Balls Deep

(edit:   yeah – I changed my title of the post but did NOT change the start of the post, so if you’re scratchin’ your head, that’s my fault.  Bad Don.  Bad, bad.  Bad.  This was originally titled “Ping.”)

Not quite the sound of a pin drop, sorry, nor the sound of what happens before ‘pong’ (which always makes me think of “ding dong” and then I hear middle-school voices and the sing-song rhyme of:  “…plays ping pong with his ding dong”).  Yes, that’s how my mind works some days.  Random fragments.  I’m pinging myself in a post, a reminder that hey, you do have a blog, ya know.  Yes, I know.

I’m getting a little more organized.  Thoughts of birth and death, living and dying… always good motivators to take inventory and some self-stock.  Two weeks ago I stopped all caffeine, chocolate, carbonation, alcohol, and spicy foods.  I increased my work outs, which wasn’t too difficult since I went from nothing to everything-I-do-makes-me-breath-hard-and-sweat.  Discovery of muscles that I’d forgotten I had.  I don’t celebrate myself too much, but I’m gonna admit here that I like my biceps.  I’m stretching again and slowly relearning some yoga poses.  I come back to breathing, time and again.  Deep breathing.

I cleared off clutter on my desks – at home and at work.  I pulled out old magazines that I’d been meaning to read – I finished them and I threw them away.  The stack of filing I’d kept piling up I organized and filed away.  Stacks at work got put into folders, labeled and filed.  Those little pieces of paper with “important” phone numbers got put into contact information in Outlook.  I deleted over a thousand emails.

At night before bed I’ve been doing crossword puzzles or logic problems, the attempts of which usually frustrate the hell out of me.  Word games I’m fine with, but the order and structures of logic are challenging to me.  The “get it right” perfectionist part of me will take those logic problems and erase and start over until I figure it out.  In the last two weeks I’ve solved a few that had stumped me years before.

Lastly, or maybe firstly, I carved out time for me to write.  Dreams, plans, and outlines… fine – any day, any week.  But since the writing workshop in Monterey this spring, I consciously put writing away and didn’t allow myself the time for pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.  I’m not the swiftest with figuring myself out, but it was another one of those slamming my head against the wall revelations to acknowledge that distractions are the same as saying conscious priorities.  Maybe in my older age I’m learning to embrace that which, historically, I’ve enjoyed running from.  Could be too that I’m over being coy with myself – I do like to write.  Skip the extended forplay that is an existential exercise in mental blue balls – it’s balls-deep fucking time to write.