Carrot Cake

I'm taking a short break from my daily activities. I don't want to say my daily grind because that would imply I'm productive with my nose to the grindstone, which is a painful sounding idiom if taken literally. If searching for and almost finding the perfect carrot cake in Boulder and its surroundings after January 19th but before January 21st were a job, however, I might be able to say that. Let's just say that nothing beats homemade, so far, but I have tried some good contenders over the years. And I put a lot of effort into my yearly search.

Yesterday, I was on a mission. I wanted to find a piece of carrot cake, a good one, not one made from some kind of boxed cake mix with limp carrot bits added to it and then topped with thin, overly sugary frosting. Homemade wasn't happening, so I wanted the next best thing. It took some doing, but I found a pretty good piece of carrot cake at Pizza Colore. After reading a Yelp review about the cake, I called to see if they were still baking the dessert in house. Sure enough, they were, so after a decent morning with an OK run and the rest of the day at work, I scooted over to the pizza place a few blocks away, purchased the cake slice (I think he gave me an extra large piece after I confessed it was my birthday), and headed back to my car.

As I strolled down the mall and then up a few blocks, I took note of my foot, which seemed oddly less painful than it had been in recent days. As is often the case, the minute I noted this, I felt a stabbing pain shoot across the top of my foot. On I limped, determined to keep my attention on the cake slice in the plastic container held tightly in my hands. The pain subsided and then came back and so on until I finally reached my car and sat behind the wheel.

Back home, I made a birthday wish and then ate the cake, which was delicious. My only complaints were that the frosting was a little too sweet to my taste and the cake lacked raisins. I'm not a huge raisin fan, but they are perfect in carrot cake.

What I'm really doing here is taking a break from writing by writing. I haven't been adding much to this project I'm working on, but I'm very, very slowly plodding forward. It's an absolute mess of 20,000 words or so at this point, but I'm starting to get some kind of outline going. It is such a weird process, and I wish I had a better idea of what I want this thing to be. It will need a lot of work before I can even get to the fun part of rewriting. Can you write a novel by adding just a few words a day? We'll find out.

Creating a novel or story is a lot like making a cake. In order to get to the fun and fancy decorating, you have to first get through all the grunt work: bake the cakes, even them out, put a base frosting on, stack them, and then add a thicker layer of frosting before you can start really decorating it. In writing, you have to create some kind of outline, get the story out, rework it to the point where it's not a complete mess, rewrite it, and then go through and get creative with it.

Next week I'm scheduled for surgery. It's going to be interesting because I'm still taking care of my mom and working. It sounds like it's a pretty simple procedure. I don't know the recovery time, but I'm hoping it's not long. I've been able to run and even ran a harder workout without too much pain. According to my doctor, running won't hurt anything. It's just nerve stuff. I'm conflicted about the best way to handle this, but my doctor seems to think the surgery will work.

It seems quite a few families on our street aren't doing very well lately. One neighbor recently passed away. Another is in the hospital. My mom is still recovering. My other neighbor's daughter just had foot surgery, and my other neighbor recently had hip surgery. That's a lot of unpleasantness in this small neck of the woods. We are all hoping for brighter days soon.

Oh, and you know that saying about kill your darlings? Sometimes you have to kill someone else's little darlings, and that's even harder when the writing is good. The last couple of months seem to be all about letting go, something I've struggled with all my life.

Looking Back (again)

Actually, I don't want to reflect too much on this past year. There were some pretty shitty and disappointing parts and some not so bad ones. After crawling out of one of my more serious depressions recently, I'm not in the mood to think too hard about anything right now. The one message I keep coming back to is to try to avoid getting caught up in other people's bullshit and lean on those who actually care, if you are able, of course, because for some of us, reaching out isn't easy.

Something I keep bumping up against lately is this idea that our minds create pain. On some level, this is true, as there's a huge psychological component to pain. But, man, every fucking time I run into something I know is real, physically real, all the talk floating around about how just using your mind to magically get rid of discomfort trips me the fuck up and I'm left trying to push through pain that I shouldn't.

As I head into 2020 possibly facing my 12th foot procedure (I don't want to call it surgery because it's not major surgery) I'm oddly optimistic, sort of. I mean, I ran some pretty embarrassing races this summer in terms of time, but most of them were improvements on what I've run in recent years, and I did so on an increasingly sore foot. See, I have a sharp bone that's poking up on the top of my left foot. The nerve that runs over it is crying out every time I press up onto my toes. Sometimes it hurts just sitting around, too. There are some other issues going on in the joints near my ankle, but, chances are, shaving that bone down will reduce the pain by a fuckload. The diagnostic cortisone shot I got this week seems to indicate this will be the case.

In other news, I got to watch a leg amputation at the vet clinic. It's a long surgery, so I only stayed about two hours into things, just to the point where the broken dog's leg was freed and everything looked good for a healthy recovery for the pup.

Best wishes to everyone for a happy, healthy 2020. I'm off to do some writing, something I gave up for far too long. Yeah, I suck at that, too, but at least it will occupy my melancholy mind for a while.