The lady vanishes

...a dispatch from bewilderness

When I began in media,

Webs were webs,

Clouds were clouds and

No one was massaging kale for a five-part bento box lunch.

Back then, we didn't know how to do anything

Because there were no YouTube videos to tell us how

So we just sat on our hands.

If you believe that, you might want to buy oceanfront property in Tucson. Don’t.

Then media became a dinosaur. Its body kept getting bigger and bigger while its brain kept getting smaller and smaller.

Walking in and out of this room today, we have Whitney, a human, Coco, a dog, Will B., another dog, Mark, a human, and another Mark, who is another human. In my last dispatch from bewilderness, the “u” key wasn’t working on an effed-up keyboard. Two new keyboards later, I have a “u” that works when I need it, not just when it feels like it.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film, The Lady Vanishes, a young woman on a train becomes disturbed by the sudden disappearance of a kind older woman, referred to back then as a “spinster.” The old woman, who was a music teacher, is introduced to the viewer when she writes the letters of her name in the condensation on one of the train’s glass windowpanes, only to have them evaporate almost instantly.

Eighteen years ago, I got hit by a drunk with a truck and got a new life with a mind of its own. This is called a Traumatic Brain Injury. I woke up each day and wondered if I had emerged from a really bad dream or had really been hit by a drunk with a truck. I lost the loss itself, and the means to describe it, then dealt with it again each day. 

I began scratching anything I could recall on any surface I could find – paper plates, paper cups, placemats, napkins, coffee stirrers and Popsicle sticks. This became the start of “scraps.” Then the start of a book (ready to be queried now) and the start of this stack.

In 1939, Reader’s Digest published these words without attribution, “The difficult we do right away. The impossible takes a little longer.”  I got better. Way better.  Word by word, step by step, day by day.  

I didn’t do it alone. I had help from: God, Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Albert Einstein, the Dalai Lama, Helen Keller, Anne Frank, Carl Sagan, Gabrielle Giffords, Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Jr., Stephen Hawking, Confucius, a few people I love, plus readers like you. Thank you.