While it’s always an option, moping doesn’t help much with what needs to be done.   Tempting though it is, many times, to mope, moping is its own reward.

 Be of good cheer, he says cheerfully to himself.   It won’t do to dwell on the realization I had the other day, in the process of forbearing from telling an old friend that he was acting like an old asshole.   On the way to meet him, many hours after several anxious wake up calls I had no way to ignore, I jotted:  the reward for mildness, another chance to remain mild.

 “Yes!” he said cheerfully when I said it to him.

 “It’s very fucked up,” I said, never more truthful.

 Multiple recordings from Verizon inform me that my internet service will be out at least two weeks.  I am not the only customer affected by this outage, apparently there are thousands of us, phantom limbs waving as we recall a time we could pop on-line for any or no reason.

Doctor left me a message, less than a week after my first call.  My blood looks good,  excellent, in fact.   He invited me to call him back for another round of phone tag.  Hopefully his secretary has printed and mailed me a copy of the actual numbers.  I’m very much into stats, being a lifelong baseball fan.

 In the penultimate session of the rather sad compromise of an animation workshop that is the last one currently standing I found myself making lemonade yesterday.  Four of the twelve kids brought in model releases and I’d photographed the only one of the four who was there the week before.  He changed expression a dozen times and I printed a sheet of his heads, cut them out and made stickers out of them with a wonderful repositionable glue stick.   He was remarkably unproprietary about the use of his head.   His is the manic head of “The Bad Murderer”, an ax wielding stick figure drawn on a blackboard who cuts up another stick figure with his worried face on it.  

 The lemonade came in the form of a series of photos of the other three who posed for their headshots, and one particular sequence.  Once I saw those frames flashing by, the stern, serious face, kind of closed and tough, bursting into animated antics, and back to the stern, closed face, I realized I had pure gold in my hand.  

 Now, in less than five seconds, you see the magic of animation in progress, including the effect it has on the child animator.  The little girl glows as she clowns for the camera, her inventive, mischievous soul shows itself in a devilish flash of fun, then back to an anonymous social mask.

 Not a bad day’s work, methinks, as I prepare to go down to Darling Coffee for a cup of expensive tea and an hour on the internet.  Better to think of that kid’s wonderful star turn, and the fantastic five second ad for the program, than of all the other reasons someone without an income, or an inkling of how to have one, would find to mope.

The doctor, after taking pains to impress on me that he would have treated a long-time patient like me for free, that he had nothing to do with his group’s three month wait to participate in the Affordable Care Act, shook my hand and said we’d talk when the blood test came back in a few days.  

We did not talk, though I got a bill for $445 from his office for the twenty minute visit.  Mysterious, since I’d presented a valid insurance card and the wellness visit was supposed to be “free”.   Also mysterious, the $300 charge for a wellness visit and another $145 for a wellness consultation.

Whine no. 1:  no call back yesterday from the good doctor to talk about what my blood might have to say about the state of my health, though the bill, I was told, had been paid by insurance.

The internet is still not working here, increasing my feeling of isolation and dislocation.   Verizon is supposed to be here any minute to restore it.   Verizon’s DSL service, it must be said, is pretty crappy under the best of circumstances.   Rain seems to make it much worse, and it rained last night.   We’ll see if they show up and fix the line, three more hours left in their appointment window.  (He arrived, determined problem was in basement, door locked, super busy.  He’ll try again tomorrow, armed with super’s number.  Still no service)

Without the internet I can’t send follow-up emails to my unreturned calls from yesterday.   The businessman who sits on the board of the largest public after-school program in the country, among those calls.   I can’t have a look at that wealthy non-profit’s website to familiarize myself with its operation, to sound better informed than I am now.

Another call back that was promised but never came is from the controller of the outfit that is currently employing the animation workshop, unpaid, for months.  Second promise to immediately send the checks was made on April 17 when I sent the unpaid invoices again.  Left town, got back, no checks arrived in the intervening three weeks.

Whine no. 2:  people are weasels, and overbooked weasels at that.

Instead of attending to anything productive, like taming the skin-crawling chaos on and around my desk, I open at random a recently received proof of Philippe Petit’s Creativity: The Perfect Crime.   On the page, now dog-eared, in a list called The jackals of negativity, I spot a familiar jackal, disguised as a fact:

Fact:  I can’t do it alone, I need help.

Petit, a man who repeatedly snuck into the new World Trade Center, casing it until he was able to solve all technical challenges, rig a tightrope between its twin towers, and stroll serenely across space, dismisses these jackals as mere excuses.   “Impossible, what is that?”  asks Petit.

Every problem can be solved over time, with enough attention and persistence.  Provided a person has the burning desire to walk the next step a thousand feet above the pavement to which most people fix their eyes.   A world of darkness, yes, but look also at all those beautiful colors.  Amazing, really, how colorful this hopeless world also is.

What gives the world its marvelous color?   Creativity.   Try living a day without it, you will find yourself fucked, wondering what the point of any of this exertion is.

I can do it alone.  I could use help, of course, but I can do it alone.  It will take much longer than it should, if I had the small team that would be so useful, but I am the man for the job.  If I can stop wasting time tapping my cane against the darkness.