud sits you down on his coach and you talk.. and eventually we are able to peer into your soul, into the unconscious. This is one of the ramifications of the “record” approach.
So here we have a recording, of where I was at, just a few short hours after my mom’s death: Here we have a record of a psychological state.
One thing, from an artist’s perspective, I find interesting about this recording is the difference between “in the moment,” when it was recorded versus “in reflection,” when editing. In the moment you’re often thinking “I must make this worth listening to” and you have various judgments your making about the value of what you’re doing that is based on the perspective of the moment….
I can tell you that 4 hours after my mom died I did not have a lot of perspective! For about one or two weeks after my mom died I probably didn’t have anything going through my mind but dealing with my mom’s death. Now that I have a little bit of psychological distance from the moment of the recording (though not really that much) I can see that it’s an intensely powerful recording / moment. But in the moment I wasn’t even sure of the value of recording it.
I ended up not recording too much during that intense first week or so.. I have a recording made after the first wake: My mom was big on going to the local 99. I had always had a sort of snobby attitude towards the 99, didn’t like the food so much, and I guess I’m sorta… I don’t know.. the sort of people who go there aren’t really my people.. But the people who go to that 99 where the people who loved my mom, and so it was sort of an amazing experience to go there after the wake.. all of us sitting at the table.. all the toasts to my mom.. And I found myself feeling sorta attached to the 99 crowd…
I’m not really sure how to wrap this sorta thing into the podcast, or even if I will, but I have it.. Something interesting to take a listen to.
I’ve been having some trouble putting spaces between paragraphs on this blog, don’t know why that is.. so I apologize ahead of time if that renders this a little hard to readSo its 3 AM, I just got from the hospital. It was the first time I ever saw a dead body. It was spooky, I felt afraid to touch her. Her skin was so white, she looked so lifeless.. I didn’t know what to do. Do I try and say goodbye? Is this to be my last memory of what she looks like, this image forever seared into my memory? Life and death.. this is the way of the world. This is an experience we all go through.. I am not alone. You know I wonder how this all comes out.. I mean.. once the denial goes away, and you’ve kind of gone through the shock of it all, and you kinda go back to life as it was before.. only now its somehow different. I wonder what that’s going to be like. What scares me the most is how do I manage, how do I carry on, how do I keep going? I don’t mean this in terms of the psychic shock of loosing my mom.. I just mean all the stuff that needs to be done now. Like my dad, how do I take care of him? He has dementia, can barely remember stuff as it is.. he is not able to take care of him self. What about the estate and all that? What about this house? What about how dependent I’ve been on my parents and how I need to now be independent, make that transition.. What am I going to do about money… where I was dependent on my mom for that.. how do I work all this out? How do I transition into the life I’ll need to live just to survive?Today, earlier today, was the first time I had had piece about all this.. about the sense that I could do it when it came… But I didn’t expect it to come like this.. so soon. I want to thank the people out in social media land who’s warmth has helped me feel a little less alone in what I have have to deal with and just generally. It’s little things really.. but just those small gestures of compassion, I can’t tell you how much it means to me. This goes to another problem. Right now I’m too in shock to deal with this, I’ve only been aware of my mom’s passing for a couple of hours… But you know she’s been sick for a long time and it was a pretty steady decline. I almost lost her the wed before Thanksgiving. So I was trying to prepare myself for this… And one of the biggest things is this sense of being alone in the world.. feeling alone in the world.. without having my mom there to lean on. So.. I guess this goes out to you reading this.. My feeling is that the social media community… that’s probably where I’m going to be looking for a sense of family.. So to you my dear reader.. at this moment.. I don’t really have all that much other then you. I mean.. I’ve been living this kind of isolated life for a while.. without having enough social connections.. not feeling connected to the world enough.. But the social media community… You guys have helped me feel welcomed and a part of you. You’ve given me hope.. For you I dream.. I mean its for you that I blog and podcast.. I mean I have some very big dreams for what we could do with this social media stuff.. how we might make the dreams of our hearts manifest.. That’s what I’m out here for.. and I hope I can help you on your journey.. I don’t think I can really express how much I love you, love this community.. love what we are doing.. love that I’m able to be alive at this moment and participating in what I believe to be the greatest revolution that ever happened. I mean you guys.. you’re what makes me thankful.. I say this… almost sounds like I’m speaking to an abstract you. But there’s so many of you out there.. don’t know if you’re actually reading this post.. but so many of you whom.. even if in just small ways.. have touched my life.. and I want to share my gratitude with you for all that.I suppose I’ve said whatever’s on my mind… and maybe I can leave it at that for now.
