30th Dec

 Back at home after a longer stay down at my brothers.

Not a huge amount to report over the Christmas break. Did a whole bunch of not a lot. Noodled with some proto game company art. But didn't break a sweat.

I saw my Mom on Christmas day, which, was pretty traumatic. She was terrible. Mostly lucid. But sometimes questions would get repeated. Sentences would go round and around. A line between talking to her like a child and an adult, varying from moment to moment. But that wasn't the trauma.

The trauma was for my whole 35 minutes there, she couldn't sit up straight, hunched over to the side - but she didn't want help. Eyes mostly closed. A look of pained struggling on her face. And her lungs. I've had asthma to one extent all my life. Almost carked it as a kid. I know what bad lungs sound like. These sounded 10/10 panic mode horror. Her breath bubbled. Like coffee in a coffee machine. She did not have the strength to clear her lungs. It sounded like someone drowning. Which. It was.

I was so alarmed about it, I dithered about fetching someone. I. Think. I need to get some attention for her. I asked her if she was on meds for it. Not really. Did she want me to get someone ? No.

At times she faded out of consciousness in the room. Just. Gone. For a minute. Then back.

I honestly thought I was going to watch her die right there.

I teared up a few times but clamped down hard on it. Be calm, be there, for her.

We chatted a little. The time flew by. I held her hand as I left.

And then I ended up speaking to one of the nurses for as long as I had spoken to her. Her lungs are very bad I said. Well. A nurse did listen to them today she said. Very bad I repeated. I know what bad lungs sound like. I am sure you know what you're doing but.. we do.. they are very bad. I will mention it to the doctor tomorrow she said.

After that I listened to the nurse chat about her life. It seemed like the nurse really needed someone to talk to. So I spent 30 minutes with her outside whilst she smoked a cigarette. Thanked her for all of what she did. A very worthwhile job. Hard.

As it turns out. Two days later. My brother got a late call from the care home.

Never a good sign.

Your mom has a very serious chest infection they said. By all rights we would have sent her to hospital by now, but 1) she has a DNR and does not want to go to hospital and 2) the home had already sent a couple of residents to the hospital where they had promptly picked up covid, so, that wasn't a great idea.

The call was letting us know, that shit was serious, and, why they weren't doing a lot about it. 

Once again my mom stands on that edge. She's been pronounced dead a few times by now. And comes back. We shall see I guess.

But yeah. Chest bad. Very. Bad.

I told you fucking so. It doesn't matter where I go. People are always a dollar short and a day fucking late to me. Listen to what I fucking said. Chest. Is. Bad. Shit happens in that gap. Of being a day late. Doing something that needs doing. In those gaps, half of the worlds fuckups, mistakes and deaths happen. Meh. Sometimes I hate how slow and fucking stupid people are.

Anyway.

Sooner or later one of these problems will get her. It had flashed across my mind whilst sitting there with her, that pneumonia was often the way people went out. The last domino to fall, lungs go, breathing fails, done.

I came home from the visit straight back to my sister for Christmas dinner.

How was she, asked my Sister.

I said nothing but grimaced. Words felt a little tricky right at that point. The familiar slippery knife of too many upsetting emotions roiled under my calm surface. Words are often too tricky to get out at those points without the control breaking and everything coming out.

My Sister looked at me in the lowlight of the front hall.

How are you ?

I said nothing but grimaced again.

She got it. More emotionally astute of me than most. I guess it runs slightly in the family.

She hugged me and I struggled to keep the tears in as she held me.

I talked to her briefly in the kitchen about our mom. Her - grown up - kids flitted in, quiet, listening, not engaging with us, but ears perked up. I didn't guard my words. They are plenty old enough to understand misery ( 30 years ish ).

I thought she was going to die in front of me I told my sister. She was drowning on every breath.

Well. At least you've seen her. We get this every year. She's bad. We think she's going to go. If she goes it's her time.

It's not the death so much I said. But the suffering. She was really bad. At one point she was hunched over, face red, pain on her face, struggling to cough but not making it. As bad as I've ever seen.

I saw my sisters eyes change. Bloodshot. The tears start to form.

Ok. Enough.

Don't fester about it she said.

Yeah. And I left it at that. Anymore would have twisted the knife into my sister, and that, I didn't want to do.

The small silver lining I suppose, is that when the care home gave us the phone call about her chest, it was no surprise to anyone. Everyone had already processed the warning.

As for myself. My health was not too bad over the holiday. Tired. Exhausted. Everything is an effort. Every single task you undertake is like hauling yourself up from a well of tiredness that just pulls you to sleep, and if not sleep then sit. I waited for it to lift. Just. Rest more. It will lift.

It did not lift.

Almost like I have some chronic fatigue problem. Ha ha.

I saw my Sister a good few times. Athena got to meet everyone. She was on best old lady form. I saw my former padawan and talked to him about shit. He's going to read this very probably. So he gets to see a split perspective now. His fundamental reality was beating himself up. Stuck. In that pattern. Of kicking himself. I told him not to. But I get it. The words simply slipped away. The reality is harder. Rule #1. Dont be a dick to yourself. I think I should get it made into keyrings or something, ha ha.

And of someone feeling they are a freak. Everyone else does X. Why cant I. I am abnormal.

There's the secret. *Everyone* gets that. And typically. The situation someone finds themselves in... is not unique. Not a unicorn. It's just often not talked about. Or educated about enough. With all due respect to geologists, we learn about fucking rock strata at school, something you will never, ever use or care about, but never learn anything about the human condition. About self worth. About mental health care. Something that you will absolutely need in your life.

Teaching priorities are shit yo.

But. That's something of an achiever, scientific, rational approach to learning. Learn How To Do. How Shit Works. Never Ever Question Stuff Like what makes you happy, what makes you sad. Why. What's a healthy thought pattern. What's an unhealthy one. Oooh. Far too non scientific. Let's instead bury it in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist ! Make sure you do well in your Maths exam !

Because remember. Knowing your times table is very important when you're in the padded room in the psych ward.

Ha ha.

This shit is all the more pertinent in the times where new studies are coming out saying there is an enormous jump in mental health problems amongst kids .... because... of the fucking internet, social media, always on goddamn judgy mcjudgementalness and impossible standards and online feedback that positively fast breeds anxiety. Why did they not like my post. Do they not like me anymore. Oh my god. I am an idiot. etc. Multiplied by teen hormones.

But no. By all means. This. Is basalt. And that. Is a quadratic equation.

Treating kids/people/humans like they're just a fucking box full of facts. A box with a slot that you push paper into. And test to see how much of that paper they can regurgitate to you. For fuck sakes.

People. So fucking stupid at times. Herp a derp. Lets just follow these teaching patterns given to us by archaic fucking thinking !

We have an entire generation at this point - millennials - that are more or less all engaged in some form of low level mental health battle if not outright full on bonkers level health battle, and the generation after them - Z, is fucked as all hell. 

Who was King in 1724 ?

Can I talk about my anxiety ?

No. Fuck you. Who was King ?

Anyway. I'm starting to rant about teaching again. Not teaching. Teaching is cool. Ranting about the fucked up structured form of education of young uns that we inflict upon them as Normal.

The internet.. as should be awfully apparent by this point, is nothing if not an absolute destroyer of all paradigms before it. It delights in ripping up The Old Ways and replacing them with Entirely New Ways at a speed that has never been seen before in human history. Instead of millennia you get decades. Instead of centuries you get a year.

We've kind of got comfortable with that from a purely physical practical way. Oh yes. It destroyed the old record industry and remade it anew - after a period of much angst, anger and soul searching. It destroyed snail mail - by and large. Destroyed book shops. Encylopedias. TV. Albums. Maps. Fact books. Is destroying our concept of major societal signposts - commerce, highstreets, physical shops.

But the thing that is slow. As always. To be fucking picked up on. Is that all consuming destroyer of all paradigms knows no boundaries.

And it's also doing a number on us. Not just our things. Or our routines. But how we think. How we engage with each other. It's a complete spanner in the works for 100,000 years of human evolution that has evolved to read body language. To sit in a space with another physical being. To have downtime. Trust. Etc. The always on completely fucks with that. In the same way that "stress" has come to be known as a problem in offices and jobs, an evolutionary trait designed to make us fight or flight becomes a major obstacle in an office where neither is useful, but your animal still reacts that way. Stress we get. The absolute pandoras box of a million things the internet has unleashed we are mostly utterly fucking clueless about. Like a poor stupid rabbit stuck in headlights, waiting for the truck to squish it.

Stress. Is like the laughable old banger of an automobile that someone walks out in front of with a red flag in terms of a problem and problem acknowledgement. We know what stress is. We talk about it. Here it is. How to avoid it ( follows some shit advice ). Heres its crank handle. Isnt it funny. Look. Crank crank crank. Here goes the engine !

The internet and all the mental health demons and psychological shifts it does to us is like 21st century car industry. Complicated, diverse and so much faster. Like unleashing a range of Teslas on some poor Victorian schmuck thats only just got used to a bicycle.

And by and large, we're entirely oblivious to all of this happening. Apart from the symptoms beginning to boil out of the masses.

Teen mental health problems massively spiking. The rise of the cult - conspiracy theorists, extremists, echo chambers of nutcasery. All feeding a groaning mass of anxiety and incapability of coping. What you're seeing is a massive real time psychological experiment with a host of different stressors and changes. And people are dropping like flies.

The shit is beginning to slosh about our ankles, and a few, are looking down and wondering, wow, whats all this shit, and man, does it stink. Hey. Guys ? Err. What's this ? Is. This. A Problem ?

It will get worse before (if) it gets better. ( An edge case scenario is I think this actually takes down society as we know it. Yeah. Thats right. Twitter ends up being the usherer in of The End Times. Not directly. But from all the shit it stirs up. The failure of communication and empathy it inspires. That malfunctioning human evolutionary social coping stuff breaks. And we end up in a war. Wars. With extremists. Setting off shit. Or destroying vaccines ( already happened ). And thus the world ends in the largest tantrum in history. This also gives you a lovely new theory for a Great Filter if you subscribe to the whole Fermi's Paradox thing ( which I personally dont, but still ) ).

To correct the problem, you have to first acknowledge the problem ( Rule # 3 of mental health ). And then you have to understand the problem. And then you have to start coming up with ways to address the problem that you now understand. To be frank. We've only just started taking stress seriously. And that's been going on for a century and more. All the rest of it out of Pandoras internet box, forget it. We are barely even acknowledging the problem. Understanding it is out. And addressing it. Ha ha ha.

Anywho.

Here's me. On a soap box. About society. Humanity. Pfft. This should be part of my Book Of Humanity. Hitchhikers Guide to Humans And Their Society perhaps.

So what else.

Mentally pretty good over Christmas. A few days I either woke up, or went to sleep, in pain, sad, knives in stomach. Thinking about Ares. Ho hum. But it's better. I. Often talk about Athena and Ares together. Like. They're still a team. I don't know. His final huff of breath still haunts me. I wonder if he knew. Would he thank me. Or hate me. The trusting head to head bop he gave me right before. Jesus fucking christ. Stop it.

And breathe.

Today I got home. Went for a nap. I feel. Absolutely horribly tired. Perhaps it is this house. I feel more tired here. Maybe it's the early start, long journey, busy day. I don't know.

Everyone was surprised I was "quitting work". Perhaps everyone just thought I was mulling it over or spouting off steam. But no. Still the plan. Still happening. On the 11th. Or thereabouts. Everyone has related that they absolutely want all the gossip. They want a blow by blow conversation. How does it pan out. Who offers what. What anger is directed. What emotional blackmail. Or will it be a total non event. Heh. No one seems to think it will be a non event. You can only hope though eh ?

On that note. I saw something on imgur today. Not a million miles away from my position. The text messages make interesting reading. And. This could be something that I will be in for. The anger. The bargaining. The desperation. Repeat. Click on the link, and have a read. Particularly read the texts. They are golden. Beggars and Choosers and all that.

https://imgur.com/gallery/eG7Pnla