Guest post by Puggg
I made detective.
I found out today. On National Boss’s Day, to lick boot.
Early this year, when I was figuring on whether I should make a try at detective or not, a certain someone told me that all the reasons I was giving myself for not doing it was just me being crazy in underestimating myself, and that what I really needed was better writing skills for writing my reports, and he could tutor me on that. Really he’s been sort of my writing tutor for a few years, it’s just that when I threw myself into the process to making detective, I really had to put my pug nose to the grindstone when it comes to that.
And I think you know who this “certain someone” is.
Which is why today is bittersweet.
The thing which he helped me get, is the thing he’s in no condition to share in the glory of.
I know I’m not the star of this website, so I know who you’re really interested in, which means it’s time for more depressing news.
The first half of this the third month of recovery has been yet another bad period, and if it keeps up for the rest of the month, it’ll mean yet another bad month to go with last month. The good news at least is that no hospitalizations, no going unconscious in any way events, no seizures. The bad news is that the way this has been a bad first half of October is a different kind of bad than the kind of bad September was for him. I would rather not say any more than that, even though the lawyer has given me permission to. Because it’s something on the personal side. If he’s ever in the right kind of condition, I think it should be up to him whether he wants to expound.
Which means I’m still dreading hearing my phone ring during odd hours of the late evening or in the middle of the night. But for a different reason why I feared it last month, and again, because October bad is different than September’s bad. But I can’t say that the doctors and therapists didn’t warn me that this would be a rough and long ride.
One of the ways that the way this has been a bad first half of the month for him has been saddening is that, as I keep up and manage his internet life as much as I can, I’ve come to find out that he’s made himself really useful to quite a few people. Just look at tutoring – He’s my writing tutor, but I also see that he is or has done tutoring in logic, algebra, calculus, politics and civics, ham radio, astronomy, accounting and finance, philosophy, history. From what I see, there are at least five computers out there in the wild here in the metro area that he put together for other people, it looks like someone else bought all the parts and guts and innards, and he put it all together. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I knew he had something of a wide range of interests just by hanging around here, but it wasn’t until I got a look at his online life, of the kind he doesn’t really talk about here, to know how wide. I don’t see any evidence that he is or ever was interested in ballet or dance or art, but anything other than those, and he’s interested in it, somewhere between mildly and being a full blast nerd. Plain speaking, it’s not just true from me knowing him personally, I now see with my own eyes gazing over his online life some of which comes off of his real life that wherever he goes and whatever he does, he’ll find a way to make himself as useful as practically possible to quite the handful of people. Earlier this year, he made the off hand remark to me that he was amazed that the thing he was doing for a living at the time, before he left it for the new business he started up, that thing was PR, was a thing he had almost no formal training in, but wound up being good at it anywho.
Which is why it pains me when I am told and I hear him say with my own ears in the last two weeks about how suicidal he is, how he wishes he would have never been born, how he wishes the hit would have killed him right then and there, how he despairs that nobody in the world really needs him, or how he’s going to spend the rest of his life being a useless vegetable. It’s sad because it’s not him, it’s just a matter of a malfunctioning brain, a brain that may never function right ever again. I really do hope that at some level he realizes that his despair is just a matter of a malfunctioning brain so he has something of a built in block against trying to do any of this for real, but I can’t get a clear enough read from him eye to eye to know whether or not this is true. The doctors can’t answer that question definitely, either. They can only remind me, and the uncle, of the same thing they’ve said for months, that we can’t let ourselves put too much positive stock into improvement trends and we can’t put too much negative stock into the desperate times (like now), because it’s probably going to be a lot of quick and severe switch ups back and forth until about a year into recovery, maybe more. In the meantime, considering the current bad weather, where we’re secretly hiding him out as part of Operation Keep Away, the instruments which would allow him to do that to himself most easily are hidden away, but I also know that anyone who wants to do that to themselves bad enough can find a hundred ways to do it.
If he wasn’t this way in the first half of this month, if he was now the way he was back in August, I’d have no problem either bringing him myself or having his uncle bring him to my promotion party later this week, even if he wouldn’t fully enjoy, or appreciate, or even understand it. But now, with all this going on, it would be a scene, a debacle.
All it means is that during the party, I’ll have to do enough celebrating for the both of us.
