After changes upon changes…

Fang is more or less the same. Which, depending on how one looks at it, is either a good thing or a bad thing. I tend to see it as a glass half-empty, frankly.

Because the one thing about myself I’d most like to change, and which seems most intractable, is my resistance to change.

Let me lay it out for you, as it stands now:

Mostly moved into the new house. Shit in boxes will probably remain there for a while, at least my shit. My back has sent me the message, loud and clear—cease all moving-related activities immediately or suffer the consequences!

I’m only writing right now while I wait for the Naproxen to kick in.

Still haven’t heard from my employers whether my job is going to make the move to Boise with me at all, and if so, in what shape? Apparently the guy in accounting/payroll is going nuts, but I am not the guy with his answers. All I can do is re-remind my supervisor of my situation and hope that he finds the time to resolve my employment status, one way or the other. Meanwhile, I’m blogging this morning when I should be working, which is a luxury that I am mindful to be grateful for.

On the other hand, I sure do hate my job in its dying industry. On the other hand, without it, we can’t make ends meet. I mean, placed in perspective, my pickle isn’t so awful. I’m not cannon-fodder in Afghanistan like my nephew is. I’m not pulling the graveyard shift at a chemical company with questionable safety protocols like a childhood friend is. I’m not facing the end of a long, distinguished legal career and just finding out my employer is trying to strip me of the pension I had planned to retire in comfort on like a loved one is. Hell, I’m not even flipping burgers at McDonald’s. (And my gimpy back rules out even an emergency return to the fast-food career of my youth.)

But I have so much more I want to do with the dwindling good years I have left. I have ideas for at least three more books in me, but between performing my meaningless job, parenting and wallowing in unhelpful self-pity, I can’t imagine how I could get even one of them off the ground. And if I lose the job, I get to spend every waking hour doing the one thing I hate more than my job, which is looking for another one.

Plus I have 3.5 more weeks of enforced family-together time before The Missus and The Boy go back to school. And since we just moved here, The Boy has no friends yet, so every waking moment The Missus or I are called upon to entertain him. And besides being busy, I’m just not feeling that entertaining lately.

And in the interest of full disclosure, I’m not being miserly with my misery. I’m making sure The Missus, who has bent over backwards to accommodate me, is suffering right along with me. I swear, if there was a switch I could hit that would just make me tolerable company, I’d push that button like a hop-head on a morphine drip.

Speaking of which, the back pain that had been so manageable on Christmas Island that some days I would forget altogether that my lower spine is shaped like a cork-screw has been a constant issue since the move. I’m burning through pain-killers just to get through every day. It’s only a question of what runs out first; my insurance coverage, the stash I brought with me or my stomach lining.

None of which is contributing to my joie de vivre.

I guess this is the point (about 2/3 of the way to end, roughly) where I go looking for a silver lining. As I’m drawing a blank at the moment on sunny revelations, I’ll go to the last refuge of scoundrels and patriots, song lyrics!

RUSH writes about change all the time, usually its inevitability. Resistance is futile, that kind of thing. From their biggest hit, Tom Sawyer:
    “[He knows] changes aren’t permanent,
     But change is;”
to their deepest album cuts, say Circumstances, where they reiterate the same point in French:
    “Plus ca change
     Plus c’est la meme chose
     The more that things change
     The more they stay the same.”

But I’m not feeling terribly RUSH today. I almost drowned my pricey cell phone in a Pepsi Slushie a few minutes ago and I have a long day of mind-numbing work and nerve-rattling waiting-to-hear ahead of me.

I’m feeling a lot more like Paul Simon’s The Boxer, kind of punch drunk and bone weary and it’s still only 10 a.m.:
    “After changes upon changes,
     We are more or less the same.”

Lather, rinse, read again from the start. Repeat.