PTSD-itis… or There and not quite back again.
wolram e. deaps by Marcos Vergara
Today I’m doing exactly what I swore not to do anymore – (a) indulging in a spot more navel gazing and (b) admitting to a weakness of character I’d prefer to debunk or laugh off in the circumstances. But last year my body tried its steady best to kill me. It wasn’t North Korea after all.
I don’t know; I guess I got complacent. kind of like the Allies after WWI, thinking my physical self would always hold out. It was bullied, dependable. I think churning out two novels in the course of 3 months at the beginning of 2016 pushed the poor chassis a tad too far, coupled with a comic book script for a new character 18 months in the mix, loaded with ups and downs, that still hasn’t seen resolution The old body threw a wobbly that took me to places I prefer not to return to. In moments of quiet musing, I do however swing back via those landscapes. Hence the advice from several people that I might be suffering a form of PTSD.
Yeah, alright, maybe.
I’m tempted to pull a Roy Batty and say here “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”
Instead Wolram E. Deaps from my own fiction – the novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude – jumps closer to mind. Hence the admission that I might indeed be suffering from something akin to PTSD, just as a few people have suggested.
Wolram, however had in fact recently kicked the bucket. I’m not there yet and would prefer to steer clear of this abyss in future:
His summation?
“I have meagre proof, no framed-up certification, nothing to toss in a court of law as evidence of a rapid departure from the mortal coil. I recall a gun was involved, pressed up against my
skull, and a loud explosion followed. An ancient Chinese philosopher, whose bloody name escapes me, reckoned that ‘A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.’ This was prior to the advent of gunpowder, so I’m wondering what fluff the fellow would have churned out concerning a single bullet.
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ictor LLaszlo by storymancer
“Having proved my credentials—citing the crackpot savant while slinging in a footnote—allows me to get straight to the point.
There is no neat beginning with which to start things. And while debarkation here might be meaningful to the hoi polloi, so far as I was concerned?
Hardly.
My grand entrance in these parts elicited no dull, heavy, monotonous clang of a divine bell, let alone a jaunty toot-tooting of car horns. Festivities, it seemed, were off the agenda.
The climate? Well, this wasn’t balmy enough to postulate the outer suburbs of Hell, but Paradise remained well and truly lost, and one saw nary a pitchfork nor harp. I suppose a better address would be the place to find the Pearly Gates, while Saint Peter must have been gallivanting on French leave. A blessing, since I’m not one for preachy types.
Lacking, to my mind, was a suitable background score banged together by Chopin—though with Frédéric François out of the picture, it was the opportune setting for Victor Laszlo to shepherd a rousing rendition of ‘La Marseillaise….
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“You might recall the suavely scarred, excessively honourable
Resistance leader, from the film Casablanca? Sadly, the man was nowhere. At times I found myself humming the melody, deprived of Laszlo’s guidance, but to be honest test pattern music would have sufficed. Alas, I was indulged with silence.
“Not for my ears the faintest chorus of cicadas, wild squawk of ravens, or a reassuring rumble of distant traffic. Tiresome Christian Vespers and their Muslim stand-in, adhān, remained mute, and there appeared to be too few little darlings to belt out for me ‘Oranges and Lemons’.
In the moments that I stopped humming as I hoofed it along, I heard scarcely a sound—a reminder of the hush that prevails with snow.
Hereabouts, we’re fleeced of the sight of pirouetting flakes, so I initially considered hearing loss was a by-product of the hop, skip and lunge, from life to a possible demise. A rival thought that I’d alternatively gone insane later crossed my mind, but let’s not go there now.
Although it was plain to see this domain went through the clockwork motions of day and night, and while the feel was more terra firma than Elysian Shangri-la, some aspects were awry. For one thing, the damned weather never committed.
Occasionally, the wind picked up or a light mist draped the horizon, but there was nought I could point to and declare, ‘I say, there’s the sun.’ I marked an absence of rainfall, thunder, or hail. I missed the rain. Where I came from, it used to pour down by the bucketload.
The sky was a canvas of flinty grey looking like it was painted with a bold brush and careless abandon.
At one time, I spotted a sign writer at work up there in the heavens. If I expected ‘Surrender Dorothy’, I was thwarted—the baffling word ‘Jihi’ slowly dissipated and became nothing.
No matter how far I went, the venue otherwise refused to change.
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