6/13

the walking dead

                June 13, 2018

            6/13

            i'm thankful that though the trail near our house where i go running every day is closed for maintenance, which depressed me because we live on a busy road with a small and dangerous shoulder and i need to run every day to not feel like shit, that got me to go down a nearby road i hadn't been down, just a bit further down the busy road, which turned out to have sidewalk for as long as i needed for my run, which was a nice surprise. i'm thankful that though i prefer a flatter trail, it's good for me to run on hills, which this route had, sometimes. i'm thankful for the middle school near the road, which is probably the reason it has such good sidewalk coverage, even though it is a very ugly middle school that reminds me of the prison they lived in on that one season of the walking dead.

i'm thankful for yoku's island express, which is the video game i've been playing lately and which is like an adventure platform game except where instead of being a little person who runs and jumps around as in most of those games, you're a little pinball and you traverse the environment by way of bouncing off of pinball paddles. i'm thankful for how pleasurably (and sometimes pleasurably difficult) it is to move through a game world in this way, an island made of linked pinball machines. i'm thankful for how even though some parts are hard, they never feel as hard or impossible as actual platformers like celeste, because even if you're playing a complex pinball game, it's still, at the base level, just pinball, and if you keep trying, you're going to eventually hit the ball right.
i'm thankful for this essay by aubrey bell, who is my favorite tweeter. i'm thankful for how interesting it was to read her write longer prose, since all of the writing of hers i've consumed has been in this other form, a form which lends itself to a certain kind of voice and tone and structure. i'm thankful for how she conceives of her twitter account as a way, amid struggles with mental health problems and the general horror of the world, to "provide quantifiable proof that [she] wants to be alive," that, in this light, rather than her twitter account being the paraphernalia of an addiction or a waste of time or something that serves to exacerbate her mental illness*, the body of her tweets (jokes, groans, observations, silly thoughts, puns) is that necessary evidence that she is alive and wants to keep being alive, "over 20,000 pieces of evidence to prove it."

* "I was depressed before I was on Twitter. There are millions of articles, studies, (and tweets) linking social media to mental illness. Aggressive use is either a symptom or it is a definitive cause. We are urged to “unplug”, “digitally detox”, or “log off.” As if closing our (god-given) apps and switching to a dumb phone will rid us of an ill formed long before the internet and will sustain past it, should we get there"

i'm thankful that on the new medicine i have been feeling mostly good during my workday and mostly kind of crappy in the evenings, which isn't ideal but on balance still better than before and i am hopeful this will continue to improve. i'm thankful to know it was bad that i worked on a work project in the evening last night, which did not help matters at all, but that i am not going to beat myself up too much because i have generally gotten better at not doing that and i was happy for the progress i made. i'm thankful i have been doing yoga in the mornings before work, which is good, and that i think what i hypochondriacally feared was a hernia is just a muscle i pulled during a hip opener. i'm thankful, on our hard floors, to have borrowed d's thicker yoga mat, which makes the movements more pleasant. i'm thankful that yesterday a friend at work told me that a conversation we had was a "happy bright spot" in a difficult day.

i'm thankful that though it has been raining heavily every day since the weekend, today is supposed to be the last day and then it will be sunny again. i'm thankful to have felt bad because when i was trying to mow the yard last friday morning, i started mowing the little patch of grass i share with our neighbor that i told you about before but then the mower ran out of gas and there was no gas to refill it with and i felt bad, like what i had envisioned as a small good deed actually turned out bad by leaving our neighbor with this uneven lawn, and then i felt worse because the continuing rain meant that the grass was never dry enough for me to get out and finish the job. i'm thankful, though, that our neighbor has not seemed to care, and the rain had made the surrounding grass grow up so that the two-tone effect is not so pronounced, and on the weekend i got a new backup gas can and filled it up and i'll be able to do it again soon. i'm thankful that grass continues to grow, even if that means i have to cut it; i'm thankful for rhythms and for cycles.

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