Spooked

Still not feeling well.  It has been a week.  I've been taking everything from elderberry to oscillococcinum, with Umka and Zicam in between.  It's getting me spooked.  When I wake up in bed in the middle of the night--what IS the middle of the night?--or sometime not too toward morning, I get The Fear.  What is it that is going to get me?  I'll be in bed alone.  Then what?  I shouldn't worry about the "then what," but one can't help it, I think.  But I have a lot of shit and I don't have a clue where it is going to go.  Right now, I don't like anyone enough to leave it to them.  

I think the feeling is mutual.  

I could be happy enough, I think, if I moved to a monastery, one without a stringent regimen and only a loose hierarchy.  I've seen documentaries on monasteries, though, and the lives of monks, and none of it was as I imagined.  I saw the young Buddhist monks in China with my own eyes.  Nope.  

What then?  

Maybe I could join a commune.  But I've seen documentaries on them, too.  

Sometimes I think to take in wayward women, but then I think again.  

I wish I liked dicks.  Older, sophisticated gay men seem to have a nice life.  But I don't.  I've never rubbed one out thinking about somebody's pecker.  Genetics or upbringing?  I don't know, but it is certain.  And I'm not homophobic.  "Some of my best friends are. . . ."  I've been around.  It just doesn't excite me.  

And so, where does that leave me?

Yesterday, I decided to set up an outdoor "studio."  I've had the idea for a long while, but I've never tried it.  I have some very large canvas backdrops saved from my studio days, big, heavy black velvet drapes, larger plain canvas ones, several painted ones, and a huge drop cloth I bought at Home Depot.  They were all stored in bags inside containers.  I couldn't even remember what all was there, so I took them all out and lay them on the lawn, one atop the other.  Then I brought out my backdrop stands.  I got some clamps for those that did not have sewn sleeves on top.  Then I brought out my portable strobe light and my big Fuji GFX camera with the strobe controller I recently bought.  I put up the first backdrop, the big drop cloth, then got a chair to set on it for reference.  I took a few pics with and without the strobe.  But I needed a human subject to really get a sense, so I downloaded an app on my phone that would allow me to trigger my camera remotely and sat my camera on a tripod.  

It was now 90 degrees and I was still sick and sweating like a greased pig.  I felt weak.  Why had I thought this was a good idea?  I couldn't get the app to work for ever so long, then my neighbor called to me over the fence.  

"How's your mom?"

"Much the same.  My cousin is leaving tomorrow to go home, so. . . ."

"What are you doing?"

"Oh. . . I'm just trying to figure out how to use the lights outside in the daylight."  

I looked like a nut, I'm sure.  The day had worn on and the sky was bright but partly cloudy, so the light kept changing drastically from moment to moment.  I needed an assistant, I told my neighbor.  I was getting too old to do everything myself.  

In a little while, I got the app on my phone to connect to the camera, so I experimented on myself with the lights.  

With one light and a pale background, I was getting too much shadow.  There were two ways to fix that.  One was to use a second strobe on the opposite side.  The other was to use a darker backdrop.  O.K.  Those aren't the only two ways, but they are the ones I was thinking of.  If I wanted to do this on locations, though, I would have to buy a second portable, battery powered strobe.  

It was midafternoon now, and I was sick and hot and tired and beat.  I wanted to lie down and take a nap.  I didn't have it in me to take down the whole thing and put up another canvas.  I didn't think I had it in me to put everything away to tell the truth, but it had to be done.  This was a thing I had wanted to do.  I wanted to see what it would take.  What it was going to take now was a lot of energy putting things away.  

So I broke down the backdrop and began taking my camera and strobe and tripods and chair back into the house.  After that, I faced folding the big backdrops by myself.  I would have to buck up.  This was going to be like packing away sails on a boat, I said, a big boat with heavy sails.  

I am not very good at folding things.  

But I got better.  I took my time and brought the ends together, then, as I had some distant memory of watching Ili fold sheets, I took up folds of fabric in between until I got to the other end, then, letting go of the folds,  I halved the canvas and laid it down and walked to the other end and did the same thing.  Then again, and Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. . . it was working.  And once the ten or twelve feet had been folded into something three feet wide, I made three foot folds lengthwise, and VOILA!  

I felt accomplished and quite proud.  

I did the next one and the next one and the next one until all of them were neatly stacked in a pile.  Then one by one, I took them back and packed them into the container.  

And by then, my lower back was barking.  

Since my cousin was leaving in the morning, I had told my mother I would make a dinner in the InstaPot and bring it over.  I needed to go get fixings.  I was making a chicken stew.  

By five, the stew was ready and I was clean.  I felt like shit, but it was time to go.  

The stew was not all that good. 

By the time I got back home, my alma mater was eight points behind Auburn in the NCAA Tournament semi-fiamls.  It was halftime.  I searched once again for a way to watch the game and eventually found that I could stream it on my phone but could not watch it on tv.  WTF sense did that make?  Capitalist sense, I guessed.  The Greedheads had somehow run the numbers, etc.  

I sat on my couch, phone in hand, and watched my team come back to win impressively.  Victory!  On to the Championship game.  

When I woke this morning and got out of bed at five, my back was stiff and sore.  And now with sunrise I am very tired and will try to get a little more sleep.  There is something I should want to do today, but I don't want to say it in case I don't do it and have nothing to show.  We'll see.  There was a reason for setting up the outdoor studio and lights yesterday, but I am pretty sure I am still lacking courage.  

My phone neither rings nor pings.  I hope I sleep.  I'm going to need to figure out what will happen to all my things.