Nightmares, disappearances, the spring, mental illness, the old police station

Wednesday 4/10/24

Lots of nightmares last night. Often when I have them it's one after another, different subject, different characters, like it's a film festival of nightmares. Molly will usually be in one because the embedded trauma is so deep. I don't know if it will ever leave the level where it is at given the nature of that trauma.

I have a cousin I was fond of. I still am. She lives near the Garden (meaning the Boston Garden; here in Boston, one says the Garden and they usually mean the sports arena, but they could also be referring to the Public Garden), which is close to me, of course. She helped me out in 2016 when I had pneumonia. We would get together and do things, like go to a Red Sox game. I last saw her on the first day of 2020 when we got together that afternoon at a bar (cranberry juice for me, obviously; I go to bars despite my non-alcohol ways--usually alone, because there is at most one or two days a year when I am not physically alone, to read and watch a game). I've reached out, asked how she was doing, invited her to thinks like Christmas concerts for which I had an extra ticket, but I haven't heard a word in those years. I've sent along a few stories, such as "Best Present Ever." Not a single response. Not an email back, a text. Everything ignored.

You don't know with people. What, if anything, is going on with them. I'd say that one knows less than ever, this world being what it is right now, and the ways in which people now are and act. I've said that I hope everything is okay, if there's anything you need, etc. But nothing. I don't feel anger about this, but partially because it's so typical now. I like this person. When I was sick, they were really there for me. I could give other examples of this--how people just disappear. Disappearing is a commonplace now, a norm of our age that says much about this age.

Snow was general in James Joyce's "The Dead." Mental health issues are general in our world in 2024.

Yesterday was the first day it felt like spring for me. It was probably spring-like the day before, but that's when I had that strange seven-hour illness thing going on and had put the heat on. I shut the furnace off yesterday for the season, ran 3000 stairs at City Hall, did 100 push-ups, with one less layer of clothing. Normally I wear the same thing for most of the fall, all of the winter, and into the early spring: sweatpants, T-shirt, sweatshirt, fleece, beanie. I dispensed with the fleece for yesterday's workout.

Yesterday as I was returning from this workout, there was a man who was probably my age but looked fifty-seven with his son in tow--probably about eight-years-old--and they were meeting up with another man who was likely my age and looked closer to sixty. The dad was one of those guys who looks like he's transporting a boulder under his shirt. I was passing by them, so I was within earshot of their conversation--there was no one else on this street, which is my street, and more of a lane (it was once a cow path) than a full-fledged street--for let us say ten seconds.

The dad's conversation featured the word "ain't" no less than three times. Now what chance does the boy have not to talk this way himself in life? People will say that's a small thing, and language doesn't matter, because it's dead anyway. Okay. But I've been speaking of mental illness. So much mental illness derives from people's inability--which is greater than ever--to communicate and communicate effectively. That isolates people. From others, from themselves, from the truth, from reality, from healthy coping strategies. They think less well, process less well, handle life less well. I would say it's a big thing.

I've talked about the disused tollbooth from the 1950s at the edge of the North End where I do some of my push-ups. It stands in front of this disused building that is quite regal and elegant, a police station built in 1931. (That same year it opened, you could have gone to the movies and seen Bela Lugosi in Dracula, William Faulkner's Sanctuary came out, and Skip James cut his finest blues sides.) Isn't that a beautiful structure? Boarded up and empty.