Weekly Writing Summary
for the week ending 5/11/2023
I'm Almost Back
I wonder what it means that my production pattern suffered such a disruption in the middle of this series. I've lost at least eight stories off the final count and found long hours to feverishly contemplate futility. It's rare that I so deeply question my intentions when in the middle of production. I'm more practiced in questioning before I begin and even more skilled at second-guessing myself after completing production, but my Covid-19 infection produced some space for me to fret within. With sleep withheld in favor of coughing, I spent several serial endless nights alone with my thoughts. I became flotsam, nudged by emotion, ignored by pretension. Covid-19 temporarily suspended my usual ceaseless internal narrative. It rendered my internal stories disjointed, if not wholly silent, to produce a whole new iteration of my notions of silent night. Snippets floated around and through what Covid left as consciousness. I can only report out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences. Covid felt like a space walk without the benefit of a helmet. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I'm almost back, lacking a few stories and ahead by one somewhat vacuous new experience.
Weekly Writing Summary:
I began my writing week considering all I have ever felt terrified of experiencing, me at that moment in the middle of my first bout of Covid-19, in BoogeyMens. "Everything we presently hold dear will very likely become as one in the gaseous belly of our future sun."
“Our future seems secure together.”
—
Thinking I was already recovering rather than slipping into extending my bout of Covid-19, I imagined myself Rededicating. "There's no longer any going backward or even any viable veering off this long-established path. I am whatever I am, and I do whatever it is that I do. I, perhaps like you, now live a life inexorable. I've traveled beyond the points where I was making choices. Having chosen, I must accept the fate that found me as my own." I would have at least a week more disruption to experience.
"I might just as well be Rededicating my efforts …"
—
I caught myself in one of those rare moments when I seem to gain some awareness of myself while *Chiseling excess concrete from around a new sidewalk. This story proved the most popular this period. "I suspect that if only I could be perceptive enough, I would perceive these life lessons playing out around every activity I engage in. But then, I'm human, and I guess I'm supposed to maintain a certain studied blindness to my surroundings."
" … which explains my aching shoulder."
—
I managed to feel good and Disrupted, though Disrupted and good seem like awfully strange bedfellows. "I might have needed to have been Disrupted, a perfectly unprovable assertion that I find reassuring." After two weeks of Covid-19, I continue to test positive and feel Disrupted.
" … getting good and lost along the way?"
—
This week's writing summary had three missing stories within it. Last week's had four. Next week's, God willing, should return to a full contingent after a longer Covid-19 run than I expected. I might have expected this unexpected occurrence, but didn't. My defense, and an ultimate universal defense, could be that I didn't. I sensed the Boogeymens, but I always do, regardless of the situation. I seem to be forever Rededicating myself to something, for I've always considered even the sincere absence of dedication a rough equivalent to original sin. It's all hard work, much of it inconveniencing. It says nothing about anyone to notice that they seem to be Chiseling, for that might be the human condition manifesting again. Fear, rededication, and even hard labor cannot reliably prevent anything from being Disrupted. It's not really about whether I fall off the horse but whether I climb back aboard again. Thanks for following my fits and restartings!
©2023 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved