Gratitude Alphabet

Doing a writing exercise, I guess, is what I'm doing. Because I've hardly written anything for months. Since I got sober, yet again. Excuses, excuses. Blaming deficiency of soul on being married and sober. For whatever reason, not writing anything, even long letters. Even short letters. Even skeets, threads. 

Also, doing a gratitude exercise, I guess, is what I'm doing. Because I've been getting gloomy and doomy. Perhaps I can blame that on being married and sober as well? Writing is hard when I haven't got the swoony swagger I get from various kinds of buzzes. Gratitude is also hard, in that wilderness. Wild clarity, where I'm pining for clouds and fogs and coils of vapour to flavour things and suggest a soundtrack and obscure painful realities and disappointing probabilities.

A is for Alison, my sister. A good sister. I'm lucky to have her, things are much better with us than when we were kids. Even though there's a long distance, physically, and emotionally, although I am grateful for a kind of closeness with her that I don't have with my parents, even, perhaps because of shared cultural references and experiences, and just less autistic weirdness. Just a little less, anyway.

B is for Brian, my dad, the best dad in the world, and other father's day cliches, but in this case, really. He is sweet, despite autistic weirdness. A father I can be proud of, and am, sometimes, when I think about it. Don't want to think about him ever dying, I'm grateful I don't have to much, not that time yet, hopefully not for a long time.

C is for Chels, an old friend I've never met in person, chat up sporadically, sometimes between gulfs of years, I prize that catalogue of messages, some incredibly good vibes at times.

D is for Doors. Cause they allow entry to rooms. Cute.

E is for Erin, my wife, the love of my life. Takes care of me in ways I don't even know. Someone to take care of. It was something I wanted for so long. And then I get what I want and feel burdens. But I can take stock and realize how lucky I am. And then feel like luck is a burden, don't want to feel obligated to feel gratitude. And then I can think about things that bring tears to my eyes, like how she baked that cake for my sober birthday, that molasses cake that I loved, that she thought was weird and bad.

F is for Fur, cat fur, it's so soft, feels so nice to pet, the nicest tactile feeling that I get, on a daily basis. Especially Tatiana's, the poofy luxury cat, the softest thickest coat I've ever had the pleasure to pet. Worth the stress and expense of cat maintenance.

G is for the Government. Could be worse. Does some good things. Social services. Gives me tax refunds. There's a system set up, that I've been able to tap into at times. Can't be easy, running the whole apparatus. Wouldn't say I live in a failed state, even though it might be heading there, but maybe I could still win the death-bet.

H is for Holidays, seems like they've added a few since my school days. So that's nice. It's hard to find time and energy for anything other than survival, but there's usually one a month, if I could plan better and do better at following through with plans, I might be able to nurture some more soul. Writing is hard, it's making me sweat. Like, I know I could come up with a metaphor much better than "nurturing" soul, but I can't be bothered, it would take hard mental labour, I'm not inspired. Well my writing joints are weak, they're creaking, haven't been stretched. And I'm not even a third of the way to Z.

I is for, I dunno. I gotta keep this moving, I wanna do the whole thing before I drop off. Nevermind nodding, don't mention that, forget that. Keep it moving, keep it grateful, ok?

J is for Judy, and Jennifer (both), and I could go on with J names, but I'll just try and tick those off in later entries, should they happen, magically, by themselves, or maybe through some strenuous writing exercises in a future regimen. Maybe I'll even book another counselling appointment. Maybe if I can get that Laziness Does Not Exist book read, to feel sufficient prepped for another session. Maybe I should just book it, stop trying to prepare. Already killed the momentum.

K is for Kyoto, that disc from the box set of Keith Jarrett's Sun Bear Concerts, such a great improv. Guess I could've made K for Keith, but I like that I made it Kyoto, more specific, and I did get a lot of pleasure from mp3s somebody ripped from that disc, while generating landscapes in Vistapro 3.0, even if the first batch I downloaded, in the early Napster days, were glitchy and I wasted so many hours trying to "repair" the waveforms. Am I really "grateful" for the Kyoto concert? Yeah, a little, I guess. Just going on quick associations from letters.

L is for love. It's real, even if I'm not a great lover of love. But love songs don't make me nauseous like they used to. I can feel it, I guess that's something that androids dream of, it's not something to be taken lightly, and as much as I fucking hate things sometimes, it's good that I can fucking love things too.

M is for mom. She's the sweetest, despite autistic weirdness. I'm feeling so lazy and tired doing this exercise, I can't be bothered to say things in an interesting way much of the time, but mom is one of the things that inspires the most deep and genuine gratitude. Aside from all the ways she is special, I owe my life to her, directly.

N is for Nevermind, the Nirvana album. I don't know when the last time is that I actually listened to it, it's probably been years, and I was probably drunk, and appreciating music in that way where it's a soundtrack and nostalgia. It has many permanent rooms in my head, that album. It wired me in all kinds of ways. The associations. They still take me back to that birthday, when I turned eleven, in New South Wales, my first walkman with that tape to go with it, being transformed aesthetically on hearing that music. Still, there's never been anything like it. Driving to a water park in the morning. Driven. Formative in ways I can't define, because it's aesthetic.

O is for Osaka, maybe my favourite of the Sun Bear concerts. Another one I wasted hours trying to de-glitch. Although I'm grateful for those hours too actually, because I learned things about waveforms doing that. A formative experience in audio editing, unknowingly leveraging neuro-plasticity in my adolescent flailing at engineering.

P is for Pickle Rick. I am grateful for that episode of Rick and Morty. It's probably in my top ten. Even though it's not all that cool, according to the people that are cooler than me, but it's hilarious and creative, and I enjoyed it immensely, both times I watched it. That jaguar character. I didn't watch it a third time when I was rewatching the series with Erin, I skipped that one, because she was barely tolerating the relentless grossness of the series, and I knew that particular one would have sent her over the edge.

Q is for the letter Q. It's useful sometimes in wordle, when I run out of vowels, but there's a U left, and I want to try some 2 letter combos, like in QUASH, or QUACK.

R is for Ratatouille, the movie, I really enjoyed it when I watched it the one time, back in, I dunno, 2007, on Luc's recommendation. Made me appreciate a host of other things, Luc, Fidel, animals, cooking. Not that I became a food guy, thank god, I'm barely tolerating The Bear. Actually I don't wanna admit how much I enjoy that show, but I still want to maintain an aloofness from foodie culture. Wanna maintain a toe-hold on this self-declared niche of cool.

S is for Savoury, the herb. It smells so good. Even the inferior imported savoury they shipped to the Mt. Scio farm where I packaged the stuff, scooped it out of a giant bin and bagged it. And the smaller amount of fresher stuff they grew there, my god, so good, so [insert better writing here]. What I'm really grateful for is the job. The owner, can't remember his name now, but he was a good man, respectful to his employees, liked to hire ex-convicts, and weirdos and losers like me, with barriers like autistic weirdness, that made having a silly low-paying job like that a high value thing in my mind, just the petty achievement of having a job like a real person to go to and afford a modest life by western standards.

T is for Tony. I'm so glad he's back. Thought I'd lost him forever to his mental illness. I did lose him for more than a decade. But we're friends again. It means a lot to me. It was so upsetting to me when he went paranoid schizo on me back in those days, I would sometimes dream of him coming around, but it was only a dream, until the last few years, he reached out again. And we're living on the same island, which is great, I get to go up to Port Alberni and visit and play music and talk about stuff that's important to us.

U is for Ucluelet. Maybe Erin and I will go there soon. I have rosy-tinted memories of the place, even though the few months I lived there were actually quite dark and stressful. But it will be nice to see it again. I really am grateful for the experience of living there back in 2012. I guess it helps that it's long in the past, I know that I came through it, I have that benefit, that too did pass, and I can see the good, barely remember the anxiety about trying to find work, and that brutal day of work processing the bloody muck from the bottom trawler, and then having to hitch to tofino every day to be a dish-bitch at the marina restaurant, occasionally getting to borrow briar's VW jetta, trying not to drive it like the disrespectful dumb dude I was. Yeah, I know, this is supposed to be about gratitude. But I am grateful for those hard times too, because I get to write about them, and feel hard for having gone through them. The hard-won "hardness" of a privileged working class canadian cracker with sweet parents.

V is for Vampires, cause I've gained more appreciation of them since getting with Erin. I've discovered there's a lot more to the mythology and creative possibilities I hadn't imagined. Maybe I'll even do something with the concept some day, if I ever take a second crack at doing fiction. Yeah, I dunno.

W is for words, even though I'm having trouble with them lately. But I love words, which is why I feel their void so painfully now. I'll get back to them.

X is for X-rays cause, well, I love everything on the electro-magnetic spectrum. Not x-rays especially though. I'm gonna have to look at the dictionary if I keep doing this, cause X, you know.

Y is for youth, specifically, the youth, younger generations, cause I think they're turning out better in a lot of ways. I mostly hated people my own age when I was younger. They're less bad as my contemporaries in middle age, but also, I think newer gens have a lot to recommend them. I don't envy them coming up in this world. I cut them a lot of slack because of it. They're annoying in a lot of ways, of course, that's just gonna happen, but no more annoying than I found my own gen when I was younger. They have at least the capacity to be more informed, because of information technology, and a lot of them are. And a lot of them are misinformed to increasingly grotesque degrees because of that same technology, but the possibility to be better informed than any past gens is a net good, I think.

Z is for Zodiac, because it's fun to lark about with astrology once in a while, it's cute. My baby does is sometimes, it's endearing. It would get old fast if she got super serious with it, but it makes a nice aesthetic. I'm not as dismissive about her budding interest in wicca. I guess she would consider them somewhat related, but there's a lot more meat on the wiccan bone, I think. 

Okay, I got to Z. Now I don't have to be grateful, I can just ramble. I can stop rambling now if I want and go to bed. I dunno what I want to do. Ramble I guess. I need to write a long letter to Matt. I need to write a novel that is a memoir that is a plan to die with dignity. I need to do all this shit, damnit, feed my soul, collate lyrics to plug into scraps of keyboard improv to build songs. It feels good to finally do some writing, in so fucking long, at least, I'm grateful for that. Hopefully I'll do more of that, whether it's therapy writing or nursery rhymes for stunted adults, or whatever. There's a loneliness. This is a step in the ridiculously circuitous escalator to address that.