💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 10-27.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:28:37. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-04)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I follow a lot of writers on Mastodon. I get a lot of reviews boosted into my feed. One writer in particular pumps out a great number of short reviews, probably in the knowledge that for many books, one review might be all they get. And this morning I read a review he wrote for a poet I know, one I've worked with closely, who has edited my work. A phrase leaps out: "brain tumour diagnosis". I'm stunned. The poet is somewhere around my own age, maybe a few years older. In the past couple of years I've lost a number of people from my youth: to an overdose, to a heart that stopped during sleep, to drifting into oncoming traffic in a mountain pass. I spent a great deal of my life having very little exposure to death, losing only my grandfather, to lung cancer, when I was 12.
It's a bill that comes due; it's a fact that everyone has to wrestle with eventually. And so I did more googling (since the tumour was mentioned in the context of a recent book), and I can see that almost every interaction I've had with him has been under this cloud. When I originally sent him work, and we started talking, that would've been before; but the acceptance of the work, the editing, the publication - that would all have been after.
I'm writing this because I'm thinking a lot about how much time we have, how much we think we have. How so many of my days seem sing-songy, variations on the same over and over, and which, while I fill my time with things I love, they really are the same. Hack on my projects. Write. Publish to geminispace. Play my guitar, play my fiddle, neglect all the other instruments I used to play.
The truth is, I'm convinced I have a lot more time. The truth is, I have no way of knowing that's even true. How as I work on minute little bugs, or add unit tests, I think, _this should only take an hour_. What's an hour in my context, anyway? Could be almost nothing. Could be more than I think.
And it's a balancing act because living my life every day like I'm about to die is one of those things that sounds good in movies and fiction, but falls apart under examination. So I should abandon long-term goals? So I should quit my job, move someplace warm, eat good food and drink liqueurs and coffee until my money runs out? And what then?
What then, indeed. How to balance what's important and what's singularly necessary in the presence of an uncertain and unknowable limit. I've already lived longer than a number of people I grew up with. Will I outlive many more? Or will I be next? How do I balance and live my life in the presence of this? There are no easy answers. I have no good ideas.