Writing ourselves into oblivion

"I don't want to get up. I can't go on like this," my character said, lying in the bed I had written for him. "How do you get up in the morning?" he asked me.
"I pretend that I am you."
"How does that help?"
"For a moment nothing appears real."

Ah, the luxury of being a writer. Writing yourself into a little oasis in an otherwise turbulent world. Or is it the opposite. Is it the turbulence you seek? Somewhere to direct the pain which would otherwise consume you. To help convince you to get up at least one more day.

"And when you know what is real, how do you go on then?" " he asked,
"I have responsibilities."
"Family?"
"Family, yes. Do you want me to write you a family?" I asked.
"Will they be less dysfunctional than your family?"
"My family is not dysfunctional."
"Really?"
"You have to get out more," I said.

There is pain in writing. Most people don't know that. There is even greater pain in not being able to write: a verbal constipation where words remain locked inside, wanting to get out.

Writing, for me, is directly linked to survival. It wasn't that way once, but it is now. A very good friend of mine told me, "It is the DOING of it that matters." And she is right. I am first and foremost writing for myself. Facing my demons face to face. Listening carefully to hear if I still have a voice. But I also would very much like to be read.

And now I will let you in on a little secret. Many of us make New Year Resolutions but rarely expect to carry them through. But I have made a New Year Resolution for 2017 which I have every intention of carrying through. And that is writing a new blog entry every two weeks. Since beginning this blog in 2011, it has never gone this long without a new entry. There are many reasons for not writing. And some may appear quite valid, but none are justified.

When I was diagnosed with Parkinson's, the pivotal moment was whether I would decide to fight it or not. At first, I was stunned. But it only took a short time to make a decision. I wouldn't go out easily. I was left with body and mind and each had declared war on the other. It was for me to keep it all together.

First I began with the body. I went to the gym for two to three weekly workouts. I joined a weekly Pilates class. We could clearly see what was getting better and what was getting worse, and adjust accordingly. But the mind is much more complex. When the body stumbles, you just begin to be a little more careful and put more work into your physical balance. When the mind stumbles, you aren't quite sure what to do, or where it may lead.

The key, I have found, is in finding your rhythm. The more you physically exercise, the better you fall into this rhythm. The more you write, the better the words naturally flow through you. My New Year Resolution is meant to keep me writing, to keep to a rhythm which will keep me moving forward.

And then there is my third book, a very different type of rhythm. It demands all of me at times and takes me to places that I didn't even know existed: some dark and others very bright.

And now that my new characters have begun waking up, I find them beginning to speak to me, and not just through the pages of the book. They appear to have confused what is real with what is unreal and their place in it. I would try to show them their correct place, but that might simply lead to an all out revolt, leaving me with no voice at all. So, the only divisions I can form are by answering back.

The one thing I haven't been able to escape, though, is their critique. I have found my characters to be my harshest critics.

Where tooth fairies fear to tread

Yesterday I sat in the dentist’s chair, with the sound of a drill boring into the bone in my mouth. I felt like I was in a road construction crew, with me as the road. The drilling finally stopped, and then for some reason the dentist had to start hammering. All in the process of raising my sinus and putting in an implant.

This wasn’t my first implant, although it was my first raised sinus. There is a commercial on Israeli television advertising “direct car insurance” without the middle-man agent - mocking the fact that we are simply financing the agent’s rich lifestyle in not going the “direct insurance” way. Well, I feel like I am supporting a whole dental clinic, with the dental work they have done on me lately. Yesterday I asked where Carmit, the head of finances at the clinic, was. “Gone away on vacation,” they told me. “Of course she is,” I thought. “I am probably sending her first class.”

And I ask myself - “What is the point?” Is there any point in investing so much in such an old horse? Maybe the money would be better spent in a continuous supply of whiskey. The good years are clearly behind me. Adva, my wife, gets mad at me when I talk like this. Go figure.

Dentistry has gone a long way, since I was a child. I remember the sound of the drill and my sister’s screams, as she went into the dentist before me. My sister, being three years older than I, has led the way through much of my life. She has met all of the milestones, such as turning 30 (officially “over the hill”), well before me, preparing the way, so that by the time I reached such milestones, they were quite anti-climactic. As was the pain in the dentist’s chair, taking my turn after her. It was never as bad as her screams built it up to be.

All in all, the pain has been taken out of the dentist equation since then, with all of the drugs that have been developed. Although I often manage to be the odd case out. The last time they had to pull out a tooth, when it was discovered that it had become shattered under a filling, it had to be taken  out in bits and pieces, a process that took much longer than expected. And towards the end, the anaesthetic had worn off and renewed anaesthetic would not take. So the last bit, including the sewing in of stitches, was done without pain killer. Did it hurt? God, yes. How did I take it? In quite a philosophical vein, actually. I figured that at this time of life, I deserved the pain. For what exactly? Does it really matter? If we dig hard enough, reasons can be found. And the pain was welcome in a weird masochistic sort of way.  It was probably the only exciting thing that happened to me in the last couple of months.

But yesterday, the treatment was quite painless. The young Israeli dentist, in gleefully arranging his tools, told me to raise my left hand if there was anything wrong. But I just settled back and the left hand never went up. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could approach life that way?

Left hand goes up. “Ah... God,” I say, “this is a bit too painful.”
“Yes, I know,” God responds, as s/he goes on drilling.
“Ah...,” I say, shifting uncomfortably in the chair, “why did you tell me to raise my hand if it won’t change anything?”
God smiles and stops drilling for one brief moment. “We like to give you the feeling of control over your own destiny.”
With that, God chuckles and pulls the goggles back down over his/her eyes and goes on drilling. Who says the gods don’t have a sense of humour.